LOVE SONG
LOVE SONG
He called his agent every day. Year after year. By now, his agent would be the only one to notice if he died; the world at large must have assumed it decades ago. He had had a remarkable success when he was fifteen. More than half a century had passed since then without an echo. This was a different agent from the one who had fostered him then. This one is from an underrated species. He adopts talent that has been booted out the door. He rarely deals with money, a trickle of royalties and residuals, nothing more. He deals in living relics. He is a eulogist, a torch singer.
The words of his hit song had been lifted from his father’s tombstone. His father’s death held fresh for a half century; the gap between a time of promise and a life that had forfeited itself in a strange bargain.
“I’m older than he was when he died. I’ve outlived my child. That’s supposed to be the saddest thing. My life’s a mix-up. It’s jumbled.”
“Joey, it’s the life of an artist. Machines write the songs. They slap them together from used parts.”
“Don’t tell me that, Max. I keep up. There’s still names.”
“You want to sing about ‘hos and bitches? Those kind of names? You can’t do it. That’s no mix-up, that’s you.”
“He looked better than me. A young hero, compared. Surrounded by his family. Mourned. Who surrounds me?”
“For the moment, Joey. There are feelers out there. There is scuttlebutt. Scuttlebutt. The Joeys are hearing whispers. They have been approached. Not directly. Waters are tested; that’s how things are done. A calculating eye is cast their way. A revival is considered; a generation in the audience, weeping.
“Joey, the human heart. We pay a price. You love deeply. You pine and remember. Graduation ring, prom night, these are songs that still bring chills. It’s given to few to write one song, and from that if one word should be remembered, it is from God’s lips. That refrain is the key to paradise. That’s what you are, Joey, touched by that. “
It took a few days, enough other calls coming in, but Max noticed Joey wasn’t calling and it scared him. The script and props for his days would remain the same, but how ghostly it would be to come to his office, adjust the phone book prosthesis supporting the front corner of his desk and turn on the answering machine to a blank. There wasn’t going to be any new clients. Nobody could find him way out in the left field bleachers. A tangled route marked by ticket stubs. The dead would take the pieces with them. One by one his clients walked the plank and each kerplunk was another nail in his coffin. Metal venetian blinds, guillotine windows with spooky counterweights rattling in the jambs, his down at the heels office on a cheesy avenue in L.A. Pressed flowers, his clients, the sallow cheeks of tired hearts or the drinker’s scalded complexion from high blood pressure. Their only toehold out of the grave was their refulgent syndromes.
A spark of jealousy in Max, of resentment? Who was Joey to discard him? For what? Reality? He could bear it now? Hah! Rots of ruck, Joey. You’re gonna need it, all I’ve done for you. A shield.
Then in he comes. Years since Max has seen him. The sweet farce they play, Joey would owe him money. They are vitally engaged, money is at stake and significant disputes flame. This was their senile, amorous dance, men in business.
Joey looked deranged. He’d dressed for an occasion. This outfit he wore, so help me, thought Max, he had set it aside for his resurrection from the grave. He would be buried in this suit and down there he would meet the gothic ghosts from his songs. Dead prom queens and railroad crossing splatters. His outfit was fifty years old, conspicuous by embalmed, faddish style.
He was carrying a briefcase. Max hadn’t noticed until he placed it on his desk and clicked the snaps. Something definitely off in this action, Max felt it: a systematic madness. Joey thought he was cultivated, splendid.
He removed a cassette player from the briefcase. He bird-dogged the cord from Max’s table lamp and plugged it into the wall socket.
“No hello, years and you…”
Joey signals Max to hush, kindly gesture, sympathetic, a finger to his lips. Puzzled but appeased, Max hushes. The cassette is clicked ‘play’ and first the bristling ether is all he hears, the flotsam in an empty room. Then, his heart fills his throat. The whole bloody, bleeding, throbbing, faithful, abandoned, vomited organ. The whole scary adventure, its heart of hearts thrashing buried and finally, in maudlin tone and sanctimony laid to rest.
Rage, Rage. The banked fires and lost time, the good deeds and the lame confederates. The tempered facsimilies Rising from his chair, smashing his doughy fists on the desk, Max thunders “blasphemy”. The song or his life? But, Max, the conciliator and consoler, the maestro of balm in resignation, him thundering?
It’s Joey’s voice covering a song in some gibberish that spears hearts. Joey plays it through to the end. Four days since he called. Four days an instrument for this song. He’s not taking orders from Max. Finally, the tape runs out and drops Max, but just where, who can say? Where blasphemy is carping and where that other tongue will have to be learned? He grouses.
“What is this thing, Joey? What’s the matter? You blaming me for something? For everything?”
“I don’t know what it is. It got into my head and I can’t get it out.”
Max breathes a sigh of relief.
“Step by step, Joey, that’s how these things are done. Don’t start with old wife’s tales. Easy does it. Four days ago you buy a tape and wham it gets in your head. That can be fixed. You’re alone too much, you get susceptible, it could happen to anyone. Well, here you are, let’s have lunch. No message. We go on. Step by step, day by day..”
“Max, four days ago I woke up. I don’t sleep very good, not for a long time now. This time I’d dropped in a well. Now I’m awake. My room is filled with fragrance. That’s what woke me. I was singing. I was in the middle of this song. And I just kept at it and enough verses out. I could see this flower when my eyes were closed.”
“Okay, you fell asleep with the radio on. It got in your head.”
“I’ll leave you the tape, Max.”
“What am I going to do with it? You think I can sell it?
“I’m giving it to you, Max. I want you to know why I left.. It’s a going away gift. You’ve been a good friend.”
“Joey, you don’t sound right. I’m going to suggest to you that right now you’re not yourself. A little thing like this doesn’t make a man give up everything. Where are you going to, seventy in a few months. Where are you going?”
“I’m going to find the singing flower.”
Max nodded, jutted his dewlapped chin, dropping his eyelids half-closed.
“Screw you too, Joey. I was sincere all this time. Blood out of my heart and now you make fun of me. I was sincere.”
“So am I. I want you to have the song. Stay kind.”
After that, things changed. Max played the song. Warily and irresistibly. He was addicted, he thought. He had to play it and what didn’t follow from the song he sloughed off. He might have gone to seed, as he thought Joey must have. A junkie for the song. Max looked for him on skid row. A lot of these guys could be Joey a month or so after starting his search. Max figured a lot of them had this song in their head, before the booze and junk they had this song. He thought the whole world had this song in their head. He surfed the internet following the contagion. He came across photos of sherpas and bushmen. He trailed such photos through the ether to temple custodians in the Himalayas, boat people in the Philippines, fakirs and gurus in India. He slipped into that, the coincidence in appearance between the wise and the misbegotten, the poor and the pilgrim, the damned and the holy, the insane and the prophet. The withering, the leathery curing that happened to the body, the light in the eyes, common to them all, zealots and porters and starving children. These descriptions made up the majority of the human race. Gainful employment was a costume. It was first love, he decided, hanging from a twig in an avalanche, that kingdom of heaven that spellbound them all.
He was accosted by a nightmare. He hadn’t had one in more than half a century. It was the same one he’d had way back then. He woke and a panther was sitting at the foot of his bed. Its eyes had woken him. Then he knew the animals had it and never gave it up, the song. It drew them to the sleeping. The song was in his head as he had fallen asleep. Waking was only sketched around it.
That’s enough. These visits from the bounding mane. He took action to root it out. Possibly. Kind of. He took action to forestall the dream or worked at its behest.
In his mirror he looked at a tramp clown. A florid complexion with sad eyes; he was in love with a singing flower and was made for the part.
He took his clothes to the laundry to freshen and press. He had coats and jackets dry cleaned. He went to his barber, stood outside the door and on the spot decided not this time. He went to a place where a young woman cut his hair. He paid too much, but what price was fair to have her near instead of Leon in over starched white smock and mild pessimism?
He went to a book emporium where an entire room was dedicated to films and music. The kid who worked there seemed uninterested in music. He had evolved past seductions. He did listen to certain bands, but they weren’t sold in corporate chains. He was into sound without sentiment. It should have direct effects on the nervous system creating a cybernetic link. This had validity. The rest was maudlin delusion. So he told Max after a few days, though Max didn’t get it. But, the kid had an encyclopedic memory for the fossilized species and steered Max to dead forms that had followed similar windings through the superstitious dark. He liked Max for the spectacle inherent in his persistent existence. Max was a bold impertinence though he didn’t know it. The second day he brought Max a jelly donut. Its innards had glazed his hands and Max respected the kid’s acute oblivion. He licked his fingers and wiped them on his pants. The kid was free from niceties. He played Max some music from his own plausible bands. The sounds were crystal clear. They hung together only by a similar alienation from physical origins, a similar antithesis to such clutter. Strangely, they evoked something haunting his song; a sinister presence in the cold animus driving crystal. As if the crystalline facets traced a spider’s web. In some ways that was as near to the song as he got. His song ran through every piece of world music he played, but wearing so many guises, it escaped him.
He would try the university. He needed a place with specialists in esoteric anachronisms, he reasoned. He skirted the psychology department. He was not going to count this as a pathology, a recondite mania. No, he chose the linguistics department. It was a lucky choice. He might have gone to the music department or theology, but some residual from Old Testament movie epics led him to those who strive to reconstruct the ante-Babel world.
He was directed to a Dr. Le Clerk by a robust female security guard. She was on the third floor. And she was immediately offended that the security guard had presumed she had enough time for practical jokes.
“That’s not it. The song’s driven me for a loop. You’re my last hope.”
He meant it and blurted the story and added that he had searched through world music and couldn’t find it. He pleaded and she took the cassette distastefully in her fragile fingers. She had him wait in the hall, a proof of his sincerity and buffer should he be playing her for a fool. A few minutes passed and then the door was opened by a feverish Dr. Le Clerk who pulled him into her office by the cuff.
Her office was piled under with cardboard shipping boxes, overflow from fell metal files of the penitential school. An intellectual ascetic, but there were exquisite touches, grails he hoped for the sake of his own search. A hand woven scarf in a picture frame hung on the wall. The colors had faded into fallen leaves, the woof and warp in the looming were distinct as tendons. Russian was his guess, very old. A unicorn was curled nearly cat-like, sphinx-like, in a flower bed. Max recognized these avatars of the goddess even without a language to instruct him. The song had chummed the waters to raise such figures from the deep, but the professor’s presence would always have summoned them, anyway. She was unanimously feminine. She was tinny and fragile. Her eyes were huge, a beautiful affliction. Her wee pointed chin was transparent to emotion. Her movements had the awkward grace of fauns or storks. In gown or sari she could have served in palace or temple; Max was completely taken by her.
The tape was playing and she went about the room collecting old musical instruments that rested everywhere. Max hardly recognized them as instruments, more gadgets they looked to him, toggled together from unlikely and tuneless candidates: gut, skin, twig and flange. Impoverished creations, scant surplus of hard scrabble, but apparently hard driven by need, like a raft from logs.
From each she coaxed accompaniment to Joey’s song. Plucking gut strings, note by note she spooned from the sounding belly a ripening from the hollow grander than the bare loom could have hoped to realize. One she plucked with her thumbs; it was an overbite of snaggle-toothed metal-long in the tooth, no gum to be found, should skull’s grin itself be left to sing-strapped to the palm sized sounding bowl, the single note’s chilling iciness a perfection, cupped there to collect melody, a melted fluid joint jaunty within its means or ambition, bold gay and prancing step left in the bones. Pan pipes her lips skated across, and Max heard the cock-sure repost twinned in the song. Andean pipes sheared soaring from tailings and scuttle. Here the moon scrapped its launch on the crags, dragging anchor yet, so close these earthly moonscapes in the arid altitudes to the straining orb, a heart sinew tied between them, the tune lifts through the musicians and floats the stony underworld.
It wasn’t until the bagpipes-bladder, cock, scrotum and womb-that she began to sing, and she is singing still-parchment mummy blooming in old age-unlikely marriage the agent for the lost and found department, novels, song, dance acts, schtick, unto the more elevated agent for lost tongues and paeans, for funerals and births buried together and descended to bedrock. Wed in a glen a unicorn might rest in, so chosen. And Max, noble urges rising from the prostrate gland upon the song with bagpipe hoist; the groom has asked his bride why such tragic, near tuneless bleat as the bagpipe makes should inspire daring folly, as his arthritic grope of the singing professor, and she answers, the linguistic professor, it’s le petit mort-the little death-which discovery forced the song and gallant shouldering of the heavens’ resurrection.
And so it went, the song unfolding forms and bedraggled old ferments, swamp and dank pitch and ebb tide reek, instruments each, he and she, toggled together by the song from such variations as mud so infused will become, be it antelope, cactus, star fish or vulture. A dialectic in the verse and body breathed into form from it, decay and re-birth, but the song continuous and promiscuous, ever so eternal in its mercurial residence in any throat or ear, priapic, flagrant urge and dire, majestic loneliness.
What truly betrothed lunatic and clairvoyant union doesn’t rant empty space hysterical?
She’d recognized the song immediately though no one had ever heard this song. It was the grail to her and a certain school of thought considered mystical to the raspy voiced linguistic academy. Brythonic, Gaelic from the Welsh and Manx side, but pre-dating either by some thousands of years, so that it was only the melody around the words let her understand it, and understand it all entirely, in and out of words, the more completely, her heart disinterred and clambering up her throat to speak tongues that might lodge an answer to a prayer. A controversy raged over the origin of language. The search continued for languages without lineage, for the primal moment when stones and wind and tossing water found their translator and grumbles and wails and mutters spoke the elements’ desires. Here was that song, language tailored from the transparent wake of the moon.
Here they’re echoing the maid whose throat they’ll cut and bury in the bog. It’s her song and they pick it up and form a chorus for her. She’s the one in whom life is sweet this short time before dying, each moment illuminated. Both melody and song are heard for the first time, these are not memorized verses, and they will never be repeated. Each time they listen to another maid to learn how to speak, because so close to the grave, she hears what the seed hears, the star’s chorus that has brought form from the deep and dwells within it. Now, they cut her throat so that it bleeds the song into the earth, and bury her. A flower will grow from her navel. This is the flower’s song.
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