Music and Memories

Music and Memories

He drifted in and out of the alleys. He drifted through wall of brick remembering something, distant, faint, drifting, like him. He drifted through a wall and found himself in a house, in a room. A little girl’s room. She lay sleeping on her bed, under a comforter. Something came back to him at the sight of her, her raven hair spread out over her pillow.
“Imagine there’s no heaven,” he mumbled out. The memory, forcing its way through his mouth. He didn’t know where it was coming from. “It’s easy if you try,” he continued. Who am I? He wondered suddenly. Another verse came to him, “And it started to rain (John)” John, he was John. Am I dead? He asked himself. He was floating, wasn’t he? How had he died? His name was John but who had he been, what kind of person? Confused more than ever, wanting answers he drifted through the wall.
Another room. He stopped dead. It was a grand. A memory flooded in. It was a grand. It was like his home, so familiar but so alien after so many years… so very many years. He floated ever so slowly over to it barely daring to acknowledge it for fear it would disappear. He hovered just above the bench, daring to raise his hands. His translucent hands, so like an ancient one’s with the skin transparent so you could see the blue veins and riddled bones. They sat in the air just above the keys, trembling. He had needed something the past twenty five years he had been drifting, being nothing but an invisible drifter. He had forgotten everything. But that girl, her hair, reminded him of something, a pebble. Now with the pebble loose it was dislodging other memories. A landslide. He remembered. He remembered what he had been searching for. All that time. He didn’t need the word for it. He stared at the keyboard, memorizing every fault, every key. Something broke through and his hands, almost possessed. He needed the sound that would come. It had to come. He remembered. Push the keys and hear the sound. He brought his hands down bracing himself for the sound he needed. Like man held underwater needed oxygen he needed the sound of this chord or he would die. But he was already dead. His hand went through keys in silence. No sound, none at all. The keys hadn’t reacted, depressed one millimeter. He flew away from the piano.
He wasn’t there. He was crazy. He had always known it. Memories of insanity found themselves in his transparent head. Since he was in school, he knew. He saw things differently. He was insane, not the genius he had tried to convince himself. No that was it. He had been, was, a genius but being a genius meant insanity. He wasn’t there. No one could see him. He couldn’t speak, make noise, make music. Wall had no meaning, something he would have enjoyed in life but in death, he longed for the structure, that making of sense. The furniture didn’t acknowledge him, the piano hated him. Music had been his life, his being. Why was he here if he couldn’t live, couldn’t play, couldn’t even remember what else he had lived for? Remembering nothing but music and insanity. He had to leave. Haunt somewhere else. Somewhere where he could forget again, not have to deal with the pain of needed something so bad but that something be unattainable.
Above him, a fluorescent light went on. He turned towards the doorway and saw her. The most beautiful woman of his death and he was quite sure, of his life. Slim yet curvy, her ebony hair down her elbows contrasted amazingly with her bright green eyes. She wore pajamas and her eyes were ridden with sleep. She couldn’t see him, hovering, cowered in the corner. Her intent in the room was obvious: play piano. She sank onto the bench and he felt a surge of uncontrollable jealousy and hatred. Her perfection, her luck. She could sit on bench and stare and the empty rack, she was alive, the piano, the furniture acknowledges her. But not him. He was dead. Nothing.
Her long fingers flexed and settled onto the keys. They perched there lightly, alert, feeling the ivory underneath, supporting them, like a bird on an elephants tusk. He hated her. Then he hated the piano. Why would it support her and not him? Why did it favor her? It didn’t have eyes; it couldn’t marvel at her beauty and judge her that way. He bet it would let her play, let her make music on it. Let her but not him. It stood there smiling, so condescending even through its black teeth. It said to him, “I let people who are above me play. You are not above me. I don’t have to let you make music from me. You are dead. She is not.” He had to look away. When had he become less that an object, an instrument? He saw then the guitars hanging on the wall. He glided over to a brown, wooden looking one. The most familiar. He stared down at it, betting everything that it hated him too. He had to know if it was just the piano. He reached down with his grotesque arm and before he could grasp it, test its hatred, the evil and beautiful woman struck a chord. Nostalgia washed over him.
He swirled away to another time and place. The interviews, the concerts, his friends, his wife, the music. Yoko. The name reverberated around his head unleashing memory after memory. Sean. Cynthia. Julian. New York. Liverpool. L.A. Paul. George. Ringo. And the music. The music that was his life, his booze, his pot, his oxygen, his water, his world. The music less years of Sean that weren’t really music less even though he didn’t write or perform. His life before death played before him like an album and he remembered everything. From his mother’s death to the crazed years of The Beatles, through Cynthia, through Yoko, through the miscarriages, the war, all the way to the gunshots. He remembered his life and he knew. He knew he would never forget.
At peace, he settled into the room, on the piano that didn’t hate him anymore, and listened to the chords he had written, had performed, now played by a younger version of Yoko. It was all he wanted. He had the music and the memories. He was complete.