Who Are We to Judge the Music of an Octopus?

               Who Are We to Judge the Music of an Octopus?

                               A short story by Paul Crehan

The octopus swam up the aquarium like an arpeggio up staff paper. Bob listened as he watched. What did he hear? I’ll be damned, he thought. Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. With a discordant note here; now there. But the effect wasn’t jarring. It was communicative.

Was that octopus communicating with him? No. Impossible. Well, maybe not impossible—what did he know about octopuses, or any cephalopod, really?—but surely improbable. Nonetheless, it was fun to think about—that maybe it was communicating with him; and certainly that movement and those arms sectioning off that world of water into distinct steps up, into a shape that resembled such a universally well-known melody, couldn’t be ignored.

Bob watched the octopus play Bach. Octo-Bach. Up a bit more, now down, down, and up again—with exuberance. He began to orchestrate for his soloist. A column of flashing fish gave him pizzicato violins. Bottom-bumping groupers provided the bass. He would have started conducting in front of the glass, but he wasn’t alone. There was a school group to his left, a woman with a walker to his right. Considering the one, then the other, he thought, I am middle-age. Then he thought, Middle C. Then he thought, Middle Sea.

Food for thought, he thought; and decided to get a tuna sandwich at that deli he’d seen across the street.

As he pushed through the aquarium door, he thought, do all creatures make music as they move? He headed down the steps that led to a broad cut-out in the sidewalk. The white-striped crosswalk started here. He’d have to take it to get to that deli on the corner. Auguste. Fancy name for a deli. Impressive.

He paused on a step to watch people crossing; as if crossing a keyboard, he thought. Kid on a skateboard—glissando; that old woman following—hey, that was the old woman next to him in the aquarium: how’d she get ahead of him?—staccato. Staccato. Staccato.

Sometimes these people landed on a crosswalk note; most times, in between them, which produced a strange sound. To his ears. He had colleagues who composed pieces by only writing down what they heard between notes. It was all pretty academic stuff, all that plunging into the seas of intervals, but sometimes it was hauntingly beautiful. Dr. O’Neill’s stuff was like that. Pretty, and interesting enough to burrow its way into his mind so that he’d repeat it to himself. Over and over. Real Philip Glass.

The schoolkids flowed past him down the steps and into the crosswalk, and he thought that he could do something Glenn Gould-like here—video what he saw and superimpose a piano keyboard over the black and white crosswalk; and play the melodies of people walking.

That woman with the long white coat and white beret. Andante moderato. The messenger bicyclist—like an eel. Allegro. Allegro sinuoso. Taken together—discordant? Chaotic? Or beautiful? Yes, he’d do a Glenn Gould. He’d come back tomorrow and take video, then get to the computer and start laying down what he heard, as people got from one place to the next. In their crossing.

He hadn’t been excited by an idea for a while. He had spent long hours in his office and his studio at home, to no avail, unless you count more and more frustration and anxiety as a fantastic yield. In that case, he was one of the more successful and fecund composers of the 21^st Century.

His head full of his idea and tomorrow and its new fruit, he took the last step down from the aquarium and took the crosswalk himself. Onto a thick white-painted line. He heard the C below C and smiled and a bus hit him.

A bus hit him and dragged him thirty yards off the crosswalk and down the street before it could stop. What kind of music was that?

Something discordant. Or not discordant at all. However one might hear it, it would still make sense. Man meets Fate. Beethoven. Verdi—La forza del destino. Would one need a big cymbal clash for The Moment, or would that be too obvious?

There was a lawsuit, but it didn’t go anywhere, because there were security cameras that caught the accident, caught it from many angles (“accident,” many would think—with quotes—because they didn’t believe in accidents); and of course his colleagues would think “accidentals”—as in signs to lower the pitch of a note—“to a double flat,” the sardonic Dr. Terry O’Neill would tell a colleague after the funeral, eliciting a sharp, “Terry!”

The footage clearly showed that Bob stepped into the path of that bus, and there was no way the driver could have stopped in time. Bob was at fault. He—his mind; his musings; his decision to visit the aquarium that day—it was all simply in the bus driver’s path. And he wasn’t musing. He was doing his job. Driving. Driving through traffic. Driving down the street, anticipating his next stop.

Tess saw Bob get hit and dragged. She fainted in place, knocking her cheek against a yellow-painted concrete bollard on her way down. A man helped her up. (A grace note, Bob might have thought.) He vanished.

Others everywhere, Tess saw—once she could make sense of things—had phones to their ears. The bus driver sat on the first passenger step of his bus, forehead resting on his arms folded one atop the other across his knees. All of his passengers, as many noted, but not Tess, had disembarked. But one remained. An old man. He had a homeless vibe. Wild hair, army surplus jacket, idly looking here and there, as if this were just another bus ride on just another day.

Tess found herself on a concrete bench. Don’t gasp, she thought,  just breathe.  Slowly. She was afraid of fainting again, or worse. What if she went into shock?

She was not in control of her eyes. She couldn’t peel them off the street-dirtied arm, flung out from under the bus, palm up, cupped and—from her perspective—holding a miniature of a spired church, cemented to another street well off in the distance.

She willed her body to get up. It wouldn’t. And she had work to do. Graphic design. She did well. Too well. She needed to hire staff. Two people, at least. But she kept putting it off. She’d need someone to push her; to tell her it would be all right; and at this moment, to tell her, Honey, breathe.

Interestingly, she and Bob might have made a good couple. Or, it’s not Interestingly, but something else. Sadly? Provokingly? As in: “Sadly and provokingly, two people who might have been perfect for each other wouldn’t now have opportunity to explore that possibility.”

The 34-year-old Tess would go on to live only nine more years. Metastatic breast cancer. Her sister, Laura, spoke beautifully at her funeral, as did an old boyfriend who had married someone else two decades prior, but who still carried a torch for Tess. He hadn’t been invited to speak, but he got up out of his pew and walked up the steps into the sanctuary and to the mike, flustering Laura, and confusing the priest (who looked at his program to see who this was).

The old boyfriend, however, spoke from the heart about Tess, and in fact, characterized and summarized her even better than Laura had. Everyone knew and felt this. Including Laura. Everyone wondered what might have happened between Tess and this boyfriend, because, wow, what a big and loving soul he was. What had Tess wanted, if not this guy? So. Tess ended up a mystery; an object around whom speculation and wonder, even a little fascination, orbited. What had they missed about Tess? What had they not seen? They had stopped at her introversion; her quirkiness; her quiet. Those were the broad strokes that had made up their Portrait of Tess. But how incomplete—obviously—it had been. Mere sketch. In exiting the church, quite a few people entertained thoughts like these; and because it’s only natural, began to wonder how well their own family and friends knew them. Where had their own family and friends stopped in the painting of their portrait? Maybe—probably—they had only gotten as far as a rough sketch, and that was enough for them. And it was wrong. Incomplete. Where was their ex-boyfriend, if you will, who saw them—and loved them?

Not everyone exiting the church thought these thoughts; maybe only 20 or so did. Most had already leapt ahead from here into their day—the usual binding stuff of life, banal but demanding. An unsurprising amount wondered if it were okay to slip away and not have to go to the reception at…wherever. They weren’t really listening.

The pallbearers and morticians pushed Tess into the dark of the hearse and closed the door on her. One of the pallbearers brushed her off of himself with sweeps of his palms down the sides of his jacket. 

Thus Tess.

She had one kind of ending. Bob, another. Tess’s funeral was open-casket. Bob’s wasn’t. As you can imagine.

But imagine if Bob had crossed the street safely and to within a couple of feet of Tess, who was standing there next to the yellow-painted bollard. Bob was the kind of guy who would smile and say, “Good morning,” and see what the response might be.

Of course, Tess was the kind who would only nervously smile back; but she had been made pretty, and so, Bob might have followed up with, “I’ve just come from the aquarium. I haven’t been in ages. If you haven’t gone in a while, I’d suggest it would be worth your time.”

He’d do that kind of thing—say what was on his mind if it were a happy and positive thing to say. But he’d leave it at that. He wouldn’t add more. He’d opened the door, inviting her in, and if she didn’t enter, oh, well, and Bob would move on. But perhaps Tess would say, “Oh. No.” Bob wouldn’t be sure what she meant by that. No, as in no, it wouldn’t be worth her time? Or no, as in she hadn’t gone in a while? And because he wasn’t sure which it was—her taking a baby step, or her shutting him down—Bob went on, “There’s an octopus there that moves just so beautifully. It’s surprising, really. It made me think.” He’d leave things there, giving her opportunity to say, “Oh? Like what?” But if she merely smiled or merely said something like, “Yes, I’m sure,” and looked away, dismissing him thereby, then Bob would have clarity. He had opened the door for the pretty, shy girl, but she had chosen not to enter. Fine. There was a tuna sandwich with his name on it. (“Bob? Order for Bob? Tuna on rye?”)

But Tess might have said, “Oh? Like what? What did you think?” And Bob might have shared words like those with which this story began. When Bob got enthusiastic about something, he was charming, not boorish. He was the kind of person you might listen to not because you found his content interesting, but because he did, which made you smile. It made you happy for him, which gave you something—feeling happy for someone; and that was a nice thing in a day. A grace note. It could be a sustained chord, too. Long, lush, lovely, memorable.

Uplifting.

And Tess would have responded to what Bob said. Though introverted and shy, she was the kind of person who would have responded to his kind of thinking. Maybe it was nonsense, what he thought. Maybe it was loopy. But it was engaging. She’d think the word synesthesia; in this case, seeing sound; and she was the kind who would have appreciated, without thinking about it, really, that he had gotten her to think about synesthesia. And anyway—hell, he was right: the aquarium was a treasure in this city. And she walked past it without thinking at least twice a week.

They would chat on; and Bob, his heart beating hard, would wonder if she’d like to get a cup of coffee with him; and because Tess would have felt safe with Bob and maybe a little attracted to him, she’d say yes without thinking about it.

For Bob (Tess wouldn’t have thought of this), there’d be the opposite of Mysterious Barricades. There’d be Mysterious Open Channels. Did someone ever write an antiphon like that to Couperin’s masterpiece? In other words, there’d be no impediments to their getting together, but instead, one thing after the next, one date after the next, a first kiss, a first embrace—all the natural, successive notes that have to play for a melody to be—would fall into place; and oh, the powerful, lush, incredibly harmonic sustained chord filling the church and bursting through its walls to spread and rise, once both had said, “I do.”

But of course that wasn’t to be.

Had she and Bob gotten married, Tess wouldn’t have worn white. She’d had that truly lovely relationship with the boyfriend who came to her funeral. She’d honor that by not wearing white; and Bob would have understood, which is one reason she would have said ‘Yes’ to Bob’s proposal. She’d wear Bob’s favorite color, sky-blue. She’d wear it to honor him; to say, ‘I am yours.’ Why had she and the long-ago boyfriend broken up? She couldn’t remember, but it had a lot to do with how much she worked. Or, it wasn’t that at all. But something else entirely. Some mysterious barricade.

And Tess and Bob would have led a harmonious life with the two kids Tess had always imagined having, Bob teaching music theory at the U, and every couple of years getting a commission from an orchestra or performer for a symphony or concerto. It would be one of Tess’s favorite things in life to be in traffic and hear the classical DJ say something like, “Up next, something to help make your evening commute more tolerable. In fact, great. Think I’m overstating? Here’s Robert Richardson’s Piano Concerto #3 in F. Yuja Wang is at the piano, with Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic.”

They would have friends, lots of friends, thanks to Bob; and though Tess would never really love their parties, she’d enjoy spending time making food with Bob’s sister, Rose, and Rose’s daughter, Maeve. They’d be the party for her; the reason to go to a lot of work to host thirty, forty people at the big calendar events.

And since we’ve grown fond of Bob and Tess, let’s do what we have the power to do, and that’s re-write their ending. Let’s put this story in reverse, all the way to where Bob leaves the aquarium. He leaves the aquarium and stands in the broad cut-out in the sidewalk, watching the traffic. He sees the bus. But it’s way down the street. He crosses, and, as he nears the other side, he sees Tess, standing by a freshly painted yellow concrete bollard. He doesn’t think to ask why she’s standing there. Why would he? People stand. They stand anywhere. For any number of reasons. Or no reason at all. She’s just standing there by that bollard. Perhaps waiting for someone. Or pausing in her walk to think something through. Like, did I forget to unplug the coffee? But whatever, there she is. Pretty. About his age. Tweed skirt patterned with squares of different greens, looking like farmland you’d see from 30,000 feet up in a plane; black, beat-up, hole-y Converse Hi-Tops. Black bolero jacket. Untucked white button-down blouse. Hair—black—in a French braid. Black hornrims. No make-up. Not necessary. But still, no make-up. Dressing for herself; not for others; to please herself—not others. Nonetheless, arresting, attracting. Whimsical. Maybe she won’t make me feel small if I say, Hello. Thought Bob.

And he says “Hello,” and he adds, “I’ve just come from the aquarium. I haven’t been there in ages. If you haven’t gone in a while, I’d suggest it would be worth your time.”

And she looks up at him—he’s a good foot taller, and she sees that he’s not threatening; in fact, has a kind face. No wolfishness in it. Not handsome, really, but attractive, and words are coming out of her mouth, “Oh. No.”

Bob pushes on, “There’s an octopus there that moves just so beautifully. It’s surprising, really. It made me think.” And Tess thinks. She looks at him, glances away, then changes her life.

“Oh? Like what? What did you think?”

And they hear a bus pass, and they talk about octopi.

Bob will compose the music for their wedding, held in a field. It will be the music the octopus wrote. It doesn’t matter whether it was good or bad. Who are we to judge the music of an octopus? Maybe among octopi, it’s as beautiful as anything in the universe.

                                         The End