Dream: I’m in a car. A small portable electronic keyboard is on my lap. Despite its size it’s filling the car with massive grand piano resonance as I play. I’m performing one of Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes (something which in waking life would be laughably, absolutely impossible). I find I haven’t prepared well, but I’m playing my best. I can approximate on a general level the activity of the piece — I’m roughly outlining the music, giving an impressionistic account of it — if the music were a relief map then I was slicing everything away but prominences, peaks, valleys and deep oceans — the other passengers aren’t really paying attention. They’re talking idly, it’s beginning to irritate me. My embarrassment at their indifference alternating with brazen confidence.

I’m now at home, playing the piano while my mother and Uncle are watching television. Again I’m playing Liszt, and I go to seek my 16-yr. old sister’s guidance. I carry the portable keyboard to her bedroom. She is giving cryptic looks and begins to explain chords and basic music theory, subjects of which she’s wholly ignorant in waking life. She begins to talk about Eugene: a former student who had displayed some level of mastery early on in his career and who was later famous for asking amazingly incisive questions about harmony or structure or the proper rubato to apply to a difficult piece, who would appear to absorb the answers, the key distinctions and lessons, but who would apply none of it to his work, leaving everyone baffled. His skills disintegrated rapidly, his career crumbled. I listened to her, envying his arrogance. Missing the point that he was a failure, I became jealous and vowed to outperform him.

The phone rings. I pick it up in my room. Carissa — that’s my sister — is with me. The receiver is quiet, but soon there are sounds in the background as if someone else had picked up on the line. I immediately suspect my father. Whoever’s calling isn’t saying anything, and my dad’s listening in again. I know to go to his bedroom, where he always is. I never stop to think that it may have been father himself calling me from his room just to get my attention. I leave my sister and walk into his room.

His presence fills the space like molasses, oozing, oppressive, without safe gaps and spaces to breathe in, I feel him in waves — he is holding the phone and in the middle of muttering something like “why the fuck doesn’t he come in right away he knows I’m calling him” — he sees me, throws the portable receiver at me and I think to catch it but I can’t, I’m carrying a giant book, so I can’t make a clean catch, I watch the phone bounce on the floor. He is pissed as hell yet stays in his chair, looking at me. As if to justify his flinging of the phone at me, and make me feel guilty about not catching it, he shows me the palm of his hand, which is ruined, scarred, mutilated from some accident.

I nod.

Suddenly the oppressiveness in the room relaxes. His tone becomes whispery, confidential. He tells me that “something bad happened to your mother last night — one of the cats got very sick. It almost died. She had to take care of it. This upset your mother greatly. … It almost died.”

I knew he was going to suggest I comfort her. I was to be his carrier pigeon, his ambassador of comfort to mother. All prior, similar failures of his seemed to gather and flow around this present one — I was conscious of a sudden spinning wheel of resentful memories, with what he was asking now of me as the hub — this sudden congress of memories struck me numb.

Father still held his hand up in earnest, gnomic, votive sign, palm facing me, the skin of it a spidery network of gouges, some raw, all crisscrossing. A glove of scar.

I stood there, breathed slowly.

I accepted everything.
   
   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2007

posted by Snail at 1:58 am