A familiar echo.

Merit: Memento
Type: Fetter (3)
The Juilliard Metronome
Threshold: The Stricken
Key: Phantasmal
Channeled Numen: Phantasm (Wits + Expression)

Juilliard has the highest suicide rate in America, one of those unspoken, open secrets about the school. Nobody ever talks about why the rate sky-rocketed in 1977, but there’s a story told about a young woman who died that year with her hands at the keys of a Bosendorfer, her head resting near a metronome still ticking when they found the body.

In her first year at the school an unhealthy infatuation with her studies germinated a seed of discontent within Melissa Brown. Jealousy and paranoia motivated the girl to lash out at a highly competitive student body with sabotage, to create chaos where there was none. She would subtly change musical notation, send a piano out of tune, instruments would vanish then reappear on opening nights; anything to shatter confidence and ruin the competition.

Melissa’s finest method of torture was delivered via the metronome. The girl devised a trick where the weight would slide out of position during any performance or rehearsal and speed musicians into quickly-paced meltdowns. Nobody could pin-point the exact cause of the suicide rate upswing because there were so many avenues toward breakdown for the fragile minds of musicians. Nobody really questioned why Melissa’s classmates were dropping like flies.

Melissa’s OCD only enhanced her musical ability but she neglected herself, unable to see beyond her driving rage to be that year’s virtuoso and eventually died of a wasting bacterial infection in her lungs on the morning of her triumphant graduation day performance at Carnegie Hall. She thought it was just a cough.

Her ghost gravitated toward and was bound to the device by one of NYC’s infamously intolerant Advocates; drawn in by the stuttering beat and trapped there as punishment. The ghost within is compelled to action nearly the moment the inverted pendulum rod is unhooked, eager to enhance any performance to it’s pinnacle (success) and longs for the opportunity to shake a venue to rubble with a sonic boom (dramatic failure).

Benny texted her when it was safe to disengage the nurse and make her way downstairs. They pulled up to the lock-up around Madison Square Garden. Benny had enough pull at the Mayor’s Office to get these last-minute permits. Police barricades for five city blocks. Deep in the background the metronome began to carry on it’s steady tock.

She exited the cab and the illusion took hold like hooks in her eyes.

Worse, pins and needles in a soul moved for the first time.

The architect was positioned on the north east corner of 33rd St, standing as tall and as strong as he had been at twenty and the illusion was real.

What he wanted most to see were the elephants marching up the avenue as they did when he was a kid and there they were. Big as life, their smell tremendous; even more pungent than the sewer vents and opposing - flowers.

Fifteen pachyderms of varying sizes wreathed in garlands of flowers.

How the circus used to do it when the circus was still a big deal a million years ago.
Some kind of miraculous throwback, the architect watched the parade with tears in his eyes. He was even eating from a bag of peanuts.

Some trick, Benny.

Penny could tell the fiction and fabrication from the real world but let herself get swept up in the commotion. How much research had gone into this. There were women in sequined costumes riding horses a color she’d never seen in nature. Acrobats in the middle of the street. Men walking across oddly flexible balance beams.

It was the best night of his life and when the hour was up, Benny made sure the architect’s death took a dignified turn back in his home among all the things he’d collected over the years. Among his most prized possessions, accolades and other accoutrement of a life well-lived.

He was ready.

Peyton, what does paradise sound like?

Too short a night for so frequent a beep from the phone. Text messages, the ultimate means of passive aggressive communication. Ding.

What are you afraid of? Turn it on.

No sleep, just minutes and seconds between the bump, the next bump and the grind. Ding.

Ding.


Ding.


Penny.

To the empty room, aloud. “What.” The phone twitched a tone. Ding. Irresistible.

The time has come to turn your heart into a temple of fire.

Clear instruction. Penny got out of bed. Time to leave Maine, thank fuck.

Your essence is gold hidden in dust.

Benny meant the metronome. Left in the basement after Devin made it work by accident with a DO NOT SHAKE post-it stuck on the base. And the note. The note inside was a nice touch.

Place, date, time. 

The note crumpled neatly in the shape of the inside of her fist and stayed that way as it sailed across the room into the bin.

To reveal its splendor, you must burn in the fire of love.

So he knew about that. Penny chucked the phone in her bag. What did she expect, really. Benny spies. More cursory packing. She was going to New York. They have everything there, the fuck did she need to pack? Splendor. What’s that mean. What’s he got planned.

Rituals change is what Compton said. But they don’t change, not that much. He takes off after fuck-ups, and personal implosion. That is the old man’s ritual, whether he realizes it or not.

Still. Friday. And all that entails.
Penny would have to coerce someone into making the drive. Didn’t want to wake anyone in the house, have to explain why she was going before she left for however long.

Benny would ask about Chase. And vice versa. The note was specific. Benny would not ask about a stranger. She could make it look the right way.

It’s not work, it’s devotion, it’s correction, it’s necessity. What Penny was knew first and foremost about Friday is that love, as a method, continued to be a four letter word.

First impulse; release the catch, let the static weight swing, see what happens.

Penny felt it stir, the ghost in the machine and instinctively knew she had no way to channel whatever lay within. When the pendulum swung it was a feeling like .. like being the tide and feeling the pull of the full moon.

Something Keene said skimmed the surface of waking thoughts. “I’m not allowed to trust myself anymore.” Penny thumbed an expletive-filled response. She was not hungover, still had all her teeth, fingers, toes. For now.

Second impulse, bring it back to Benny.

It had no return address but after getting the run-down from Devin, of course it came from him. Of course he called her. Of course that’s why he was summoning her now.

So she left Maine in the middle of the night, the note on the fridge NYC BRB and she arrived two hours later by charter plane out of Bangor International, Eddie the doped-up cop trailing after in another of the follow-cars.

“Your instincts are getting better,” he greeted her on the tarmac.

“We’ve come to an understanding and it’s mostly a selfish act, Benny.” A beat, handing over the metronome “It’s not for me.”

“You read the note.” Penny hated the good girl tone he delivered that line with. Benny continued through, breaking the silence “And that Devin seems nice…” and Penny picked up the trailing comment “…a little,”

Benny interrupted to opine with firmness “Exactly-“

“-like me when I was that age.” Reluctant to admit it, “She even likes the old man, too.”

Their police escort flashed only red lights, lined up and led the way through the Midtown Tunnel. The checkpoint was backed up three vans long. Benny, impatient “Time may ever be with us but, for our friend the architect…” and the driver swung out into the unblocked lane.

Penny knew who he meant, she had met him at one of the mayor’s functions at a time when the High Line was just an installation at MOMA looking for investors.
Pancreatic cancer.
Stage 4.
“He’d like to see something special.”

“At least he got to see his vision come to life,” Penny offered.

Benny thumbed the metronome’s surface “Now he’ll get to see his dreams come true.”

Her favorite city was the light at the end of the tunnel. Speeding into lower Manhattan, looping to the West Side by the FDR every light shone brighter than she remembered.

Fewer sodium glares, fewer familiar faces, a sad thought, New York is closing.

He preceded her by minutes into the Tribeca loft. Some people were still superstitious about living downtown, others more or less comfortable witin a permanent haunt.

Penny, only slightly bothered, stood there with the body guard-slash-nurse in the hall. It did not hold the antiseptic smell she had thought might permeate the air. Instead it smelled of jasmine plants, loamy, lush, exotic considering how many stories they were vaulted in the air.

Another attendant adhered himself to Benny’s elbow, murmured something then stepped away brusquely to make their transition to street level as smooth as possible. The nurse had an agenda, believed he was escorting the dying man. The nurse was very busy and didn’t notice what Benny was up to. It was Penny’s job, he’d told her, to keep the nurse busy.

Penny, always good for a distraction. The best.

From a certain vantage point Penny could watch what went on in the foreground; Benny fastened something around the architect’s neck whom he then helped out of his death bed. She watched a trickle of blood drip down Benny’s thumb, pool in the cufflink. Caught sight of the key, the blood at the architect’s collar-line.

Sloppy, Benny. Or maybe deliberate. So she could see how it worked.

The moment the necklace touched his skin, the architect transformed. A man in his prime in rumpled clothes. The architect squeezed Benny’s hand, a profound gesture of thanks, went to change and returned in his best suit. The one he’d be buried in.

One More River To Cross

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvJ_gIOSWgQ

Lobby Posters, Napoleon In Rags

“I’m just as fucked up as they say.”

Get to finally get to know each other…

At some point I found myself rehabilitating in the library, what serves for one in this place, anyway. Makes me miss the old loft, Eva… Daisy.

It’s kind of everywhere, not just the one place, but the essentials are here in this room with one blocked window. The light hardly gets in at all but the heat stays, warms the bones of the house.

The heat stays and ignites a perfume in the air of decaying paper, crumbling glues, peeling cardboard. Vanilla, the odor of so many decades in and out of storage. They don’t know it, but the smell of this collection is home. I’ve known it since the first night in Frisco. Since Baltimore. Memphis.

It’s easy to stay here and be this pile of broken bones, closeted away. So many flimsy photocopies that need sorting, the index needs updating.

Found the old Speak & Spell.

Thought we lost it.