TORCH MUSIC
A collaboration with M.F. Korn

George Llewellyn III was not exactly the typical suburban American. The generality of his neighbours, you see, had taken the trouble to clear their yards of endemic crabgrass. Not George, though. He was a bit anarchic on the quiet.

It was not as if his own parents were anarchic. They had got together in quite a planned sexual foray sort of way - a significant gestation period before the Millennium - and forged the makings of George. Nothing anarchic about that, I suggest. George's own children - mishaps, even miscegenations - were not, in any shape or form, anarchic personalities, despite their anarchic origins. They simply nagged poor old George into an early stiff gravity. Then went their own ways towards the stars.

So, George, left alone, still slightly anarchic, grizzled by once desirable grooves, enjoyed wading through the unkempt wastes of his yard - sometimes accompanied by one of his drinking cronies (usually ponderous Hoss), sometimes not - wondering if the skyline was really the sucking pit it was made out to be by the new Religiosos of 21st century downtown Towbar.

Then, he stumbled, upon a monolith. A monument of metal that had not been there the night before.

"My toe!" he cussed.

"Your what?" queried Hoss, spitting a quid of tooth-loose tobacco from his mouth.

"Shut your wipehole, Hoss! Can't you see this wadn't here before, now? Mother of Christ at Halftime, what is it?"

"You'd better watchit son! What the hell is it?"

Hoss swallowed a cuspidor's worth of brown fluid bacco juice backwash as his jaundiced boggle eyes popped out of his bulbous lard head.

The smooth, textural finish of the thing was immaculate and otherworldly. In the way that no 30 year machinist at the Exxon plant could have cut to specs if it were pure blue-twisted steel. Gunmetal but dark aquamarine, no, perhaps when they looked into it, they saw the black spectral absence of light - a proportionate object amidst these rings of smelly toadstools in George's yard, yes, of perfect dimension but a dimension of some other dimension, maybe not of this Earth. It stood magnificently, rising from the thatched rises of weeds and dandelions all ripe, like a futuristic Stonehenge triptych shooting to the celestial heavens from this rise of wild weeds.

"Don't touch it, Hoss!"

"I wadn't gonna touch it, now. Don't know what kinda metal that is? Do you?"

"I don't know. It ain't nothing like I ever saw before."

"It is kinda pretty, though."

A boy, evidently one of George's half-breed issue who hadn't yet left for the stars, yelled at him through a tattered screen door on the back porch.

"Daddy! Mamma said come inside and eat!"

"Go on and play Nintendo, boy! I'm busy!"

The boy cussed him behind his back, out of earshot and the door slammed on itself, the screen swinging in the wind at the concussion.

"Daddy, Mamma said come inside and eat!" whined George in mock of the voice now gone - an ancient habit whence he couldn't help himself. Yet, he'd been damn sure all his children left home yonks ago upon some godforsaken hunt for a better future - and his wife'd been dead for at least a tandem of eternities, or so it felt. A bit of a ghost, no doubt. He shrugged and spoke the! same words in sepulchral hushed tones as if to seek pardon for the earlier mockery: "Daddy, Mamma said come inside and eat."

Hoss ritually repeated the refrain, if a little off trail: "Daddy, Mamma said come inside to come inside her." He chortled as he spouted residues of plug juice every whichway of the wind.

The darkness was now taking store for the night - hugging the warm breaths of the stars to its bosom with fewer and fewer winks towards an approaching death ... hopefully a painful death of one of George's smart-arsed neighbours.

"Go get a torch!" snapped George. It being his yard, it was his right to make decisions.

Hoss scuttled off and the further Hoss scuttled off , the more George thought of a creature on all fours.

There was still sufficient seeping glow, by some trick of dusk, which allowed George to continue his examination of the metal monument. The rise of weeds honoured it with out-stretched leafy prayers. George knelt, too, as the wind again slammed the door.

It wasn't kneeling as in a genuflection, more that of getting a better look-see at his very own monolith. He daren't touch it, he thought; but why shouldn't it have been perfectly fine to touch it? - the contour, the smoothness, its capability as if it were charged with otherworldly kinetic energy, all wound up - but he didn't anyway.

The corrugated rusty shell of a 1973 Dodge Dart lay on its gut stomach, its life's breath long ago squeezed out of it like a carcrusher. Strewn about the tall sawgrass were rusty tools, a Big Wheel missing a back wheel, a jaded easy bake-oven caked in slimy mud and birdcrap, an old Sears washing machine engine, a Sears minibike chassis, gutted like a perch.

That night, despite the dying of the dusk, something compelled George to do something marvellous. Sucking in his slack dough pot, under the infinite palette of stars swirling, George cranked his Sears riding mower and attacked his lawn. He slew the five f!oot high dandelions, and longstanding perennial weeds, which before were so secure of their safety, and now which gallantly fell under the sheath of his power mower. The riding mower itself chocked and sucked in air, inhaling clouds of ragweed, dust, soot, old charcoal briquet mist of carbon, and minefields of petrified dog dirt. And yet the Sears mower persisted with George valiantly saddled atop his steed.

The odd thing was, George, who only liked Hank Williams, Kitty Wells, Ernest Tubb and Porter Waggoner tunes, found himself whistling the opening theme to Shostakovich's Fifth symphony, and actually heard the magnificent lush orchestration in his head, noticing well the ironical touches to the music that Shostakovich hid in there. And he hadn't the faintest idea why. As he cut a swathe around the pantheonistic monolith, and mushrooms, weeds and tentacles of crabgrass which radiated from several central hubs of root like that of octopi, he stared blankly at the black strangeness of the object, now whistling the second movement of the Shostakovich.

The stars suddenly seemed to begin talking to him in celestial harmoniousness. Melodiousness, too. Steeped and dipped in secret atonalities more fitting for Schoenberg than Shostakovitch. Holst made a ceremonial clash of astrological forces...

The noise was suddenly interrupted by the ponderous tympani of Hoss's paws arriving with a torch so powerful, George mistook it for a spotlight, shafting the night sky for the Luftwaffe around the peak of St Paul's Cathedral that he had seen in picture books. Silence ensued, as the Mower cut out. The stars were dead still. The monolith glinted in the strobes of a sudden electrical fault that seemed to beset the heavy-duty torch.

"Thought I'd bring the biggest baby in the shed," wheezed Hoss.

"I've been cultivating my garden, as Voltaire once told me I should," said George. He demonstrated with his wheeling arm the bowling-green garden his yard had become, the torchlight spluttering as it crested the black dunes of its imputed greenness. The monolith glinted like a wondrous emblem of Truth Foretold. There was a music about its shape neither man would have noticed, given the brash patchwork of a Towbar dawn. No, you see, with night, embossed by mankind's golden stuttering effulgence, showing the monolith up in its best light, there was a visible music moving around it like a kaleidoscopic halo.

"Who's Volt-Air?" croaked a kettledrum toad masquerading as a plugless Hoss, or vice versa.

As in answer, the monolith lit up like a colour organ and whined with its ondes martenot of Messianic fervour.

"Gee, Hoss, this like a Second Coming. I wish my dear old wife could come back and see it all..."

The door slammed, despite the lack of wind in the now soundless electricity of the air.

Though there was no glass but instead punctured rusty screen, a beatific light penetrated through the porch, of myriad colours to reveal the image of a Byzantine stained glass portrait, piercing the moth-ridden humid air into the sky. Blazing forth like an incandescent kleig light, the image was that of George as an old man, very old, lying in a bed in a pure white room. Hoss began crawling around on all fours, grunting like a pliocene ape, his cranium becoming bracheocephalic in nature, that of a Neanderthal, pointed skull. George's half-breed son came out of the door, and it appeared that he had rearranged his Nintendo 64 Gameboy to that of cleverly bypassed and manipulated circuitry, and he was holding this entertainment apparatus, which was clearly not for entertainment anymore. For some inexplicable reason, the wire extension to the Joystick was now soldered to a perforation in his left temple, that of "jacking himself in" to the now much more sublime and complicated Nintendo apparatus.

Hoss climbed the pecan tree, scuttling up its branches in a very economical and easy manner, grunting the whole way, the lycanthropic fur patches now visible through his workshirt, which now was in tatters due to his morphism. George stared into eyes of his son, and they melded into one symbiotic blend. The monolith beamed like a popsicle of pure evangelical white light, humming unknown microbytes of mathematical symbols unknown to the race of Man. Knee music. Torch music. The song went on.

George said, "Son, did you send the signal?"

Son or Song, he wasn't sure which. But the boy, his temple bearing wiring, replied, "The signal is going to the stars."

Hoss had regressed to that of a sort of pliocene or equine ape, oblivious now to the transcendence of George.

George woke up in a white room, one hundred and ninety years old.

The monolith grew as silent as the old Dodge Dart in George's backyard.

George blinked.

When he opened his eyes, he was sucking his thumb. The blue-green globe of Earth lay beneath the placenta-sac which contained him. George was a star-foetus.

Anarchy was his watchword. Or his curse. He tried to clamber back - through the nettles and crabgrass - to some semblance of reality whence he could take an overview. Towbar township floated in some aetheric miasma of religious half-growth - cults and cuirasses covering its crystalline chest. And the monolith rose from between his loins, playing such glassy music - unheard, even in the circular arguments of a minimal millennium. It became, eventually, a choral Requiem with an infinite number of deaths at its heart. His afforested garden-centre had given birth to a stiff gravity.

"Oi! Oi! Cuckold!" shouted Hoss, as he gallopped away on heavy hooves, towards the Rose Garden. Hoss himself, after all, was no more than a centaur, one with a cockadillo coxcomb.

George tried to shave his chin, this time, with the Sears. But then his dear dear wife emerged from anarchy and made his monolith stereo.

(Only the Bartok joke from Shostakovitch's Leningrad Symphony played out towards the playful end of time, where a better future waited, if not for George certainly for those he loved.).


Previously unpublished