Sergio De La Pava - Personae

He is more than a century old; was.

I walk away, to the other side of the counter where I sit on a stool and look into the kitchen. I forgot to close the eyes and now he is staring at me. The last thing he saw was dirty cracked linoleum but follow his eyes now and you can reach the Sun.

Someone is at the door. As they come in I stand and move away from the counter. There are steps you can take to stand in plain view without being seen just as you can follow someone quite closely without them noticing provided you understand the behavior of soundwaves and take care to maintain proper angles. [2] fn This is fact not opinion. For a more extended discussion of the applicable phenomena see, if even possible, Dr. Helen Tame’s article Sound Without Fury: Soundwave Behavior and Surreptitious Audition in Issue Three of the now-defunct SCIENCE FACTION MAGAZINE. A tall woman walks in. She is leading a girl by the hand. They are dressed in almost costume plainness and as they pass the kitchen they merely glance at the body before entering the room I’m in. I contemplate speaking but decide I don’t want to influence events, just want to see what will develop in my absence.

They are looking for something but the girl is merely mimicking the adult without comprehension. She is nine or ten. After the woman opens and closes a drawer the girl will then reopen and close that same drawer without looking in. They are done and go into the bedroom holding nothing. I have not been seen.

In the bedroom they engage in the same conduct with the same result. They say nothing but look at each other often. The woman puts her hand to the child’s face and with a thumb wipes her cheek. They sit on the mattress, saying nothing, holding hands. When they rise the girl is holding something and I, who have stared continuously at her face since first locking on to it well, cannot account for the acquisition.

It is a white package and it is secured shut by twine in the form of a bakery box. She is carrying it and they are walking towards me. I decide to let them see me and to investigate, I am interested. Then I step aside and they walk past. They walk past the kitchen. The woman stares straight ahead as they pass but the girl drops her head back to look. They open the door and leave. I stare at the door. Time passes. I go to the window but see no one. I have made my first mistake in a long time and that excites me with possibility.

There is nothing that blatantly indicates where the white box came from. The piano bench for example doubles as storage but is sufficiently full that there was no possible room for the box the girl carried so forlornly. In there is a notebook. A music notebook with leger lines forming grand staffs. Written by hand, in pencil and recently, is an aria I recognize immediately but have not played in years. I take off my gloves and sit at the bench. I play it straight through once, at first using his music then from memory, the notes surprising and moving me as I remember why I stopped playing them. Then again but this time more deliberately, allowing some notes to fade to near silence before being replaced. I begin a variation out of order then stop. The aria is the only music in the notebook. This is a coincidence but coincidences don’t impress me or cause me the slightest wonder.

The average person greatly underestimates the frequency of what they term coincidence and often the unscrupulous profit as a result. Thus the frequent discoveries that the Bible, for example, has a hidden code that prospectively details the precise unfolding of the Franco-Prussian War or whatever until someone, one hopes, points out that the real shock would be if the comparison of two immeasurably rich entities like the Bible and all of human history failed to produce any matching patterns whatsoever. Similarly, I have mentioned that Mr. Doe spent more than a century on our planet and I fairly recently concluded my fourth decade therein creating ample opportunity for something like my having written extensively on the only piece of music transcribed by the individual whose death I’m investigating; this is especially so when one of the individuals has been a compulsive producer of monographs on wildly divergent topics, although with a discernible if not exclusive focus on matters related to investigative techniques and Music, since the age of sixteen.

And there remains the matter of the box because while it is true that the girl carried it towards the front door she did not in fact leave with it and it now rests bluntly near that door where I direct stares at it as I resume playing and pretend that what I see is a residual image not yet dissolved behind my eyes and not one supported by actual presence, a pretension necessitated by a kind of urgently palpable aura emitted by the object; how I’ve determined that the round pills are not responsible for John Doe’s pose but almost certainly the contents of the box somehow are, all meaning that I am duty-bound to approach the box but so do not want to that I contemplate the abandonment of that duty and incorporated within is the conclusion that while such an abandonment can be perfectly legitimate it can only be so if it is not specific to this incident but is, as it were, General, meaning just the kind of complete abdication and cessation I am not even remotely prepared to make, so instead I go to the box.

I am tentatively untying the box and sitting on Doe’s sofa. Wait. Should I untie the box?

I have yet to fully inhale the apartment as I eventually must but sometimes sensing is enough and I sense that whatever secrets exist therein will devolve freely under even minimal scrutiny but not so for the box.

Should I open it?

Maybe the box is empty. I’ll open it and contrary to all intuition and sense impressions reveal not a saturated piece of our universe but rather the absence at the core of everything, that what is fashionable to believe has fashion only because true.

But when I open it I’m only slightly surprised by what I see. Another notebook but this one’s marble and thus spongy in the way only those can become. Initially black now barely grey it contains writing that ranges from colorful immediacy to mere ghostly impressions.

Digging further results in an untimely TV GUIDE (yes, the mini booklike magazine) this one remarkable at first glance only for its copious writing in red ink in seemingly every available margin that once provided respite from the publication’s incestually suggestive coverage of the titular industry. This writing is in the same hand as they say as marble notebook’s.

Next is a roll of paper towels but not the kind you would ever find in someone’s home with the heightened absorbency and easily perforated sections. No this is brown paper closer in the spectrum to wood than most paper dares and what on introduction appears to be meaningless scribbling thereupon evolves on closer inspection into more writing, again with the from the same hand thing, but made almost indecipherable by the fact that the writing has been quite literally rolled over itself so that the reader’s visual processing of the most immediate letters is undercut by the many successively fainter letters that constitute later writing and which essentially bleed through the paper to compete with the more relevant letters at least when the roll is in its most composed state.

Last is a collection (collected, at least in the nonhuman sense, by a binder clip in the upper left corner and this clip is of the largest size commonly available in the U.S.) of research. The bright whiteness of this recent paper is sudden and intense and it takes time to notice that what signifies here is not so much the computer-generated symbols on the front but instead the by now familiar and severely human prose on the back of almost every page.