The Astonishing Color of After

by Emily X.R. Pan

It felt so different from the parks back home, full of thick trees draped with scraggly brown beards. Star-shaped flowers smelling like kumquats. Long leaves waving like flags, flapping their rusty undersides. We watched children racing down a path toward a small playground. Kites sprinkled the sky like confetti—a butterfly, a phoenix, a winged monkey. It was an Axel type of scene. He would’ve pulled out his portable watercolors and made us stay until he’d gotten at least two good pages. And once he went home, his quick strokes of color would bake from raw visual into warm, delicious audio. The kites would be rendered in arpeggios. The children would become little timpani gods roaming the earth in seven-eight time. For Axel, watercolors are just his way of taking notes—his own form of shorthand. He uses the colors to guide his compositions, to produce pieces of what he calls opera electronica.