LOVELY THINGS

Richard Toller was staring out his fourth story window at a lazy Saturday midtown street when the ash began to fall. “It’s kind of like Christmas” he thought as the first whitish grey flakes settled themselves on his open windowsill, “but a bleak Christmas. A Christmas without cheer or red nosed Santa merrily ringing the charity bell on every street corner, a Christmas smothered by muggy summer heat, a Christmas without trees or snowball fights. I guess it’s not really like Christmas at all.” He closed the window and turned away.

 The daylight was odd and pale as the sun fought its way through the dense billows of smoke. When it came through on the other side it was weak and weary, having lost its pep and bright summery sheen in the battle. Richard’s room had been dreary to begin with. The walls, painted a light blue some decades ago, had been baked to a sickly grey by time and by the sun and by the inevitable dust kicked up when ordinary people do ordinary things for extended periods. 

He meandered across the room and stood before the upright piano jammed into the corner, ruefully plinking out the melody of the short piece he was composing. The television was on, but muted. Excited reporters rushed to and fro across the screen, chronicling the Cyprus Bay fire that was “still only eight percent contained.” That explained the raining ashes, the untimely overcast sky that yawned over the city. Cyprus Bay was about one hundred and fifty miles away from where Richard stood, but the wind and the ferocity of the flames carried those dancing particles all that way. 

There was a heavy knock on the door. Richard stopped playing and held very still. The person outside hesitated, then knocked again. 

“I know you’re in there, Toller” said a gruff voice through the door, “I heard you playing. You haven’t paid your rent in two months! Open up!” 

Richard held his breath.

“You can’t hide in there forever, Toller. I’m going to call the police if you don’t either pay or pack up and leave today!” 

There was the sound of angry breathing, then heavy footsteps as they left his door and descended down the stairs. Richard let out his breath and sank shaking down onto the piano bench. Since he’d quit the janitor job there hadn’t been any kind of a steady income. He told himself that he’d had to quit, that nobody of intelligence could clean toilets and vacuum empty hallways and listen to his own footsteps ringing out his loneliness forever, but since then he’d found no other work. Actually, he hadn’t even thought about another part time job. The thought of interviews and training shifts and coworkers and yet another nametag to add to the collection that sat neglected on his dresser made him sick.  His meager savings had drained quickly, and now he was flat broke. He could sell the piano, but that was like asking a man to sell his lungs. Still, some people gave up their lungs for free or even paid eight seventy-five per pack for the opportunity to do so in California. He sighed and looked out the window. The wind had picked up and the ashes were being blown into a pile near the bottom. 

A wan and sordid smile crept onto Richard’s face as the inspiration came trickling into his mind. As he turned his attention back to the piano, he thought:  It comes creeping through the crack between the window and the sill like a gas.” He took a deep breath, placed his fingers delicately on the ivory keys, and then played. It came to him in full and he played without hesitation a piece completely new to him, sight reading his own soul. When he finished the piece, he grabbed the mechanical pencil and the mostly blank sheet music and began to scribble down the notes. When he finished, he played the whole thing over again. It was a bleak piece, but deep and poetic, like the ashen flakes of strangers’ homes and strangers’ lives gathering up in indiscriminate heaps against the windowsill he couldn’t afford. 

Satisfied with his piece, Richard jotted a title over the first line of music. It was called The World is Burning Town by Town (and I am glad, for nobody listens to classical music anymore anyway)

“This is a good piece to end on.” Richard said aloud to the empty apartment. He tapped the pages into a neat stack, placed them gently on top of the piano, then went searching through his cupboards for his final means of escape. 

* * *

The sun was beginning to set. The haze from the Cyprus Bay fire made all the light a warm orange. It made things look like cinema, with special lighting cast intentionally to create mood and perpetuate the artist’s theme. The window cast an orange square into the center of the room

            Richard had no rope. He didn’t want to go out, to go to a hardware store and buy a length of death off the spool. Anyway, he had no money to do so. He found a heavy extension cord lying in a neat coil at the bottom of his closet. It had black rubber insulator and seemed more than sturdy enough. He was only one hundred and fifty pounds with his clothes on. He also didn’t know how to tie a noose. His first attempt yielded an unattractive loop that would definitely not fit over his head. He undid the cord and tired again.  He had to try three or four times before he made a noose that seemed right. While he was working, a little snatch of a tune came unexpectedly into his head. 

            “It’s too late for that.” he thought, “This one will disappear with me.” He tried to dispel the tune from his mind, but it stuck fast. It was bitter, but strong; black coffee in the morning without cream or sugar, a soldier who has taken two or three bullets in his legs and still refuses to let the flag touch the ground. Richard clenched his eyes shut tight and gritted his teeth. The old urge to drop whatever he was doing and rush to the piano was returning. 

            “I’ve got to go through with this. I’ve got to follow through with something.” He told himself. Heaving a great breath, he took the finished noose and looked up at the light fixture. He had moved the coffee table out of the way already. The ceiling was eight feet high, and Richard himself was only five foot five. He dragged his piano bench to the center of the room. The square of orange light that was stretching from the window fell on it perfectly. As evening grew deeper, the light was slowly changing from an orange that was just a hint beneath yellow into an iron ore red. It was about right. Just about right. 

            Richard stepped onto the bench. Even on his toes, he could just barely reach high enough to fasten one end of his extension cord around the stem of the light fixture. He adjusted it too so that he would have a little drop, but his feet wouldn’t touch the ground. He didn’t want the temptation to chicken out once he had taken his leap, the most dramatic leap of his life. As he stood on the piano bench, looking out the window through the dangling loop of his noose, Richard thought about leaps. He thought about risks: all the risks he had never taken, all the joys that his mouse-like coward’s soul had barred him from. The woman came into his mind; the small and lovely woman with deep brown hair hanging in pleasant curls around her shoulders, whose eyes glowed with life and with some secret joy that Richard had longed to understand. She had sat and watched him play all night long, back when he used to perform in the bars and restaurants for tip money. The patrons of the bars always wanted to hear Billy Joel or modern pop songs, but when nobody was looking Richard would slip in a few of his own pieces. He played these with a different kind of passion, leaning into his notes, flitting his right hand like the wings of butterfly, slamming his left like a hammer on the anvils of hell. They tipped less when he played classical, sometimes even booed, and eventually the manager would tap him on the shoulder and remind Richard that there was a mood they were trying to maintain. Richard always gave the managers his hangdog smile and a stumbling, muttering apology, then turned his attention to playing Piano Man for the fourth time that night. 

            The woman was waiting for him when the bar closed down, standing outside the back entrance of the bar. 

            “I liked your playing.” she had said. 

            “Thank you” he replied. 

            “You played some classical music.” She commented. Richard nodded, keeping his eyes awkwardly on the ground. They were alone in an alley at two o’clock in the morning. He didn’t want her or anyone else to get any wrong ideas about his intentions. She had fixed him with a long look. Finally, he glanced away from the pavement. Their eyes met. There were words forming in Richard’s throat, words that he knew were coming although they had no place. He didn’t know this woman’s name, her story, anything. He bit his lip to keep himself from speaking the words he knew he’d regret. 

            “Who was it?” she asked him finally.

            “Hmm?”

            “The classical pieces you played before the manager got on your case. Who wrote them?” 

            “Oh, uh, me. I did. I wrote those.” Richard’s voice dwindled to nothing and he felt his face turn red.” 

            “Oh. They were beautiful.”

            “Oh, well, thank you.” Richard said. His head jerked away with the nervous tick that had plagued him since childhood. There was another long, uncomfortable silence, and those words were building in Richard’s throat again. They were swelling up so big that he almost felt like he couldn’t breathe, that the thing his soul was trying to say to this woman and his brain was desperately trying to stop was blocking his airway. He took a few short, nervous gasps, hoping she wouldn’t notice. Her eyes lingered on his downcast face. He looked so troubled, so tortured, so gaunt and afraid. She was waiting for him to speak. He couldn’t manage more than a weak smile and some vigorous nodding. 

            “Well, I’d better be going.” she said with a sigh that begged Richard to stop her, “I just wanted to say that I liked your music.” 

            “Thank you.” Richard croaked miserably. He watched as she turned and walked out of the alley, disappearing into the urban night mists and haze. When she was far away, vanished into the night and even the taillights of her car had dwindled into nothingness, Richard let the words that he had wanted to say to her go flying out against the grimy alley walls.

            “Run away with me. Run away with me now and I will love you forever. Run away with me and every song I write from now until forever will be bursting with love and joy and sunshine. End my misery, end my loneliness, throw open the curtains of my dark heart and let the sunlight in and run away with me tonight!” 

            Of course, there was no answer except the damp echoes of his own voice bouncing back to taunt him. 

            Through the window, which faced west, the blood red sun just barely touched the horizon line, partially visible through the maze of buildings stretching around his apartment in numberless blocks. The light square that now bathed the noose and the bench and Richard himself had deepened to crimson. The woman was probably out there somewhere, had probably run away with somebody brave enough to ask her. He hoped she was happy and, if she ever heard about it, that she might shed one or two tears for him, but no more than that. 

            With a sigh that saluted the indifferent city out his window, Richard stood on his toes and fitted the loop of the noose over his head and around his scrawny neck. He shut his eyes and took a slow breath, feeling for the edge of the bench with his bare toes. That tune that had been buzzing around his head while he tying the noose was still there, playing in full force and expounded by the beautiful acoustics inside his skull. He waited, letting the song play out in his head. He could grant it that courtesy. When his mental orchestra was in full crescendo, Richard tensed his legs. As the strains boomed out their symphonic climax, Richard gathered the bitterness over everything he had been too afraid to do in his life, swore to the abandoned ruins heaven that this act would make up for them all, and stepped off the piano bench into the warm and waiting empty air. 

* * *

            Richard Toller hung with his toes twitching a foot above the floor for seventeen seconds. He felt himself swinging, his heels bumping against the piano bench he had just stepped off. It wasn’t the way he’d hoped it’d be; it wasn’t a quick lights-out and goodbye horrible city. He heard the strangled, undignified murmurs coming from his own throat as the extension cord dug into his skin, heard the light fixture creak under his weight and, oddly, he heard in bright vivacity the strains of the piece he had mentally composed right before he stepped out into the air. It was playing double time, though, and getting faster. It was racing, gaining speed without losing the crisp distinction. The screws that held the light fixture to the cheap ceiling groaned like a melancholy French horn. As the piece reached its climax, reached the place where he had stepped off when he had written it, the screws gave way with a terrific crash, like an orchestral cymbal.  Richard found himself hitting the ground, sprawling on the wooden floorboards alongside his cord, the light fixture and a significant amount of ceiling plaster. One of the stainless-steel arms of the fixture had come down on his head, and for a moment his vision wavered in confusing doubles. 

            Richard didn’t know how long he had lain on the floor amid the wreckage of his attempt. His mind drifted over continents and centuries of music. When he came back to himself the window showed the dim illumination of city night. There was a hole in the ceiling, showing the boards and bones that had rested hidden since the day they were built. Looking down at himself, Richard saw he was covered in white dust. Ceiling plaster, covering him in gentle blankets of false snow. Like the caress of angels, like the ashes collecting on his windowsill.

            “Okay.” Richard said finally, his voice richer than he had ever heard before, full of decisive vibrato. In a state of passion that bordered on panic, he scrambled off the floor and pushed the bench back in front of the upright piano where it belonged. He threw himself on the keys of the piano, banging away furiously, putting into sweet temporary existence the tune he had heard in his mind. It wasn’t more than ten minutes long as a piece, but he played it over and over, each time through adding the artistic flourishes that made up his style. He worked the keys like a relief sculptor shaping a lump of clay into a glorious statue of God. Small bits of the plaster flew from his hair as he tossed and writhed in his passionate agony. He brushed them quickly off the keys and kept playing. As he worked himself into a sweat, the flash image memories came rushing through his mind. He saw the backseat of his childhood car, the familiar shape of his father in the driver seat, the way his massive arms clutched the steering wheel in an iron death grip. He saw a bright green lawn dotted with white crosses, his father standing ramrod straight in his uniform as they placed his battle buddy gently into the ground, the same massive right arm lifted into a rigid solute as young men fired rifles into the air. 

            In the tender places of his song, Richard saw his father’s face. Not as he had last seen it, mutilated by buckshot when Richard was fourteen. Neither was it the face Richard remembered from his childhood when it was tired and worn past its years, with sagging eyes and the ruptured blood vessels in the alcoholic nose. He pictured his father young and strong and joyfully fierce, the way it had looked in the photos from before the war. He didn’t remember his father being away in the war, just that he hadn’t known his father until he was three years old. He remembered the lively happiness of his father only from photo albums, his father before machine gun fire and insurgent strikes and IEDs on roadsides had leaked all the merriment away like water in a paper bag. The photos were nice though, so Richard added them into the song. 

            And he played these things, played these joys, these fears, these memories, these pains and loses far into the night.

            The sun rose as Richard carefully placed the last note of his piece on the sheet. Some of the smoke from the Cyprus Bay fire had been blown further south, but not all of it. The sun was less red than the previous day, shining in golden brilliance against all the windows of the city. Richard sat, looking at the sheets of music in front of him. There was a satisfaction, he decided, simply in having the music down on paper. Whether or not he could make any money from it, whether or not a single other person heard his composition, the sheets were there. They were solid, real, their weight a testament in and of itself to his own accomplishment. As long as he could continue to produce these stacks, the rest would sort itself out. Landlords and rent checks and part-time jobs would come and go like the tide, but these pages would last. These pages would always bear his name, would chronicle forever, even in forgotten history, the tragedy of last night. 

            Richard erased the title he had put on the first page the day before, silently grateful that he always worked in pencil. He clicked out another bit of graphite and wrote his new title in a clear and legible hand. 

            What A Lovely Thing It Is To Fail