Love

To move a single finger, the brain first sends a signal telling all your fingers to move and then, almost immediately, another one: a signal that tells all the ones that weren't supposed to move to stop. But this feels wrong. I am measured. I am not the quick tempering of some unbridled impulse: an infinite pack of dogs let loose and then almost entirely recalled. The last dog still running: running as though still in a crowd—reckless, galloping, the vanguard made guard, shattering against the terrible thing at which he is going. I am not that.

I sat, as I used to often sit when at The Projectile, at the front row of the balcony, leaning forward, with my elbows on my knees and my chin in the cup of my hands.

There is not a single detail of that day I have been able to forget. I had come down from my home in the city for an appointment, to a town a couple hours south—the town that I grew up in and in which I still maintained various administrative obligations.

I had decided to stay for a pair of Hitchcock movies: Vertigo and Rear Window. I'd gotten to the theater early to listen to the organist. It was a matinee screening or maybe an early evening one. It is not so important; what I remember is that the sun was still up when I arrived.

For as long as I can remember, The Projectile has had an organist play before certain, special shows. And, I must confess, I often went as much for the organ music as for the movies. And I don't know why I feel the need to condition that sentence with: "I must confess." I must confess, it is more to sound humble than out of any misgivings about who I am. Because yes, as you may have guessed or perhaps remember (having read any of the not-insubstantial set of articles which repeated my name, photo, and promise), I was once one of the premier organ players. That is, before I quit: the career prospects feeling parochial, too many doors closing in on me all at once.

That afternoon, the man played stunningly but there was something disconcerting about his technique. He played almost like he was trying to catch up to the music, like he was exhausted. Though I was far away, I could see his body rush into the movements that would make the notes right before they were needed. I could see his feet lurching across the pedal board. His hands darting across the layers of keys almost like every note was impossibly far from the next. But the sound, the layers of sound, came on thick and beautiful and accurate. And there is no sound like an organ, I have always said. It is the sculpture of music: every note already there at the onset, each intonation emerging, selected, from the all-sound of the bellows.

While I listened, the place filled with people. And then, all of a sudden, the theme from Vertigo swelled in the large room. Almost at the same time, the organist began sinking lower and lower. No, not in his seat: a whole block of stage was lowering with him. In my mind I could see him going down forever. And we watched the whole structure around him swallowed by the stage while the sound stayed, unflagging—after all, it did not come from him—and the lights dimmed.

A few seats over, I heard a small child cry out faintly: "He's going under. He's going under. Isn't anyone going to help him?" And I gave a loathsome snicker and I wanted to stretch across the three empty seats between us, grip my hands murderously around his armrest, and whisper in his ear that they kept the organ man there beneath the stage. That he lived down there off of the roses confused show-goers sometimes threw at the stage thinking themselves at a play instead of a movie. The poor organist of The Projectile: his carpaccio of petals, his miserable water store of stems—the desperate last sips of flowers, made his.

I have little patience for people unable to extrapolate—even children. But before I could say anything, the movie started. It started even while the curtains were still opening; it was almost like it was in a rush to get going. And the whole theater clapped; clapped like they thought not only that it was the end but also that movies are a thing that should be clapped for. They clapped as though letting their hands do the talking. And oh did I long to do the same. For once in my life. To stand and swing blindly at the world.

But they got quiet and the well-worn film crackled to life and Universal orbited around the earth into view, and I thought about how dismayed Copernicus would be to see something so retrograde. Then Paramount, then Vanta Vision, and, finally, the mustache of James Stewart's name gliding into place above Kim Novak's lips. Then the spirals. How beautiful it was to watch film, something so used by light.

In the first scene, I heard him. It was faint but it also sounded like he was discovering something: the new taste of a word in his mouth. "San Francisco," he muttered to himself, pensively: with a little nod. And if the camel is what follows the dromedary then "San Francisco" is what follows whatever follows the camel. Luxurious humps of sound. So all this seemed innocuous—lovely, even—but so too are so many awful beginnings. After all, all beginnings are lovely like diving boards: a seductive brief lift and then an inevitable, quickening fall.

So, I turned towards him with a scrunched "do you really think that's a valuable contribution" look on my face, and, though he was looking straight ahead, I felt I had extracted the little, copacetic smile he now wore, on his strangely small face—a face like the continents of his individual features were as of yet one landmass, still waiting to be teased apart. And I leaned back into my chair and gave my head a couple dissatisfied turns.

I managed to refocus in time for that first majestic parallax effect where Stewart is hanging off the building and looks down and the camera moves back and zooms in at the same time, which is so much a metaphor for the movie: a simultaneous pulling and stretching that shifts the world—that distorts but does not displace. And I felt gleeful, giddy.

By then, I had forgotten anyone else was there. Until, softly, I heard the words "Grace Cathedral." It sounded like a slap to the face. I must have shot upright in my seat because the people next to me looked at me and shook their heads: looked at me as though I was the one causing a disturbance! They must have thought I'd fallen asleep and I blushed and felt angry at the man who could not resist naming places. And though Grace Cathedral was indeed there—albeit only briefly—in the background, I was immensely annoyed.

I must admit that by now I was, in fact, rattled—waiting for his next interjection. And he kept me waiting; kept me waiting long enough that anyone rational would have returned their attention to the movie, but I,. I knew that he was not finished. I did not let myself fall prey to his pause. So when he muttered "Coit Tower," my first reaction was pleasure at having anticipated it: at having avoided being lulled defenseless. Though this was quickly replaced with a peculiar rage at having considered my attentiveness to something other than the movie a kind of victory.

And as the movie continued, so did he: “Ernie’s Restaurant” and my attention was quartered “Legion of Honor” between the movie, the anticipation of “Brocklebank Apartments” his voice, the part of me that was trying "296 Union Street" stay calm, and the part repeatedly stabbing that "calm" part in the “Big Basin Redwoods State Park” throat.

He spaced out his interjections into a crueler kind of incessance. And when he said 37.789189° N, -122.404764° W (slamming the 't' of “point” down hard with his tongue), I couldn’t take it anymore. I got up and I left and that small face followed me as I walked up the steps to the exit. I stumbled through the theater doors. I'd been so distracted that I'd forgotten to take my jacket off and now I felt it heavy and damp and I felt dizzy; but I would be all better soon; I would walk down to the reception; I would tell them there was a man causing a nuisance, that the man was crazy: talking constantly and geolocating the shots and saying coordinates and shit. And I could already picture them grabbing him by the coat and dragging him up the steps. The other theater goers clapping as I returned to my seat. The small child saying: “feed him to the organist!” and the crowd laughing. Slowly, I took the stairs, the banister, down to the reception.

When I reached the ground floor, catching my breath, I heard something strange: the sound of keys being pressed without music—the particular, almost-always-drowned, unvarying, unaccompanied sound of keys being pressed. It was coming from a slightly open door beneath the stairs. I walked towards the clicking. It was strange but I began to turn away: I wasn’t here to talk a shop that I had sold and forgotten; besides I had vengeful business to attend to and I was drowning in my jacket, and...

But then I recognized the song. And if you have never felt what it is like to recognize something in the absence of its definition, not even from its shadow, but as if from a fainter, almost entirely consumed echo: an entire poem rushing back to you from a single word, a single syllable; if you have never, then your whole existence is that sickly simulacra, empty keys without music, the decaying afterglow of an actual beauty, which you can never know you will never have. Just so, the song came back to me from the almost soundless clicking of keys in the room and I could feel my fingers start to move against my legs and so I opened the door and I saw him.

He was older than he had been from further away and though he did not stop playing, he looked at me as I walked in. He had something sad in his eyes and his mouth was slightly open and breathing. "Ah," he said, repurposing an exhale, which immediately took its toll—the next sound he made a series of coughs. But all the while, still he played..

"I'm sorry I didn't mean to disturb you. I just heard your playing; I heard you playing 548 and, well, and the door was open". And, almost imperceptibly, he started playing faster: the same piece, just faster. And at the same time, he said "You play," not looking at me, staring straight ahead, and I was confused and annoyed that he had not recognized the genius of my recognition of his song. I figured that he must not have heard, so I added: "548, is a beautiful piece." But he did not give a better answer.

We could hear some of the movie from above: chewed up voices mixed into the fast clicking of the keys. We stayed, for a moment, in these side-effects of sound. And then he said: "Continue."

He stood up, still playing, and looked at me. It took me a moment to understand what he meant. He began not quite singing but evoking the song: the frame and rhythm of it. I walked over and stood beside him. Hovered my hands over his: followed his hands and fingers as they moved across the keys. We played like this for a while. Eventually, he looked at me and I nodded. And my fingers were a pack of dogs straining against the tendons which rippled the back of my hands. And all at once, he pulled his hands back and my hands fell onto the keys. And I stumbled through the first set bars and then began playing. There was still no song, but it hammered in my head.

When it ended there was another set of notes to reach. My head swam with sound and I drowned in it: drowned through it. And as I played quicker, I felt my heart race till it was like a bell ringing in my chest, and so I slowed, slowed my fingers, but I felt my heart slow too, slow, impossibly slow, and so I froze. And in that half second, so did my heart. And I looked back and he smiled: a smile of keys, littered with the gaps of accidentals.