Damon Knight - Orbit 18

So here I am, a young man frying in a hallucinogenic withdrawal, suspended in this contraption like a fly trapped in the web of a spider frying in a hallucinogenic withdrawal.. . You’ve seen pictures of those poor tangled webs that drugged spiders make in labs? That is what Pierson’s Orchestra would look like in two dimensions, from any side. Glass arms holding out bright brass and wood instruments like Christmas-tree ornaments. A glass hand, a tree reaching up in a swirl of rich browns and silvers and prisms. Music doesn’t grow on trees, you know. The cymbals are edged with rainbows.

Most certainly I have been suffering delusions. It is easy afterward to say that a conversation with a man dead three centuries is an illusion, but while it is happening, quite definitely happening, it is hard to discount one’s senses. Damage is being done in my brain; it is as if I can feel the individual cells swelling and popping. I am very sick. There is little to do but sit and wait it out. Surely it is near the end—in a sudden flash I see the Orchestra as a giant baroque cross upon which I am draped . . . but no. It is a fantasy, one I can recognize. I am afraid of those I can’t recognize.

“Just like sex,” the deaf man said, “climax at the end.” I wait. Time passes. Pop pop pop . . . like swollen grains of rice. Something must be done. Might as well play the damn thing. Put on a show.

I’m not convinced by you, Pierson! Not a bit!

I begin arranging the keyboards into concert position, my hands shoving them about like tugboats pushing big ships. Dispassionately I watch my hands shake. The cold comer of my mind has taken over and somehow I am outside the nausea. I am seeing things with the clarity you have when you are extremely hungry, or tired past the point of being tired. Everything is quite clear, quite in focus. I have heard that drowning men experience a last period of great calm and clarity before losing consciousness. Perhaps the tide is that high now. I cannot tell. Oh, I am tired of this! Why can’t it be over? Bach’s “Rejoice, Beloved Christians,” the baritone playing the high line. The passages come to me clean and sharp now. I find it hard to keep my balance; everything is overexposed. I am swaying. I close my eyes. A Chopin Nocturne. Against the black field of my eyelids’ insides there is a marvelous show of lights, little colored worms that burst into existence, crawl across my vision and disappear. Behind the lights are barely discernible patterns, geometric tapestries that flare and contract under the pressure of my eyelids. The music is intertwined with this odd mandala; when I clamp my eyes hard there is a sudden rush of blue geometry with a black center, with it a roll of tympani, shrieking of woodwinds, and the strings fitting quickly and surely into the fantastic blue patterns that blossom before me. Mozart’s Concerto in G, as effortlessly as if I were the conductor and not the performer. Above it rises a trumpet solo, my own improvisation, arching high above the structure of the concerto. My interior field of vision clears and becomes a neutral color, grey or dull purple. Ten clear lines run across it in sets of five. The score. As I play the notes they appear, in long vertical sets as in a conductor’s score. They move off to the left as if the score were on a conveyor belt. Excellent. Halfnotes, quarter-notes in the bass clef; long runs of sixteenth-notes in the treble, all like the sun shining through pinholes in a dark sheet of paper. The concerto flows into Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, with a transition that pleases me. As far as I can tell the score is perfectly accurate. I am playing brilliantly, with enough confidence to throw grace notes of my own about in passages of great speed. I think, “It would be nice to have the cellos playing their counterpoint here,” and then I hear the cellos making their quick departure from the rest of the strings. My fingers are not doing it. Play it with everything you have. The Finale of the Third, every single instrument achingly clean and individual. Nineteen years, Pierson, is this what you meant?

The Orchestra is the extension of what I want to hear.

I move into realms of my own, shifting from passage to passage, playing what I always wanted to hear; half-remembered snatches, majestic crescendos that you wake up from in the middle of the night, having dreamed them, and wish you could recapture; the architecture of Bach, the power of Beethoven, the beauty of Mozart, the wit and transitions of de Baik. All a confusion, all a marvel. Think it in your head and hear the Orchestra play it. The performer the instrument, the instrument a part of the performer. Pierson, what have you done?

Music. If you are at all alive to it you will have heard passages that bring a chill to your back and a flush of blood to your cheeks; a physical response to beauty. A rush. The music I am playing now is the very distillation of that feeling. It soars out and for the first time I hear echoes in this room, it is that powerful. The score no longer consists of musical notation; it is an impressionistic fantasy of a musical score, the background a deep blood red, the notes sudden clusters of jewels or long flows of colors I can’t identify even as I see them; yet see them, most certainly. The drums are pounding, strings rushing and jumbling, awash in a wave of fortissimo brass shouts, not blaring—the horns of the Orchestra cannot blare—but at their highest volume, triumphant—

... triumphant she is as I ascend the dais I can see her face and she is strained and ecstatic as if in labor for to her I am being bom again and throughout the investiture all I can see is her bright face before me unto her a Master is born—

. . . and masterful, chaotic yet perfectly calculated. The score is a mille jleurs of twisted colors, falling, falling, the notes are falling. I open my eyes and find that they are already stretched wide open; a rush, a rush of red, red is all I see, a blinding waterfall of molten glass cascading down, behind it a thousand suns.

I awake from a dream in which I was ... in which I was . . . walking through hallways. Talking with someone. I cannot remember.

I am lying on the glass floor of the booth, I can feel the bas-relief of the clef signs. My mouth feels as if it had been washed in acids, which I suppose it has. My legs. My left hand is asleep. I have been poured from my container, my skeleton is gone, I am a lump of flesh. I move my arm. An achievement.

“Eric,” comes the Master’s voice, high-pitched in its anxiety. It is probably what awakened me. His hand on my shoulder. He babbles without pause as he helps me out of the Orchestra, “I just got back, you’re all right, you’re all right, the music you were playing, my God, magnificent, here, here, watch out, you’re all right, my son—”

“I am blind,” I croak. There is a pause, a gasp. He holds me in his arms, half carries me onto a cot of some sort, muttering in a strained voice as he moves me about.

“Horrible, horrible,” he keeps saying. “Horrible.” It is age-old. Lose your sight, and learn to see. I blink away tears for my lost vision, and cannot see myself blink.

“You will make a great Master,” he says firmly.

I do not answer.

“The blindness will not make any difference at all.”

And after a long pause—

“Yes,” I say, wishing he understood, wishing there was someone who understood, “I think it will.”

Our guest today, the marvelous actress Mercedes McCambridge, was at one time in dire need of trouble.

—Barbara Walters

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That love is salt in my wounds, that love is sand in my throat, Claire.

Claire. Claire.