Damon Knight - Orbit 18

I swing down the basses’ keyboard so I can play it with my feet. I indulge my bad habit and watch my feet as I play, big toes trapped and pointing downward under the pressure of the other toes, bouncing over the yellow keys and creating low bowed notes that expand out of the rising spiral of big, dark bodies behind me. My arches cramp, and in my guts something twists. I can’t remember the music—the conductor’s score that threaded through my head is gone. I can no longer play. Sweat is breaking out on my face and arms, and the Orchestra is slowly spinning, as it does in concerts—

... I am waiting for Mikel and JoAnne to arrive so we can leave for the concert. I am at the battered old upright piano that I brought from Mother’s house right after the funeral, playing Ravel’s Pavanne and crying at it. I laugh bitterly at my ability to act, unsure as always if my emotions are real, or feigned for some invisible audience in a theater wrapped around my head; and I think, ignoring the evidence blinking before me: I can call them up at will when I’m miserable enough!

Mikel and JoAnne walk in, laughing like wind-chimes. They are both singers in Vancouver’s Opera, true artists. They light up some Baygolds and we smoke and talk about Tslitschitche, the quartet we are going to hear. The conversation slows, Mikel and JoAnne look at each other:

“Eric,” Mikel says, “JoAnne and I are going to drop crystals for the concert.” He holds out his hand. In his palm is a small clear crystal that looks like nothing so much as a diamond. He flips it into the air, catches it in his mouth, swallows it, grins. “Want to join us?” JoAnne takes one from him and swallows it with the same casual, defiant toss. She offers one to me, between her fingers. I look at her, remembering what I have heard. Nepana-thol. I do not want to go blind.

“Are you addicted?” I ask. They shake their heads.

“We restrict ourselves to special occasions,” JoAnne explains. They laugh. The idea of it—

“Hell,” I say, “give me one.” I hit notes on the piano: C,G, G G sharp, G—B,C; and put a crystal in my mouth. It has no taste. I swallow it—

Hallucinations. For a moment there I was confused. I get back onto the stool and regret moving so quickly. Nausea is making me weak. I try playing some Dixieland, an avocation of mine of which the Master disapproves and in which I am (perhaps as a result) quite knowledgeable. It is difficult to play the seven instruments all at once—clarinet, trumpet, trombone, banjo, piano, drums, bass (impossible, actually; watch the tapes take down eight-bar passages and replay them when repeat buttons are pushed; often playing the Orchestra requires skills usually possessed by sound engineers), so I drop all of them but the front line.

The trombone is a fascinating thing to watch! Unable to anticipate the notes as human players do, the glass arms of the Orchestra move the slide about with an incredible, mechanical, inhuman speed. I am playing the Jack Teagarten solo to St. Louis Blues, and I am hitting wrong notes in it. I switch to the clarinet solo which is, to my surprise, the solo from The Rampart Street Parade (you see how they fit together?) and quit in resignation. I hate to play poorly.

“All you have to do to stop this,” the voice says out loud, and then I finish it in my head, is to get home and swallow a nep crystal. Without a moment’s thought I slip off the stool: my knees buckle like closing penknives and I crash into the bank of keyboards, fall to the floor of the booth. In the glass floor are inlaid bass and treble clef signs. After a while I pull myself up and am sick in the booth’s drinking fountain. Then I let myself drop back to the floor.

I feel as sick after vomiting as before, which is frightening.

“Do, do something,” the voice says, “don’t just look at it.” At what? I ask. I pull out the celesta keyboard just before me, the bottom one in the bank. I look up at the ornate white box that is the instrument, suspended in the air above me, dwarfed by the grand piano beside it. The celesta: a piano whose hammers hit steel plates rather than wires. I run my finger along a few octaves and a spray of quick bell-notes echoes through the chamber.

I try a Bach Two-Part Invention, a masterpiece of elegance that properly belongs on the harpsichord. My hands begin to play at different tempos and I can’t stop it; frightening! I stop playing, and to aid my timing I reach a shaky right hand up and start the metronome, an antique mechanical box that struck Pierson’s fancy at about eighty. An upside-down pendulum, visually surprising because it seems to contradict the laws of gravity rather than agree with them as a normal pendulum does.

I begin the Invention again, but the tempo is too fast for me (I usually play it at 120); the notes become a confused mass, sounding like church bells recorded and replayed at a much higher speed.

The gold weight on the metronome’s arm reflects a part of my face (my eyes) as it comes to its lowest point on the left side. And my heart—certainly my heart is beating in time with the metronome’s penetrating, woodblock-struck, rhythmic lock.

And just as undeniably the metronome is speeding up. Impossible, for the weight has not moved on the arm, yet true; at first it was an andante tock . . . lock, and now it is a good march tempo, lock, tock; and my heartbeat a tempo all the way. With each pulse small specks of light are exploding and drifting like tiny Chinese lanterns across my eyes. I can feel the quick pulses of blood in my throat and fingers. I am scared. The tocks are now an allegretto tocktocktock. I lift my finger up, a terrible weight, and stick it into the flashing silver arc with the gold band across its center. The metronome stops.

I begin breathing again. My heart begins to slow down. A true hallucination, I think to myself, is very disturbing. After a time I push the celesta keyboard back into its nook and try to stand up. My legs explode. I grasp the stool. Cramps, I think in some cold corner of my mind, watching the limbs flail about. I knead the bulging muscles with one hand and keep shifting to find a more comfortable position; it occurs to me with a start that this is what the phrase “writhing in agony” describes; I had thought it was just a literary figure.

The cold corner of my mind disappears, and that was all that was left—

I come to and the cramps are gone. They feel like they are on the verge, though. If I don’t move I think I will be all right. I wish it were closer to the end.

I can see my reflection in the tuba’s dented bell. A sorry-looking spectacle, disheveled and pale. The features are architecturally distinct. I can quite clearly see the veins below my eyes. The reflection wavers, each time presenting me with a different version of my face. Some are dome-foreheaded and weak-chinned; some have giant hooked noses; others are lantern-jawed and have pointy heads. Some are half-faced—

... I am trying to keep in step with the rest of the Children’s Orchestra, now being temporarily transformed for the Tricentennial celebration into a marching band. A marching band: in the old days they used to dress musicians in uniforms and have them walk through the streets in ranks and files, playing tunes to the tempo of their steps. I can conceive of nothing more ridiculous, as I struggle under the weight of a Sousaphone, a tuba stretched into a circle so that it can be carried while marching. There are no pianos in a marching band, obviously. Fuming at the treatment a child prodigy receives, I puff angrily into the huge mouthpiece and watch my reflection sway back and forth in the curved brass surface. The conductor is scurrying about the edges of the group, consulting the Parade Manual in his hand and shouting, “Watch your diagonals! Watch those diagonals!” Next to me Joe Tanaka (he is a cellist, drafted as I have been) says, “If God meant us to play and walk at the same time, he’d have had us breathe through our ears.” The halls force us to make a ninetydegree turn and there is chaos. “Step small on the inside!” the conductor is shouting. Each rank looks like a game of crack-the-whip. “Halt!” the conductor shrieks. Still breaking up at Tanaka, I cannon into the girl in front of me and three or four of us go down in a tangle. In the midst of the cries and recriminations I look at the crumpled Sousaphone bell and see the lower half of my face reflected: big mouth, no eyes—