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THE MUSIC BOX
"The brain is the
most remarkable instrument for music," his friend Max said during
an intermission. Max, a neurologist at the Mount Parnassus Medical Center,
was, like many of Iggy's friends a genius, but music of any kind could
send him into raptures. It wasn't that Iggy pretended to be any sort of
genius himself; he knew that his mind was no better than average at the
usual tasks given to Everyman, its just that he felt when among geniuses
and great talents, they ignored his idiosyncrasies. He didn't feel overwhelmed
or reduced by intellect; on the contrary, he felt sheltered from the demands
of competition. In a sense, because of the nature of our Luddite society
at large, the particular geniuses he knew shared some of his feelings.
Although they may have possessed differing reasons.
He was not sure if he had always been that way. He had just returned from
Europe - well, just returned about five years ago - and all the world
was filled with newness. Things that should be familiar appeared to Iggy
with startling clarity as if experienced for the very first time. Colors,
tastes, smells, not to mention art, music, taking the subway even, felt
fresh and exciting.
"That's the way it always is to Americans who return from extended
travel like you," his friend Carlos had said. And pretty much everyone
else agreed with that sentiment. The truth was American was so isolated
from the world that any outside exposure was bound to cause . . . changes.
And Iggy was changed, there was no doubt about that. He felt sure of it
standing right there on the steps inside Davies Symphony Hall watching
the throng shift this way and that like leaves eddying on a slow, muddy
current. There were people down there who probably would not even recognize
him here today, nor he them. We are all rivers stepping into something
twice or something something like that to do with time. According to Heraclitus.
That much he did remember.
As a matter of fact, Iggy did not even recognize his own mother when she
and his father came to The City some time back. There he was standing
beside the gate with the letter from his father describing meticulously
the date, time, flight number and accommodations. Suddenly these two old
people appeared in front of him out of the clouds and he was being enveloped
in a warm maternal embrace. After a momentary recovery he put his arms
around her and looked at the balding man there.
"Ah, yes, father. Dad. Mom." Iggy said. While his mother effusively
gushed, "Oh my boy my boy!"
Apparently they had not seen each other for some time.
His father was momentarily disgusted. "The big man moves to the big
city and now so formal!"
Well, they got over that and so did Iggy and the rest of their stay went
quite well, for it is a universal truth that no matter what, the child
remains a figure embedded solidly within the amber that lodges in some
particular place within a mother's heart. Psychologists have been trying
to find it for years, but not one of Iggy's genius friends has found it
yet, or if they have, they do not speak of it. Yet the child that lodges
therein is always modified somewhat from the original model.
Iggy realized that even if he had leapt up in the middle of a restaurant
with a chainsaw to slaughter every patron and host in the place, his mother
would have simply said, "Iggy you know that is not you. I don't believe
you would do such a thing. Now stop that."
The histories are packed with stories of mothers brought before grand
juries to testify with utmost astonishment and disbelief against the most
heinous crimes. "My boy kill 65 people with a blowtorch and a mattock?
Then bury them under the fruit cellar and in the garden? Impossible! You
see, as a child he always hated to get his hands dirty. The feel of earth
under his fingernails was detestable. There you see. Impossible!"
For example: on a warm day just before his parents left, Iggy and they
entered an ice cream shop after a half day of sightseeing, and his mother
- once again the parent treating the child, tells him go ahead, order
his favorite. You know - the special one.
And Iggy hit one of those scary blank places where he did not how to go
forward for some reason, one of those places he had been running into
a lot lately. Didn't these people know he had changed? What was wrong
with them?
"I, ah, don't eat ice cream. Any more." He said.
His mother expostulated and condemned the fashion of all these new diets
ending with the usual maternal inquiry of suspicion: you getting enough
to eat?
His father, in what Iggy had come to realize was fairly typical of him,
responded with irritated authority in speaking to the patient girl behind
the counter. "The boy will have raspberry swirl. Mocha chip for me
and mint chip for the lady. There!"
He saw them off with some relief and went back to his steady job as a
clerk for the law firm of Hawkim and Snaggit. He was grown up and had
a job and paid his own bills and so got on in the world and he needed
no irritating reminders of any past dead life. In fact, the vast majority
of people he knew he had known for less than five years and his address
book was filled with crossed out names whose significance he couldn't
recall.
In the swirling anonymity of The City, where constant flux and change
and construction and tear down meant every moment became a new start among
strangers who did not press for reminders of anything. In Europe he had
loved the constant pace of newness and exposure. Even when he had gotten
seriously ill along the Rhine, that too had been an experience.
There he had been, waking up after apparently fainting or something and
a rather charming nun sat there and began chattering at him in German.
Was he supposed to know German? He didn't know. For it seemed he couldn't
speak English or any other language for that matter. His tongue was thick
in his mouth, like some foreign object. Had he been embarrassed after
the fall? Well no, for he must have been unconscious.
It took some weeks to get out of there, during which he practically had
to learn how to walk again. He felt he had been reborn and was starting
life afresh. This did not bother him; on the contrary, flickering images
of some imaginary past life felt troublesome, disturbed. When he got home
he found these books by dark authors like Poe and Lovecraft and these
dark demented writings that felt as if someone else had written them.
Someone who had been inclined to thoughts of self-murder.
He threw out those books and all the writing and got rid of photographs
of things which no longer had any significance. Right out into the trash
it all went until his room was as spare as a model living unit for Ikea
furniture. He got himself a brand new job without any recollection of
where he had worked before. No one contacted him from his old job and
probably they did not care he had disappeared, for in the anomie of The
City, people come and go all the time. And Iggy was satisfied with that
state of affairs.
But these reminders tend to be persistent, for it is the nature of Iggy's
people to want to bind that much harder those things which are unfortunately
most ephemeral and he had reached that age when his predecessors were
beginning to look to their final resolutions.
One day the mailman, Mr. Patch, brought him a small box which came from
far distant Amherst. The return address listed a Mr. and Mrs. Neal Blenheim.
There was a small rosewood box, a ceramic figurine, a letter and a short
note inside. These things were like clues to some mystery. For he had
no idea who the Blenheims were.
When he opened the rosewood box, he found the underlid was an arched dancehall
of mirrors before a plush velvet dance floor and a metal post set on a
dais above two grooves for the placement of earrings or whatever. Beside
the brass post were the shattered figures of the ballroom dancers: a man
wearing a tuxedo with both arms broken off and a woman wearing a swooping
gown, missing one leg. They appeared on close inspection to be both Japanese.
Underneath was a winding key, which Iggy twisted. The jewelry box chimed
briefly and then went silent.
Beside the key was a small note with a date of some years previously.
The note was addressed to him, and it said simply, "Those were the
best years of my life. Janice Mandelbaum."
Totally mystified, Iggy opened the letter from the Blenheims. It talked
substantially about the failing condition of Mrs. Mandelbaum, who it appeared
was not much longer for this world. The woman did not go out, did not
watch television, did not read books or the papers, and apparently did
not leave the bed. The box and the figurine were among the final possessions
being parted out to relatives, although the fact this was happening before
the actual death of the person involved somewhat annoyed Iggy. It seemed
that everyone around this woman had accepted her own sense of futility
without question. The letter, written in a spiky but clear script, was
signed "Love, Aunt Miriam."
He had to re-read the letter to find a reference to "distribution
to nephews" before he had a clue regarding what this woman was to
him. Aunt of some kind, apparently. As for the figurine, it was a five
inch high porcelain statuette of a boy playing a standup bass. It had
a chip in it and Iggy found it rather ugly and turned it over to read
with a the name in pale blue "Goebels", which his eyes tricked
him into reading as "Goebbels", sending a little shock of fear
through him until he parsed out the letters again. He wrapped the thing
up and put it away in the box it had come in.
Who were these Blenheims and why were they sending him junk in the mails?
Relatives, it seemed. This must be precisely the reason why people treat
as a commonplace the idea that all relatives must be irritants.
He turned to the broken music box, wondering if it could be fixed. So
it was that with tweezers, superglue, exacto knife, a magnifying glass,
eyeglass screwdrivers, wads of tissue and got knows what else he went
to work for the next four hours. It was close to midnight when he finally
was done and there it sat, with a newly polished mirror glass and the
Asian couple perched once again upon the metal post, which he found revolved
to the sound of the tink-tink of the musical device, which he never really
could get working properly, if it ever had.
And so there it went, this couple in revolving in their own detached reverie
on a long lost world to the sound of the broken music. The thing must
have recalled a time and place for someone, but for Iggy it meant nothing
other than somebody else found it worth keeping. There was that note after
all. The figures were plastic, the box itself made of pine stained to
look like rosewood and the mirrors had been glued on leaving irregular
gaps. You probably could buy something just like it in Chinatown for about
a dollar and a half.
He wondered who this aunt was and if he had ever met her. It was then
he realized that he did not know if he had ever met her or the Blenheims.
That the wisps of recollection evaporated over an empty baseball field
strewn with unrecognizable trash where a little boy wandered lost and
confused, unable to remember the way home. And where all of the signs
had been whited out.
He got up and made ready for bed. A stray light caught the mirror reflections
from the jewelry box which chinked once before again going still. That
night he slept soundly, without nightmares or troubling dreams of any
kind. It was the deep sleep of a man who is at peace with his memories.
Or lack of them.
Copyright
2006 by owen Montana. All rights
reserved. Conditional permission
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OWEN@ISLAND-LIFE.NET
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