Hitman Melodies Section 9

IX.
The afternoon wore on, Sebastian in his chair, Venus reclining on her couch. Whenever Sebastian thought he might be falling asleep, he got up and chained Maddy to the divan. Whenever the feeling passed, he got up and let her loose again. It didn't matter, he stayed in the chair, she stayed on the sofa. To complete the Victorian schtick they had going, Sebastian got out a long-stemmed pipe (not quite the Sherlock Holmes style, but close) and smoked. It was a heady mixture of marijuana, tobacco, and some other mysterious herb he got off a dead Viet Namese apothecary-turned-smuggler down at the docks. This stuff was not stashed at the house, this stuff he carried with him all the time. He did his deepest thinking under its influence. His concentration was a tangible entity, and, as Maddy watched him, energies circulated in the room with the smoke; galaxies of smoke swirled and dispelled and renewed their trains with each drag. And yet the silence retained its virgin pristinity.
Evening crept into the room and bled its colorless wash onto the floors and furniture like a slow-rising tide. Dusk had briefly illuminated the smoke with gold, but now all was gray, and what light there was hung heavily on the room like damp laundry. In a fit of inspiration, Sebastian lit a fire in the fireplace, (it seemed to take only a moment), and suddenly cheerful flames and eery shadows could be seen doing battle there on the thick hearthrug. His eyes watched the interplay of Ying and Yang swirl to a pitch of desperate contrapuntal crescendo until Maddy crowned the moment by rising from her place and kneeling on the rug.
"I want to ask you about your music," she said.
"No you don't," he explained.
"I'm quite musical you know. In college, I couldn't decide between music and journalism; I took classes in both. Then I won an essay contest that had a scholarship attached to it, and that decided me. But I still play."
"Play?"
"The piano."
"Piano, Schwiano."
"I still love it. I still know that music says something words can never say."
"Platitude me not, thou wench of low estate."
"I know. It's hard to say. But I know music speaks the truth. And I think you are connected. There is a truth about you that feels like a song."
"Don't flatter me--"
"I know, you're still going to kill me."
"And don't truth me either. There is no truth. I mean there is truth, but it exists, like perfection, like everything else, on a scale, on a continuum, in a constant state of flux wrestling with every absolute definition we try to restrain it with. We can only know gradations of truth, level after level all spread out in a sequential line from the force of gravity to the face of God, and even there the absolute eludes the squamous mind. At the end of Il Paradiso, as Dante is carried up into the highest heaven, he looks and discovers the fixed, ultimate, immutable face of God is changing--"
"With every change in me," she intruded.
"Yes," he explained, softening in the sweet sympathy. She knows her Dante. And with this little corner of insight, the breadth of her mind is hinted at, and he begins to understand that she understands, and understanding he understands. It has somehow become important, this conversation; it has become a point of contact. He doesn't know with what. He has no time to consider, but suddenly it has become supremely important that all the old thoughts he has had filed away in the "I've-got-that-all-figured-out File" get aired out, get tried out, get shared out--with this woman. The sound of release is deafening. It is a trumpet fanfare born of repressed loneliness he didn't even know he felt until now. He realizes how completely he has been fooling himself, and how desperately he needs to tell her, for her to know, for her to understand. He looks at the pitiful pile of his life's burnt-out trophies smoldering at his feet, and realizes that if ever he continues anything again, he must continue this. With the rattling brass zinging in his ears, he continues, voice rising urgently, clumsily.
"But even that doesn't mean there is no truth, that we can't have truth, it only means we can't capture it with words. Truth is a power, a living entity that comes down from on high and visits us and blesses us and transforms us and lifts us up. When you want to get the truest expression of soul, you have to go to music. Literature never sings the living truth, it points a finger at it and asks music to take over. We experience truth in the moment. Music is not even the truth itself, it is just the carrier."
"Yes. Yes, I see."
Now, louder: "Music mobilizes the energy of higher worlds which channel directly into the physical dimension via the mind and the muscles of Man. There is nothing made up, momentarily in the mind, about music--it is a reality truer than the most real reality you can name, more real than all these busy, fumbling, puerile occupations we call life, more real than death."
"More real than death. You would have to think that wouldn't you?"
"Why would I have to think that?" he mocked. "Because I meld music and death into an indissoluble unity? Because I use music to ease the passing of condemned men--"
"And women," she interrupted.
"--we'll get to that--because I use music to ease the passing of the condemned from one dimension to another? You think just because I keep music at the right hand of the executioner, I have to justify that with some bullshit moral posture, so I won't feel bad when Joey Spinelli gets his head blown off? Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit! My God, woman, you think I became a hit man BEFORE I became a musician? I've ALWAYS been a musician--I just stumbled into this organized crime bullshit because I found out that there was good money to be made and--"
"And?"
"And--"
"And?"
"I don't think I've ever said this out loud before."
"Tell me."
There came a hush in his voice and that hush crushed the two of them into a smaller space. She had crept closer to his chair. The fire would have raged on with his convictions even if he had not thrown another log onto the grate and knelt down beside her on the rug. It was coming--the intimacy--with a tympano roll and a low anticipatory flutter in the alto flute. This was the part he had held inside for too long. This was the lame duck in the row, the loose canon in his philosophy, the exception to the rule. His voice lowered itself an octave and sibilantly hissed its secret, the warm breath of it almost caressing her ear.
"And the death part of it--the once and only part of it--made the music more precious to me. There, I've said it. I don't play the singer of swan songs for the mark--I do it for me."
"Ah."
"The hypocrisy of it grinds me."
"I see."
"But I can't help it. It's like a drug. The ecstasy of the mark flows into me--"
"Yes?"
"And I die each death with him. For a moment my soul rises up with him, I see the heavenly terrain with him. I NEED IT. I need to kill--because I need to--"
"To love," she explains.
"Yes." And she gets that, too. Jeezus! "It is the only peace I know. I hate my life. I hate my power. I hate my killing. I hate my music. But it is only in these tiny moments, when the music opens up the door for me, that I am free."

Only the supplest body, a child's body, can slump into despair as did the sagging limbs of Sebastian Chronic as he collapsed into the lap of Maddy High and wept, confessing all. Again they were weeping together, and it was not for poor made-up Mimi, but for the vast inconsolable isolation of Adam expelled from Eden, awake to all but the bliss of his lost non-entity. Poor, poor Adam! Mother Mary deliver him from his state of dichotomous knowledge! Give him the courage to fight the angel at the gate!
"Maddy, I want to kill you--because I want to know you!" he cried, and, reaching up, laced the shoulders of her robe with graceful fingers, playing into her flesh like fuguing tunes.
"There is another way," she said, and slipped the robe from her shoulders.