Trick of Light

He woke up to the American girl's foot nudging him gently. She looked down at him on the floor with a timid smile & asked if she could roll a cigarette. Next time, don't ask, he said. Just roll it. Shadows of the leaves still writhing across his sheets. She sat by the window smoking. Last night, she said, I noticed something on the ceiling in Stefan's room that I haven't seen before. I asked him about it & he said the only person who could give me the full story was you. He sat up on the floor & opened the refrigerator, hoping to find some champagne left over from a few nights back, but it was empty. It's gone, she said, we finished the bottle by the river last night. I'm the wrong person to ask, he said, if I told you, it would be a skewed version with details pulled out of my ass & an ending you wouldn't believe no matter the conviction in my voice. I've lain on my back in that foul room of his almost every night the last two weeks & I never saw it before, but when I saw it last night, I couldn't ignore it, it was always present, always waiting from above. In the early morning, after we had been asleep already a few hours, he was on top of me again, his wet raspy breath in my ear, on my neck, clenching his fingers around my waist, lunging into the faint light, waiting for me to moan so that he could cum again, but I held my breath, obsessed by the hole in the ceiling as the sun began to fill up the room & the light crawled through some of its cracks. He must've felt awkward fucking me & he asked what I was thinking about, but I didn't answer. The hole seemed to pulse by some trick of the light. The whole ceiling caving inward upon it. Spilling into it like a void in space. Maybe I was still drunk or something, but I felt everything in the room was somehow drawn into the hole, unable to rise toward it, but still attuned to its unshakable presence.

Trailed by a Curse

He remembered he had left some weed in his glasses case & smoked it by the open window as he read the book without a name. Chapter 7. The son is taken into custody. His father refuses to pay the bail & sends the mother to visit him in his jail cell. The son stays in his cot in the corner as his mother cries & tells him that she knew from the moment of his birth that he would be a curse on their name. Till the day we die, she screamed. First drive us to hell, then haunt us there with your rotten memory! He had a bruised eye from fighting with the police who found him crouched half-asleep beside a shed some 10 miles outside the wired stakes of his father's land. No son of mine. As she screamed from beyond the bars, he peered into her mouth, lost in its darkness for a moment, in the silence that awaited him there in the cell, the silence he knew he must coerce & tame or be swiftly dismantled by it. A guard led her by the arm into the lighted hallway before the door was clasped shut. He started dozing off & put the book down. He spread out his blankets on the dusty floor & curled up inside them, listening to the leaves scratch together. Their shadows wresting loose from a gaunt tree. He closed his eyes & felt like he was sinking into a bed of them, not struggling against the descent, dizzied by their sharp musk, buried by what has fallen. In the middle of the night, he heard singing. A group of drunk Russians in the street. High-heels clacking off the stones. As the chorus grew fainter he heard a pair of voices against the wall beside his window, a man & woman trading breathless sentences. Her heels strayed away only a few steps. Rustling jewelry. His coarse voice urging from the sidewalk as she stumbled across the street. He lit a smoke & stood there awhile before following after her.

Faith in Resentment

He told him he had to go, needed to make some money for the ride back. The organist handed him a ten & said melodies have rarely come to me because in the end I resent music, foolishly hold it accountable for all my carelessness & strayed desires which have always led me against the wall, my hands behind my back, waiting for a reprieve. He put the money in his pocket & said thanks for it & the beer. He passed through the park & could see the scars in the trees shining in the lamplight. At the entrance of Warschauer station, he bought some sausage from a fat pimpled man in a wheelchair who rocked back & forth. He slid it in a bun & passed it over the plastic roof which housed the steaming scraps, eyes hid behind sunglasses, beats heard from the headphones around his cleft head. After washing the food down with another beer, he took out his guitar & harmonica & sung "I Fought the Law," even though he never had, the law tends to leave you alone when you've only ever been a threat to yourself. The organist felt his playing was premised on bad faith for the god he was paid to serve, the house he was hired to awaken. Has he failed to serve those bruised & strung-out highwayman, the blind bluesmen in movie lots, cast-out pastors who prophesized in song, voodoo priests & convict seers with all that he grumbled & cursed on busy paths? Twilight & what to offer but this drunk homage. But he knew he wasn't worthy to pay such homage. Too enslaved by fear whereas the others, those for whom he sang, whose songs he whimpered, would risk their soul for a bus ticket to Biloxi.

A History of Sound from the Borderless World

After a city is laid to ruins, do you think it can ever regain its identity, what makes it whole, a sense of cohesion? Is that laid to ruins also? When I wander, I notice that the streets have no pattern, they spiral outward from wherever you choose to rest, some without names, the numbers on the buildings are out of order, passed a park where a stone statue of a war martyr poses enthroned, battered in bright red paint, abandoned courtyards, gutted cemeteries, a grass plot bordered on one side by a building with a billboard on it that faintly pulses under a frail fluorescent light. People come here to get lost & stay lost until they startle awake in the morning with no desire to stay any more & they leave in the same state as they arrived, restless & unamused, gulping whiskey, suitcase slung over the shoulder. Come here to abandon their ambition, stunned beyond the periphery of a world without an axis, to fall asleep in an afternoon dark as any night only to awake & feel as if you had just recovered from a long sickness, face draped in sweat, the curtains rustling together like dry skin. I was standing in a courtyard that I had somehow wandered into. Warm rain fell gently. Tapped off the bicycles gathered against the wall, off the waste bins & the cobbled floor. A melody appeared in my mind that I held onto as it repeated itself, gradually transforming into a soprano's voice, a sustained & shrill cry, unobstructed & piercing, then the melody continued repeating until the rain stopped & the voice ceased with no trace of an echo.

Sieve of Melody

I began writing piano music when I was a student at the conservatory for a few girls in my class, the ones who captivated me with their severity & those cunning glances they passed to one another. I named each piece after their initials. I never knew if they played them or hummed them aloud in the shower or burnt them in steel baskets. You should have played them, he said. No, I was too shy, besides, getting any one of those girls alone in a room was impossible unless you were the teacher in which case you had full possession of their time. They would hardly speak to anyone else. I entered a competition my last year there with a sonata. I played it blindfolded before the committee & stood up afterwards & bowed before a portrait of Stalin on the classroom wall. I was disqualified & almost expelled. I kept writing pieces & using the paper later on to roll cigarettes. When I got married, I lost my ear for melody if I ever had one to start with. He asked him if he ever wrote a piece for his wife & he shook his head & said no & told him that he wrote a piece for his son while he was dying. A lullaby. He played it at his bedside on a toy piano. Sometimes when I'm walking in the afternoon, I'll hear a melody trembling as it tries to take shape, but nothing ever coheres because the space I wander through transforms with every step & the music cannot hold. Nothing coheres in this city. No center on which to stand. Only boundaries within which to wander. Unheimlich. That's what they call it. The sensation of realizing that your origin has no beginning & that your memory has no end. Music needs some center of gravity from which it first strays & eventually orbits. When the ruins of a city slowly disappear, the inspiration therein follows. The organist asked him if he wrote songs & he said he never wrote anything down, all the songs piled together in his head, the ones he'd heard & the ones he'd imagined, the lyrics intermingled, each refrain fueled by irredeemable desire.

Weight of Return

He bought another round with the money he had earned & the money he had stolen. The organist told him he didn't practice anymore but wandered around the city, trying to replace the conversations he had in his life with the ones he had imagined, wondering if he should someday return to Estonia, pretend like it's home again, return to that fallen tree near the border where he sat & stared at the tangled snow trails of hunters long passed through that rose up from the valley, return to faith to ease the final phase of entropy. He asked him if he wanted to return to the States & he said he never thought about it, never had the desire to return to anything. We unknowingly tread circles again & again. The days repeat themselves of their own accord. Why would anyone choose to return? But the repetition of life, the organist replied, is an illusion. When I returned home after circling through Russia for years, the world I had abandoned was completely altered, the only pieces that remained were the ones which terrified me & I knew it was never my home in the first place. It wasn't a circle that I had tread, but another path I had to untangle. If nowhere you return to is the same as it was before you left it, then maybe the nothingness after death is different than the nothingness before birth.

Endless Joke

Both of us, he said, play before an oblivious audience. Yours are too consumed with their next station, in Eile, rushing onward to where their pleasure & pain await them. Mine are the near-dead, papyrus-skinned, deaf, compulsively wetting the roofs of their mouths, waiting for the Word, embittered over the failed promises of their pension plans. We play for ourselves. With ourselves. But if an audience is oblivious, truly oblivious, he replied, then they're not an audience. Just people happening by & no one can expect any more or less from them. Are you only playing for yourself? In a church, aren't you playing for someone else? Someone who you know is listening? Mortals may be oblivious, but you've captivated the infinite. I don't play for anyone but myself, the organist said, if I did, then the music would have no direction. No force. Plagued by distractions. Certainly not for God. If I wanted to play for an idol, I would do it for one worth believing in: money, sex, posterity. The moment you humbly present something beautiful, something you've pieced together out of pure humiliation before the infinite, it dismantles it with unworldly tact, then spits it back in your face. Maybe then you should present it with pride. The organist told him he had nothing to be proud of & that he wanted to keep it that way. He lives out of a suitcase. Has a wife that posts pictures of their dead son on the walls of her room, pointing to them, laughing silently to herself. Once she wrote with lipstick when will the joke be up? on her bathroom mirror. When the asylum worker tried to wipe if off, she bit him in the arm. He told him he played at a Russian Orthodox church in the West that reeked of death. They lit hundreds of candles to hide the stench. Incense & petal water. Nothing. Only when the doors finally close after the last congregant, will the church smell once again of an empty tomb.

Far Cry & Fugue

When he opened his eyes, a squat man with a beard & pale green eyes was standing in front of him. The people passing can't hear you, he said. All the cars. The horns. The trains coming in & out. If they could hear you, I'm sure they would listen. Maybe give you a little more money. You were playing the blues, weren't you? The world is too loud for the blues. The passion's lost in the noise. I don't care if they can hear me, he said, as long as I have enough to buy a few beers after I'm done. Maybe they will hear the words later when they step into a quieter place. He set the guitar in its case & snapped it shut. Please save your money, the man said. Let me buy you a beer. They drank at a table outside a bar. The man pointed to the park across the street. On those trees, he said, you can see fingernails etched in the wood. Communists. Jews. Russians. Germans. Anarchists. Each has left the same grip of death. It seems each corner of this city is haunted by murderers & the murdered. How can you have music on the same corner where a boy had his throat slit, where an old lady was raped with a Kalashnikov? You know you're the first musician I've seen playing on these streets since the last time I was here. The people here are too weary to let their daily rituals get shaken up. They only hear their own second-guessing. He told him that he disagrees. Death lures musicians from their hovels. The soul of Orpheus' lyre. Requiems. The cloaked violinist one step behind the pallbearers trudging up to the pit. He asked him if he was a musician & the man told him that he's a traveling church organist. I started playing all over Russia & Eastern Europe, he said, once the Soviets let me leave Estonia. I haven't gone back too much since my son died & my wife stopped speaking & got put in the asylum. She knew he was going to die & she was always the consoling one. But when he died, she said that her love died too & wouldn't speak to anyone. I saw her last winter. She was watching game shows in her robe & her toenails hadn't been cut in years.