Vanishing

Another acquaintance of mine has disappeared.  I asked people who knew him about it,  and they just shrugged.  Maybe they know and don't trust me enough to say, but the man is gone.  It happens all the time.   I'm thinking that perhaps it is my particular circumstances where people vanish, relationships break up suddenly, and that it is only me, my world that's constructed this way.

Because in the novels I read things like this don't happen, or when they do,  readers and reviewers complain about dangling, incomplete plots.  Life flows in literary works without constant crashes, without ends before the last page, without black holes.  In my own life, plots tend to stop suddenly, and when that happens, there is nothing to write home about. Is it just me, you then ask?  What did I do wrong?  What should I have done instead? Etc, etc.

It's different in popular songs. There, perhaps it is the short format that allows it.


Little Richard:
I woke up this morning, Lucille was not in sight.
I asked my friends about her but all they did was sigh

Carole King:

So far away

Doesn't anybody stay in one place anymore?

The Speed of Time

We were reading, my comedian friend and I, an article about Hong Kong physicists who said they had proven a single photon cannot travel faster than the speed of light, thus making time travel an impossibility, when it occurred to me, a science ignoramus, that if said photons could be slowed down (they never said it was impossible), then time could proceed forward as before, while we along with our photons could stay behind travelling backwards in time, the only problem in view of the above finding would be returning back to the present, if we so desired.   Which  remark provoked my unknown comedian friend into asking, "what's the speed of time?".  I immediately wrote this phrase down, the way songwriters write down often banal phrases they hear for eventual future uses in song lyrics.   This particular one would fit perfectly into David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust period.

And then it occurred to me that it is perhaps the comedians who more often than scientists stumble intentionally or by accident into deeper truths.   I was watching an appearance of a well known standup comic on a television talk show, and he asked (rhetorically) about people who sit in the audience of various events filming the stage with their smartphones.   They are watching the performance on a tiny screen, to watch the shaky results later on a bigger screen at home,  and this after paying high price for the tickets, to be there, when they're actually not completely there, he was saying. This reminded me of the time when I met an Israeli man while we were both traipsing through some European city playing tourists, and he explained that he, alone among the thousands of other sightseers  there, did not carry a camera, because he wanted to see the place through his own eyes and not through the camera viewfinder.

If all of the above is not terribly interesting, then know that there is a small proud town somewhere in the state of Oregon called Boring.

Ventilator

You can't be too careful when trying to avoid tempting the Devil into sending your way a ventilator of anger and rage.  A victim of murder narrates "Sunset Boulevard", the 1950 film directed by Billy Wilder,  there have been other movies and novels employing the dead man narration, and I suppose that if one was anticipating being murdered, he could write an up-to-the-minute story, the only problem being how to liberate the manuscript from the hands of the murderer. Howard Hughes and Charles Foster Kane are two people who ended their lives with nothing and nobody around them, and only with piles of money. A diplomat published a novel he spent a period of a dozen years writing, and which, he says, does not contain a sentence that didn't come with great difficulty.

A dream.  No one was interested in going so I went alone, and as soon as I sat down in the audience, I forgot why I was there.   I must have read something about the performers that drew me to this event.  A woman sitting next to me said that during the previous evening an old singer appeared, and she was there.  I knew this man when he was starting up, a subsequent one hit wonder, who somehow managed to stay in the limelight.  She said that he told her he was now a millionaire film director, but I'll have to check if that is true.  The performers then all came in a group of a dozen or so, they weren't musicians, and some of them sat down near me.  They divided the audience into groups and I found myself in a group with several of these performers.   We were shown pictures of regions of the world, physical maps as opposed to political, those multi-colored maps illustrating various characteristics of the land, yellow for deserts,  green for forests,  jungles and prairies,  beige for hilly terrains and dark brown for high mountains.  Each map had the names of major cities printed and strangely enough, it showed its region in complete isolation from the surrounding areas which were printed blank.  We looked at all these pictures and then there was an intermission.

After the intermission we were assembled in new groups, and my group stepped inside a roomy, dark bus to work.   We were given the task to identify the regions in the new set of pictures which were duplicates of the maps we had seen previously, except that all the identifying names had been changed into meaningless words.   We set out to work.  I got the idea to consult Google to find physical maps of Earth's regions and sought to find matches comparing the shapes of the regions.  I didn't succeed, but someone in the group did in the end  identify just one of the pictures correctly.

Voices

Found art. I  found this poem (?) on the narrow path which cuts across parking lots and a park leading from the train station through and to the residential areas. It was written on the  inside (!) of a torn blue envelope, one of those that are sent to all addresses every several weeks containing "valuable" coupons from car repair shops, smog check stations, pizza parlors, hearing aid vendors and other local businesses. There was no room to write anything on the envelope's face or back which contained more advertising, and even one half of its  inner side was covered by small print explaining the rules of some sweepstakes, so the clean inside had to suffice for whoever wrote this text.  I picked it up, read it, started walking, then thought better of it, stopped, pulled out  an old envelope out of my backpack, copied the poem to it, and set the original on the utility box by the path, a small rock on top of it, the owner might return to retrieve it, as it didn't look discarded and only lost.  I'll come back later to see if it's still there.  It said:


You ask if I speak to voices in my head
I have no voices in my head
No voices anywhere
I  speak to ears that don't hear
To heads that won't listen.

Emotional Megaphone

People seek a way to express their strong emotions. A release valve. And sometimes they find an emotional megaphone.   Thanks to modern computer technology a megaphone may be used over long distances, across continents and oceans. Megaphone is not a  tool of dialogue, it goes without saying.

She said, wrote on a computer keyboard "We must talk." I answered, also via a keyboard, "Talk, I'm listening."  Some people, even in face to face encounters, will approach you to say  "We need to talk" and wait for your answer, assent, or god knows what. Well, we're talking already, why the prelude?  And so, I answered "Talk, I'm listening."  But that's not what she had in mind. "Call me on Skype!" she demanded in Arial font.  Skype is a computer program, one of several such programs available,  which allow people to communicate face to face across distances using a computer camera and microphone. A visual telephone.  Listen to the other person speak while staring at his pimples, bad teeth, thinning hair, and judging his reactions to what you say by studying the pattern of his blinking.

I don't recall how I came to suspect what was up, it all happened a long time ago, I do remember that there were no other hints, but I decided that it would be prudent to avoid a face to screen confrontation, and I wrote that the camera of my computer wasn't operational, please write instead.   And she did.

She wrote on Skype, which can be used to pass written messages, awkwardly but it is possible, so why not use e-mail?!  And it was as I had anticipated a stream of angry  accusations, threats, warnings, all in semi-literate sentences, from this highly educated family member who took upon herself to judge my behaviour in matters which did not concern her, or affect her in any way, and was (my behaviour) innocuous, moral and perfectly legal.    I didn't respond, knowing that an emotional megaphone can only be provoked into greater fury if one only peeps a shy reply.

That was only a beginning, a prelude to a longer saga which is itself  a sad story for another occasion.

63 Friends and Other Dreams

I have 63 friends.  I'd prefer that the number were a prime number, but at least it is divisible by 3, and it'll change sooner or later anyway.  Actually, both words, 'have' and 'friends' ought to be surrounded by double quotation marks.  These are, if you haven't already guessed, Facebook "friends".  I know and have met a handful of them, and most of those reside thousands of miles from here.   Several of them are my former workmates residing in the area,  they're mostly inactive online, none of the active ones will communicate with me directly,  one's reputation after leaving a workplace takes a major hit.

Two I have known for decades.  Two are younger brothers of old friends who I hadn't known had brothers, one of them my oldest friend who passed away three years ago, the other a public figure who cannot expose himself on online social media.  So I have those two guys' brothers!

Most of those friends are people who asked me to friend them, on recommendation of some other friend, especially the hyperactive brother of the public person.  A man from Switzerland asked to friend me last week, I don't know who he is, he posts in German, and I figure must be a friend of my Swiss friend.   Others who asked to friend them have been musicians,  none except one widely known, all excellent and underappreciated, and I feel honored that they decided to connect, even if motivated by commercial reasons.   Two of these musicians are quite active, and we've had some lively exchanges, that could theoretically lead to actual friendships if we ever met.

And the one musician who is widely known and who asked to friend me a few weeks ago is none other than "Bob Dylan", if you can believe it. I can't and suspect it is an employee or a grandchild of the artist.  

I joined Facebook only because a member of my extended family named Carmen, the only name of a friend I will mention beside Bob Dylan's, with whom I had a one time business transaction, told me that she communicated via Facebook and I could take it or leave it.

All of the above leads to a darker conclusion, which was actually a preamble that started this arithmetic meditation late last night, long and sleepless for whatever reasons, and as I often do I reverse the order of things.   The conclusion was the cold hard truth that I have lost everyone, or that everyone has lost me, and that is a plain fact without any tears, regrets or accusations.

Someone in the house told me that she had phoned me during my absence and that my brother-in-law Tommy took the message.  I found Tommy in the basement hanging up his laundry on the line.  She told him to ask me to call her back.  Why, I wondered, we had broken up, there was nothing more to say, no leftover business to conduct.   I decided to call her only because I think one should  return all phone calls.  I had trouble finding her number on my cell phone, dialed it, she answered, noise on the line, sound of music, I had to say "Hello" three times before she spoke up and asked me if I understood why we had broken up?  More static on the line, a singer in the background singing in Portuguese, I could barely hear her and asked her to repeat the question.  She said that I should understand those reasons.  She didn't say what they were, and I answered asking rhetorically why it mattered, it didn't matter to me if I understand or not, no I don't understand and don't know why, and I realize that knowing and understanding won't change things, won't affect history, present or future.  The singer was singing another song, she didn't say anything, where are you I asked, who are you with, she didn't answer, the song continued, I waited for her to answer but she didn't and I woke up with the song ringing in my ears, not knowing where I was, who she was, and why Tommy was so young. .

Then I decided to write her a postcard.  I knew she wouldn't read a letter, so it had to be an open postcard.  What should be on the picture side? All black? No. Not a tourist view, how about a photograph of the ocean, nothing but the ocean to symbolize the distance between us.  Where would I find such a card? It would be unsigned, but she would know from the postal stamp,  I'd have to decide on the color of the ink, and it would read:

"I don't miss nostalgia.  

I don't miss anyone but her."

Aunt Sara

My parents were long dead by then, when a woman showed up at my doorstep, dressed in black, sunshades on, a violin case in her right hand, and while I was staring at the case wondering if it contained a submachine gun, yes, I've seen too many gangster movies, said, "Hi, I'm your aunt Sara!"

I said, "Uh, I don't believe I have an aunt named Sara!"

With her free hand she removed the sunglasses and asked, "And now?"
I must have opened my mouth wide, as I saw in front of me a picture perfect face of my mother's twin.  Is it makeup, plastic surgery or what, I thought,  trying to examine her features.  She looked more like my mother than my mother's older sister, my deceased aunt.  I invited her and her violin case inside.

She was a violin player, she said with the Q_______ Quartet, a world famous ensemble, that even I had heard about, and in the case was a 150 year old Italian made instrument that she didn't want to leave in the car.  She opened the case and invited me to pick it up, but  remembering my bad luck and tendency toward clumsiness in such situations I declined.   Aunt Sara then told me that she was born after her and my mother's father was killed, and her mother decided to give her up for adoption.  I realized that my mom and her older sister, my other aunt, kept this a secret from me, and they certainly must have known it themselves.  Aunt Sara said that she had found me through Red Cross.

"You're my only living blood relative!" she said.  That wasn't exactly true, as I had several cousins from my mother's side who would be her cousins as well.  In any case, I learned that she and the string quartet traveled the world, were based in Sydney, Australia, where two of the members were from, her husband was their manager, and they owned several apartments around the world, including one here in the city.  She promised to send me tickets to one of their appearances.

And as promised, a week later, a pair of tickets to a concert at the symphony hall arrived in the mail.  I went to see the quartet.  I called my mom's elderly  cousin, a distant aunt, to report all this, and she confirmed that indeed there had been a girl infant given up for adoption.   Then I heard nothing from Aunt Sarah for six or seven months.

She showed up again, this time without a violin and without sunglasses, dressed colorfully, and when I opened the door, said, "I need your help, my husband's dead!"

I invited her inside, and she explained that she wasn't a grieving widow because the marriage was merely a business arrangement.  She asked me to provide her with an alibi for the previous evening.  No, she didn't murder him, but there was another man involved, and she wanted to avoid a scandal.  I was on the spot, and I tried to persuade her that it wasn't a good idea, as the investigators would look for any inconsistencies in our stories and we just couldn't coordinate everything between us.  Besides, I had three guests here the previous night, so now I'd have to lie that no one but her was present.  But she begged me, and eventually I relented, we agreed on a story line, time, circumstances, details, conversation topics, menu, everything I could think of, knowing full well that it still wouldn't be enough for a skillful investigator to demolish.

Sure enough, a  couple of days later a police detective called me asking to verify her story.  The conversation was brief and he appeared satisfied with my answers.  As it later turned out, aunt Sara's husband was accidentally  murdered by a local impresario who negotiated with him the purchase of a 40 or 50% interest in the Quartet, and for some reason or another spiked his drink with a dose of sleeping pills that proved fatal.  The man went to prison, the Quartet continued touring.

Then, about a year later, a New York journalist asked me to speak about the case and I reluctantly agreed.   I told him our version of the story, he recorded it, and I asked that my name not be used in print, or I'll sue.  The story appeared in a national magazine a couple of months later.  In it, without mentioning my name the writer accused me of lying and being in cahoots with my aunt Sara, who had been allegedly in cahoots with the murderer, in a plot to take over the management of the Quartet.