Gods and Monsters Installment 38: A Little Night Music

LAST WEEK: Teresa died of an infected tooth. Pamela and Sarah moved into a small apartment together.
Read last week’s installment here. See all installments here. Read the next installment here.

Chapter 113

Gabriel

San Francisco — 1986

Fireworks and Visions

A developer has purchased the row of buildings in front of Gabriel’s. It is a long swath of land extending all the way to the bay. He intends to build a row of luxury apartments that will change the face of the city, reinvent the Tenderloin, and make him famous. He’s already rich; if he wasn’t, he could never have purchased so much land in San Francisco. But even not considering his contacts and connections, his inheritance and ingenuity, this project has been visited by good fortune. Opportunity has fallen into his hands as freely as raindrops: all of the buildings he wanted have come up for sale. All except for Gabriel’s.

He planned to include Gabriel’s apartment in the design, but ill luck haunted that acquisition. First, there was a mold that caused five different inspectors to get so ill they couldn’t even walk off the job. They had to be carried away in ambulances. The insulation contained unacceptable levels of asbestos, making demolition exorbitant. The pipes burst and much of the building flooded, though oddly enough, the basement containing Gabriel’s workshop remained dry. When the developer came to assess the damage, a loose tile fell from the roof, nearly putting an end not just to the project, but to his existence. Gabriel’s building was removed from the design.

Demolition of the rest of the property began. This is why on New Year’s Eve; Gabriel can see clear to the Bay. Only a week before and it would not have been possible. But tonight, standing by his window, Gabriel can see fireworks explode over the city, streaking Bay and sky with shooting stars of color and light. In the waves, sparks leap like neon dolphins. Gabriel sees the light and color. He does not know this, but for the first time, he is seeing the world as most do. He is sharing the vision of humanity. This is not due to a change in sight, but rather circumstances. These colors of fire are separate for all, falling like wishes in the night, dotting the waves with fleeing partials of radiance and hope.

The lights from the city reflected on the Bay are single hues too. Each color stretched to breaking point over midnight water. Gabriel watches the color bob and fall.

His eyes turn toward the sparks disappearing into the night over some warehouses by the Bay. He follows one all the way down, watching it drop onto the rotted wood and burst into flames. He smiles.

PART IV

Beginnings: Jeremy

“What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven.”– Ludwig van Beethoven

Chapter 114

Jeremy

San Rafael — 1859

A Little Night Music

People don’t want a story to be like a life. They resent a tale like a tapestry. The sisters know this. They don’t want threads to suddenly materialize or change. They take exception when major characters appear mid-book. Even though the love of your life might waltz through the door on your seventieth birthday, it’s unlikely, even ridiculous… but not impossible. Things happen when you look the other way. A stray breeze can topple a mountain if the angle is right; one errant pebble hitting another starts an avalanche.

Decima cuts threads of different lengths and colors and feeds them into Nona’s cloth.

“I remember this emerald green,” Nona says. “So many textures interwoven in this design.”

In the cavernous room, her moving fingers strum the warp, creating an abstract fabric of sound. She is using the longest threads she can so that each piece of cloth, no matter how small, reveals the entire pattern. She seems possessed, unconscious, as if the material is weaving itself, a mystery, unplanned.

The loom never stops. Usually the pattern that is weaving when the sun goes down is weaving when the sun rises, but sometimes it changes in the night. A baptismal gown stretches into a ghostly hood. A wedding dress becomes a shroud. Morning metamorphoses into mourning. The fabric of the universe is unknown, even by the weavers.

***

“If you follow a life,” says Ryo, “one strand leads to another. You take me to Pamela, and Pamela guides me to Jeremy. It is impossible to understand her without him. Jeremy was both her lover and her creator.

“The living move forward, but I travel backward, heading for the source.

“Jeremy was born in eighteen fifty-nine, in San Rafael. He had dark hair and sea green eyes. His only companions were loneliness and time—two escorts who offered no comfort.

“Jeremy’s father, Dean, was rich, the son of Robert Dollar, a shipping and lumber magnate who’d made fortunes felling trees, changing them into boats, and sailing them halfway round the world in search of more trees to fell. Arriving on the California coast, Robert saw redwoods bigger than dreams towering above the sea, and he knew he had found his place. He purchased vast stretches of old growth and carved his name through swaths of woodland from Sonoma to British Columbia. When he died in eighteen eighty-eight, Robert left his fortune and home to Dean.

“Dean, studying the microscopic formation of the silver ores, never looked at the redwoods that managed to survive his father. They were too large to be of interest. Nor did Dean care for his father’s money. It’s easy to disdain an inheritance if you are the heir. Indeed, they are the only ones who can truly disregard money.

“Jeremy’s mother, Gayle, was a talented soprano from Boston, bred to marry. She hated the country. She despised the insidious birdsong so different from the measured melodies of Mozart and the fervent longings of Chopin. She was kept awake by unfulfilled desire and the incessant croaking of frogs, remembering a time when melodies sprung from her lips like promises. Her past had been lovely with harmony and order, a domain of neat brick buildings and civilization. Now, she was surrounded by golden fields dotted with ancient oaks and giant redwoods that screamed of primal worlds and human transience. A place where bears were more plentiful than barristers.

“Nine months after her marriage, she gave birth to Jeremy.

“Dean spent his days examining minute particles and contemplating microscopic elements. His wife and child were combinations of atoms too large to be of interest.

“You and Pamela and Jeremy all had absent fathers and dissatisfied, questing mothers. Is there a reason for this? I don’t know, but perhaps it might make understanding, empathy, easier?”

River turns toward Ryo. He cannot hear him, but he feels him. A whisper in his ear when there’s no wind, an arm around his shoulder when he’s all alone. It’s the comfort of ghosts.

“Unlike Alma and Teresa, Gayle poured all her love and desperation into Jeremy.

“On his fifth birthday, Gayle hired a music teacher to come out to Marin from San Francisco. Back then, it was a long journey. Each week, the thin young man took rail, and ferry, and rail again, to arrive at the Dollar household, violin case in hand.

“Jeremy had sizable talent in his tiny fingers. Gayle determined that her son would be a prodigy. He would be her vindication. One minute, she’d cajole him with treats and tales of glorious concerts, the next she’d slap his face until it burned. If a sonata was not up to her exacting standards, Jeremy was locked in his room without dinner.

“It was cruel, even more so because Jeremy’s gift was so great. He should have been able to curl his back into the embrace of the bass clef and find some comfort from loneliness, but Gayle’s regime denied him this solace. Jeremy’s music became his adversary. It filled the night with the beauty of isolation, the pain of solitude.

“Dean never noticed. He was too busy listening to the elemental melody of metal; too busy hearing the harmonies of the periodic table to pay attention to the chords of a violin, or the shrieking of an unhappy wife.

“Late at night, while his parents slept, Jeremy would sneak down to his father’s desk. Running small fingers over its smooth surface, he swept miniscule fragments of silver into his pocket.

“Perhaps, he hoped, by holding something material, however tiny, he might capture his father’s attention? In bed, Jeremy rolled the flakes between his fingers. He wanted them to stick together, to form something large and permanent, something as lasting and tangible as a father’s love.”

Chapter 115

Gabriel

San Francisco — 1986

Flashes in the Night

Gabriel puffs on a lavender cigarette and watches colors bursting in the midnight sky. Fireworks are painting his vision as the birdsong has painted his silence.

Any other man would have seen a reflection of his face in the window, transparent over the night, color exploding behind it like visions, but Gabriel sees only the trails of stars. Gabriel doesn’t have a reflection. He cannot see behind his surface. He doesn’t know he is beautiful, and if he did, he wouldn’t care. He has only just begun to care for the color in the dark and the music in the night, and it has made him hate.

“There are two ways to make fireworks,” Ryo says into Gabriel’s unheeding ear. “Hot incandescence and cold luminescence.” Ryo sighs. Now that River no longer hears him and Jim is gone, he feels truly dead. A shadow in darkness.

Maybe, he thinks, words unheard by the ear are audible to the heart. So, he continues, hoping his words will reach more than air. He wants to make Gabriel embrace the color, light, and music in the night. Does knowing the science behind beauty make it more or less accessible? He doesn’t know.

“Like a living being, incandescence produces light from heat. It burns with passion. It glows, at first emitting long waves of infrared that only the nocturnal, huddling beneath exploding skies, can see. But the rising temperatures are visible to all—red, orange, yellow, and finally white which, as you are just learning, contains all colors, if you but know how to look.“Interesting that we, or rather humans, cannot see the long and short of it, but only the waves in the middle. I’m sure there’s a meaning there, but I can’t see it yet.

“I remember when I was alive, people talking about overcoming limitations, as if desire or hard work could expand vision, as if we were not all limited by our biology, hemmed in by our field of vision, hearing, taste and touch. The living see such a small fraction of the spectrum.” Ryo waits, as if hoping for an answer, yet Gabriel, who can see and sense far above and below the human spectra, cannot hear him. To hear the dead, you must be able to open your heart, and that is something Gabriel cannot do.

“Luminescence is cold—cold as you are,” Ryo continues. “Yet even the tiniest, coldest atom, even you, contains a heart: a heart made of light and neutrons, circumnavigated by electrons so small, they are not even as big as the tiniest hope. Fuse hope with energy and it becomes excited, excited and unstable. But with time fever fades, passion calms, and all that pent-up vigor explodes into cold, cold light.

“Pure colors require pure ingredients, pure ingredients and skill. Only those who have persistence to learn to make the simple shades flawlessly ever understand how to make the complex reliably. Tenacity and time, dedication and determination, yet all is over in a flash, leaving only sparks that fade from memory before they reach the ground.” Ryo sighs again. He is pleased with his metaphors, frustrated that Gabriel cannot hear him. He misses Huck.

Watch the author read this week’s installment in the video below:

NEXT WEEK: River wants to understand the truth, but he is afraid. He knows that a thing is not untrue just because it’s unimaginable. History, if it teaches nothing else, teaches that.

Edited by Mitchelle Lumumba and Sophie Gorjance.

E. E. King

E.E. King is cohost of the MetaStellar YouTube channel's Long Lost Friends segment. She is also a painter, performer, writer, and naturalist. She’ll do anything that won’t pay the bills, especially if it involves animals. Ray Bradbury called her stories “marvelously inventive, wildly funny and deeply thought-provoking. I cannot recommend them highly enough.” She’s been published widely, including Clarkesworld and Flametree. She also co-hosts The Long Lost Friends Show on MetaStellar's YouTube channel. Check out paintings, writing, musings, and books at ElizabethEveKing.com and visit her author page on Amazon.