The Composer

The composer, spinner of a weave of enchanted stories, whispered in his ear like a moth lingering perilously at a flame’s edge. Drawing closer and closer like a thought to its frenetic possible conception, James could feel her motion pulling him toward her. He held his breath as though underwater when alerted to the embodied song of her presence afraid to expel her before her words became clear. From what felt like miles away a faint hint of words unspoken could be made out. Yet these lucky syllables, a simple collection of a language yet to be known, did not tease or taunt but asked instead to wash over him in a meditative calm leaving him dually speechless yet with fingers itching for a pen. 

A librarian in a small town, James was no stranger to speechlessness. The humdrum of bulbous fluorescents buzzing above him, the thunk of books hitting the back of the shelf, and the whispers of patrons reading aloud were his only company during most of his shifts. He had regulars whom he spoke to but none he called friends outside the oak-stained walls. He wore the same white button-down with beige khaki pants and black socks every day to work after stopping to get a black coffee and a roll at Mama’s Coffee House. 

He liked it. He liked the quiet and the routine and chatty Catherine who came in to get sufficient material for her monthly book club. He liked the dullness of his life. He knew he was boring and asked for little more. At least that's what he told himself. 

Like so many other intellectual refugees James sought asylum in the chapel of knowledge at a young age. Always a quiet boy, he gravitated toward silent spaces. Spaces that didn’t ask him to become anyone else, which didn’t belittle his identity, which made him feel safe. A place where the sheer volume of pages imprisoned sound so his thoughts could finally be heard. 

Growing up in a tiny southern Baptist community with four brothers, identity was a genetic prescription rather than an environmentally assumed privilege. He was to be a good Christian at the dining room table but a rebellious contradiction when roughhousing with his older brothers. But James was not a good Christian and the only thing rebellious about his personhood was his Tourette's syndrome which made him prone to flipping the pastor the bird during Sunday school. If only it stopped there he often reflected. Instead, his mild physical outbursts positioned a quiet child by nature into the deceptive role of class clown. 

His birth was a wrong place, at the wrong time, in the wrong body event. 

In rows of beautifully bound pages, he found a welcoming rest from the joke of his birth. Authors, for most kids his age, would only ever be words on leather spines. For him, they were friends. They were friends who listened when he asked them questions and took no notice of his involuntary expulsions. They were friends who answered in poems and prose rather than an emotionally depraved punch on the arm by his brothers or the violent and blaming raised voice of his father. He had found his element. 

Yet the periodic table wasn't as set in stone as the 10 commandments his father preached to him appeared to be. And in those waning moments at the end of another night's tryst with the library eluded by questions for authors, he would begin to question himself. They were those big questions that meant everything in an isolated thought and nothing if you spent any more than a few minutes considering their bigness. 

What does it all mean? What should I do with my life? Why am I here?

After only a few nights of careful pondering in what had come to be known mockingly to his brothers as “the asylum” James had his answer. He was no longer content simply learning from the greats. It was time for him to assume elemental form. 

What would he write about he thought? What might transcend time to drive his great hypothetical work into lore and literary canon? 

High expectations nearly proved fatal to his ego during his first attempts. While the Tourettes proved difficult for the maintenance of a steady hand he was no stranger to his condition. It was the complete lack of creativity which killed. He would pick up a pen only to find himself drifting off into boredom thirty minutes later. It might not have been so bad had the only time-telling instrument at the library not been a cuckoo clock. Every hour soon became a waking nightmare of spasms and lifeless mind-eating head in your hand's defeat only to be mockingly awakened from his doldrums by a CUUCKOOO! More deafening by the hour, he found himself dumbfounded at his lack of notice of the clock before. Had it always been there? And why hadn't he ripped the bird's little ornate plume from its ornamental wooden nest ages ago? 

The only thing that was curious about his lack of imagination was the noticeable physical transformation with which his Tourettes undertook. The slight spastic tremors in his upper and lower extremities were less muted than they used to be. More colorful, more vivid, more rhythmic; like a piece of music had entered his body and an unseen composer was keeping time. 

With a lifetime of questions for authors in his breast pocket, he still knew he wanted to be a librarian. Despite his first failed series of writing attempts he folded them into his forgotten back pocket and set his sights on a degree in the library sciences. His tics and spasms died down after he had buried and eulogized his first attempt at writing, returning to a pensive non-threatening murmur. Any hint of a question for his sudden state was replaced with utter relief for its passing. 

Halfway through his library science PhD at 28, he tried again. What was the worst that could happen he reasoned? With the passage of time came rationalization for his past state. That rise in symptomatic intensity coupled with his first attempt at pursuing his deep-seated dream may have been just unlucky and poorly timed.

He picked up his pen like he had a thousand times before in the past few months to write his dissertation. Only his intent had changed; his intent to write something which came from deep within him. Nothing... His mind was maddeningly blank. 

And as if on cue every motor tic and spasm repressed in the years since his first attempt roared to life. His movements weren’t as impulsive as they were moments before. His movements were operative. Yet he could not shake the feeling that he was not the operator.

With the sudden and seemingly unprovoked possession of self came a rhythm stronger than the first he had felt years earlier. The rhythm had the same tempo as before. It was familiar but unreachable, like the echo of a song that had played in his youth. 

Any chance of writing was replaced by an eerily orchestrated series of unwavering compulsions. It was as if he was being punished for his attempted creativity.

Despite the uncontrollable barrage of motor mortar shells a tiny part of him wanted to believe that he was a part of something larger. He chalked it up to Christian roots, to misguided hope, to anything that might make him feel less insane. But in a quiet refuge within himself, in the sanctuary of his being where his soul was not eligible for judgment, he knew. He knew that his heart's rhythm which allowed him to breathe was no more coincidental than his muscular orchestra was driven by his attempts to write.

To mediate his hyper-metabolic symphony he stopped again, not that it was much of a choice given his physical condition. He told himself it was for good. 

This time his silent wise friends, the untouchable greats of literature who had been the encouraging backbone of his literary dreams, weren’t there to catch him. How could their brilliance console his physical inability to write? 

This was no writer's block. It was an unspeakable rhythmic surge of energy as though he was connected to an entire town's power supply whose current had no choice but to pulse through him.

As he always said, his birth was a wrong place, at the wrong time, in the wrong body event. 

So he withdrew into the autonomous business of a hermit. Despite life's seemingly bitter mistrust for him, it continued anyway. Books still needed to be shelved, youth literature classes needed to be taught, and high school papers needed references. It was quiet. It was dull. And he wanted so badly to like it. 

At sixty, following a sudden heart attack, he realized it was time to meet his pitiless orchestral composer.

As soon as the pen hit the paper with the intent to draw from within rather than without he could feel his composer being pulled to his muscular strings. The irrepressible rhythmic ball of energy began in his face this time: the slightest crease of a smile in an otherwise unsmiling man; a raised eyebrow without a lingering question. But as the hours passed these sensations grew stronger and more pervasive just as they had during his other two writing attempts. A forgotten numbness not felt since the prolonged squeeze of a trigger during childhood target practice with his brothers seeped back into his stubborn arthritic fingers. A dull foot pain garnered from a “mistimed” firework set off by one of his brothers after another of his family’s classically patriotic 4th of July barbeques flared to a lazily combative level of anger. Nothing new he thought. 

Then out of nowhere, he heard it. 

A voice.

It was the voice of a woman who knew him deeply. The voice of a woman who loved him. 

The presence of those first broken syllables was felt like a storm on the wind. His entire body began to twitch and hum with intrepid anticipation such that he adopted an unbearably animated, unstoppable series of metered tics and spasms as her voice became clearer. With waning strength and nothing more in life to lose, he duct-taped his pen to his hand and prepared for a dazzling and expectedly fatal philharmonic of puppeteered muscular contraction. 

Then without warning the conductor eased her grip and his muscular symphony was replaced with a paralleled musical one. It was the song that had been playing in the car that day. 

His mother loved classical music he suddenly remembered and Beethoven's famous Symphony #9 was her favorite. The swell of the music washed over him and he hung his head in nostalgic ecstasy and began to cry as repressed memories flooded back to him. 

The sound of her kind voice could be heard as though she were whispering in his ear. He saw her face as though she was standing next to him. He heard her laugh and felt her arms around him such that it was like he was back there in that little red VW bug. 

He and his mom were on the way to the library for the first time at the age of 5. He had begged her to let him go. He had told her he could be quiet and well-behaved. Finally, after months of exhaustive asking they jumped in the car.

Now the car was upside down. He couldn’t remember how it got there but it was. He tried to call out for his mother but she was unresponsive. He climbed out of the car and screamed for help. 

His father had witnessed the accident at the end of the driveway and was there moments later. He pulled her from the wreckage, lay her on the dewy morning pavement, and looked up at his youngest son with cold eyes and said without

pausing...

Your birth was a wrong place, at the wrong time, in the wrong body event. 

Even now at sixty, he could feel himself shrinking beneath his father’s unloving gaze. His eyes were pitiless and disowning. His father just left him there with his eyes glued shut and his hands trembling and returned to the house. The effect of a series of memories 55 years removed was just now being realized. For it was in that moment, scarred beyond repair, that his hand first twitched and his diagnosed “Tourette’s” began. 

Every tremor, involuntary muscular impulse, spasm, and poorly mistimed twitch felt in the last 55 years was the forced result of his mind repressing memories too painful to reconcile. And every time he touched pen to paper with the intent to draw from within, every time he got close to exposing those awful memories, his body was wrapped in an unknown muscular symphony conducted by an unknown composer. 

Now he knew. His mother was the composer. He knew that she had not been trying to hurt him but to protect him. 

Before the horrific near hallucinogenic memory subsided his mother's voice was felt and heard one last time. Those lucky syllables finally formed a sentence in his ears and exhaled the words, he realized only then, that he had waited 55 years to hear...

I’m sorry. The accident was not your fault. Your birth wasn't wrong. It was one of the most right things to happen to my life.

With those words, he was released. The pen, still duct taped to James' now steady hand, fell to the paper, and with it finally came the gift of a lifetime of stories he had unknowingly kept inside.