Maestro
I hadn’t seen the Maestro in almost sixty years, but I recognized him on sight, despite his burdened posture and thinning hair. His eyes protruded as if reaching out when he approached me in my doctor’s waiting room and sat.
“You have a familiar face, if I may be so forward,” he said, “and perhaps for that reason a question came to mind when I saw you, one I’ve been unable to answer and that seems too intimate to put to a stranger. What reflects back at you from your own depths? I ask this not because I expect you to reply or as a personal challenge, but as one person among many who face this ongoing question, which will remain with us until the world as we know it heaves to a halt. Possibly some people in this room are using their electronic devices to distract themselves from their reflections and the incurable uncertainty we carry with us wherever we go. Last month I completed a ten-day hospital stay in a progressive-care unit. I suffered from severe double pneumonia and was hooked up to oxygen for the duration of my stay. My doctors prescribed steroids and three broad-spectrum antibiotics, and I gradually got better, a surprising outcome since they learned after analyzing my sputum that I’d contracted a viral pneumonia, which could not have been cured by the drugs dripping through my IV. As I lay in bed unable to sleep due to the flow of caregivers pouring into the room, I felt an encroaching sense of disappearance. I became disoriented and began to see things in the painting on the wall in front of me, men in hats large enough to disguise them moving in bizarre patterns, some sneaking in my direction, others hiding in stands of trees or behind rooftop chimneys. I asked a nurse who’d shaken me awake to give me a pill what the subject matter of the painting was. A rural village, she said, with plants and trees, a few rustic houses, no people. I asked her to turn off all the lights when she left because an overhead fluorescent bulb filled the room with shadows I couldn’t resist trying to identify no matter how much I assured myself that only caregivers entered my room. Lying in the dark, I was sure something unseen was approaching, something that would reduce me to nothing, which implied in a way I could not refute that I’d never been more than a fluctuating set of impulses and desires, despite of all my efforts to attain substance.”
His eyes stayed on mine as he paused to catch his breath, and I remembered days in high school when we joked about him hearing thunderbolts inside his head. He wore the same frayed blazer every day and had a wispy beard and quoted poetry or philosophy when the subject at hand called for it. He did not ask about my health, though he could see my nasal cannula and the attached oxygen cylinder in the cart by my knee. I believed he knew the answers without asking.
“All my life,” he resumed, “I have experienced my mind and voice as grinding in unison against an obstacle I could not name or move past or grasp the nature of. But in my diminished condition, with little strength to fight, it came to me that I’d created the obstacle to embody everything I’d failed to understand and reach and that my struggle against it had provided me with a dramatic purpose. Consistent with my loss of the obstacle was the idea that all the self-defining stories I’d told myself had been contrived to sustain an illusory identity and should therefore be disowned. Would anything survive beneath my discarded striving and this nullifying awareness? Would some form remain to hang my being upon? I had no answers, and for weeks I’ve been disturbed by the thought of similar ideas and questions coming to people as they age, grow ill, and gradually dwindle to nothing, just as we are, Stuart.“
I lowered my head, stunned at the sound of my name. What did I fear had been revealed? My growing erosion? Was it what was left of what I called me?
A woman called out his name, and he stood. A door opened and closed, and I glanced up. A minute later a voice called my name. I went through the same door and on my way to the examination room looked down hallways but did not see him.
I’d had a similar painting in front of my hospital bed. Its contents appeared to shift in the dim light as dark clouds intermittently blocked the sun. I imagined human activity, people going about their lives and sometimes peering toward me.
My doctor said I was slowly recovering and he wanted to see me again in two weeks. I stepped out of the room, my mind on the Maestro, annoyed with myself for not facing him after he said my name. How had he known me? He’d always looked at us, his classmates, as if he knew better than we did what we were thinking. Had his experience enabled him to sense my erosion during my illness? What story could he tell himself that would allow him to continue and would he believe the story?
I searched for him on my computer later, but his name was not unusual and I wearied of scrolling through pages of hits, some of them obituaries I read through.
I returned to my doctor’s office for my follow-up visit, still toting oxygen. I looked for the Maestro, more interested in hearing his voice than the doctor’s.
We have not crossed paths again.
* * * * *
Through
I had let Pierre know I’d be in town for a night. I hadn’t seen him in over a year and hoped we could get together for a drink, renew our conversations about reading and politics. Instead, Pierre had invited me to a party at his house that night. The firepit would be going, guests outside and inside, many of them from the local historical society he said he’d recently joined. I still had interests in town and needed to check in on one of them that afternoon, attend a meeting, address safety concerns, then back to the hotel for a shower and over to Pierre’s.
I arrived somewhat late and parked in Pierre’s long front yard, the last space available in the row. A sign on his front door instructed guests to enter. I followed the sound of voices, on the lookout for Pierre. A lot of people were outside, and on the covered patio I saw a table with wine bottles and plastic glasses, nearby two ice-filled coolers with beer and sodas. I poured myself a glass of wine and smiled at a few of the guests, none of them familiar, none of them greeting me, but their eyes lingered. The firepit blazed in the backyard, smoke swirling, and I caught sight of Pierre in its light. As I walked toward him I passed a couple headed to the house and they angled their path away from me. Pierre saw me, waved me over. We said hello and he asked how I’d been. He did not introduce me to the two men he’d been speaking with and they did not address me or shake my hand when I told them my name. The three men continued their discussion, ignoring me. Figuring I’d interrupted something, I turned to the firepit, its glow illuminating clusters of people, some of their eyes on me, their body language suggesting lowered voices, shared secrets.
One reason I’d left the town was that I’d gotten sick of the relentless gossip. Whenever I was in a group of any size, at a dinner party or a restaurant or wherever, the latest tales would eventually be unleashed, the morally superior listeners shaking their heads while craving more of the same. I began to have nightmares where gossip targets were burned at the stake, carved up, and eaten on buttered buns.
The number of firepit watchers increased and it struck me that more than a handful seemed disapproving of my presence. Had some mention of me turned up in the county newspaper concerning one of my interests? Years before I’d bought a piece of property populated by three decades-old live oaks. I’d cut the trees down so that the property could be developed. The newspaper quoted me saying that I was willing to pay the fine for chopping down the trees. The story was accurate and I couldn’t object, but I didn’t see why others should object to my paying a fine for removing trees when I’d had a legitimate reason for doing so. I stared at the faces of onlookers and some of them stared back as if seeing right through me. The fire began to unnerve me, a nudge could tip me into the flames, and I imagined the guests watching as the flames engulfed and then devoured me. Could their attitude be caused by those trees? What were they thinking? Had one of them been at the meeting earlier? Was I imagining things? Perhaps they merely wondered who I was and if I was supposed to be there.
I abandoned the atmosphere of the firepit and went inside, hoping to see a friendly face. I finished my wine and put the glass down on a table. I saw that Pierre was now in the kitchen and engaged in a conversation with a woman whose head tilted close to him, as if reading tiny print written on his face. He noticed me but showed no recognition. At a loose end, I introduced myself to a couple peering out from the comfort of a wall. I had the feeling they’d already known my name and they did not tell me theirs. After we stood in silence for a while I left them, fearing they judged I was disrupting their peace.
I drifted, anger coming over me. I’d taken a motto from my father and had lived by it for years, not exclusively, but I kept returning to it. Stay in, stay quiet, stay out of trouble, he often said. Should I retreat to my hotel room? People eyed me, their gazes converging. Everyone had a dark side, even them, and they were showing it in the way they treated me. They seemed to be provoking me to ask what they thought they were looking at so they’d have a right to ask me for explanations and answers. I wasn’t going to get that ball rolling.
I went out the way I’d come, somewhat regretting I hadn’t thanked Pierre, but what would I have thanked him for? I walked down the row of parked vehicles, hearing footsteps behind me. Was it someone wanting to tell me off? I stopped and saw a man approaching. He passed without a wave or a word, cringing slightly. Did he think he had something to fear from me? What did he think I was thinking? I followed my motto and didn’t ask, though I thought about it all the way back to the hotel.