The Memory of Whiteness: A Scientific Romance Read online

  I try a Shimatu Two-Part Invention, a masterpiece of elegance that properly belongs on the piano bar. My hands begin to play at different tempos and I can’t stop them; frightening! I stop, and to aid my timing I reach a shaky right hand up and start the metronome, an antique mechanical box that struck Holywelkin’s fancy. It’s an upside down pendulum, a visual surprise because it seems to defy gravity.

  I begin the Invention again, but the tempo is too fast for me and the notes become a confused mass, sounding like church bells recorded and replayed at a much higher speed. The gold weight on the metronome’s arm reflects a part of my face (my eyes) as it comes to its lowest point on the left side. And my heart—my heart is beating in time with the metronome’s penetrating, woodblock-struck, rhythmic tock.

  And the metronome is speeding up. Impossible, for the weight has not moved; yet true. At first it was an andante tock … tock, and now it is a good march tempo, tock, tock; and my heartbeat with it all the way. With each pulse small specks of light are exploding and drifting like tiny Chinese lanterns across my eyes. I can feel the quick pulses of blood in my throat and fingers, the tocks are now an allegretto tocktocktock, and frightened I lift a finger, a terrible weight, and stick it into the flashing silver arc with the gold band across its center. The metronome stops.

  I begin to breathe again. My heart slows down. A true hallucination, I think to myself, is very disturbing. After a time I push the celesta keyboard back into its nook and try to stand. My legs explode. I grasp the stool. Cramps, I think in some cold corner of my mind, watching the limbs flail about. I knead the bulging muscles with one hand and keep shifting to find a more comfortable position; it occurs to me that this is what the phrase “writhing in agony” describes. The cold corner of my mind disappears, and that was all that was left.…

  I come to and the cramps are gone. They feel like they are on the verge of recurrence, though. If I don’t move I think I will be all right. I wish it were closer to the end. How long was I gone? Time expands with my breath, deflates in my exhalation. How long have I lived? I no longer believe in time, the metronome is broken, the moment here is all that is, the moment and the only moment.

  I can see my reflection in the tuba’s dented bell. A sorry-looking spectacle, disheveled and pale. The features are architecturally distinct. I can see quite clearly the veins below my eyes. The reflection wavers, each time presenting me with a different version of my face. Some are dome-foreheaded and weak-chinned; some have giant hooked noses; others are lantern-jawed and have pointy heads.

  I reach up to the stool and grab it; my hand closes on nothing and I look again; at least six inches off. I must get up on the stool. Arms move up, feet grope for purchase, all very slowly. I move with infinitesimal slowness, as a child does when escaping his house at night to run the streets. Head to seat, knee to footbar, I stop to get used to the height, watching the broken light explode in my eyes.

  Now I am up and seated on the stool. I remember a holo in which a man was buried to the neck in tidal flats at low tide. Ancient torture of our primitive ancestors on old Earth. A head sitting on wet, gleaming sand, looking outward to sea: the image is acid-etched on the inside of my eyelids.

  Do something. I pull out the French horn and oboe keyboards, play the soaring, ethereal duet of De Bruik’s Garden Prayer. “These are the instruments with colds,” the Master once said to me in a light moment. “The horn has a chest cold, the oboe a head cold.” Timbre, the heart of music. The prayer is too slow, the instruments cannot play the glissando, mistakes intrude and I switch to scales, C, F, B flat, E flat, A flat, D flat; bead, bead, every good boy deserves favor, each good boy does fine; then the minors, harmonic and melodic—

  … “Drop that sixth,” she yells from the kitchen, “harmonic, not melodic. Play me the harmonic now.”

  Again—

  “Harmonic!”

  Again.

  She comes in, grabs my right hand in hers, hits the notes. “Third down, sixth down, see how it sounds spooky? Do it, now.” I do it, I see the difference, it is like a light bursting over me, a whole world revealed, suddenly a realm of feeling is available to me that before didn’t exist, and I feel I am floating over the bench, lifted by sound. “Okay, do that twenty times, then we’ll try the melodic.”

  * * *

  I stop playing minor scales, my heart pounding. I collect the oddball keyboards seldom played—glockenspiel, contrabassoon, slide clarinet, digeree-doo, glass harp—and become bored with the quintet even as I gather them. I am sick again in the drinking fountain. Matchheads in muscle; it hurts to breathe; and time flutters like an anenome, in a tide of pain. Certainly I have been in the Orchestra for a long time. A walk around the room would be nice, but I fear it is beyond me. I am very near the end, one way or another. The tide is rising. De Quincey and Cocteau, Burroughs and Nguyen, Kirpal and Tucci, you lied to me—there is no romance in withdrawal, in the experience itself, none at all. It is no fun. It hurts.

  * * *

  There is a knock at the door. In it swings, slow as the arm of the metronome when the weight is highest. A short man struts through the doorway. Tied to his middle is a small bass drum, and welded to the top of the drum is a battered trumpet, its mouthpiece waving about in front of his face. Beside the mouthpiece is a harmonica, held in place by stiff wires wrapped around his neck. In his right hand is a drumstick, in his left an ancient clacking device (canasta?) and between his knees are tarnished cymbals, hanging at odd angles. He looks as scruffy as I feel. He marches to a spot just below me, lightly beating the drum, then halts and brings his knees together sharply. When the clanging dies down he looks up and grins. His face has a reddish tint to it, and I can see through him.

  “Who are you?” I ask.

  “Arthur Holywelkin,” he replies, “at your service.” Suddenly I see the resemblance between the disreputable character below me and the imposing statue high in the foyer. “And you?” he says to me.

  “Johannes Wright.”

  “Ah! A musician.”

  “No,” I tell him. “I just operate your machine.”

  He looks puzzled. “Surely it takes a musician to operate my machine.”

  “Just an engineer.” We are speaking in a dead silence, a perfect stillness. “Did you really build this thing?”

  “I did.”

  “Then it’s all your fault. You’re the cause of all my troubles,” I say down to him, “you and your stupid vulgar monstrosity! When you assembled this joke,” I ask him, kicking a glass upright, “were you serious?”

  “Most serious.” He nods gravely. “Young man,” he says, emphasizing certain words with drum beats, “you have Completely Missed the Point. My Invention is Not an Orchestra.”

  “But it is an orchestra,” I say. “It’s an imitation orchestra—an orchestrion, an orchestrina—whatever you call it, it does a terrible job! All you’ve done is turn a sublime group achievement, a human act, into an inferior egotistical solo—”

  “No, no, no, no, no,” he exclaims, drum beats for every no. “The invention is an imitation of an orchestra only in the same way a one-man band was an imitation of a band, eh?” He winks suggestively. “In other words, not at all. It is a fallacy to become comparative.” He takes off and makes a revolution around the Orchestra, playing “Dixie” on the trumpet and pounding the bass drum, and filling all the rests with cymbals. It sounds awful. Back again. “Wonderful, eh? Thank you.”

  “You have proved my point,” I say viciously. “This instrument is a joke. Nothing but showmanship. I am an artist”—voice hurting—“and I cannot abide it.”

  Slowly the grin on his face disappears. He grows in stature, pulls the bass drum around to the side so that he can lean into the Orchestra and scowl at me. “My invention is no better or worse than any other instrument. No further from human action than any other step away from the voice.” Now his face is shoved far into the Orchestra, it glares at me from between the tape recorders and the neck of a cello.
Low voice, whispering: “If you are ever to learn to play my instrument properly, you must change the way you think of yourself.…”

  “You can’t change the way you are.”

  “Certainly you can. What could be simpler?”

  The silence stretches out. Red and blue lights reflect in the glass.

  “Listen,” he commands in the whispery voice. “The Orchestra has been misnamed. I did not build it to play symphonic music of the past; in that regard the Masters have mistaught you. The instrument has its own purpose, and you must find it. You must look around, think anew. You must write its music yourself. That is what I did. They never thought of me as a composer; but they were wrong. All of my work was music.”

  “You were a mathematician.”

  “Exactly. And because of that I built this instrument. And you must learn it to understand me. To understand its purpose.” He puts up a hand to stall my protest. “You don’t know it very well yet.” His small smile is frightening. “I took nineteen years to build it, yet it would only take two or three to put it together. Haven’t you ever wondered about that? There is more to it than meets the eye.” Now his voice becomes portentous, deep, ominous, and his red face is as tall as the control booth; it appears he is crouching down to stare in at me, and a giant finger waggles at me from the top of the keyboards: “There is more to it than meets the eye. You must learn it completely. Then compose for it. Then play it; play it with everything in you. And then—” He pulls away from the Orchestra, shrinks back to his original size. He turns, walks to the door, clink clink clink. A dull drum beat, a finger pointed like a gun. He leaves. The door closes.

  * * *

  So here I am, a young man sizzling in a hallucinatory withdrawal, suspended in this contraption like a fly trapped in the web of a spider sizzling in a hallucinatory withdrawal.… You’ve seen pictures of those poor tangled webs that drugged spiders make in labs? That is what Holywelkin’s Orchestra would look like in two dimensions, from any side. Glassy arms holding out bright brass and wood instruments like Christmas tree ornaments, like strange fruit. A glass hand, a tree reaching up in a swirl of rich browns and silvers and prisms. The Yggdrasil of sound. Music doesn’t grow on trees you know. The cymbals are edged with rainbows.

  Most certainly I have been suffering delusions. It is easy afterward to say that a conversation with a man three centuries dead is a delusion, but while it is happening, quite definitely happening, it is hard to discount one’s senses. We only know the world by our senses, after all; or if not, if we know the world by more than our senses, it is a difficult thing to prove. The senses … damage is being done in my brain; it is as if I can feel the individual cells swelling and popping. I am very sick, very sick. There is little to do but sit and wait it out. Surely it is near the end.

  I wait. Time passes. Pop pop pop … like swollen grains of rice. Oh, no—no!—not my mind. Something must be done. Might as well play the thing. Set out to learn—to start to learn.

  I’m not convinced by you, Holywelkin! Not a bit!

  * * *

  My destiny.

  * * *

  I arrange the keyboards in concert position, my hands shoving them about like tugboats pushing big ships. Dispassionately I watch my hands shake. The cold corner of my mind has taken over and somehow I am outside the nausea. I see things with the clarity you have when you are extremely hungry, or tired past the point of being tired. Everything is quite clear, quite in focus. I have heard that drowning men experience a last period of great calm and clarity before losing consciousness. Perhaps the tide is that high now. I cannot tell. Oh, I am tired of this! Why can’t it be over? Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” the baritone playing the high line. So nice, the way 9/8 time rolls over and over. The passages come to me clean and sharp-edged. I find it hard to keep my balance; everything is over-exposed. I sway. I close my eyes. A Shimatu fantasia. Against the black field of my eyelids’ insides there is a marvelous show of altered light, little colored worms that burst into existence, crawl across my vision and disappear. Behind the lights are barely discernable patterns, geometric tapestries that flare and contract under the pressure of my eyelids. The music is intertwined with this odd mandala; when I clamp my eyes hard there is a sudden rush of blue geometry with a black center, with it a roll of tympani, swirl of mercury drum, wail of woodwinds, all fitting surely into the fantastic blue patterns that blossom before me. De Bruik’s monumental Tenth Symphony, as effortlessly as if I were the conductor and not the performer. My interior field of vision clears and becomes a neutral color, grey or dull purple. Ten clear lines run across it in sets of five. The score. As I play the notes they appear, in long vertical sets as in a conductor’s score. They move off to the left as on a computer screen. Excellent. Half-notes, quarter-notes in the bass clef; in the treble, long runs of sixteenth-notes, all like the sun shining through pinholes in dark paper. As far as I can tell the score is perfectly accurate. It is more than one person can play and I don’t remember commanding the tape of the Symphony that might be on file to join in, but when I think, “it would be nice to have the aeolia howl through this passage,” the airy whistling courses through the music, picking it up as a scrap of paper is picked up in a gale. My fingers are doing it, and yet my mind is not. Play it with everything in you: now every single instrument in the statue is giving voice, the Orchestra spins, the glass arms fiddle and finger and jerk about madly, the great finale of De Bruik’s greatest symphony tears about the room, carrying me with it so that my heart beats like a child inside me, trapped and fighting to get out. Nineteen years, Holywelkin, is this what you meant? My mind is doing it, and yet my fingers are not.

  The Orchestra plays what I want to hear.

  I move into realms of my own, shifting from passage to passage, playing the music I have always searched for, the half-remembered snatches and majestic chords that I have woken up from in the middle of the night, and wished I could recapture; and now the lost time has returned, the lost music is mine. The architecture of Bach, the power of Beethoven, the overwhelming beauty of De Bruik, all confused into a marvel of thought: think it and hear the Orchestra play it at that very instant. The performer the instrument, so that my hands fly about the control booth, my feet, elbows, forehead, all playing, while the essential I floats out of the body to observe and to listen, astonished to rapture.

  Music. If you are at all alive to it, you will have heard passages that bring a chill to your spine and a flush of blood to your cheeks; a rush of blood through all your skin; and this is a physical response to beauty. The music I am playing now is the very distillation of that feeling, oh, hear it!—it soars out and out, I close my eyes, but the rolling score no longer consists of musical notation, it is an impressionist fantasy of a musical score, the background a deep blood red, the notes sudden clusters of jewels or long flows of colors I can’t identify even as I see them; yet see them anyway—drums pounding, strings rushing and jumbling, awash in a wave of fortissimo brass shouts, brass floating, triumphant—

  … triumphant she is as I ascend the dais I can see her face and she is strained and ecstatic as if in labor for to her I am being born again and through the investiture all I can see is her bright face before me unto her a Master is born—

  … and masterful, chaotic yet perfectly calculated. The score is a mille fleurs of twisted colors, falling, falling, the notes are falling in great thirds. I open my eyes and find that they are already stretched wide open; a rush, a rush of red, red is all I see, a blinding waterfall of molten glass cascading down, behind it a thousand suns.

  * * *

  I awake from a dream in which I was … in which I was … running down alleys. Talking with someone. Perceiving a destiny. I cannot remember.

  * * *

  I am lying on the glass floor of the booth, I can feel the bas-relief of the clef signs. My mouth feels as if it has been washed in acids, which I suppose it has. My legs. My left hand is asleep. I have been poured from my contai
ner, my skeleton is gone, I am a lump of flesh. I move my arm. An achievement.

  “Johannes,” comes the Master’s voice, high-pitched in its anxiety. It is probably what awakened me. His hand is on my shoulder. He babbles without pause as he helps me out of the Orchestra, “I just got here, you’re all right, you’re all right, the music you were playing, my God, here, here, watch out, you’re all right, my son—”

  “I am blind,” I croak. There is a pause, a gasp. He holds me in his arms, half carries me onto a cot of some sort, muttering in a strained voice as he moves me about.

  “Horrible, horrible,” he keeps saying. “Horrible.” It is age old. Lose your sight, and learn to see. Or learn … something. I blink away tears for my lost vision, and cannot see myself blink.

  “You will make a great Master,” he says firmly.

  I do not answer.

  “The blindness will not make any difference at all.”

  And after a long pause—

  “Yes,” I say, wishing he understood, wishing there was someone who understood, “I think it will.”

  Chapter One

  THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

  the exemplar of contemplation

  Dear Reader, two whitsuns orbit the planet Uranus; one is called Puck, the other, Bottom. They burn just above the swirling clouds of that giant planet, and with the help of the planet’s soft green light they illuminate all that dark corner of the solar system. Basking in the green glow of this trio are a host of worlds—little worlds, to be sure, worlds no bigger (and many smaller) than the asteroid Vesta—but worlds, nevertheless, each of them encased in a clear sphere of air like little villages in glass paperweights, and each of them a culture and society unto itself. These worlds orbit in ellipses just outside the narrow white bands of Uranus’s rings; you might say that the band of worlds forms a new ring in the planet’s old girdle: the first dozen made of ice chunks held in smooth planes, the newest made of an irregular string of soap bubbles, filled with life. And what holds all these various worlds together, what is their lingua franca? Music.