Airbag

Airbag









A week ago I was dropped from my record label and only have myself to blame. The genre I chose to play was based on what music was popular at the time. I should have been more aware of how quickly commercial music falls in and out of favour, but with my immediate success also came blindness.

The kids grew up much sooner than anticipated. They always do, any parent will tell you that. They developed and headed off in separate directions, leaving me behind like an old toy. Some of them started listening to music with more depth. Others just converted to the next big thing. The fans who once screamed and wept at my gigs couldn't care less about what happens to me now.

My girlfriend Louise promises she is here for me. Her income is enough to take care of us both but it is not enough to satisfy the needs of my mind. That sense of achievement that is always needing stimulation like a persistent sexual organ.

I spend weeks trying to change genre. Trying to find something the kids will love. I try mixing styles. What better way to create something fresh? In today's world of musical derivatives, my list of ingredients is vast. I toss it all to the pot. I add classical and country and blues and folk and hip hop and metal and electro and techno and house. If my piano could feel it would be disgusted in itself. I certainly am. Disgusted and embarrassed with my lack of originality, and my shameless plagiarism.

Eventually I have an epiphany. Why should I have to cook with overused ingredients? Tossing my old stock out the window, I decide to create my own meal from scratch. Let's do something that hasn't been done in a long time, I tell myself. Let's write something completely new. A song that isn't a derivative of something else.

I quickly find every combination of notes and chords I play sounds old. I can't have that. I tinkle with the inside of my piano. Distorting the tuning. Placing items between the hammers. Eventually I make every key sound unique. Then I begin to write.

I spend weeks mashing and caressing my keys, deciding which direction I'm going to go. Eventually I settle on something in between. I rearrange notes whenever I feel a portion of the song sounds even vaguely familiar, adding mad experiments to my jagged composition, defying convention and sometimes just plain punching the keys. But still I am not satisfied. There is something still out there, I know it. Something no one has touched.

My girlfriend leaves our home to visit her parents at some point. I use this liberal period to experiment with a variety of drugs, euphoric and hallucinogenic. Most of the time the product of these sessions sound brilliant until I am sober again, then it is just noise. Sometimes I just laughed at nothing or lay there moaning with euphoria. A few times I ended up in such a state I couldn't even bring myself to face the piano. Once I spoke with my dead mother.

My chemical sessions end with me no closer to success. Sobriety seems like a drug itself for a while, but eventually I recalibrate my head. Before I know it I am battering and stabbing the keys again. My girlfriend enters and exits the frame a few times, enquiring about the dreadful noise I’m concocting. I tell her I’m experimenting, trying to find something new in music. She laughs, kisses me in the head and tells me good luck. The uncertainty in her voice is apparent enough to hear over the dreadful cries of pain from my piano.

I have gotten nowhere over the course of two months. A part of me is becoming convinced there is nothing new left to discover, that every forest and cave has been ransacked and eventually torn down. But the part of me that believes otherwise still has the upper hand.

All of a sudden I feel something about the song that I’m writing, a peculiarity that evokes an intense curiosity in me. I write down the sequence so it does not escape my memory, imprisoning it on scrawls across paper. I notice my handwriting has become less presentable than it was before these sessions.

I begin to play again. Over the course of a few hours I discover more pieces of this puzzle. Combinations of notes that fit impeccably together, locking together with an unprecedented beauty like two perfect lovers entangled in lust. All it took was the first piece, and now it is growing itself, like a living thing. The birth and development of genius!

For a moment I am convinced that what I am writing is the greatest song in the world. Later I realise that it is much more than this. More than a piece of music. I carry on, determined to unlock this puzzle. To release the treasures lying hidden within its intricacies.

My girlfriend enters the house, kissing me on the head and breaking my concentration. I nudge her away, irritated. I put a finger to my lips. Shushhh. She coos at my music as I play. I take no notice; I am no longer in this for the compliments. This music is for me. Eventually she wanders off, leaving me alone with my piano. Leaving me consumed by this enigma.

I do not come to bed that night. Neither my piano or I need sleep. My girlfriend tries to lead me astray wearing only her underwear. I pretend to not notice her. She becomes persistent. Rubbing my shoulders and kissing my neck. Again I nudge her away. I tell her I'll be up soon, my hands still stroking keys as I speak. She leaves angrily behind my music. The soundtrack to her rejection.

As the sky grows darker so do my thoughts, my obsession lying with the notes and keys that I am sowing together like an elaborate embroidery. An embroidery that seems to exist outside of just sound. By this stage my creation has become so complex I have no choice but to develop my own language of sheet music consisting of unique symbols and runes.

When my girlfriend comes downstairs the following morning she can tell right away I have not slept a wink. My eyes are no longer able to strive from the piano for any more than a few minutes. She tells me I should really get to sleep before she heads to work. I nod in agreement, carrying on regardless for what I know will be the rest of the day.

As she leaves the house, she nods and comments that what I am playing is beautiful and that I am back on track. A moment later I am vaguely aware that I have completely forgotten her name. Over the course of the day the doorbell is rung over ten times and the letterbox chatters as though an explosion has gone off outside. I even hear the door handle being tried as someone attempts to disturb my music, but they stand no chance of accessing my home. The door is locked, and I have pushed a filing cabinet and a wardrobe against it. All of the curtains have been drawn too, my only light coming from a single lamp leaning over my instrument.

I think she comes home at some point, finished with work and perhaps worried about me. With my keys in both the front and back door, she is unable to enter the house. My music drowns out her knocking on the windows and the shrill cry of the phone, her last attempts at contacting me before she leaves for her mother’s or the police station. Then I am left alone with a canvas of silence to paint with my music.

My masterpiece is nearly complete, the vast puzzle almost solved, its locks filled with ivory keys. Only a few gaps lie in this cryptic jigsaw, filling rapidly with notes and chords and tinkles and splashes as I play faster and more determined, narrowing down the clues until I am left with only the correct answer. Ambrosia fills the room, the tinkling and pounding of my piano seducing the air and evoking an unprecedented sense of achievement more rapturous than any orgasm I have ever felt. I am close to perfection.

I hit the concluding chord and am certain I have reached the end of this puzzle. I add the final note to my sheet music with a trembling hand. In its completion it has become art in itself. Almost unable to sit still, I begin to play the song from beginning to end for the first time ever. Each note sends shudders up my spine that almost send me into spasms of emotion, every chord a stroke of pleasure throughout my body, my natural chemicals being warped and configured into illicit substances. My eyes dart frantically from paper to piano to paper to piano to paper to piano and spittle hangs from my chin, spattering over my musical notations with every stuttered breath, the pencilled scrawls spiralling out of control and impossible to decipher by anyone but myself. As the song nears completion, I feel myself growing more aroused, much harder, the sensations in my body becoming more intense. My body shudders, my playing quickens in accordance with my sheet music, my breath comes in short stabs, the sweat meandering over my face, dribbling over my body, my fingers, the ivory, intertwining with this instrument, filling it. As I hit the final chord and let it ring, I fall back from my stool lost in my own violent orgasm as though struck by a fist. I wail like an animal as the euphoria shoots through every vein and artery and bone and organ and even the hairs in my head.

I am blinded by the pleasure, by the revelation that my song has unlocked. Tears of happiness rush down my face. More unprecedented sensations jolt through my body. I go into another wild fit of ecstasy, jerking and trembling and salivating and laughing. Then I pass out.

*

I awaken later to the phone ringing, my world now a great pit of darkness. I clamber to my feet and feel for the piano. I embrace it with blind arms. I sit down, my new ability pulsing through me like a superpower. Begging to be unleashed again.

I tinkle with the keys with light fingers, teasing myself. Foreplay before the main event. A vast hunger almost cripples me, a reminder that it has been a long time since I have eaten. I play a few notes, a gluttonous symphony, and I am instantly quenched. I fancy a drink. My fingers spill across the keys, and the taste of fine whisky meets my tongue. The buzz of alcohol too. Soothing ice coming to a stop against my lips with each sip.

I am blind, but indifferent to this fact. The landscapes evoked by my music are all I need now, the realms conjured up through concoctions of notes and chords more vivid than anything attainable by human sight. If I require a holiday, I will play a symphony, and a plain more beautiful than any foreign country spills across my senses.

The doorbell rings, and deep voice demands I open the door. I am vaguely aware that the police have been there all day as I lay unconscious, initially attempting to coax me out gently. Eventually I hear the sound of them bursting through my door. They scream at me to come out with my hands in the air as they storm up my hallway. My music immediately halts them in their tracks as they enter the living room.

I play something alluring for them. Twenty minutes of incredible beauty. It is the least I can do since it is the last piece they will ever hear.

I let them experience life's zenith. As the song progresses I hear them cry and laugh and sing and fight and dance and scream and fuck. They submit to the music, becoming its marionettes. When it is over I give them a moment to savour their experience where they lie gasping and wondering what on Earth came over them. Then I play a few tyrannical chords. An obnoxious piece that wipes them from existence.

I repair the my damaged door with a quick swipe of my left hand. With a slow melody laced with an ominous bass I erase my girlfriend from my life too. I smile to myself; the canvas is once again blank. Now I am in the mood to play something else, just to listen to, a piece dedicated to myself. My fingers feel possessed as I play, the alluring music soothing me in ways even the most potent drug cannot.

My bladder is full, but I don’t have time for toilet trips. A soft splash of ivory fixes that.

I begin another improvisation, a soft piece that rushes over me with waves of excitement, erasing any evidence of my existence from databases and memories alike. With a second symphony, a more powerful and despotic number, I imprint into the citizens of the world the instinct to never come near my home, and for them to never question it. My next song grants me eternal life, and my piano too. Together, we become one, an inseparable being of flesh and wood and ivory and bone, entangled in an intricate network of tendons and veins and strands of muscle, my blood rushing through its structure and vitalising it, and vice versa. From my body, a great curtain of flesh has drawn over the grand instrument, throbbing and pulsing in excited blue spasms with every finger and hand gesture that graces the ivory. I begin to weep again, tears of happiness splashing over the keys and my digits as I continue to play, tangles of flesh dribbling bodily fluids, evoked by a vast spectrum of emotions, an amalgamation of music and flesh.











2307 words.