Every Day A Little Death; or Are You Still Coming

Are you still coming? The words flash a few times on the telescreen, leaving their squirming green imprint on my eyelids once I turn away. Heading to the kitchen, I ruminate on the message, reading it over and over again as the chip downloads it to the digital cesspool of meeting notifications and invoices that my hippocampus has become.

Are you still coming? I can almost hear her saying it, the slight melody of the lilt in her voice branded in my mind as I turn on the faucet, watching the water spill out in a perfect, crystal-clear wave, the same calculated and measured trajectory each time, not a single drop outside the glass. Downing the glass greedily, I try to run the calculations for the calorie depletion and fatigue expectations the all-nighter has cost me, but the system refuses. TOO MUCH CEREBRAL TRAFFIC, the smoky, neon letters flash in my head. It used to read the diagnostic out verbally too, only within the soundproof walls of my skull, of course, but I had long since done away with that setting.

I still remember the look that the repairman had given me when I had asked for it to be removed. At first, I had thought that he just wanted an autograph, possibly a selfie too. It wasn’t every day that the floors of my house felt more than just one pair of custom-made soundless slippers. I had had to order the extra pair five days in advance to my email, knowing I would never use them again after they had been contaminated with his sweaty skin. (The hydrofoam ear plugs had taken even longer, not that the company cared about the collateral expenses their visits cost me.) But, no, it wasn’t admiration that had graced his countenance nor was it any fanatic degree of excitement that people used to have whenever I crossed them. He just stood there and let his mask of corporate politeness slip and then just stared at me with his ugly, glaring humanity. In that moment, it was as though the ringing in my ears had translated into some material sting that danced across my skin, tearing me to pieces as scalding cobwebs of pain racked my limbs and kept me frozen there, enduring it all for the sum of eternity squeezed into a few seconds. 

And he had made such a racket in leaving too. 

Are you still coming? The message flashes again, this time even brighter. She’s sent it again, as if repetition could add any significant sense of urgency. All that she does succeed in adding though is more seconds that it takes me to stumble through the doorway to the Atrium, blinded by the increasing luminosity of the words scorching my mind’s eye as her torturous pestering persists. Within the small hall, I take a moment to dive back into the dark waters of the deeper settings, searching, searching, searching for the mental switch to disconnect the chip from the main computer and thus from her. On natural autopilot, my feet continue carrying me all the way to the threshold to the Chamber, stopping there for a moment as I give up my fruitless search with a sigh and begin the emotional exfoliation required by such a sacred place.

With carefully measured breaths, I let the bolts of memory start to pummel me, blaring headlights on a busy city street, whipping and wrapping all around me. One strip of memory zips by and unfurls itself, peeling back to reveal the pockmarked face of the delivery driver the other morning. Pain rips through me as I remember his gruff frustration with me, the way his raspy growls seemed to seep into my cracks and freeze there, splitting me open like rocks in the winter. I had specifically asked them not to send someone to my door, to just email me back instead. On the outside, my hand begins to rock back and forth, smarting as though placed in a bowl of boiling water. Another memory attacks, blindfolding me as I am plunged back into last August when the air conditioner stopped working and again the company had sent in-person handymen in the place of the digital manual I had requested. They had tried to speak with me, but of course, I hadn’t let that happen. The memory still found other ways to torture me though; I couldn’t stop reading his lips over and over. Aren’t you that guy, the one everyone’s talking about? I downloaded the new EP as soon as it hit the airwaves, man. Could I get-my closing door didn’t let him finish. I almost jolted out of the trance as my foot hit the wall in a mad twitch of furious movement. My mother has always said I took everything out on my body. She had been all too eager to nod before chuckling, he does to his body what he wishes he could do to the rest of us.

At the crescendo now of my jerks and spasms, I knew it was almost over. Impressive and massive, one last blinding memory stood in my way, crushing me beneath it as it pushed me back into the day before she left, almost two years ago, pressing me beneath the surface of the water and holding me there as the audiovisual recording kicked in and started drowning me.

Quit being so dramatic, her lips read with a roll of her eyes. You’re acting like it’s the end of the world. 

It is the end of the world: my world!  I shouted back, stuffing my hands back into my pockets to hide the blood from earlier. I shudder as the double-set thought hits me, remembering how I had remembered wiping away the remnants of my fists’ altercation with the wall only minutes before she had gotten home. 

It’s one doctor’s diagnosis, she sighed, flopping down on the couch like my mother used to after I had worn her out during piano lessons, insisting my notes were better. Just go get a second opinion.

My ears ring with pain as I box them both in and out of the memory, adrenaline spiking as my limbs are controlled only by its tides now. 

Go get a second opinion after seeing the best ENT in the world?! Sure, that will look even better in the headlines than “Gifted artist loses hearing; career is devastated!” The words themselves are beginning to claw back up my throat as my mouth starts to remember the phonetic movements. Horrified, I try to break the trance, signaling the chip over and over to let me out, but it still refuses. Blistering rays blind me in an instant: TOO MUCH CEREBRAL TRAFFIC.

 Maybe everything isn’t about your career, she mumbled, peeking at me from beneath those fiery locks. 

Maybe everything isn’t about my career? I took a breath before slamming my nails into my palm, turning to face here as I spread my battered arms out from me. Everything you see here is my career. It was my career that got us here, that paid for this house, for this lifestyle, for your pretty face. It was my work, my music, that bought us this life, this fanciful dream you filled my head with, and now that the one thing that made all this possible is being ripped away from me, you’re asking for the truly impossible. You’re asking me to hope this can all still continue, that my life can remain as it was!

And it is then that my palms meet the floor with an electrifying jolt as I collapse against the door, the ghostly remembrance finally seizing me inextricably in its grip as I hear her, truly hear her voice with all its waverings and modulations even here in the sanctum of my silent mind. 

“No,” she said, “I’m asking for our life to remain as it is.”

Crippling, the noise floods my brain, setting off every hormonal and mood sensor as my heart slams against my chest, spiking the volume of every alarm attached to my corporal mainframe. My throat closes up just I can imagine speaking her words as she would have spoken them, my mouth melting into hers as the scenes mesh together and suffocate me in a sheet of bitter, unmerciful total recall. 

It is a wonder that even in the fragmented maelstrom of memory that has inundated my mind I can pull together two splinters of my own present thoughts, but by the grace of some cruel and conniving God, I do. Pounding my fingers against the keypad, some of the distinctive material pain pulling me out of this mental quicksand somewhat, I rapidly type in the code, praying for the scanner to read my prints faster. After what seems like two lifetimes of flesh pounding steel, the metal door finally opens with a silent blow of mist that soon reveals the marvelous, tacit beauty of the Chamber.

“N o-  o ne d  iag nosis -you  r care er-our  lif  e as it   is.” The slicing, splicing words keep boring into me like icicles in my back, triggering every nerve as they replay over and over, concentrating their efforts on paralyzing my spine as I try crawling to the Chair.

 TOO MUCH CEREBRAL TRAFFIC. TOO MUCH CEREBRAL TRAFFIC. TOO MUCH CEREBRAL TRAFFIC. TOO MUCH CEREBRAL TRAFFIC. TOO MUCH CEREBRAL TRAFFIC.

Small puddles of drool begin to form under me as my jaw goes numb and slackens. Sliding through my own saliva, my fingernails now bloody from digging themselves into the cracks of the floor both to keep moving forward and keep me somewhat tethered on this side of consciousness, I pull myself into the Chair. Between swirling thoughts and memories, I curse myself for removing the outside distress signal from the chip (damn all its cacophonous beeps and blaring) and for the silence I sowed into every inch of my own perfect palace. Stupid in my mental digression, I feel the bile rise in my throat as I realize that I have forgotten why I came here at all, what element of safety I craved in here, another cell in the prison I built myself out here. The memories sensed my broken tether and cut me loose to the ocean of my own recollection, brewing now with every churning twinge of pulsing emotion. I pray for anything to pull me back and out of this, anything at all.

“Quit being so dramatic,” she says, every chord of her voice mellifluous in my ear, present and clarifying. “You’re acting like it’s the end of the world.”

A flying asteroid jettisoned by these words, my fist connects with the control panel on the Chair and suddenly the room fills with the most profound symphonies of Mozart, booming deep and hearty with the revelation of music that transcends my body and soul in one gentle swoop of an angel’s wings. And so my angel of music and my savior have descended upon me as I see it all clearly, the world she spoke of, the real world as it now lays before, no longer the palimpsest of memory but rather the clear parchment of present possibility, blank and uncharted. My eardrums rattle and quake with the overstimulation, the pouring river of song let loose by an armada of cellos, harps, violins, and flutes, every conceivable instrument it seems, each and every one crying out their smashing, chaotic, graceful song with the intention of pulling me up from the dregs of thought and back into what I now believe to be reality. 

And so here it is that I have come, the pining edge of my salvation, the very cliff from which I throw myself each and every day. Oh, how fickle is my precipice! 

Little by little, the memory comes back, no longer a flood but now a gentle stream, easing me back into the proper current of recollection, all monitors silent. 

The doctors had said that I was going deaf, that I should try to minimize noises around me in an effort to slow the disease’s progression. They had forbidden to me the very tools by which I thrived in my craft, the daily inspirations that came with every tinkling of the faucet and every quiet grunt of a footstep. Without these sounds, my music would dry up, become insipid and boring and lacking the divinity that showered down upon me as I climbed those notes up to the closest resemblance of God. My life mattered when I made music. How could they ask me to give that all up? How could she have asked me to give that all up?

And so I cut away all that wasn’t my music and came here every day to die a little death in the arms which had first given me life.

As the percussion clashes like thunder, so does there come rain, wetting my cheeks and clothes as I hear myself cry for the first time since she left, the last time I heard anything but the joys and sorrows of Mozart and Bach, of Chopin and Beethoven. 

Now, I may as well have gone deaf completely for not one note of the music can I hear, blast as it might throughout the surround-sound speakers outfitting the entire room. All that trails through my ears is the gentle music of her vocal cords as she sing-speaks any words, all words to me, everything she ever said all coming back.

And from the darkness of my muted mind comes one quiet message, four quivering green words begging to be heard. 

Are you still coming?