Tonight, I walked into my hotel
room, and who was sitting in the recliner by the window? My girlfriend. She
brought my acoustic guitar with her, all the way from Tennessee. She didn't
even give me time to say, "Hello, babe," she just handed me the
guitar and told me to play. I sat on the bed, and she sat beside me, her face
an ant's jump away, grinning a mile wide smile like a new horizon. I strummed
the strings without a pick, opting to play with only my fingers. I put flesh to
steel, fingertips dancing a melodic nocturnal hymn, and I let my voice sing
words born of the day's thoughts and musings. The sound, more so than the words
themselves, brought tears to our eyes. My girlfriend embraced me as I played
acoustic dirges through the open window, into the cool night air, carefree and
honest. We continued to weep, and our tears met on the mattress. Soon, the
crying overcame us both, and I could no longer create beautiful music. I
dropped the guitar. We howled emotion to the sky, crying oceans into the hotel
floor. There was no music to accompany our tears, now. We ran purely on shared
remembrance of the music I had played, letting memory fuel our weeping eyes
long into the night. We never slept, we only cried.
After our eyes dried, we took a plane to Paris. We walked the
streets with my acoustic guitar slung over my shoulder. I sang high and low
pitches, in harmony with the chords and melodies I strummed on very willing
strings. My voice and the sounds of my guitar bounced off walls of buildings
older than time. Windows that were opened for the fine smelling French air were
new passageways for my musical message. Children's glares and menacing
expressions soon turned to laughter at the sound of my voice, and their parents
were moved to tears by the delicate timbre of my street tunes. I walked slowly,
so all pedestrians could hear the music, and my girlfriend followed close, her
eyes like waterfalls, wet with adoration for beautiful sound. As we passed
other females whose smiling eyes fixated on my soulful aura, my girlfriend
spoke French words to tell them to look, but not to touch. These girls were
confused, as my girlfriend's words seemed to be at odds with the ideas my music
shared, begging anxious lovers to join in closed-eye mental stimulation that
bordered on taboo.
A woman approached me, screaming that I had torn down all
walls of human separatism, and that the message I was sharing could unite the
world. Others joined her in this praise, saying this music would heal
generations of pain and sadness. I thanked her. Others said it transcended
human understanding, and weaved cosmic unity with other planes of existence.
They were shocked an American could do such things with song. At least three
different smiling women wearing quite stylish scarves told me I broke their
hearts there, on the street, with my guitar. But as I played a new sequence of
never-heard chords, invented on the spot, inspired by the beauty of love, they
each claimed I had mended their hearts. As I continued to play the chord
sequence, and let my voice join its pulsing rhythm, their mended hearts desired
further mending, and mended themselves into a single heart, composed of three.
A round of applause broke out along the street, and I said "thank
you" a hundred and fifty times. I cut the thank yous short by breaking
back into song, a song created on the spot, but that so touched the souls of
the surrounding crowd that everyone joined in singing, knowing the words as I
sang them, in some miraculous unification of notes and voices. The women bobbed
their heads from side to side with smiles for miles, and the men screamed the
words back at me louder than I could manage. We did this long into the French
night, and candles were lit around us, so that our faces glowed in the kind of
romantic light that sparks feelings of attraction and romance. Then we kissed.
All of us. Thousands of us. My girlfriend was there, and we laughed. The
kissing went on for hours. And then we slept. Then we all awoke, and then we
cried. Crying exhausted us, so we slept again, through the day. When we awoke
again, I told my girlfriend I would be in trouble, because I was supposed
to be in a meeting at the lab. We rushed back to the airport, hopped on a
plane to Chicago, and got back to the lab in time for the rest of the
meetings. No one knew what had happened.
* * *
I was deep in a dream, standing in a dark room with no sound.
Guns pointed at me from twelve directions, like the hours around a clock. A
voice warned me that one move would set them off, so I stood motionless. I felt
gun barrels moving up my legs, but I didn't dare look down. A gun stabbed into
my side. Then my back. Then my stomach. The voice said goodbye, and the guns
fired.
I awoke in my hotel bed, cold with sweat, and rolled over to
comfort myself with my girlfriend's presence. But she wasn't there. I sat up
and saw her by the window. It was dark, couldn't have been past two in the
morning. I knew this because the clock said 1:58. We'd gone to bed only an hour
ago.
"HI," I said. There was no answer. Her gaze into
the streetlight filled night said it all. She was done.
"I'm done," she said. Her words said it, too.
"I want to go home."
She explained she'd grown tired of our week long
relationship. A week is all it takes, she kept saying. I was too tired to know
what she meant. She didn't look at me while she talked. I looked at the floor
to see my acoustic guitar, smashed to pieces.
"What about the music?" I asked. "All those
tunes we played to make things nice for everyone?"
"It'll wear off. Music only works because people are
attracted to notes. But when they get to know you, Philip. Ohhh. When they get
to know you. It's over. They'll go back to their normal ways. Give them a few
days. Maybe you can spark a triumphant response from some people in the first
few moments they know you, but you don't have enough to keep them going. And
that's why I'm leaving. You're nothing past the first few hours. After that
it's all downhill."
"Downhill can be a good thing," I tried to remind
her. "Gravity's on your side. It's easier to move."
"It's easier to move away from your weakling
grasp," she replied, making a good point. I had nothing.
"I had a dream I got shot by over a dozen rifles,"
I said. She didn't care and I didn't blame her.
"It doesn't take one very long," she said. I didn't
know what she meant, but she threw me a small notebook. It was small in height,
but thick, like a dictionary of words created by 500 minds over 500 years.
I opened it to see names of people I knew. Almost every page
had a new name. Written on these pages were brief stories, notes, journal-like
entries of the first time I'd met each of these people. Accounts of enjoyment
rapidly seemed to dissipate.
"Look in the back," my ex girlfriend said.
"The backup pages. The Appendix."
I flipped to the last 500 or so pages, to see nothing but
graphs. The x-axes in each graph were labeled, "how long I've known
P.J.M.". It was labeled in intervals of days. The y-axes were labeled,
"how glad I've been that I've known P.J.M.". The highest value on the
y-axis was "extremely happy". The lowest value read, "dismal and
regretful". Most graphs showed the same trend, with the peak, around
"happy" appearing after one or two days, with rapid, almost
exponential falling, over the following days, weeks, months, toward dismal and
regretful. Some graphs never peaked, never shot above "regretful",
and dipped below "suicidally angry" most of the time. They weren't
graphs I wanted to see.
"Here's mine," my ex said. She turned the notebook
to the last page, with a graph that was peaked for a day, and quickly fell off,
until the y-value fell below "would rather die than know him". It
went for only a week. "Goodbye," she said. She walked back to the
window, which, for the first time, I noticed was open. She jumped out.
"Are you dead?" I asked, fifty seconds later, after
running out of the hotel and finding her lying in the parking lot. She was.
Tragedy had befallen her. She said she wanted to go home. I thought she meant
back to Tennessee. I sat by her body all night, while police investigated the
incident, and while paramedics tried to bring her back. A crime scene
investigator approached me, carrying the small but thick notebook my ex
girlfriend had given me.
"This is your fault," he said, showing me the graph
my ex had drawn.
"I know," I said.
"I could have made her happy," the crime scene
investigator said, looking at my ex's corpse as the body bag zipped closed over
her. "You destroy everything, sir. If my colleagues weren't here right
now, I'd kill you." He pulled open his coat to show me his pistol. I knew
he meant it, and I nodded.
"Should I kill myself?" I asked. But the
investigator had already stopped paying me attention, and had walked off to
discuss the tragedy with his the officers who swarmed the parking lot.
I went to work the next day. Tragedy wasn't an acceptable
reason in my employment contract to miss a day, so I had no excuse. Saturday is
a day like every other day, the contract said. I went to lunch with my
coworkers. While we ate, I hoped the waiter would poison my food. It didn't
happen. The food was delicious. But to my surprise and joy, a quartet of masked
villains entered the restaurant, with weapons waving above their heads,
screaming demands to the restaurant's management. My coworkers were terrified.
The masked bandits approached our table, as we were the only
guests in the restaurant at the time. They demanded our possessions, then
demanded a hostage. At first they tried to take one of the women, but I stood
up, and volunteered myself to be their hostage. They agreed, and took me.
Police surrounded the building in minutes, and four guns
pointed into my skull in a desperate act of negotiation.
I convinced the villains to release the rest of my coworkers,
and the restaurant staff. It was nice to see them run out the front doors, into
protective cover of the police. But they looked back, toward the restaurant, in
hopes I would come out breathing. I know they couldn't see me through the
windows, because the sun was so bright, but I waved goodbye to them, trying to
signal with a simple wave that I'd enjoyed working with them, and it was
nothing personal, but I had to clock out.
"If you move, you die," one of the masked men told
me.
"I know," I said. And he was right!
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