"Once upon a time blah blah blah nohunters blah blah gogogogogo"
-Rumpelstiltskin
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| Life's Music | | | Author: | | | IP: | Toronto-XXXX | | Date: | 08/04/02 07:08 | | Game Type: | Starcraft | | Labels: | none | | Report Rating: , # of Ratings: 1, Max: 9, Min: 9
Lifetime Rating for |]agomar: 8.6667 |  |
The music screamed from the radio. Harsh guitar, sharp, hissing voice - shrieks of synthetic sound and that constant, hypnotic boom of drums. I lost her, the singer brayed, lost her, lost her, lost her, come back to me baby, you mean so much to me, oh, oh the pain, I lost her.
He sat, quite still, behind his desk. The speakers were turned so high that their pulsations caused a breeze to beat incessantly against his forehead. Trying to get in, he thought with the slightest of smiles as the music died down for a moment. Then the guitar blasted back into full volume and the song continued, louder than ever.
He reached for the stereo's switch and turned it off in disgust. The house was empty as he sat back in a creaking crimson chair.
"Holy shit, stupid piece of crap songs they make nowadays." It surprised him to feel positive revulsion rising within him. "Stupid cliched bullshit, I hope they all burn in Hell."
He rose, annoyed, and sauntered out of the room with a half empty coke can in his blistered hands. He took of his sweaty shirt and flung it haphazardly against the wall. He sat down on another chair. He listened.
Cars honked far below his little apartment, a girl squealed as her german shepherd bagged a frisbee and romped triumphantly through the park. A jet liner came thundering by overhead and swarms of birds rippled by outside with frantically flapping wings. As he continued to listen, he imagined all noises meshed into one grand sound, a single expression of life in that instant around his apartment. A single note in a song about . . . well, about everything, perhaps. Everything makes some sort of sound, after all - even the absence of sound is a form of expression.
He smiled, and walked over to his mirror. Mark was strong, and tall, and his hair and eyes were dark. His face was chiseled and even at his young age he knew full well he was handsome, and reveled in it. He had placed a mirror beside his favorite chair to see himself, so he could turn around and say "ah, I may be stupid but at least I'm good looking." It was a joke, of course. He knew he was smart.
He grabbed a fifty pounder and felt his fingers slip into place around its slick bar. He watched his arms and admired the countless muscles rippling smoothly to and fro across the surface of his skin. He heaved it. One, two, three. So easy.
Then he heard the ring. Three weights on each side clanging together in perfect unison, echoing the honks of the cars, the whimpers of a nesting pigeon, the dull echoes of a subway train sliding into its station.
He put the weight down, slowly, and marked with amazement the sudden collapse of the unity of sound around his house. The sounds remained, but out of sync with one another, in chaos and confusion. He lifted, and harmony returned. He lowered, and anarchy erupted.
He thought about it, and decided to skip a workout for the first time in six months. All through the night he dreamt about it, as city lights lay splashed about the walls of his room. In the morning he awoke with a groan, and stumbled over to the mirror. He gazed into his own black eyes. Slowly, methodically, he walked back, and reached for his glistening, stainless steel watch. He returned and carefully struck the mirror with it. The resulting chink seemed to unite the noises outside, sharpening each one and melding them together. When it died the unity died with it, and as in the day before discord resumed.
"I am the fulcrum," he whispered, half in chagrin. It was a line from a book he read the other month, and even when published some twenty years earlier that sentence was already cliche. Then the neighbor turned on her cursedly loud radio to that familiar, cursedly bad song. I lost her, lost her, lost her, lost her, come back to me baby.
In the abysmal revulsion of the moment, as he listened with a sort of petrified fascination to the song's utterly degrading artistic nature, an idea struck him. He'd bought a keyboard for his girlfriend's birthday the day before. She loved pianos, but since neither had anywhere near the money needed to buy one that was one fetish that would have to be only half satisfied for now. He opened the package now in total desperation. Plug it in. Turn it on. Set the volume. I lost her, lost her, lost her, lost her, come back to me baby.
He touched a key. At once the noises merged around him, and a single scintillating note rang forth. Another key - anything to keep him from that cursed song. The music changed slightly. He grinned a little. "Got you now, Anne" he growled, glancing out his window to his neighbour's dainty little balcony. He decided to play the scale of C major, and somehow, as the notes rang forth, one by one, the noises outside seemed near jovial. A man's deep laugh and the beautiful melody of a nightingale wove their way into his symphony with a harmony that warmed his heart and caused a tear to form near the corner of his eye. Then his finger slipped, and the forlorn sound of an A minor jerked out of the keyboard's speakers in stark contrast to the rest of the scale. A woman screamed in terror as brakes squealed with the weight of an onrushing van.
Mark ran to his balcony in horror. Blood splattered across the street. Shattered glass across a broken corpse. A shaking man, crying in utter shock, stumbling out of his car and tumbling to the stony ground. A single drop of saliva slipped from Mark's gaping mouth and embarked on its voyage to the concrete some twenty floors below. It splashed neatly on the woman's head - or what was left of it. Mark stepped back in revulsion and tried desperately to shake off the feeling of immense guilt wrapping its tentacles around his soul. The neighbour's song droned on remorselessly, nearing its final orgasmic climax. "I lost her, lost her, lost her, lost her, come back to me baby, you mean so much to me, oh, oh the pain, NO! I lost her."
Mark was frantic. He'd actually been a rather sweet child and a good boy for most of his existence, but sometimes life's greatest mistakes occur through acts of compassion. Sometimes they're just acts of good that spiraled out of control. More often they occur through some baser nature that struggles to express itself in the wake of a great pain. As Mark had thought to himself years before, one of the greatest myths is that evil is somehow inhuman, somehow belonging to a realm outside of normal feelings or emotions. Evil, on the contrary, is the most human of any action - it is the ultimate expression of a person's weakness, of what happens when a person breaks down under pressure. We all have our limits, and we all respond to them differently - as Mark would say, were he here today, "evil should be pitied and turned into good, not loathed and turned into greater evil."
In any case, Mark reached again for his keyboard. He played another key with trembling hands - D major, a scale laden with two sharps and a touch more piercing than the one he'd played before. Nevertheless, the chaos lessened outside and a new music sprang from the molted skin of the one so rudely interrupted. The police arrived, their pulsating sirens fitting neatly into Mark's unsure, staccato notes, and the scene below shifted gradually to one of comfort and wistful remorse.
Of course, Mark remained outside his music, unaffected by its soothing undertones, and as he reached the third octave he reflected on what he believed to be the real cause of the accident. "Cursed neighbour," he hissed in a decidedly snakelike manner, "filthy whore. Let her play that music again."
He was not disappointed. "I lost her, lost her, lost her, lost her, come back to me baby."
Mark smiled grimly. He raised both hands to the keyboard and resolved to play a real song. A gentle, soothing song on the surface with an occasional violent outburst cleverly hidden by layers of fluff. "I'll think about that rotten woman as I play them," he breathed, and he conjured up a scene of his fat old African neighbor festering on a couch, her rolls of fat wobbling to the wretched tune.
The song came naturally, so naturally that even Mark was frightened for a moment. Moving melodies expressing life's deeper beauty welled up in waves, while his right hand danced across the higher notes in a gleeful depiction of life's little joys. But now and again he turned to his neighbor's window and stabbed a false note, and it seemed to him he could almost see the glass bouncing in agony. Mark thought of the blood spilt in the street below, and slowly he emptied his mind of grief, pouring it ever so gently into a cup of hatred for Anne.
The notes became more frequent. The rotten song stopped echoing out the window. Laughter sounded in the streets below. Mark paused . . . paused . . . paused . . . .
Harsh guitar, sharp, hissing voice - shrieks of synthetic sound and that constant, hypnotic boom of drums. I lost her, the singer brayed, lost her, lost her, lost her, come back to me baby, you mean so much to me, oh, oh the pain, I lost her.
The song positively roared from the open window. Apparently Anne was having second helpings. Mark felt a spark of rage kindle within him. He remembered the drop of saliva. Tumbling down, down, down . . . splashing on a broken skull. His hands trembled. He slipped.
The song became dark. Minors pried into its melody like fingers reaching through the cracks of a locked door. A man howled outside as a rottweiler tore at his ankle. Mark remembered to focus on Anne, and with a renewed fury he hammered at the keys. Tentacles of hatred snaked from the song, and in his mind he could almost see them enveloping Anne's frugal apartment.
Nothing happened.
Mark delved deep into his mind in that moment. As the trees swayed lazily outside and clouds gathered on the horizon. As the gulls cried for food and the sun grew a dull orange in the mounting smog. Mark thought as he had never before, and the ideas that sprang to his head should never be conceived by a human being.
Look at me, he wondered at himself. I am God. With a finger I change the course of fate and time. Had I touched that E instead of the F, a man would surely have died. He laughed, truly, for the first time since he'd heard that song on the radio the day before.
I lost her, lost her, lost her, lost her, come back to me baby.
In his mind, Mark became God. His song grew in its fury. It struck like a sledgehammer into the core of mercy, and sliced like a sword through the cords of human goodness binding us together.
It became the most terrible, ruthless, hideous noise ever heard in our world. I am the Kraken, Mark slithered, and you, my great, fat Anne, you are my lovely ship.
A plane erupted above Mark's apartment, and he laughed to see token shards mutilating Anne's window. Fire rained from the heavens onto the grounds below, and those clouds on the horizon rose into vast thunder heads hurtling ever closer. Bolts of lightning scorched the land. Hail clawed through the broken fragments of Anne's window and pummeled the furniture inside.
But the song still continued! Mark couldn't believe it.
I lost her, lost her, lost her, lost her, come back to me baby.
He screamed in pure fury, and wrestled with his keyboard. The notes trembled under his touch, and melodies fled before his wrath. The song rose, built like a tidal wave, then down, down, down it crashed, through the darkness and the fire and finally into an unbearable frenzy of rage . . . .
The wind howled across the desolate, broken landscape - last remnants of a storm that long since had dwindled in the horizon. The last few heaps of rubble crumbled into the ashes surrounding them. A blood red sun shone briefly through a ragged gap in the thick black clouds, casting a morbid glare across the shattered land. And the radiation - the radiation would last for centuries.
Only one thing was left standing. A thin column of metal, twisted and warped at some points, jutting out of a particularly blistered area. At its summit a small, dainty looking apartment remained. The window was shattered, and through the gap a single voice rang out:
I lost her, lost her, lost her, lost her, come back to me baby, you mean so much to me, oh, oh the pain, I lost her.
Anne cleared her throat and laughed.
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