Pastoral (2)
It later became painfully obvious to Travis that no one he ever met would or could appreciate the genius of the masterpiece but he. In that pensive hour he thought to himself the single thought that can destroy a man’s soul. ‘It was more of a curse than a blessing; knowing that all the praise you receive is undeserved, that all the passion and emotion you put into a piece means nothing because there is another who will pour his blood, his very soul into a piece of music to express the hurt and the loss and the injustice that only speaks to you saying, “set me free, make it known my beauty, make it known my power over everything, make it known that my entrancement enslaves even the devil and beckons him to curse you with his wraiths of lust and aspiration and greed.” And yet you can only be silent because your tongue has been cut from your mouth and only puddles of blood satisfy your throat.’ His throat parched and sore tightened from the thought. At this moment the powers of goodness were beyond him. He festered in the most cutthroat of moods and resolved not to quit until he knew that he had rendered Lymond entirely helpless with ‘his music.’ And Lymond in his own perverse way could only devise small stratagems in which to torture Travis, with sharp glances and venomous mannerisms, he capitalized on the knowledge that Travis always watched him. Lymond constantly assailed him with these. Both of the men insidiously deteriorated in all avenues of their independent lives but one. Each was bent on destroying the other through a feat of immensity. It was vital to both of them to make the other feel inferior and submit. It sent Lymond to vociferous fits of rage and Travis to madness and beyond. The contest still lay two days away and, once again, Travis sat down to practice. He began to play and as he progressed through the piece he began to perspire, not noticing it. All the time he thought how to add more and more of his soul and malice into the piece, to cut Lymond to the heart. He began to pound the keys harder and harder, with more votive force and desperation, so much so that the pressure shoved his brittle fingernails into his cuticles. It shot pain into Travis’s fingers as he progressed through the piece. He did not notice it though, just as he didn’t notice his increasing fatigue or his declining posture; he trudged on, completely oblivious to and physical change in his body. He had no attention left to devote to himself, to anything but the passion of ‘his music’. Hours went by, temperatures changed, the sun set, and in the waning of the moon Travis continued to play. The sun arose the next morning and the sparrows awoke to the clanging of piano keys, as Travis continued to play. Lunch came and went without a solicitation from Travis’s stomach for food, and he continued to play. The sun set and phones rang into obscure places of minuteness, and Travis dementedly continued to play. Through the night’s starlit sky Travis’s eyelids begged him to stop and his tear ducts burst forth with dour pains to stop, and obstinately Travis’s heart urged him to continue playing. The next morning a worried father burst into the unanswered door of his son’s apartment and found him with his eyes eerily wide open and unearthly, staring at his own hands as if unable to stop them as they ran up an down the keyboard as they striped it with blood and sweat. Travis’s father flew across the room to him and tried to grab his son’s hands but Travis would not allow it. Finally he pushed his son away from the piano and onto the floor. Looking suddenly back to the piano in horror he saw what his son had done to his beautiful piano. The keys looked like a set of perfectly straight teeth butchered by a demented dentist. Looking back to the floor he saw his son weeping from exhaustion. He took Travis to the hospital immediately where they bandaged his fingers and told him he could not play piano for some extended period of time. Of course the notion seemed like madness to Travis; he insisted on playing his concert that night. His father did not try to stop him; he knew the importance of making an appearance. Winning this contest would ensure his son a career in whatever venue of musical expertise he chose to pursue. His father, an ambitious man, would never stifle a resolve as steadfast and concrete as his son’s was. The nurses succeeded in closing the wounds on the ends of Travis’s fingers. Travis constantly raged in tumult over his piano contest, which was that night. He had to be there. He had to win. He knew that Lymond would be there to watch him and his every technique, and to scrutinize and elaborate on them himself. Aside from the ends of his fingers being very tender and in a constant quaver, he was given to hunger and was getting faint because of it. He quickly and messily ate at the café across the street from his flat just inside the Oberlin campus and scurried across the street to dress and gather his music. In his flat he saw both the state of disarray into which his room had fallen and the grotesque sight of his bloodied piano. It looked as though someone had taken a metal spike to it and crammed it into the spaces between the keys until blood sputtered forth. He went over to the piano and looked at the music setting on it. It too had been splotched with the refuse of perfection that ran through Travis’s veins. He looked down the side of the piano as he bent over to pick up one of the pieces of paper, which had on it a cascade of black dots and stems arranged in a detailed but beautiful manner, and saw that blood had dripped down and stained the wood there also. It mortified Travis to see such a beautiful instrument as though it had been slaughtered for some rite of sacrifice to the gods of music in return for the token of perfection. He turned away form the piano and traveled over to his bed where he laid his splattered music and began to undress. He took a tuxedo from the closet; well pressed, pristine and immaculate, it glistened with a sumptuous quality. As he undressed and then redressed Travis noticed a collection of short stories on the table. It was open to A Perfect Day For Bananafish, one of Travis’s favorites. He was reading it a few weeks before he became utterly immersed in winning this competition. He stopped, pensive for a moment, and then chose to wear the deep blue girdle instead of his red, yellow, or orange ones. Although yellow remained his favorite color and always would, he chose the blue for a change in habitual and superstitious reasoning. Orange always brought back too many painful memories. He very vigilantly tried to button up his shirt and put on his bowtie without breaking open any of the inoculated wounds on his fingers, and then a thought occurred to him. He couldn’t play with bandages on his fingers. It would be quite impossible to play at the fitting intensity with bandages, impediments, on his fingers. He stood in a pondering stare directed at the piano and, he thought about the calamity that could befall him if he were to continue on with this vehement pursuit of greatness. Truly it was madness but Travis couldn’t see it. He was blinded by ambition and the notion of defeating this potent pianist, Lymond. He rushed to the sink in his bathroom, removed the bandages to reveal a horrid sight of coagulating sores, and ran his fingers under some hot water to wash away the red sticky muddle that had decorated his gracile fingers. It burned and yet disturbingly soothed his cuts and bruises. He could not be late. From the time he attended the contest as a child observer he knew that the judges always picked the two best pianists to go on Friday and Saturday. The pianist who played on Saturday usually won. Travis had been picked to go on Friday, while Lymond got the coveted Saturday position. Travis had been ousted from his niche and it infuriated him. The other two competitors simply filled slots for the sake of posterity and tradition and everyone knew it but their families, friends, and their disillusioned piano instructors. Travis arrived on time and eagerly waited to take his position in front of the house and god. Travis always suspected that god, omnipotent, watched, yet never called on him for strength, he, entirely interdependent, delved into himself and summoned his own passions his own pangs, his own horrid and furtive, insatiable, ferocities. He prayed, however, and for a reason that cannot be known to anyone, he prayed aloud in an ingratiating whisper for god to watch his heart. While he paced backstage, Travis nursed his quivering fingers, still incepting of the fact that pain would inevitably follow any pressure whatsoever; he recollected on the difficulties he had inserting food into his mouth. It waned as of no consequence; all that mattered now was proving his own majesty over all others who confided in music to sooth the unresolved issues of their hearts, especially Lymond. As Travis walked onto the stage he became increasingly aware of his own uncertainties that he would be able to press down the keys of his piano at all. It was disparaging to see the electrified faces demanding perfection even in his jaunt to the piano at center stage. He glanced at his fingers once more and remembered the prayer he just made then finally put it out of his head and decided, “I will infuse my pain into my music as it should always be with those of a disconcerting heart.” He sat down at the piano, and began to play. The first movement progressed impeccable. Until that point no one in that concert hall had ever heard such undeniable passion expressed through music. It captivated all that heard it except one soul near the back of the hallowed hall. A young Lymond, in the spring of life, was sour and taciturn. He was altogether supercilious towards the piece; no one could deny its innovation and genius. Yet Lymond did. And, as any maniacal master of music would do he proceeded to pick apart the cruciferous piece and revise his own piece to likewise counter the indelible mark it would leave on any sane mind. Travis began triumphantly. He continued in a beautiful sustention of minor triadic progressions, which was softened into a sweet longing of love and intangible feeling, which proliferated the entire room. It brought tears to those all too familiar with the dolorous loss of true companionship or the absence of it from the former string of anecdotes that made up their desperate and broken lives, still it gave hope to those who were not so tainted by the desires of flesh. Regardless, it showed the entire universe and its omniscient maestro that in man was the answer to all the hate and evil and horrific atrocities that subjugated the earth to animalistic reasoning and made it tangible through rites of spring. (It would have been easy in that moment to forget yourself, to forget your place, your presence, and simply live in the moment. And in that moment existed the world that left with a bang instead of a whimper.) The notes possessed a commanding dominance over the room. Every chord, every sundry rhythmic change in melody captivated not only the mind but the soul. This harsh stabbing relented into a sweetness of longing for a new, better, beginning. It could not have been a hollow man sitting on that bench up there. Not even a man, a heavenly creature had to have been up there. Inside the creature a tempestuous raging against imperfection, against madness took place. Travis suspected that at any moment the sores on the ends of his fingers would break open and let loose the reservoir of blood behind the walls of clotting puss and cracking flesh that pounded against the pure white teeth of the piano, which now taunted him. With every press of the key and resonance of the note he felt the pain and worked through it. He felt the anger towards Lymond coming forth in a rage of hate and brooding force that all congregated at the tips of his bloating fingers. Finally it was all too much. At the height of his rage, the fast tempo, the fierce striking of the keys, the rapid undulation, was all too much, and they burst. His fingers broke into a sobbing spurt of blood and puss, which flowed over the piano like a waterfall of liquid psychosis. Still, he continued, without letup, the complete petrifaction of the room hindered him, not in the least. He poured every ounce of unexhausted strength and vigor into that final movement. To the end it was miraculous. The final arpeggio of death oscillated down into the deepest crevices of darkness and finally, Travis dropped off the edge of the precipice, and fainted on the sustained vanquish of the final note of his performance. He was overcome by complete exhaustion and loss of blood. In an instant several people swarmed his motionless body and hastily transported him to the hospital a second time. Lymond flustered in disgust. The next evening Lymond took the stage. He dressed in a brown squalid suit; he looked just as suited to ride a horse as he did to play the piano. Travis would not have missed the performance for the world. Despite his increasingly gaunt condition, inflicted from the preceding few days, he found it in himself to attend the concert hall that night with the assistance of a few lovely fellow students. When Lymond took the stage there were a few smirks and giggles from the audience, mainly due to the appalling state of his apparel. Travis was stern and had a very serious and sagacious look on his face. The crowd settled and disrespect drizzled into nothing. Lymond, began to play. The beginning was simple, like a squeezebox, just a methodical ululation of resounding arpeggios. To some in the audience it appeared comical in a sullen kind of way. However to Travis, it was genius. And then, when it hit him, he raced away, taken completely in one instant, taken by the sour melody, which would undulate throughout the entire piece. Lymond, on stage, looked to those on the outside as if he were crying. The tears presumed to flow from his cheeks with a refulgent glisten. It remained magnificent. Travis cared very little about anything else at that point… all the anger and hate and licentiousness of energy fell away. He became increasingly aware, through the cascade of raucous chords shooting from the stage, that this display of unbelievable sorrow, resulted as work of his doing. He poured hate into his music as an instinctual response to the gross display of brooding hate that had affronted him. Lymond played into the evening air and remained untouchable as if surrounded by an effluvium of god-given poise and smug repose. The man looked as though he took dictation. The next weekend they awarded the medal and honor once again to Travis Marlow. He did not sense victory because he knew he did not deserve it. He felt drained of any pride or relaxation. Above all he felt he had just taken Lymond’s life force away from him. As he accepted the accolade, from the stage he spotted Lymond standing at the back of the clouded and clamoring hall. Travis could see only the outline of Lymond with the exclusion of his eyes. His eyes mirrored perfectly the shining piano onstage. Travis did not stare long enough to notice Lymond’s exodus from the hall. That remained the last time that Travis would see Lymond. That remained the last time Travis felt any rest. His entire life now looked like a clandestine curtain of mediocrity and disdain. For a moment, a single instant that night Travis spent a pure session at the piano. His fingers had healed a bit and he felt that it would be ok to try and play once more, so he tried. Like a drug the experience raised him to ecstasy and then torched him with the pain of bleeding fingers and ruined keys. Blood was hard to remove from such a pure white surface; it was only in the dark crevices and tops of the black keys, the sharps and the flats, that it proved easy to remove the stain of a person’s blood. That night lived out travail and ephemeral, still it remained beautiful forever to Travis. Only one day later Travis heard of Lymond’s suicide just hours after it happened. Lymond’s father, who hailed as an avid hunter, owned a pistol for safekeeping. Lymond procured it and took a visit to the concert hall. There he looked at the piano, he focused on it, and he benevolently looked at it as if he were looking at a photograph of his own childhood, remembering all of the joyous pursuits of pleasant tunes. He laid the gun down on the bench beside him and digressed into playing the second movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, “Pastorale.” It was the Andante molto mosso, which Beethoven named “By The Brook”. Lymond had been working on a piano instrumentation of it for some time. As he played he smiled and laughed. He saw in his mind the babbling brook, the frolicking peasants, the rolling green hills and declivity of the crags in the distance pouring sheets of solid stone into the clouding trees below, which like a waterfall, flowed into the grassy glades below. He seemed more jovial than a child with a new toy. Progressing into the third movement, “Peasant’s Merrymaking,” his favorite, he fluctuated between thoughts of joy and foppery. As Lymond reached the end, in the triumphant procession of three major chords, he stopped on the last note before the fourth movement. He took the gun beside him and held it firmly in his hands. He stared at its glistening barrel, its finely polished handle and sharp trigger. He climbed into the belly of the grand piano, which proved an inhospitable host. The strings of the piano dug into the tender skin of his knees. He laid over on his side then rolled back up on his hands and knees again, which caused the piano to spurt out cries of raucously dissonant disaster. The discordant progression made Lymond laugh. The laugh was childish and fitting to his posture as he crawled around on all fours over the most expensive piece of equipment he had ever touched as if he were looking for something to shoot. Finally, he laid down in a tersely twist. He recollected on Beethoven’s “Pastorale”, he had stopped just as a storm hit the furtive city. He remembered how he thought that it held so much promise for him when he was a child. He thought of his dreams, he never exerted himself at anything but music. He neglected everything for his music, and ‘the music’ betrayed him. He looked at his hands, feeble instruments of nothing. He had done nothing with his life; he had no ties to anyone or anything. Lymond had fed his entire being into ‘the music’ and now the music was nothing, a fleeting memory of rancor and spoiled dreams of that moment when he would be revered as something great. It passed him by and left him to rot inside the belly of the beast that had become his obsession and consumed him but would not kill him and lay him to rest in peace. Alive he remained unsettled and he hated it, more than he hated Travis, more than he even now hated ‘the music’, which drove him into the stomach of the rotund, fat creature of disgust that he now resided in. The feeling crept around in his skull, scrounging up every last morsel of human in him, destroying his asylum, destroying his very thoughts, and he could no longer concentrate on anything. The feeling ate away at the insides of his mind, scraping everything from the whitewashed walls of his tumultuous brain, hollowing out everything until he was the shell of a broken and helpless boy. He did not scream, did not bang around in the piano, or struggle, he simply whimpered pathetically. He raised the gun, still clasped but covered with sweat from his hands, to his temple and shot himself in the head. … Travis looked at his fingers and saw that he needed to renew his bandages. He thought of his resolve, ‘I’m going to try and play again today.’ It presented a hard challenge for him now, to even touch a piano because it hurt him so much, not in his fingers, but in his heart, which was so full of pain and guilt over the heavenly creature he knew he had destroyed. He looked at the sparrows, whose numbers dwindled in the filtered light of the falling sun. Through the clouds pink and orange rays of light cast out fingers upon the grassy knoll of the park. The fingers reached over the entire park and curdled it in between the nook of the bending creek and the clouds kissing the horizon as a mother would cuddle with her newborn child and kiss the top of his soft head. As he looked to the horizon the sparrows took to flight. Where they went he did not know, nor would he sequester an answer as to their whereabouts from anyone. He simply desired to know, and go with them, wherever they went. He grew tired of the park, of the Concert Hall, of the city. He simply looked to the horizon and desired to go where the sparrows went. The horizon told him of the lateness of the hour. He looked to the horizon for answers, and all he got from it was the lateness of the hour.
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Copyright © 2005 Oscar Felix Norton |