It is All Music

"The more one studies the harmony of music, and then studies human nature, how people agree and how they disagree, how there is attraction and repulsion, the more one will see that it is all music."- Hazrat Inayat Khan

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Murky dolphin (short story)

I saw you in a dream. The water was filthy, and I could still see your eye, the outline of your tail. You were alone, but seemed to be smiling. We played together. I felt like I should try to help you, somehow.

I crawled out of the water, shaking from cold. Where was I? Scotland? Ireland? Some Northern country, though the roads and parking places were by now filled with sewage and standing water like in the rutted slum roads of South America. Not steaming hot though.

I remember hiding behind a car parked in near-turquoise sludge. Was it reflecting the sky? Sometimes there are those stagnant pools that grow weird hyper-colored bacteria. I don’t know. I just wanted to get back to you. What had possessed me to be in that murky water?

It was as if I awoke there. I suddenly became conscious of my position as you investigated me. Some part of me wonders if this is really real? If this is a message from my future-self, tickled by a dolphin snout somewhere in freezing-cold, filthy water in some other time? Your eye seemed very real, and like it was probing my brain, smiling, but not maliciously.

Why were you alone? Somewhere in my memory I think of a lone dolphin off the British Isles, but I can’t remember why. People come to visit you by boat, give you illicit ham sandwiches. Where are your pod-mates? Your lover? Your wife? You seemed to me male, not that I could see that far in the polluted water. How is your eye so clear? How could you see me so clearly?

It seemed salty, and green, and murky. Am I remembering this correctly? I am transcribing this from a conversation I had. I told the story to Sean while he was searching for a bottle, lying on the floor in a super-drunk stupor. A murky dolphin? Whaaat? he giggled and slurred, trying to get the top off, his coordination not quite coordinated enough.

We were in my mom’s kitchen, in a haze. My sister Lillie appeared, looking out over the bar at the living room, ignoring Sean like he was a dream, like he was from another time, like she couldn’t see him clearly through the murkiness that pervaded. He was giggling again, still trying to get the top off.

She was melancholy, in a staged-theatre kind of way. I never see the rug as dirty, until you are around. What? I wonder. It’s comparative. When other people are here, I yell at them, ask them to take their shoes off to save the white carpeting. I can see now it is really brown. Dingy. Your being here makes it seem less white.

I know distinctly that this is about time. That this is about not being around. Seeing things as others would see them. Others you respect, others you wish were around more often, to see more clearly. I don’t think I’m judgmental.

I don’t care about the dingy path through the white rug (it’s true, it’s there, you can tell people have tramped dirt through there). It’s clear that she would not care either, if it weren’t for my presence. Sean is still on the floor, banging the bottle and reaching for the under-sink cabinet.

I feel a mild sense of panic for him, him getting into that cabinet when he’s already too drunk to twist off a plastic bottle-cap. I don’t make a move to help him. The scene is dissolving and I join Lillie in looking out over the bar in a melancholy haze, mouthing words that don’t come out as sounds but more like bubbles.

Charlotte Savage 9-26-2011