I'm going off to technology free camp, so I guess this will be my last post for at least a month. Let's make it good... I wrote this last summer, in collaboration with
flower. We used the same simple plot idea, but communicated no more to eachother than the basics. This is one half of the story, one side of the world, one of the two sets of eyes. If you'd like to read hers, it's posted
here.
They said that before I could walk, I was dancing. They said that I sang in my sleep, wordless rhythmmelodies, much before I said my first words. They say that even now, if you listen close while I sleep, my breathing has a tune. I was born with music in my veins.
My name is Sef. Short for Josef I guess, though no one has ever used that name. Not that I know too many people. When I was just a baby, my mother and father, immigrants from Jamaica, died. They had won a cruise in a lottery sweepstakes, and then the ship went down on a stormy night. Neither could swim. My aunt came and took me to look after me then. My parents had had no other children before me, and Auntie neither, so I was alone. Didn't bother me. I had lots of company; the music in my head. I moved in with her next to the beach, out in Jacksonville, Florida, and every day after school I would run there. I loved it especially in winter. The cold had never stopped me, all I needed was a wetsuit and some string to tie back my dreadlocks and I was in the water. And in winter, no one was there, crowding up the beach. Since I was a child, I have swum, learning as soon as I began to dance. I was always in awe of the wave's power, the way you could just wade in and it would swirl about your hips, inviting you in. . . And then you were in the thick of it. The waves crashed and shivered over you, and could fling you straight out, water droplets flying everywhere. I loved being right by the breakers, feeling the wave's full strength smooth over me, feel it break by my toes as I dived through, knowing that much power was rushing past me. It made me feel special. And it wasn't the only attractive thing about the water.
It deafened the senses, so that I could hear what I was always listening for within me: the heartbeat. The beat drummed on in my head, a steady thunk~thunk~thunk, day and night. It was as constant as the waves, pulling in, out, in, with the tide. I relied on that beat, to keep me breathing, to keep my spirit alive. I don't know how, but I knew it was a heartbeat, and I knew it was mine. I knew it was someone else's heart beating along inside their own chest, this endless drumbeat echoing inside the cavity of my mind. I had thought that everyone had a beat inside their head, just as they had one on the left side of their chest. But when I talked of it with Auntie, she just dismissed it as a young, lonely boy's overactive imagination, saying "I have no time for this now. Go play in the beach, Sef." So i would go down to the sands and warm my feet and dance to the beat, thunk~thunk~thunk.
When I finally figured out that no one else heard a heartbeat aside from their own, I learned not to mention it in front of Auntie. To keep it to myself, and to keep myself to myself, and just be at the beach. Auntie didn't mind letting me run wild, she had other things to bother about. One of those days at the beach, dancing to myself with the wind whispering other people's secrets in my ear, the Drummers found me. The Drummers were all at least 17; I was 8. But when they saw me, they saw my talent, they saw what no one else could, or would see. "Kid," Baz, the ringleader, told me, "Kid, do you know the rhythm! Can ya drum?" Dumbly, I shook my head no, but the look in my eyes said teach me, and he saw them. Baz, with his short spiky blonde hair and graygray eyes, spent that summer teaching me. He was short, but when he leaned over his drum and pounded his life out into it, he was the tallest of them all. He told me I had the strongest natural talent in anyone he had ever taught. I never told him about the heartbeat. The Drummers, all six of them, not including me--spent their nights lighting incense, and playing out a beat, a song, an offering to the night goddess, as the waves lapped at their tapping feet. I spun to their rhythm some nights, others, I created my own, the moon lighting my brownbrown skin from the inside out, lifting me up to where it shone in the sky.
Fast forward nine years. All the drummers had left, after graduating college and heading off for deadbeat jobs during the day in the middle of nowhere, having wild drum sessions at night. For the past few years, it had been only me here, me and Fiona. She was the younger sister of Ria, one of the Drummers. She was a year older than me, and she didn't drum. But could she sing! She would get into these trances and just sing in tongues all night, her green cat eyes becoming filled with light, her face becoming flushed, her graceful fingers rising and falling with my beat. When people danced to my music (which was always based on the underlying rhythm of the heartbeat) I felt more like the rest of the world, as if instead of becoming like them, which was impossible, they had become like me, and they could hear the heartbeat as well, as long as I played it to them. I was convinced that I was the best drummer there was, and Fiona told me so too.
At seventeen, I had just finished high school, barely passed. School had never interested me. Even music class, because it had rules, and times, and everyone-work-together-just-as-we-rehearsed-it. That's not what music's about: it's about spontaneity, about just doing your thing and everyone else does their thing and when you work with the right person, the things you're doing just mesh, without having to plan it all out. My music teacher did not agree, nor did this philosophy work in any of my other classes. Needless to say, I was not going to college. I thought I had taught myself all I ever needed to know, so there was no use for "higher education". Fiona and I decided to go to the mixing pot of America--if there were anyplace my talent would be appreciated, it would be New York City, which thrummed with so many separate beats enmeshed to form one big working hustling bustling city. And so at seventeen, Fiona and I headed to NYC.
And that's how I found myself in the underbelly of the greatest city awake. Fiona and I had used our life's savings to get here, and now we worked for our meals playing an echoing beat that found its way to the ears and hopefully the hearts of the commuters constantly coming, going, this way, that way, little ants in stiff black suits. Joey, 21, had found us feebly trying to set up in a corner at Grand Central Station. He showed us the way to sit in the thick of it all, to smile, to hold out your hat for donations, to look exotic to these people who came from everywhere but here. Joey played a soulful sax at the 51st street station, and was always on the lookout for newcomers at Grand Central and Times Square. After a week or two of playing in the subways, Fiona showed up less and less to accompany me with her transcendent tongue, and after a month, she was gone. She had probably run off with Joey, the old badger.
So I moved out of the one room apartment we had been renting at the end of that month, and went underground full time. I played somewhere different each day, taking the train to whichever stop it led me to, and settling there for the day and night. Winter came, and I just curled tighter into the forgotten crannies and nooks of the city. I never minded the cold. By spring, I was able to go swimming in the hudson river, where people would stare at me as though I were crazy, and move away. I probably looked crazy too, My dreds reaching to my hips, a wispy soul patch starting on my chin, my trusted beat-on drum always tucked under my arm. No one else swam in the river, but I liked things best that way, just the water and me. The heartbeat still kept me company, fading in and out to the comings and goings of my life. I called Auntie once a month, jammed during the day, spent a few dollars on food each night, and saved the rest. This schedule went on for some time until one day I just sort of woke up.
Every time that I drum it is with the beat--thunk~thunk~thunk, ba dum, ba dum, ba de de dum. I never play unless I'm feeling it, which is why the sound is always so glorious. But one day I woke up and realized it had been almost a year of this, and that I had to stop. I had to go somewhere and do something, something with an actual purpose. But the only purpose I could find in life was the heartbeat. I was never free of it, and so it habituated my thoughts and movements thoroughly. The mystery of it, who it belonged to, called to me with every beat. This resounding question had really never occurred to me before, I was so wrapped up in myself. I had always just accepted the heartbeat as much as I did my right leg. But now I needed to know. What controlled it? Who was on the other end? Could they hear my heartbeat, just as I heard theirs? And the last, most important question of all: If my heart stopped, would theirs as well?
This last question consumed me, until all my time was spent puzzling over the answer and its implications, or trying to lose myself in my music. But to no avail. The days wore on, burned in my mind, hotter and hotter, until I could bear it no longer. I knew that I must find out for sure, though I was almost positive I knew the answer, to that last, crucial question. I was in denial. At around this time, I found that my Auntie was sick, and almost certainly on her deathbed. I made plans to see her as soon as possible, and hoping that the change of scenery would do me well.
With what little money I had saved, I bought a plane ticket to Jacksonville and boarded it that evening. The quiet chatter amongst the cabin thrummed in time with the heartbeat in my head, with my restless fingers, and with the relentless question that hounded me night after night. By now I had almost turned myself face-to-face with the answer, and boy did I not like it. My new, even more urgent question was: Which heartbeat would stop first--the one in my head or the one in my heart? I arrived at Auntie's in time to bid her one last loving farewell before she ascended the golden staircase heavenwards. In grief, having lost everyone I had ever loved, and knowing no one nor anyone knowing me, truly, I blindly stumbled to the beach.
And there I realized: what was the use of staying on this world, to be lonely and only hear the lonely heartbeat in response, when my family waited for me in paradise, in Zion? Why have to worry about dying because the heartbeat's owner died? I could end it now myself, and that's what I was going to do. I loaded rocks from the surf into my pockets and prepared to swim out and never return, my body weighted to the ocean floor. How foolish I had been to not even consider the life of the other person connected to me, how their heart would stop when mine resounded its last beat in their head. How foolish I had been, but no matter, for at the moment I was readying myself to be flung out at mercy to the crashing waves, I heard something. Or more rather, I didn't. The heartbeat no longer screamed it's threat within my mind. I cocked my head to one side, listening; but it was true: it was gone! I was overjoyed, in ecstasy, and then I remembered that when it failed to beat out its presence in the world, then so most definitely would I. And at that very moment I felt a pang in my chest; I gasped for breath--and then everything fell black.
It might have been an old woman, slowly slipping away while she slept, it might have been connected to a youth born the same day as I all the way across the world, hit by a car, or it may have been someone as troubled as I by the heartbeat and its implications that he or she ended our lives before I had the chance to. Perhaps I will never know, all I know is that now, the heartbeat is gone.
The newspapers said I had died the night before from sudden cardiac arrest alone on the beach, but there was no one on this earth who knew the true reason, no one who cared but the sea, which left its rhythm roaring in place of mine heartless yet full of heart.
Title Quote: Luscious Jackson, Sexy Hypnotist
