Unheard Music

Peter Meinke

James Vilag liked the idea of driving through unheard music, so at night he would leave the radio off as he made his rounds, his car nosing into endless waves of possibility, his shiny left shoe tapping like a metronome. He was most moved by the more emotional music he couldn’t hear, pieces by Chopin and Tchaikovsky, Dvor¿ák’s Slavic Dances or Debussy’s En Blanc et Noir. When he rolled down the window, he could feel them flow over him like tides in a harbor, filling the car with as much intensity as he could handle. Largo, maestoso . . . the idea that they were all “out there” at the same time made him breathe so heavily that the seat belt hurt his chest.
    “That’s just your imagination,” Janice said. “And keep that seat belt on even if you think the whole goddamn London Symphony Orchestra is in the backseat.”
    “Seat belts lead to careless driving,” he told her. “You wear your seat belt for twenty years and never have an accident, it’s been a complete waste of time. To make it worthwhile you’ve got to have an accident or two.”
    “You’re a looney tune,” she said, “and I won’t let you drive on your rounds unless your seat belt’s on.” So he would start each night safely buckled and later undo it as the music flooded in.
    He was an insomniac and had volunteered to drive the late night crime watch in his neighborhood on a more or less regular basis. He didn’t need much sleep anyway, and his job as editor of the in-house bulletin of St. Anthony’s Hospital wasn’t demanding. During the two months of his watch, there had been no burglaries, and everyone was giving him full credit, though he had never seen or even heard anything suspicious. He didn’t tell them he did it partly for the unheard music and partly to avoid his dreams. He didn’t care about burglaries; they seemed like petty crimes at most. People became too attached to things. James couldn’t think of any thing he’d really mind losing.
    His dreams had always been bad: for many years he dreamed he had killed someone, a stranger, at random, and would lie awake night after night grinding his teeth in agitation. There was a time in his life, before he met Janice, when what he did and what he dreamed became confused. When he was awake he thought he was dreaming. When he was asleep he’d dream of going to sleep and dreaming other dreams, often about dreaming, so the effect was like a hall of mirrors where the real self gets lost in a maze of distorted images.
    One time during this period, he or his dream self was walking home from dinner in a strange part of town. The dinner itself had been upsetting: the waiter, insinuating and ambivalently sexed, had a pink face and a throaty feminine voice.
    “Where have you been?” the waiter said. “You’ve never been here before.”
    “No, it’s a little out of the way for me. I went to a concert and it got to be later than I thought.” Why was he talking to this waiter? The concert had been a piano duet and the last piece, Le Bal Martiniquais, was still thrumming in his head. “I’d like the schnitzel, I think, and a glass of the white zinfandel.”
    “Oh my god, not the schnitzel!” The waiter arched perfectly clipped and rounded eyebrows. “Anything but the schnitzel. Our cook is Polish and hates anything German.”
    “Well, what do you recommend?”
    “The duck with baked apple is pretty good tonight, or the chicken cacciatore.”
    “OK, the duck.” He closed the menu and began tapping out a cigarette, but the waiter remained by the table. James asked,“Are you waiting for something?”
    “The captain has asked that all cigarettes be distinguished,” the waiter said and smiled. James wasn’t sure he had heard him right and continued tapping, saying nothing.
    “Not the zinfandel,” said the waiter, still smiling. “Not with duck.”
    “Jesus, bring me anything.”
    “Yes, sir.” When he bowed, the waiter’s bald spot showed, seven long hairs pasted over it. “Egri Bikaver, Bull’s Blood.” He padded away with a slight penguin waddle.
    The dinner was further marred by an Englishman, perhaps an Australian, at a nearby table who sat quietly with a bottle of Foster’s Ale in front of him, reading a letter with foreign stamps on it. He would smile as he read and suddenly begin crying, then start all over again, reading and rereading the letter. At the time, James lived alone in a single room cluttered with books and records; watching the Englishman, he felt drowned in loneliness. Who would write him such a letter?
    He ate as fast as he could, to get out of there. The duck, he had realized too late, was so expensive he could hardly taste it anyway, and the tip he left—all the money he had—was insufficient. This made him both embarrassed and angry with the waiter: the schnitzel was five dollars cheaper. Each table had its own loaf of bread, bread knife, and cutting board, and as if this were a way to get even, he slipped the serrated, wood-handled knife into his pocket. He thought of taking the breadboard, too, sliding it under his shirt, holding in his stomach, but it seemed like too much trouble, and he settled for the knife and the book of matches that—oddly, he thought—was white and blank. Had the Englishman noticed? James didn’t care. He waited until the waiter went into the kitchen, then he tucked his last bills under the wine glass and hurried into the night.
    It was raining lightly, and on his walk he slipped and stumbled over the uneven sidewalks. It never snowed in Florida, but the rain looked like snow under the streetlamps and like colored confetti in front of the bars and restaurants with their blinking neon signs. In places, his own reflection rose toward him like the cardboard mannequins on a bayonet field. He was tingling with an unfocused fear—stealing the knife had been an atypical and stupid thing to do—and he walked randomly in a westerly direction, heading toward the river rather than his own apartment. Mendelssohn’s Andante and Variations, from the evening’s concert, surged in his ears as if someone had turned on a switch.
    At some point he realized that he had begun following a well-dressed man in a pale overcoat whose black shoes reflected the light and made sharp tapping sounds as he walked. James felt the man was drawing him like a whirlpool, against his will, down into the darkest part of the city, where redbrick buildings crowded the sidewalk and swallowed what little light there was. The footsteps began to echo at his sides and behind him, and in his fear and accompanied by music, he walked faster and faster, and when he at last caught up with the man, he found the bread knife in his hand and stabbed him with all his might high in his back, and the man groaned and dropped like a side of beef at James’s feet.
    He felt nauseated, terrified. His first instinct was to run, but as he looked around he knew this was only a dream . . . he was almost certain it was a dream. Just the same, he thought, dreams are real too, they don’t come from nothing, this is a part of what I am. And suppose he wasn’t dreaming: here he stood, with blood on his shoes, a knife in his trembling hand and a dead man at his feet. It seemed best to do something, to act it out.
    No one was around. The neighborhood looked dead, too, except for a few dingy, lighted windows down the street. James bent over and grasped the man under his arms, dragging him to an open iron gate that led down to a darkened apartment below street level. As he pulled the body down the few steps, he backed into a garbage can, making such a clang that his heart nearly stopped. He froze there for a minute, standing on the bottom level, the man’s feet still three steps up. For the first time James looked at his victim’s face. He was a middle-aged man with thick graying hair, a healthy face frozen in a grotesque semblance of a smile like the mask of comedy. He looked familiar: the Englishman from the restaurant? James didn’t think this was possible; he thought he, James, had left the restaurant first, but thinking back on it, he wasn’t sure. Holding his breath, he tugged the man’s wallet out of the tight back pocket.
    There was a small amount of money, and he put that in his pocket without counting it and then looked at the driver’s license: Jack Phillip Middleton, 77 Franklin Street. James wiped the wallet clean and forced it back into the man’s pocket, an act that seemed as violent as the actual stabbing. He pulled the body behind the garbage cans and went up into the street. A young couple scurried through the shadows on the opposite sidewalk. James kept his face averted and headed for the river. He felt exhausted now, as if he had been walking under water for hours; he had to kick the air aside with every step. When he reached the river, he threw the knife as far as he could—This is my message to the world, he thought—and turned for home.
    The next morning, after he woke up, that was the tricky time. First he checked his shoes: no blood. But he could have cleaned them last night; he was a careful man. He found two incriminating items: money in his wallet and the matches in his pocket. These could be explained, too—he often resupplied his wallet at night for the next day, keeping a small supply of cash in his desk drawer for that purpose, and a pack of matches was hardly evidence that he had killed someone.
    No, the real question was whether he had dreamed it or not and which side of the dream he was on. He often had dreams that encompassed several days in a row, dreams in which he went to bed and woke up, that were indistinguishable from real life. He thought about this all the time as he drove his rounds at night. It was diabolical. It made it impossible to check on himself. So what if he read the newspaper from front to back and there was no mention of a body found near the river? He could be dreaming right now. He found it hard to take action. Editing someone else’s words and—a few years later—driving in circles on his crime watch was about all he was capable of performing. And there was Janice now, helping him keep his balance: without her it was difficult to breathe.
    “You’re my ozone,” he told her.
    “You’re my safety margin.”
    “Ozone, shmozone,” she said. “Buckle up.” She had always been solid and quick—that’s what he liked about her. He was so slow himself, everything seemed slippery to him. Earlier, when he had called her on the telephone to ask her to a movie, she had wanted to talk.
    “Phones make me nervous,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever said anything intelligent over the phone.”
    “Why don’t you read me a few pages of Henry James and break your record?” she’d asked. He wanted to be like her.
    Sometimes he thought, What if I actually saw a burglar? Would he chase him and corner him? He could tell him, I killed a man at random and I’ll kill you too, if you don’t give yourself up. These scenarios were ludicrous, but as James enacted them in his mind, his hands turned cold on the steering wheel and he put his fingers on the even colder tire iron Janice insisted he keep on the seat beside him.
    A while ago he had gone to a prominent psychiatrist, Dr. Walton Pharr, for help, but he proved impenetrably stupid. James often thought there was nothing wrong with the world that a little more intelligence couldn’t solve. He felt surrounded by people strolling around with three pounds of suet in their skulls. He believed he would have been brilliant at college if his father had chosen to send him—he had won every spelling bee he had ever been in. If he had been born ten years later, when they began having national spelling bees, he might have been famous—picture in the papers, the works.
    The psychiatrist had asked about his father. And his mother, and his childhood, and the army. What he couldn’t seem to understand was that James already knew about these things. He knew he was marred from childhood—who wasn’t? Dr. Pharr, who was fat and chain-smoked, obviously had problems with selfesteem himself; any idiot could see that. What James wanted to know was, simply, how to tell real life from dream life.
    “Try pinching yourself,” the psychiatrist suggested. He was really a dip.
    “You can dream you’re pinching yourself,” James replied.
    “Tell me about your dreams.”
    James described some of his dreams but was reluctant to tell him about the night at the weird café; that would be too much like a confession, and perhaps dangerous. He didn’t trust Fatso farther than he could throw him. “I’ve been dreaming of an animal,” he said. “I’m standing by a tree in a large backyard, maybe behind the house I grew up in, and this dark animal crawls up over a stone wall on the other side of the tree. At first I think it’s relatively harmless, like a fat beaver or a porcupine, but as it gets nearer it elongates and gets bigger and turns into a wild boar. I’ve never seen a wild boar, but I know that’s what it is. Its eyes are red, and it has ugly fangs or tusks.
    “Anyway, nothing much happens, but I’m terribly frightened. We stare at each other. I pick up a heavy stone. Then, usually, he turns away and goes back over the wall. Sometimes he just disappears, and I have the feeling he may pop up on any side.”
    “Very interesting,” said Dr. Pharr. “What do you think it means?”
    “Maybe I’m eating too much pork.” The psychiatrist brought out the worst in him. He knew Dr. Pharr wanted him to link the boar with his father, the apple tree—now he saw it was an apple tree—with his mother. But he could do that himself; he didn’t have to pay seventy-five dollars an hour to find that out.
    One time, during James’s sophomore year in high school, his father burst into a house at 2:00 a.m. and struck him across the face in front of three of his friends. They had been playing chess and lost track of the time—James in particular would fall into the world of bishops and knights and all else would disappear. He was supposed to have been home at eleven.
    “What the hell’s wrong with you?” his father shouted, while the other boys froze in their chairs. “Your mother’s worried sick!” And then he slapped him, the sound cracking like a gunshot in the silent room. You would think, James thought later, a father would be proud of a son staying up all night to play chess. He, James, would be proud if his son had done that, if he had a son. But he didn’t say anything at the time. He was as tall as his father already, and he just stared at him for a minute, and they both knew this was the last time the older man would hit him. Then he followed his father out into the car.
    He thought about all this, peering into the darkness for burglars, nosing the car slowly around corners, music rising and falling through the limp leaves of magnolias, jacarandas, and twisted live oaks. He had asked Dr. Pharr, “Tell me, how do I know I’m not dreaming you?”
    “You’ll know I’m real when you get my bill.” That was the extent of the psychiatrist’s sophistication.
    Early on, James tried to solve the problem himself. For several days he carried around in his mind the vivid imprint of the Englishman’s name and address: Jack Phillip Middleton, 77 Franklin Street. Finally, one evening after work, he gathered up the nerve to look it up then impulsively called a cab and gave that address. Franklin Street was a middle-class city block with a few trees and attached houses, each with a front stoop and a little patch of grass behind an iron railing. Number 77 was in the middle of the block, and rain started pouring down as he stood, bareheaded, heart bouncing like a headless fish, staring at its unlighted windows that stared blankly back.
    From the street he could barely make out a nameplate underneath the number, and he forced his leaden limbs to open the gate and go up the brick steps to the door; but even as he was reading the name and feeling the rain running down his face, he knew with anguish that he couldn’t tell if he were wide awake or dreaming.

Peter Meinke lives in St. Petersburg, Florida, and is the author of six books of poems, most recently Zinc Fingers, Scars, and Liquid Paper: New & Selected Poems, all from the University of Pittsburgh Press. His collection of stories, The Piano Tuner, won the 1986 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Currently, he is Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

“Unheard Music” appears in our Summer 2002 issue.