He chuckled. “Just a little one. No one ever listens anyway.”
He nervously stepped around me and peered through the open doorway. The world on the other side was black and violent sounding as the storm got up a full head of steam. Very gingerly he pushed the open door closed, effectively silencing the storm on the other side. "Actually it's more of an alarm system for me." He turned the knob on the door handle to lock it. "There are a few people roaming around these unreal parts that I don't wish to share my music with. Now, let me introduce you to my wonderful creation."
My muse offers me his hand and helps me to my feet, then he's off. His very long legs are taking steps that I can't keep up with. I'm still not sure that I want to get close to this inorganic beast of a thing. Perhaps the machine sensed this. It was changing from what I had originally seen to something more elaborate but attractive. It was looking more like a museum of classical instruments and pipe organs had been swept up into a tornado and spit back onto the ground. It was less beast and more musical sculpture.
Nervously I followed the path my muse had set off on in front of me. I came around the side of the massive thing and found my muse standing at a grand keyboard. It appeared to be the place to control and play this thing. He gave it a quick look over before moving to a platform that nearby. I joined him there.
At the heart of the platform was a large table with several rolled up scrolls and a ton of wispy pieces of tracing paper carelessly spread out. On each piece of paper there was a small diagram of technical notes. I'm not sure I could have made much sense out of them if they had been set down in proper order. They were most intimidating in this chaotic pattern.
Among the scrolls on the table there was one that had instructions for building me written on the end. Curiosity had me and my muse was busy picking up pieces of tracing paper and setting them here and there. It was like he was trying to put together a puzzle that only he knew what it was meant to look like. I used his distraction to take the old scroll in hand so that I might spy a look.
Carefully I rolled the sides of the scroll outward and watched as a breathtaking series of directions and illustrations were presented. What I saw drawn out there might have been the beast before me, but only in its skeletal form. This baby had had some major alterations from the original piece. I reached out and tugged at my muse's sleeve to get his attention. “Did you read this?”
He looked up from his puzzle solving, absently glancing at the unrolled scroll. He shrugged his shoulders.
“No, not really." he confessed. "I did like most people do when following instructions and ignored much of the text and followed the diagrams. Besides, I wasn’t quite sure what the language was.”
He might have said what language it wasn’t, for surely there were ten tongues set to print on this one scroll. Here there was the words fait accompli, and there afer ventus. Another word was in Hebrew and then a paragraph that looked like the Gaelic language. It was like so many different hands from all over stopped for but a moment to offer a bit of direction to the original author.
I looked over at my muse. “So you have no name for your invention?” I asked.
He shook his head, his attention still absorbed by his pieces of paper. “No, I haven’t.”
"Do you have any idea who made this design? I mean, aren't you curious what the original author's intent for this thing was? Perhaps they had a name for it. Naming it might make it a little less... intimidating."
This actually drew his attention away from his paper moving. He set his hands to the table top and resting against his outstretched fingers. His eyes slowly moved over the machine before him before coming to rest on the massive keyboard at its heart.
"I'm not sure I have time to be worried about the original inventor's intent. His naming of this thing would be irrelevant too. Whatever he intended to create it is not sitting here before us now. This is my invention and credit for it is solely given to me."
"So then, do you have a name for it?" It seemed silly to keep at this one question, but I really felt I needed to know the name of this thing. In all of my dreaming worlds names held great power. Without a proper name it was as though this mysterious invention had the potential of being threatening with no means to protect against it.
Slowly my muse shook his head. "Hadn't stopped to think of one." Rather nervously he cast a look back over his shoulder at the locked door. "I was rather more worried about getting it done before being interrupted."
“I would be tempted to say you should name it for yourself, but to tell you the truth..." my words faltered for a moment. There were a few glaring realities about my muse's invention. "I don’t think this thing will ever utter a series of notes anyone would want to dance to. Maybe one of your sibling’s names might be very fitting though.”
“And which one would that be?”
I had to smile when I said it. “Polyhymnia. She sang hymns to the gods.” It just seemed like something very fitting given the nature of the beast. This would be the instrument to offer up a melodic sound to the gods. Not the angels or cherubs, demigods or shamans, but the very gods themselves, whose ears could hear infinity.
He laughed softly and nodded “Yes, yes, that might be fitting, but it doesn’t really role off the tongue does it?”
I shrugged. “Neither does bastardized child of a bad one night stand between a megalith and an organ. I think you should take whatever could be considered slightly fitting, or slightly pretty at least when written out.”
He wasn’t listening again and neither did I blame him. I was not so musically inclined, except for the fact I enjoyed to listen to it beyond any other pleasure in the world. I could see his growing fascination and pleasure in this contraption set before him. And because of my love of music I could at least—in part—relate to what he was feeling. Take my sex from me, my faith, hope and religion, but leave me with my ears for hearing the sounds of melody, harmony and rhythm. Even the maddening sample of a bee’s hive set to the drone of Reznor’s pleading.
So, not to allow myself the chance to become more intimidated by this thing, I looked back towards the open scroll sitting on this alter. It really did feel like an alter too. The longer I was in that place the more I felt like I was at the center of a religious spectacle.
I ran my hands over the wrinkled parchment, taking in the water spots and the soft erosion of time in places. There was something simple and beautiful about a sheet of well made paper, especially when it was allowed to age and gain character. It was such a wonderful thing to feel underneath my fingertips.
As I mulled over this idea, my hands worked themselves over the paper till a small gap in a spot by chance opened up to me. In all the areas the paper was written upon in text, someone had painfully separated the very thin top paper layer from the equally thin bottom layer. Small windows were worked into the parchment and upon carefully opening them up I found faint writing. A clear hand writing in old English, with the lightest touch of ink to the paper so it wouldn’t be dark enough to show through. It felt like I'd found the scroll's heart (or hearts) and that heart gave up its secret.
As I made my discovery my muse had wandered off to the keyboard of the beast. He was looking over the various knobs and buttons. His hands moved over the individual keys but never dipped low enough to touch them. I think perhaps he was just trying to figure out if his new toy was turned on or if there was something more he had to do before he could sit down to it. Then he happened to remember and take notice of a series of keys that were in strange locks over a side panel next to the keyboard. He moved to start turning keys.
I read and he tinkered away. For a short while the only thing to be heard was the sound of keys clicking and paper rattling. I barely noticed as a slight hum began to come off of the musical monolith. I'm too engrossed in putting the message written in the hidden scroll windows together. When enlightenment came to me it struck my muse with as equal a force. An answer and an answer, only they should have canceled one an
other out. Somewhere beyond the locked closed door the roar of thunder could be heard.
“I don’t think you should play that thing....” I say in a very small voice, but even if I had been yelling it was already too late.
The composer found his own muse and instinct carried him the rest of the way. He hit a final knob and pushed and pulled a strange brass device that sent soft vibrations of the machine into a far more massive vibration of sound and movement. When he put his fingers to the keys something beyond notes came out.
I stumbled backwards, away from it, trying to regain my balance enough to reach for the scroll and take hold of it. The rumbling of the musical engine knocked the table right off its feet. It toppled over and sent the pieces of tracing paper into the air. All around me it was snowing little diagrams and doodles. I couldn't see through this paper shower to where the scroll had fallen to.
The scroll had been carried away by the vibrations rattling the ground. The apples too were moving. The apples looked like a little green army of round, featureless soldiers storming towards me. The scroll slipped beneath them as they marched on and I lost sight of it. I had to rush into the mist of bouncing sea of green and fling apples in every direction to make enough of a clear path to get the scroll. As quickly as I removed an apple another one bounced into its place, this caused my actions to become more frenzied.
The movement of the ground was increasing in violence: Like the vibrations of the beast was sending its poison into the very earth below, infecting it like a virus. I fell to my knees and crawled, getting bruised by the produce that bounced off me everywhere. I'm not sure what was written on the scroll would be able to help turn things around, it just seemed like a good idea to not lose it. Finally I felt it beneath the apples and was able to rescue it from the green hoard.
As I looked over my shoulder I was struck with the horrific realization that all of this fuss had come from just a few keys pressed to make one chord. The look on my muse's face was near maniacal now and I knew he was about to get to the act of playing in earnest. He stretched out his arms and brought his hands together to crack his knuckles. Then his fingers moved to the keys and the real concert began.
Dust flew from the beast's pipes and sockets as a silvery smoke jumped from the tight chords as the organ keys fell against them. It took a little rumbling to get all the construction dust off of the musical monolith, but once all the dust and clutter was shaken off that thing truly came alive.
I lay back on the ground, clutching the scroll to my chest and simply tried to ride out the composer’s developing song. It was like being on one of those hotel beds, where I’d offered it a quarter and now it was buzzing and bumping around for me. Yet this was no soft humming bed and the ride it was giving was doing nothing short of scaring the living hell out of me. Were this not a place in the unreality, the reality of what was going on in that place would have shaken me to death or at the very least caused me to wet my pants.
And that idea allowed me a moment to laugh. With my laugh came consequences.
The machine snatched the sound from my lips and pulled it into itself. It turned it over, pounded it, caressed it, spinning it till it was twisted into a note. That note shot out through one of the shorter pipes and sank back towards the ground to fall over me. With it I became the laugh; light and happy. It felt good. I relaxed and opened my ears.
This strange invention of my muse's was so much more than a monstrosity meant to make noise. Perhaps the twist was in thinking the original design was meant to be anything actually musical in nature. What had those hidden words said?
They read: As I realize in design my revelation I know it not meant a thing for the experience of man. Even as I cannot destroy that which I have drawn out, I can't bear the idea of it being truly crafted. When temptation saw me setting aside my apprehension to move to build, the Eumenides came within the storm and warned me away. Now I can only hide away this warning within my designs. Do not build this. Do not let it see the world .
Hefty words. What would those original designs for this machine have built? And how had that original design been warped into an unsettling second type of life by my muse's changes? What effect would this dreamscape have on it? And what would it do to the dreaming? Would what was born here slowly find its way beyond my muse's secret little place of unreality?
I don't know if I would be given a chance to answer those questions. A deeper revelation was being offered to anyone listening. It was twisted up in the unearthly song the beast was now singing through its mechanical works.
I came to find soon after that this monster was more than a music maker. I was right on only one account —there would be no dancing to it because the person listening would not be able to dance. The sheer thrill of it would crumple them into a tiny ball; falling into the fetal position like falling back into the womb. It might be the soft hum of a mother’s voice speaking to the unborn babe, it might have been the lullaby of a ghost singing to the grandchild it never met. It might have been the sound of sex a person had always fantasized about but never felt. It might actually suck the soul out of a person through their ears, manipulate it the way it did my laugh and thrust it back into the body to become a living piece of music.
And then I realized...
Too much, it was way too much to stand.
It was at all moments all things... the most beautiful of classical compositions and yet the angriest of screams set to chords. The thunder high above carrying the beat of a small child’s voice as she sang a nursery rhythm. All intertwining to create something that made the body’s emotions react. Only they were trying to express all emotions, all at once, and it threatened to overload my delicate and oh so fragile human nerves.
What a way to fall to ruin though. Maybe upon my demise it would suck me in and push me back out into the world as something that could be heard rather than seen. I liked the very idea of it. So I didn’t fight it, but let my system relax and enjoy of it what I could before all sensory response in my dream body shut-down.
I looked back at the muse and his invention, seeing them both through a haze. There was something not quite solid growing between us. It seemed to me I was looking at a moving picture, as if it was composing a scene to accompany the sound. This scene looked like a child adorned in gauze and silks, sitting in a blanket of feathers and pearls. She was playing with a small glass doll, whose painted face was somewhat cruel though painted elegantly. She was humming a melancholy tune that I heard over top of the machine’s roar. I could see beyond her, through her, to the creator at his canvas. His arms moving wildly as he strived to keep up with his own sprawling musical creation. For a moment it reminded me of a scene from my beloved Phantom of the Opera. The lovelorn Phantom sat at his organ madly creating his compositions the sweet Christine would later sing to.
This got me to softly laughing again. Thinking of the real muse down in his basement studio, like the Phantom in his netherworld home beneath the opera house. I’ll have to remember to mail him a phantom mask when I wake up I say aloud and this got me to laughing even harder, till I thought I would curl up in pain. The machine sucked up my laughter and my words and spit them back at me. They moved through the hazy scene. I watched the opaque girl with her doll as her eyes followed my breath to the great beast. She changed her tune somewhat to mimic my unintentional addition to the music.
Then the ground really rocked. For a moment I thought my words had wreaked more havoc than this poor world could stomach. But it wasn’t my actions causing the stir but the pulling of the sky above. Like it had suddenly became liquid and some giant hand had been thrust into it, swirling the waters (and reality) with a slight motion. Even worse, bits of the sky above were being picked at, pulled back, torn like the unwrapping of a gift. There was something on the other side and right at this moment it was trying to pry its way in.
This gave me a good slap of clarity, a moment of clear thought to tune out the music and get to my feet. It was rough going but I
haphazardly crossed the shaking ground between me and the composer’s bench. I stopped only once, as the hazy scene of the girl comes up to greet me. There is a brief hesitation before I pushed myself through it. It might have been my imagination, but I could swear that precious thing let out a small complaint as I pushed through her transparent world within this world. It bites at her for a moment before she goes back to her humming, this time a little more somber for the intimate intrusion.
The apples are still rolling everywhere underfoot. I think to myself that I will never again in my life touch a Granny Smith.
When Jupiter Sighs Page 2