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The music made me do it
Sep. 16th, 2014 05:04 pm"I'm sorry. I just — it just happened. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to. I should've told you, I just—"
He doesn't remember leaving her, the conversation, or the house; he doesn't remember getting on his bike and taking it towards the tunnels. He doesn't care to, either.
He wants to stay in the moment, not the uncomfortably close past: he checks both mirrors and finds the road behind him clear, but he also remembers the cop in the SUV that got him six months ago, and turns his head to confirm that no one's following him. The coast looks clear as he enters the tunnel, and with a grin, he rolls his right wrist, and the bike roars — he watches the numbers climb: ninety, one hundred, then one twenty. He's hugging the bike, the top of his visor barely clearing the windscreen, as he flies throught he empty tunnel.
The bike thrums under him and the engine sounds pure and beautiful and he almost takes his mind off the last week and yet... something's missing. He frowns for a moment, and then mentally says 'ah-ha' and reaches up to tap the side of his helmet, where the bluetooth receiver was nested.
And as a pounding bass beat starts to blasts through the helmet, he smiles, and rolls the throttle some more.
Eventually, he stops on a cliffside, kills the engine, and simply sits there for a moment. The music is still blasting, but now it feels wrong, somehow, and he turns the sound off, until it's just him, and the trees, and the darkness.
And the stars. He takes a seat, exhaling all of the anger and the pain out as he does, and simply looks upwards at the sky, watching the points of light overhead, the quick movement of the planes, the occasional meteor that flashes and is no more.
-
A few years later, he finds himself in an observatory as part of a college class. Right now it's after hours, and he slips in through a side door that's left unlocked. He's come here for some solitude, to think about his life.
He needs to declare a major, but he's not really sure which one to take — none of the classes have really spoken to him in a way that he would want to spend two years learning the intricacies and taking the higher level classes. In fact, the only class he even regularly attends anymore is astronomy — which he wryly figures that it is perhaps the reason that he's chosen the observatory as his hiding spot, his thinking spot. He doesn't know how to use the telescope, and doesn't try to, content to watch as it rotates on its rails, tracking some celestial object or another.
He simply sits in the office chair, spins it around, stares at everything around him: the large telescope pointing to the heavens, the rows of computer monitors, the projector and screen for classes and displays. The silence gets to him after a bit, and he puts on some headphones and shuffles his playlist, sitting back as the music — bad EDM — starts playing.
But between two songs, he realizes that there's other music, from outside his headphones, and he takes them off, puzzled. The music — classical, of some kind — is a relentless marching beat, overlaid with a brass melody. The lights slowly dim, and the projector turns on, displaying to him a sphere, yellow, round, fiery, currently spewing forth huge coronal mass ejections.
"The sun," he says out loud, and is rewarded by the sun shrinking on the screen, another dot joining it, and another, and another, until the entire solar system is laid out in front of him. They stay still for a second, in time with a pause in the music, and then start their orbits, and he watches as they leave neat, arcs behind them, as Mercury orbits quickly and Neptune and Pluto slowly make their way around, exchanging positions, until they complete the arcs to become circles — ellipses, he corrects himself in his head.
The music fades, but another piece starts, this one dominated by the strings, and the planets almost seem to pulse as they move, brightening as the upbeatness of the piece reaches them. And then, as he watches, the solar system shrinks and starts, itself, to move across the screen, orbiting something yet unseen.
He sits, transfixed, as the solar system recedes to be no more than a dot amongst the stars of the slowly turning Milky Way, until the lights start coming back on.
"Musica universalis," a voice says, and he turns to find his Astronomy professor — Doctor Arroway — standing in the doorway, smiling at him.
"Excuse me?" he asks.
"The harmony of the spheres. It's a term used to describe the movements of the celestial bodies. It's not music, per se — certainly not the stuff you're used to listening to — but there's a certain rhythm to it, a certain melody. More so, perhaps, if you also play Holst — that's what you're listening to — as you watch the movements."
He nods, looking back at the rotating arms of the barred spiral galaxy, as it gets smaller and smaller and other galaxies join it.
"I've noticed that you've been coming here a few days a week, and more recently. You never do anything with the equipment, though, and I thought that was a shame. I figured I'd give you a hint of what astronomy is like." She says, pulling up a chair and watching the movement of the stars with him.
"Is this going to be covered in the class?" he asks, curious.
"No, probably not. It's a bit esoteric for most people," she responds, and waits for the question that she know is coming, as sure as the seasons.
"Why me, then?"
"Because you have the look in your eyes," she says, smiling. "The look of someone looking to find reason among chaos, to find a melody and always pursue it. I remember that look — I see it in the mirror, every day. And I learned to recognize it when my professor told me about it."
The music fades, here, and Professor Arroway doesn't put the next song on. She simply waits.
Her student says nothing for a moment; he simply looks back at the projection, now starting to zoom in again, having reached the level of the universe. When it gets to the point where the solar system takes up the entire screen, though, he speaks, listening the music now only in his head, imagining the orbits grow until they fill the observatory, the night sky.
"Will you teach me?"
He doesn't remember leaving her, the conversation, or the house; he doesn't remember getting on his bike and taking it towards the tunnels. He doesn't care to, either.
He wants to stay in the moment, not the uncomfortably close past: he checks both mirrors and finds the road behind him clear, but he also remembers the cop in the SUV that got him six months ago, and turns his head to confirm that no one's following him. The coast looks clear as he enters the tunnel, and with a grin, he rolls his right wrist, and the bike roars — he watches the numbers climb: ninety, one hundred, then one twenty. He's hugging the bike, the top of his visor barely clearing the windscreen, as he flies throught he empty tunnel.
The bike thrums under him and the engine sounds pure and beautiful and he almost takes his mind off the last week and yet... something's missing. He frowns for a moment, and then mentally says 'ah-ha' and reaches up to tap the side of his helmet, where the bluetooth receiver was nested.
And as a pounding bass beat starts to blasts through the helmet, he smiles, and rolls the throttle some more.
Eventually, he stops on a cliffside, kills the engine, and simply sits there for a moment. The music is still blasting, but now it feels wrong, somehow, and he turns the sound off, until it's just him, and the trees, and the darkness.
And the stars. He takes a seat, exhaling all of the anger and the pain out as he does, and simply looks upwards at the sky, watching the points of light overhead, the quick movement of the planes, the occasional meteor that flashes and is no more.
-
A few years later, he finds himself in an observatory as part of a college class. Right now it's after hours, and he slips in through a side door that's left unlocked. He's come here for some solitude, to think about his life.
He needs to declare a major, but he's not really sure which one to take — none of the classes have really spoken to him in a way that he would want to spend two years learning the intricacies and taking the higher level classes. In fact, the only class he even regularly attends anymore is astronomy — which he wryly figures that it is perhaps the reason that he's chosen the observatory as his hiding spot, his thinking spot. He doesn't know how to use the telescope, and doesn't try to, content to watch as it rotates on its rails, tracking some celestial object or another.
He simply sits in the office chair, spins it around, stares at everything around him: the large telescope pointing to the heavens, the rows of computer monitors, the projector and screen for classes and displays. The silence gets to him after a bit, and he puts on some headphones and shuffles his playlist, sitting back as the music — bad EDM — starts playing.
But between two songs, he realizes that there's other music, from outside his headphones, and he takes them off, puzzled. The music — classical, of some kind — is a relentless marching beat, overlaid with a brass melody. The lights slowly dim, and the projector turns on, displaying to him a sphere, yellow, round, fiery, currently spewing forth huge coronal mass ejections.
"The sun," he says out loud, and is rewarded by the sun shrinking on the screen, another dot joining it, and another, and another, until the entire solar system is laid out in front of him. They stay still for a second, in time with a pause in the music, and then start their orbits, and he watches as they leave neat, arcs behind them, as Mercury orbits quickly and Neptune and Pluto slowly make their way around, exchanging positions, until they complete the arcs to become circles — ellipses, he corrects himself in his head.
The music fades, but another piece starts, this one dominated by the strings, and the planets almost seem to pulse as they move, brightening as the upbeatness of the piece reaches them. And then, as he watches, the solar system shrinks and starts, itself, to move across the screen, orbiting something yet unseen.
He sits, transfixed, as the solar system recedes to be no more than a dot amongst the stars of the slowly turning Milky Way, until the lights start coming back on.
"Musica universalis," a voice says, and he turns to find his Astronomy professor — Doctor Arroway — standing in the doorway, smiling at him.
"Excuse me?" he asks.
"The harmony of the spheres. It's a term used to describe the movements of the celestial bodies. It's not music, per se — certainly not the stuff you're used to listening to — but there's a certain rhythm to it, a certain melody. More so, perhaps, if you also play Holst — that's what you're listening to — as you watch the movements."
He nods, looking back at the rotating arms of the barred spiral galaxy, as it gets smaller and smaller and other galaxies join it.
"I've noticed that you've been coming here a few days a week, and more recently. You never do anything with the equipment, though, and I thought that was a shame. I figured I'd give you a hint of what astronomy is like." She says, pulling up a chair and watching the movement of the stars with him.
"Is this going to be covered in the class?" he asks, curious.
"No, probably not. It's a bit esoteric for most people," she responds, and waits for the question that she know is coming, as sure as the seasons.
"Why me, then?"
"Because you have the look in your eyes," she says, smiling. "The look of someone looking to find reason among chaos, to find a melody and always pursue it. I remember that look — I see it in the mirror, every day. And I learned to recognize it when my professor told me about it."
The music fades, here, and Professor Arroway doesn't put the next song on. She simply waits.
Her student says nothing for a moment; he simply looks back at the projection, now starting to zoom in again, having reached the level of the universe. When it gets to the point where the solar system takes up the entire screen, though, he speaks, listening the music now only in his head, imagining the orbits grow until they fill the observatory, the night sky.
"Will you teach me?"
