Tripping the Tale Fantastic Read online

  In that nondescript living room, with a drab couch at one end and an abandoned piano at the other, my choices were slim. So it was fortunate that what I really felt like doing was to move and sway to the music in my head.

  It was part soft, melancholy tune, calling for slow, languid movement, punctuated by an occasional twirl, and part rugged beat requiring significant exertion and a steady stomping for full effect. Lost in my dancing, I didn’t notice my mission as she shuffled into the living room.

  It was the beeping of the telephone that alerted me to Van’s presence. I whirled around at the sound and took in her appearance—a rank and tattered robe, bags under her eyes, coffee mug in one hand, cordless telephone in the other. Of course, she didn’t know I was coming; otherwise I like to think she would have spruced up a little.

  The telephone was pressed to her ear. She listened, took a deep breath, and hung up. She set the telephone on the dusty piano in front of her. I watched her staring at it. Since she wasn’t busy anymore, I thought it would be best to start the conversation.

  “I’m no Terpsichore, but sometimes I like to expand my reach a little bit,” I confided. “But let’s get to the reason I’m here. I’m so excited about working on this with you. It’s about time it was finished.”

  Van slowly reached for the telephone on the piano, dialed, listened, then hung up, tears in her eyes. I cringed as she thumped the mug onto the piano next to the telephone she’d abandoned a second earlier. She turned, fetched a bottle of cognac from a cabinet, and poured a hefty dose of liquor into her coffee.

  “You’re not fooling anyone with that,” I told her. “Even your Mrs. Desai from across the street has noticed. She understands, maybe, but she noticed. She’s worried about you.” Van took a big gulp from her mug as I added, “I am, too.”

  She picked up the telephone again, dialed, listened, hung up. I had to intervene.

  “You know he won’t answer,” I said softly.

  She whimpered and hid her face in her hands.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She took a breath and wiped her tears away. She attempted a smile.

  “Oh, good! That’s the spirit.”

  I was encouraged, until she looked at her mug and sighed. She picked up the telephone, and I began to get impatient. It usually doesn’t take them so long to perceive me. I tried again.

  “Maybe if you did something else for a change? That’s why I’m here.”

  She dialed, listened, hung up. She picked up her mug and reached for the bottle.

  “Maybe if you drank something else for a change …”

  Van put the bottle down and I felt a new hope surge in me. I thought she was finally with me. But she returned to her automatic gestures, picking up the bottle to pour more liquor into her mug.

  I almost gave up.

  “It’s too bad, because … it really needs your help. It’s not finished. And we’re so close! If you could just …”

  She picked up the telephone again and—I don’t know what came over me—I snatched the receiver out of her hand. Hardly the delicate first impression for which I was aiming.

  It worked, though. I wasn’t invisible anymore.

  “What the hell?!” she shouted. “What—who the hell are you?”

  She was backing away from me, frantically looking around her, I suspect for a weapon. She picked up the liquor bottle and brandished it.

  “Get the hell out of my house!” she demanded.

  Not my best manifestation.

  “No, you don’t understand …” I started.

  “I said—”

  “I’m here because of Sergueï!” I interrupted.

  She froze, arm above her head.

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry. It’s not my habit to manifest myself this way. I got impatient. I couldn’t wait for you to notice me on your own.”

  She looked confused and forgot her fear. I like to think it’s because I’m a calming presence, but it was probably due to how much she’d had to drink.

  “What? How long have been here?” She set the bottle down. “You knew Sergueï?”

  I attempted to explain. “Sergueï and I had a … a very intimate kind of relationship.” I watched as her face registered surprise.

  “Oh. I—I didn’t know.”

  Her prolonged shock worried me. This wasn’t going as I planned. “Are you all right?”

  She ignored—or didn’t hear—my question. “How long?” she asked.

  “Pardon?”

  “How long did you two … know each other?”

  I laughed.

  “Oh, forever!”

  She mulled over my answer. I didn’t understand what was bothering her so much.

  “Oh … What’s your name?”

  “Euterpe,” I replied with a swish of my dress. “I’m pleased to meet you.”

  She didn’t say anything. I understood. I have that effect on people. My presence overwhelms them—they are thrilled, energized and debilitated at the same time. When they recognize me for what I am, they are relieved, ecstatic, inspired. That’s the point. That’s why I come. That’s how I help. But with this mission, it wasn’t the same. She wasn’t responding as she was supposed to. Where was the elation, the rapture? I felt the sting of her indifference. I tried again.

  “I didn’t mean to surprise you. I’m usually much less … obvious. But I was thinking maybe you’d want to see this. Get your opinion. You are a music teacher, after all; we have that in common.”

  “You teach, too?”

  I smiled, fished out a dozen precious sheets of music from my bodice and handed them to her.

  “Something like that,” I said.

  She read the music. I could hear it in her head. I knew she liked it. Good.

  “Mm-hmm. Strong, melodic, not too complicated … Why show me? This yours?”

  “Not entirely …”

  She gasped. One hand clutched at her throat. She understood. “It’s his, isn’t it.” She discarded the music brusquely and the pages fluttered to the floor. “That’s a mean trick.”

  “It’s not a trick!” I protested. What was I doing wrong? I dreaded having to explain to my sisters, if it got any worse.

  “Coming in like this, who asked you?” she continued. “I’m trying to get through this and you just show up here …”

  “I’m trying to help …”

  “How is this supposed to help anything?”

  I had to try a different tack. Draw on my extensive experience. Speak from my heart.

  “You’re right. I haven’t been clear and I can see that this is upsetting you. Let me rephrase. I need your help.”

  “Why should I help you? I never even knew about you!”

  I shook my head. It was simply that she didn’t remember me. A difficult part of the job. Whenever I show up, it’s like the first time for them, no matter how many times I visited them before.

  “I think you should leave,” she stated.

  That would be the worst thing to do. I decided I’d have to see this mission through no matter how long it took. I stayed the course.

  “No, you have to listen to me. It’s important ... It’s for Sergueï.”

  I picked up the discarded sheet music and glanced at it fondly. I knew it so well already, no matter how new it was. I shook the sheets of paper near her face. “Like you said: it’s beautiful. But it’s not finished. He was working on it when …”

  She looked at me dispassionately. “When he was killed, by an idiot drunk driver. Say it: when he was killed.”

  “When he …” I stopped.

  “Hard, eh?” Van said, more a statement than a question.

  I nodded. “It always is. So many like him who met their demise before their work was done. Well, you know. Wolfgang, Franz, Gustav, Giacomo, Jacques, Jimi …”

  “… Death, on this occasion, was stronger than art,” she said, quoting Toscanini about Puccini’s unfinished Turandot. She glanced at the sheet music a
nd continued. “We played some of it at his funeral.”

  “I know.”

  “His friends and my friends, they were all there. They said it was beautiful.”

  “It was.”

  “You were there?”

  “In a sense.”

  “I don’t remember you,” she said defensively. She looked me up and down, as if trying to trigger a memory. “I would have remembered you.”

  “I’m easily forgotten once I’ve gone.”

  It’s true. I have helped countless men and women discover an inner beauty and I rarely get credit for it. I spend endless nights talking them from the brink of desperation and disaster, I restore courage and conviction and confidence and literally fill the world with music, but I don’t get much thanks. It was harder, in the beginning, when the art was new. I’m used to it, now. The real reward is never being without songs in my head. Acknowledgement —or lack of it—doesn’t change how I feel about my calling. It feels ... divine.

  Van took the sheet music from my outstretched hand. “That was the last time I listened to or even looked at anything he composed. I can’t bear to listen to his music, now—any music, from any of my students; it reminds me too much of what I’ve lost.”

  I picked up the telephone.

  “Then why keep calling?” I asked.

  She took a long, drawn-out breath before answering.

  “For his voice. The sound of his voice on the answering service. I’ve been paying his cellphone bill.”

  “The sound of his voice. Rather than silence. The sound of him.”

  She nodded, then rested her head in her hands, rocking slightly, to and fro.

  “… his music …” I continued. “His music … his voice.”

  She stopped moving. I heard what I rarely hear: a pregnant silence. After a time, she looked up at me and I knew I had reached her. I nodded encouragement, almost too eagerly.

  “His voice …” she echoed.

  “Yes …?”

  We were so close, I could barely breathe. She took the telephone from me, dialed, listened. She almost hung up, but she hesitated, and I could tell I had finally gotten through to her.

  “… Honey?” she said into the telephone, stifling a sob. “It’s Mom. Honey? I love you so much. So much. So much I can hardly stand it. I miss you. Too much. And I wish I could hold you in my arms, and kiss you and make it all better. I don’t know how come I can keep living without you. You are my love, my darling, my precious, my everything. And you had so much going for you. So much to live for. I can’t believe you were cut down in your prime, when you had so much more to give, so much more to create. I am so proud of you. I love what you’ve done with your life. I’m so proud that I was able to influence you, even just a little, to pursue music and composition as a career. You surpassed me with everything you’ve learned and accomplished, and I wish you were here so I could tell you again. I love you, and I’m so proud of you. And …”

  She looked at me gratefully. We shared a smile through our tears.

  “And I’ve met your friend. And, if it’s okay, we’re going to finish it. Because it’s so good. It’s so beautiful. And I’m going to do my best to finish it the way you would have. I hope you’ll be proud of me, too. I miss you, honey, and I love you. More than I can say … Bye.”

  My work was done. She was inspired.

  Van hung up the telephone and stared at it for a time. I disappeared, but I hovered for a few seconds more.

  “Do you think you can help me with this?” she asked.

  She looked around, but had already forgotten what she was looking for. She picked up the sheet music and began to hum its tune. She went to the piano, lifted the fall to uncover the keyboard and started to play.

  I dematerialized to the sound of the memory of Van’s son.

  ***

  THE VIBRATING MOUTH

  John Lee Clark

  It is a tragedy that in the twenty-first century we find ourselves in the same baffling situation we have been in since 1816, when Laurent Clerc sailed for America to establish our first school. He found its shores overrun by human-like creatures that did not speak. Clerc called them the Vibrating Mouth because he observed that spittle flew from their lips. He taught us about them, warning us that they would sometimes capture us and hold us captive, tying our hands and forcing us to vibrate at the mouth.

  At the hearth in his and Eliza’s home, he would terrify the little ones with descriptions of their idolatries surrounding the vestigial organs at the sides of their heads. “Beware, my children,” Clerc would say, “you too possess the same organs. Though they worship their own organs, yours they positively crave. Their thirst is unquenchable. I have seen with my own eyes children like yourselves dragged away to have their organs stabbed with long needles. I have seen them pour into the holes gall mixed in goat’s blood. Oh, far better for you if they cut off your organs and set you at liberty, but they will not, they will not!”

  Two hundred years later, the Vibrating Mouth have grown to be less outwardly monstrous. In fact, many are quite friendly, and we have had abundant opportunity for observation. One of our traditions is to tell the story of our first encounter. I don’t actually remember mine, but my mother loves to tell it for me. It was my first day of school, and a bus was to pick me up. But, for a reason that will shortly present itself, she did not trust the bus driver. So she got in our car and followed the bus. When I stepped out at my school, I was surprised to see her. She asked me if I was all right. I said that I was. “But,” I had added, “the bus driver forgot to talk!”

  My mother laughed and explained that the bus driver was a Mouthie, so of course it couldn’t talk. From that day on, as the story goes, I patted the poor thing on its back whenever I got on or off the bus. I do remember doing that to many other Mouthies. After many encounters, I became something of an expert. Once, out of a perverse adolescent curiosity, I even kissed one. Its lips were soft, but when I reached for one of its hands, its dumb, stilted fingers brought me back to myself and I fled.

  Not that they are easily avoided. There are 330 million of them in the United States alone, more than there are of us humans in the whole world. There are billions of them on our planet. Although many of us consume meat with relish, we cannot bring ourselves to eat them, so near to us in appearance are they. Besides, they are often more valuable alive, for they are immediately below us in the food chain, passing up to us much of our food from their farms and fisheries. We also find it convenient to live in some of the buildings they are clever enough to construct.

  But it is also true that they are a nuisance, and their staggering sway over everything means we must live with many things that do not agree with us. Fortunately, most of them ignore us, and we are free to do as we please. However, we are much troubled by a certain subspecies of their race that dress themselves in long white coats. In recent decades, these have made a flourishing sport of stealing human babies in order to shave their heads, drill holes into their skulls, and insert something. The idea is that it would cause a perfectly normal infant to descend into mouthing.

  We tried to stop these outrages, but swarm after swarm of them would swallow us up, extricating our children from our grasp. There is no logic to their practices. They permit some of our children to attend our schools in peace at the same time they compel others to sit mute all day, vibrating at the mouth in their crude, prison-like imitations of our schools. Most bizarre of all is the taking of our children’s hands to their throats while holding up pictures of cows and pigs and hot dogs and ice cream. Whenever one of our children brays at one of these pictures, the Vibrating Mouth go into frenzies.

  It is the peculiar way with these creatures that they engage in such rituals without ever accepting any of our babies as one of them. Instead, they send them back to us, often many years later, after they’ve tired of toying with their mouths. Every year we receive thousands of damaged and traumatized survivors. Thanks to our powers of patience and love, we
are often able to teach them to speak, think, and act once again as human beings.

  But sometimes we cannot. The problem is that some of them are so damaged that they don’t want to be cured. In such cases, the drill had gone in too deep. Some of them commit suicide. We should steal back our own, to save them from the terrible fate of becoming a thing. Think of it—to be able only to vibrate, never knowing the heights of poetry or the joys of human connection! But we are outnumbered, and stealing is an abnormal, vibratory act. Our elders also remind us that no human being has ever been the cause—unlike the Vibrating Mouth—of wars, massacres, famines, and such brutalities we have not the words to describe.

  Yet we cannot let the Vibrating Mouth get away with their blood sport. Even if they overwhelm the world as a silent, alien majority, we must change the situation. And it may be changing. We have long known that they could be taught to speak, but it was not until recently that we made their rehabilitation one of our primary enterprises. At this stage, we train 500,000 Mouthies annually. Most never get to sing as we do, to take our breath away or bring tears to our eyes, but they almost invariably behave better once they develop a greater awareness of their limited faculties.

  Perhaps if enough of them were thus elevated, they would learn that their vast numbers do not entitle them to destroy our world. For that is what these mutes are doing with their old unquenchable thirst, shaving off forests and mountains, drilling even at the bottoms of oceans, and inserting everywhere unspeakably foul wastes, all as though Earth itself were but the head of a human infant. They have succeeded in making it vibrate with increasing violence, but we know they will never embrace it as their home. They might place it under our care, but will our world still have the desire to be restored?

  Or will they have gone too far?

  ***

  GHOSTLY DEMANDS

  Marsha Graham

  “This is the tenth call this week, Mira,” Francine said, hand on her hip. “Why aren’t we getting a handle on this? People are being terrorized by those ghosts!”