I should have known it would be them doing this, the math was available to me all along. I watched Jack go inside, I spoke with Feli and Cashman, I saw Moist and then Dallow, eventually the scene runs out of actors, and you can work by elimination. I’d read the playbill, hell, I’d followed the casting calls, knew every person who could be passing through the doors of this faded place, no longer surprised by anything coming out of or moving around in it. I surprised myself by how much at home I suddenly felt, hand resting on the door, looking at this other man, perspiring slightly as if expending some effort to keep the room shut. It was not a pleasant feeling of home, neither cultivated through care and community nor inborn and permanent. This home was no part of me. It held me without concern for reciprocity or consent.
So we pulled back on the doors, which gave the moment their plane was broken and seemed to let out a great yawning sigh, which, real or imagined, nearly sent me to the floor. We were in the eye of the hurricane, or the beating heart of the homunculus, depending on which metaphor one preferred. To keep with the storm: one could pivot until one had seen the entire semicircle of equipment on the opposite end of the room: cables and knobs and faders and pedals, all ending in the tail of a single quarter-inch cord running into a single guitar, from which no audible sound emerged. In inverse proportion on the other side of the room, in the corner behind Dallow, who stood facing it with crossed arms and one of his puzzled , questioning looks, was a single box, the size of a cinderblock, a single power cord running into it and a single instrument cable running out, this time ending in a violin which was equally impossible to hear acoustically, as if its player were performing a pantomime, his movements in no way corresponding to the choral din and organ incantations which were finally articulated to the point where I could distinguish them. I had the distinct sense that the noise and the tremors with which it tested all of the house’s modifications and reinforcements were at their highest point since they had begun, but in this room all I felt was the vibration of the floor and the heat coming from the guitar side of the room. To say it was palpable would be a tragic understatement; the man who worked the current—rowed all the giant oars, to seek another metaphor—who, frenetically, but with a purpose, traced unknown glyphs with his left hand and massaged and tickled, prodded and fixed the various levers and dials with his right, this man generated another sort of heat with his ardor. This man was, of course, Furey, and he nodded first at me, then at Dallow’s back, then once more at the gear, suggesting “had I hand to offer, offer it I would, but this demands all of my attention, obviously, and apologies.”
Opposite him and paying little mind to any of it, eyes closing and fluttering open at intervals in time with the sweeping his bow and the beyond-minute, crackling movements of his fingers, stood Poor Old Jeffrey Young. Or, better, danced Poor Old Jeffrey Young, as his bare feet alternately clenched knobs on the front of the cinderblock and heel-kicked the chair behind him. At the first kick-clap-boom, I felt satisfied that the pathway for at least one of the otherworldly sounds which had needled and tormented me for the past hours was explained. There was a curious latency, though, between the kick itself and the apparently resulting clap-boom, and I joined Dallow in staring at the Young feet, awaiting the next hammering of his heel, watching the flexing of each toe as he rolled between the ball of a foot, back to the heel, twisted a knob, then returned to a flamingo stance, readying to release a kick. The carpet he maneuvered on was itself mesmerizing, clearly old but not worn, part of the decayed house yet resiliently vibrant, if not vibrantly resilient. It was finely woven, I did not need to be an expert to note that, and it was huge, as I traced its ovular shape from beneath the chair to the opposite corner of the room, past all of Furey’s equipment, and under a smashed-out window. I saw an antique loom, though to call anything here antique was perhaps redundant, and it seemed certain the rug was bespoke and crafted in this very domicile, it almost could not be any other way. I traced back to Furey and his brutal energy, it seemed he would choke the guitar to death without undue emotion, perhaps offering a eulogy at the burial, but knowing it had to expire at his hands all along. The rug was all different shades of reds and maroons, many of which had no business being used together, but the patterns, oddly contemporary, fractal paisleys, somehow made it all make sense. More than that, I needed to touch the fibers, and so ran my fingers along them where I stood, half afraid that I would set off some final unholy squall which would end the entire ordeal with four men atop each other and under a heap of exhausted and grateful timber.
Instead, I felt only silken threads expertly assembled into an exemplar of a craft which I could romantically say had been lost, had it not been for the assembling tool, looking well-oiled and expectant, peering at me from the corner of the room. I swept my hand up, instinctively wondering if the rug should be rescued before there was no place from which to rescue it, and noted the cables running from each wooden leg of the chair, now visible from my crouching position. I stared up at Jeffrey, who jauntily stepped and kicked back with one foot and then the other, which seemed to clench off the resonant boom before its echo could reverberate out completely. I heard a tinny, distant crash and knew it had to be the picture window, finally given way to the Young double-kick, both deft and false, incomplete and final, and replaced after an interval no longer than my shallow gasp with the full melodic burst of the choir, each voice articulated and individually discernible in texture and tone, and a theretofore unnoticed thick, felt curtain shook off its restraints and fell over the windows, swiftly enveloping us in darkness, save the completely and blocking out the light, and I fell backwards from my crouch, hairs on neck on end, wind in lungs forced out as if ex post facto justifying the gasp.
The whole enterprise had collapsed in on itself. My head was a basket full of baby toes, and Jeffrey collapsed into the chair behind him as the choir belted with the mythical force of Furey’s namesakes. I lay on the too-fine surface and let the floor expand beneath me, lifting me heavenward if not towards the tin-stamped ceiling above. Furey had dropped to a knee also, working a series of buttons that looked like a step sequencer, pitch correcting the sounds of mallets on sides of beef and church bells in patterns known only to him. Jeffrey continued plucking away at the fingerboard, now having slid on his back so he could reach his own set of dials from the relative comfort of the chair. Dallow looked uncomfortable standing suddenly, swinging his head around in the dim lights and fixing on the dark planetarium above me. I was lost in the landscape of thin metal ridges, I wondered about workmanship and lost arts, I wondered if Poor Old Jeffrey Young and Furey had ever actually met, if a handshake between them would complete a circuit and short the power board for the entire house, I was dying under the weight of dense air crafted into plush rusted beams and lain upon me.
Maybe this was home, now. I might have mistimed my jump, misrecognized my kin, misremembered the past, and miscounted the days. I told myself that the rumors could not be true, because they all concerned things people could not possibly know, but that logic was impoverished, paltry. I allowed the floorboards, gloved in finely tattered rug, to arch my back and lift me to the crafted firmament, willing for the first time to let all extremities dangle and any extremes occur, for I was adrift and afloat and trusted because there was naught else to do but trust.
