by L.C. Barlow
Chapter 25
SUBLIME
He took me to a nearby pond. It was dark, but still early night, and the stars were twinkling greens and blues and whites, reflecting in the water, so that when I dipped my hand in, I caught the sky.
Patrick told me to wait there, and he disappeared off into a wooded area. That was why I sat by the pond. I had been waiting for a while, and there were few things to do besides breathe the crystal pollen, taste the cooling air, pet the sweet grass, and whisper a song to myself.
"It's ready," he eventually said from behind me, and I followed him. I could not see his brazen hair in the night, or his bright blue shirt, or his long gray slacks. In the dark, he looked like he could be anybody, and a bit of paranoia hit me then, as though I had been smoking, though I had not.
I stopped walking side-by-side with him and drifted back, until he said congenially, "You better enjoy this. If you don't, I'm going to throw radishes at you." Then I was beside him again, made confident and comforted by his humor, forgetting the times Cyrus had led me into the dark. This was brand new, I remarked, and should remind me of nothing.
"What a cruel thing to do, Patrick," and I would have winked if he could have seen me.
"Aye," he replied. "I'm a badass."
After following him not that long, I saw a glow in the distance. It was bright blue, crystalline, and pure. Then, there was another, separated just a short distance from the first. Both levitated near my height. They peeked out from between the branches like two blue eyes of an enormous velveteen panther and watched us as we neared them. What is it? I wondered.
Finally, Patrick stopped us in what seemed a clearing, and he flicked a lighter on, began lighting candles all around, creating perhaps the worst fire hazard ever known to man. But as he lit the wicks, I could see various objects around us.
There was a white blanket laid on the ground, a bottle of wine, a... piano. I stared in awe. The two glowing blues sat atop a black piano in lemonade pitchers. I strolled to one as he continued to put the place alight, and I lifted the decanter and spun it lightly like there was venom inside. When I swirled the liquid, it glowed brighter so that the syrup smoldered a bluer sapphire than the other pitcher on the other end of the piano. I stepped to the other one and swirled it, too. Now they were even.
"Ah. Ah. Ah," said Patrick. I turned to him, and he motioned to the blanket. "Thou shalt not touch that just yet."
"This is beautiful," I replied, and he said, "Damn straight it is."
He kept motioning like a song on repeat until I sat on the white blanket and discovered its smooth material for myself.
"How the hell did you get a piano out here?" I asked.
Patrick was now opening the bottle of wine, bending and twisting his body as he corkscrewed the top. "Nothing that a good five, well-built and athletic guys can't drive here and then carry through the woods ten feet at a time."
The cork came out with a pop.
"You are insane," I said
Patrick picked up something from the ground, and he smiled at me. It was a glass. He poured the wine into it, holding it by its stem so as not to warm the wine. Though he often concealed it well, this was one of the many slips that showed he was well-groomed, well-cultured. He didn't smoke before meals, either. This was not a man who had ever had to pepper his vodka.
He grinned at me. "Oh, it gets better," he said, and he handed me the glass.
He then bowed to me, his hair flopping forward, and he straightened himself, strolled to the piano like a conductor in street clothes, and he sat at the bench, back straightened to a near arch, arms firm, knuckles comfortably curled, and he struck the keys like a masseuse with a living body.
I sipped my wine, tasted the burgundy, as the notes filtered out like leaves forming a tree, and his music combined with the music of the woods - the trickle of nearby water, the clicks and clacks of trees and branches, the rustle of tiny things on the floor beside me.
The notes filed out and skidded along these things, until the very woods were what came from the piano, and the notes, rather, were the most natural things in the world. The quarters and eights hung from the branches in brilliant colors of gold and red, and as each leaf dropped, it played its note, and then died.
It did not make sense to me why such a sublime man might want me then, or why a man who could massage such blissful notes from the inside of an instrument would need to shoot heroin and pop pills, or why a man who could fuck angels would choose the devil instead.
I watched him and his crimson hair sway between the blue to the beat of the hallowed sounds, and I watched his shirt tighten against him as his arms moved with muscles only musicians and athletes had, his hard body like stone. He was molded marble and energy, and by the end of the song his brilliant hair was drooping in front of his eyes.
He turned to me, and before I could clap or speak or even smile, he said, "And now, my friend, for something completely different." He started to play again. Only this time, the song was slow, liquid, languid. When his head bowed, it was more like he was in a dance than a race.
Like a magician waving his wand, his left arm lifted up, then even further up, no longer touching the piano, though I could see the keys there still moving, and I forgot myself, nearly dropping my wine.
His fingers wiggled, and the keys moved as though tickled, like a living puppet on invisible strings beneath his hand. His arm dropped then, plunged itself into his pants pocket, and brought out a pack of cigarettes. This pack he gently placed beside the sheets of music. Then, his right hand as well stopped lifted, and again he wiggled his fingers as though a sorcerer bringing a body to life, and the keys beneath his hand continued to play. The music never stuttered.
This right hand plunged into his right pocket, and out popped a lighter. He lit a cigarette and swiveled in his seat. The piano continued to move and play on its own behind him, and the enchanter crossed his legs, leaned his back against the piano like it was a thrown.
I had heard of this type of piano before, but I had never seen one until then. It was the kind a person could insert paper into, and it played the songs for you - made it look like a ghost was at the keys. The lengths he had to go through to get the thing out there must have been extraordinary.
"Fantastic," I said to him, and I shot down the rest of my wine and began to pour myself more. "I've never seen anything so wonderful."
"Oh," he said, and he bounded up, "the show is far from over." He darted around like an arrow, blowing out the candles one by one so that there was only the darkness and the music, the light from his cigarette, and the two pitchers of glowing blue gold.
I could not see him in the dark, and I dared not move lest I spill the wine. So, I sat there, my eyes frozen and latched to the only lights by which they could ground themselves. One of these lights moved.
The music paused, died, and silence stuffed itself into the air, and as it did so, the pitcher on the left side of the piano levitated up, drifted down, like a gem plucked from the center of a black flower about to be eaten, and then it turned, the liquid's shape shifted, and then I heard a splash and trickle as the liquid poured gently, suddenly illuminating the very keys and face of the piano. The liquid swept across, ate the darkness away, until a blue grin faced me with one eye.
It was like a watching a picture draw itself in the night, or seeing an artist etch away the darkness with a swipe, or glimpsing God peel back the curtain to the beyond. I loved it. Then, the music began to play again. The keys moved, the silence was sucked into oblivion, and the blue began to shiver, bop, and jump.
To my right, I saw the other pitcher lift, and it floated to me until it landed, ever so delicately, at my feet.
I sensed a shift in the velvet beneath me. I could feel a warmth come from my left. I smelled the smoky sweet of Patrick.
"Wow," he said. "I didn't know if this would be as amazing as it seemed. But it is."
"Yes," I said, watching the thrilling mechanism, "it looks like s
omeone left candles burning on the keys, and a wax has dripped down amongst them like paint."
"It looks like one of those pictures that moves. Like the waterfalls lit from behind."
"Yes. It's beautiful."
"And now I know what you mean."
I shifted to look at him, as though I could see him in the dark, but I could not, of course, and I felt an ache in my eyes, a craving.
"What do you mean?"
"When you said you were glad that I fucked that girl, just so you could hear her sing and me play.
"I feel that now. If I hadn't been drugged up, if I hadn't hidden that rosary in the walls of that chimney, I would never have had the chance to ask you to help me. Where would we be then? Certainly not here, watching the blood of a soul seep into a piano and making it play." I felt him nudge me in the dark. "You never would have told me that story. I never would have told you mine."
"So," I summarized, "You're glad you got drugged up and paranoid, and I'm glad you fucked a girl for no reason."
"Aye," he said, and we both laughed. "But we can move on from that, now. I think that's what we're doing here anyway."
"What is that song?" I asked. "It sounds like a ghost on a string."
"Moonlight Sonata. Ever since Marshall mentioned it, I knew it was the one for this."
"Good old Marshall." I felt a shifting beside me, and Patrick moved, lifted the pitcher, and swirled the liquid. I watched it like an illuminated tornado swirling before me.
"It's so beautiful, I want to eat it," I said. Again I stared at the piano in awe, captured against my will by its beauty.
"But it smells like shit."
"Really?"
"Smell it."
Patrick lifted the decanter to me, and I took a whiff. Indeed, he was right. Though it was beautiful, the odor was what I expected toxic waste mixed with acid rain to smell like.
"You have ruined your piano," I said.
"Aye. But some things are worth ruining.
"I have another carafe because I didn't know how much I'd need." He placed the decanter back in the grass.
I hummed shortly in assent.
Something warm brushed against my hand, and I moved it, thinking I might be in Patrick's way, but as I lifted my arm, I felt soft, malleable fingers press into my palm as though checking for a pulse, and then they slid up and over the crease in my wrist and glided against the tender part of my arm until they reached my elbow.
I turned away from the piano, and peered into the void, where I could feel him. His skin, the night, the music, the blue, it was all delicious.
He was near my cheeks. Inching closer, he pinned me with his warmth, made my lips part when I could feel his own very near. I could smell and feel him breathing there, gliding as close as possible with his face nearing mine like a skater nearing thin ice. But he dared not break the barrier between us. It was tantalizing. I felt bound and free and powerful.
"Patrick, you are such an electrifying mess."
"That's the piano, Jack."
I could feel the puff of those words like clouds against my lips, and, unable to bear the weight of the moment any longer, I pressed myself against him, felt him rock back and his lips bend and then open, and his warm, wet tongue dive against mine.
He rocked forward again and pulled me against him, and the taste of his mouth was like smooth smoke and cinnamon. I knew at that moment that his cigarettes were black, his whiskey was strong, and that he had not shot up in weeks. I drank him in like I had the wine. I swirled him like I had the burning venom.
I felt his clean hands against my waist, pushing and pulling, and then wrapping themselves around my back. I brushed my hands through his hair, over this hills and valleys of his face, and I thrust my tongue deep against his.
We pulled apart slowly.
"Don't ever leave me, Jack," he whispered against my neck.
"What if you ask me to?"
"Not even then."
We embraced again, sinking into the blue, the harmony, the black, black night. And when we finally parted for good and watched the piano again with a new, thoughtful peace existing between us, he said tenderly, "Do you have enough soul now?"
"Because of you, I might get into heaven."
"And I just wanted a chance."
He dipped his hand into the decanter beside us, and when he pulled his fingers out, they looked wetted with the blood of angels. I saw the hand, as if alive on its own, float up above where I could see, and then I felt him rub my head. His fingers started on the right, moved center, to the left, and then dipped back into the blue. He continued, from left to back, and then round again. Round and round he went, painting a circle in my hair.
I knew what he was doing and stopped his hand.
I dipped my own hand into the decanter, felt the cool splash against my fingers, and I brought my smoldering hand up to his hair. Rather than making a circle, though, I marked him with two triangles, both of them jutting out like hooks just above his brow. When I was done, I felt like I was staring into a mirror.
"Who goes into a man's house to steal someone else's rosary? Who gives eight hundred to the homeless? Who gives fifty grand to her sister without a penny left for herself?" I heard Patrick's deep sing-song voice ask. "Jack does," he said.
Yes, I thought. And who waits in the dark with a knife in hand, striving for the blood of men? Who kills the wife of a minister and her children? Who strangles adulterers with piano wire while her mentor watches? And then, who loses it all? Who fails? Jack does.
"What do you want?" Patrick asked. "What do you think would make you more you?"
I did not know what to say.