rhapsody on a theme by gleick
When we first started moving into our new place,
I would take a few boxes with me after work
and show up in the evening at the deserted
house, its large windows looking out on me,
waiting for the moment when I'd open the
deadbolt and the emptiness of the place would
tweak some forgotten part of my lizard brain,
and the traffic noises outside would speak of
loneliness, of the previous owners who had
fled the economy all the way to Idaho, taking
Jesus and their four children with them.
I'd been here many times before, the wood
floors creaking with empty house noises,
when I'd put up tape and dropcloths, where
I'd turn on the radio a little too loud, and the
news of the day would make its own white
noise to cover the emptiness of the house.
Over many nights of fast food and beer, the
painted rooms began to suggest something
other than airless, insulated, self-contained
and hermetically sealed spaces, and I began
to be reminded of my parents' old house, the
one with its own hardwood floors, with the old
rocking chair that my sister and I used to turn
over and make a scratchy fort out of with a
flannel blanket, the smells of bacon cooking
and the promise of a vanilla breakfast shake.
My parents divorced but their house remained,
standing there still in the heat and the dust,
the air-conditioned dark beams in my old
bedroom ceiling still there when I stared up at
them, hallucinating with the flu, in a tightly-
sheeted bed at nine; where the house reminds
us all of our physical and emotional frailties.
The questions left unasked.
I've heard the same news stories over and over
on the radio for a while now, so it's lost its white
noise news-wallpaper effect.
On another night, on the drive over, I flip around
on the AM dial (because my radio's broken and
only gets AM anyway) past the right-wing frothing,
past the UFO crank radio in the mountain deserts,
and home in on a classical music station for some
reason, and there were the piano concertos I
was ashamed to have a fondness for as a teenager,
the little preludes I never practiced, coming in
faintly at first on the bridge, gaining strength here
and there, but never enough to get a really strong
signal.
There's some sort of high-energy music coming
from somewhere else, and the low angry murmurs
of threatened males with talk shows, and as I pass
the the high-tension wire towers along the bridge,
and the dark world outside is still at seventy miles
an hour, and hot, the high-energy music ch-ch-ch-
CH-CH overwhelms with static, like fading
paintings over centuries, like friezes where the
very attempt at restoration kills the rich oil
veneer.
The radio station comes on very clearly in the house.
It's my company for the rest of the month, room
by painstaking room.
It doesn't create the white noise escape, but more
like tone paintings in my head, particularly with
pieces I used to know from when my father would
play them, almost as a sacrament.
(My religious relatives would send him tapes filled
with evangelical sermons; he would tape over them
with Beethoven.)
And then Beethoven's Pathetique begins, and
there's such poetry there, such passionate life from
a man just beginning to suffer deafness, that the
house gains something, and the work I do fits in with
the traffic noises outside, and the floor's creaks feel
welcoming.
I still listen to the station in the car, even with the
static, to take hold of that artful life while it fades
away, while the faster life of convenience and
accelerated isolation takes root.