Pete A. Nicholson

Sunday, December 14, 2008

F#A#Infinity

(This an excerpt. For the full story, contact Ballyhoo Stories, or write to me.)



…The sea air, at first a panacea for his exhaustion, soon tightened his chest and whipped his face. His compositions, so bright and realised in his first months on the island—all twinkling arpeggios and soaring Eastern harmonies—became icy, minimalist constructions, devoid of feeling, collapsed. He would play them on his weathered harmonium, the notes hanging in the stale air of the shack like smog, resonant hum aping digital squeal.

The small bay near his shack with the gums stripped bare and teetering over the impenetrable green of the water, the inlet of bowl-shaped perfection littered with overturned boats, became no different to him than the towering insurance building that dwarfed his old Richmond apartment. He ceased to be able to distinguish between the Tasmanian sunsets, luminous and unreasonable in their play of form and colour, and the oppressive grey of the Melbourne city sky. Nature had lost its difference, its clean contrast and silent victory.

It was a strong recommendation of the softly spoken doctor that Keith visit a Tinnitus Support Meeting at the Hobart Community Union Centre the evening of his discharge. He drove Keith there in a salmon-coloured sedan that smelt equally of musk and Port Royal and did not attempt to make conversation, instead put a tape in the car stereo, let the layered drone of the song fill the gap where there may have been small talk, encouragement, reassurance. Keith was grateful and moved equally by the silence and the music that replaced it, stuttering out of the speaker just above his left knee, asking what it was as the car pulled up to the hall. It’s seven trombones recorded in a water cistern with natural 45-second reverb, the gentle doctor said, leaning over to open the door for Keith without removing his seatbelt. Oh, Keith said. Thanks.

The meeting was informative and revelatory, a wild orchestra where each player could only hear his own part. Keith saw people from all walks of life—timber workers, single mothers, lawyers, machinists—saw the unifying characteristics of bloodshot eyes and constant, agitated movement. He recognised in others his own 100-yard stare, saw 200 people concentrate frequencies with their temples in order to study something on the horizon. Keith heard the sombre men and women at the lectern speak of dangerous rumours, common fallacies, instructive tragedies, inspiring successes, herbal remedies to relieve them of the burden of constant concentration; heard confessions of the tormented and the saved and was moved to tell his own story, but thought better of it, a little overwhelmed to be around people again.

Keith was endowed with perfect pitch, had already scrawled the movements and keys of his ringing across a thousand sheets of loose-leaf, notating rhythms in his tinnitus after he had failed to find pattern in the ocean, wind and car ferry. In this woman he found a pure tone, a refined pitch melting from note to note. She was countering his barely recognisable G with a pure gospel C Major, and before he knew it he had told her so. She slid her left leg to the floor and fixed him with a sedated smile, pointing her head in the direction of the door. She didn’t speak until they were outside, until the PA from the hall had been replaced by the thick scent of eucalypt and the vague drone of traffic.

It was little more than an hour after Keith’s mumbled introduction when the two were installed in his shack, a squeaking A-frame found with all the doors open, the wind heaving through the massive pyramid of loose paper in the lounge room on which his laptop sat, barking out a manipulated 4-second loop of Brahms that sounded like a million crickets submerged in molasses.

They cleaned the place together, adjusted lamps and wall hangings, exchanging introductory information amid her calm demands for how the shack must now be set out. Her name was Isabel, she was ten years younger than Keith and had spent much of her 28 years wandering through clouds of white noise that could apparently be divided into towns; the Nepalese rug, all fiery reds and deep purples, had to go, but otherwise the neglected simplicity of the house suited her condition, brought her some calm. Isabel asked about the harmonium and Keith told her about growing up in a rural ashram with his mother in Gorakhpur after his parents’ divorce, of chanting before a man who seemed oblivious to them, of occasionally feeling a tingling atop his head and occasionally cleaning the shit from mangy cattle, of seeing the wide-eyed expression in devotees he would later try and distinguish from the faces of war veterans like the good doctor, wondering whether spiritual rapture had a similar effect on the body to prolonged exposure to violence, of trying to run away one morning and finding another village five miles away where he could not communicate but whose people knew who he was from the red ash markings on his sweat-caked forehead, of sitting at a kindly man’s feet that same afternoon drinking bitter tea and being taught a simple song on the harmonium, a heavenly three-note melody Keith felt invoked the holy even when his mother later told him such a tune did the opposite, now finding himself playing that tune in place of speech to a sleeping Isabel splayed out on his couch in what seemed like her first true rest in who knows how long…





Originally published in the New York journal Ballyhoo Stories, and later nominated for the 2005 Pushcart Prize.

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