Before we come around to Mrs. Wilkins’ response to this foul-smelling wretch who had appeared at her door, it is important that we share some basic background information about her. A brief biography is very much in order.
She was born on Tristan, February 13, 1948. She endured a relatively uneventful childhood, unusual only in the interest she had in music. From the time she was in the third grade, she would wake up early and get to school an hour before classes started so that she could play what was then the only piano on the island.
During the 1960’s many Tristanian parents felt that their children should have opportunities beyond fishing, working in the Plant, or licking stamps. For the first time in generations, young people were given the chance to leave the island to study. Nearly all of the students went to England since, due to some obscure diplomatic resolution, all Tristanians are able to travel on British passports.
Mrs. Wilkins, then simply known as Miss Wilkins, won a scholarship to Cambridge to study music. Once there, she rapidly became involved in the growing counterculture movement. She became fascinated, even obsessed, with the various forms of popular music then fashionable. The psychedelic music coming out of San Francisco at that point particularly grabbed her. Her favorite band was Strawberry Alarm Clock. Hoping to emulate their style, she formed a group of her own called Breakfast All Over.
Breakfast All Over’s best-known song “Eat it For Breakfast” rose as high as number seventeen on some British singles charts. Success was short lived: the band broke up soon after “Eat it” peaked on the charts, apparently because of an inability to decide which guru to follow.
After the breakup of the band, things only got worse for Miss Wilkins. Her thesis “Structural and Motivic Analysis of the Music of Strawberry Alarm Clock” was unanimously rejected by her department at Cambridge. She was forced to leave the University.
She decided to return to Tristan, hoping to be able to somehow make a living teaching music. Remembering her own difficulties in finding a piano to practice on, she spent most of the money that she had made with Breakfast All Over on a Steinway, which she had shipped to Tristan. The rest of the money she spent on a huge stereo system and an enormous collection of recordings, including at least five copies of everything Strawberry Alarm Clock had ever played. It was perhaps the largest private collection of psychedelic music ever assembled. This, too, was shipped back to Tristan.
Finally, she had herself shipped back to Tristan.
By the way, it was sometime during her stay in England that Leonore was born. Only Mrs. Wilkins knew for sure who the father was, but all she would say was that he was someone famous.
For years one of the most popular pastimes for Tristanians on rainy days was to speculate about who Leonore’s father could be. Many thought it was the Prince of Wales, whom she slightly resembled. Others, who had some awareness of music from Mrs. Wilkins’ record collection, thought it might be Jimi Hendrix, whom Leonore also resembled slightly. It was Tristan’s favorite mystery and it seemed that the answer would never be known for sure.
By the way, when she returned to the island with her piano and her thousands of records and reels of tape and her daughter, she announced to everyone that from now on she would be called Mrs. Wilkins and that she would now be their music teacher. Tristanians are overwhelmingly agreeable people and they willingly enough complied with her wishes.
All these things flashed through Walt’s mind in the long moment during which she stared at him in fixed concentration, then audibly drew her breath in through her teeth. She stood up hesitantly, telling him to wait in the parlor, she would be back.
II
W
hile Mrs. Wilkins
is out of the room, it might be an opportune time to remind the reader that this story is not about Walt alone. I am as much a part of it as is Walt, or Mrs. Wilkins, or even Jose, King of the Parking Lot, whom you have not yet met.
At about the time that our Mrs. Wilkins was searching through her three rooms of scratched and outdated recordings, I was descending from the roof of the apartment building in which I live. The building is at the corner of Ninth and Folsom streets in San Francisco. San Francisco is over seven thousand miles from the beaches and lobster pots of Tristan de Cunha.
What was I doing on the roof? I was checking the automatic transmitter, which I had built. I found it to be in perfect working order.
I walked casually down the steps. The first flight was bare wood, and so echoed under my feet. The other flights were carpeted and much less noisy. On the second floor, I stopped off at my apartment to check the antenna.
Building the actual transmitter had not really been a problem. Scavenging the parts was less difficult than I had expected. My only difficulty had been finding a suitable antenna. I needed a large and well-formed piece of high quality metal that would transmit my signal through the universe.
My solution had been staring me in the face. Like some kind of Zen paradox, I had missed the answer because it was right in front of me.
The frame of my Bosendorfer Imperial grand piano, which took up, and still takes up, about 90% of the floor space of my apartment, is about the best broadcast antenna imaginable. And it was already here. All I had to do was drop a signal wire from the transmitter down the side of the building, through my window, and attach it to one of the bolts on the capo bar.
I found the antenna, too, to be in perfect working order.
I decided that I should check the piano in its function as a piano, as well as being an antenna. I found it to work marvelously.
I do not really play the piano in any conventional sense of the word. I remember when I was in second grade, every Friday was talent day. The classes would get together and sit on the floor while the kids who at that young age thought themselves to be talented did their respective things.
There was one boy whose name I do not remember. Every single Friday he would sit at the decrepit upright piano and play “The Entertainer”. If there are nine months in a school year, that means that he played that same piece thirty-six times, every Friday without fail. For no reason was he ever sick or out on a religious holiday on a Friday.
At first I sort of envied him. I could play nothing on the piano or anything else, and he could at least play one thing. After a while I began to experience a subtle shift of feeling, perhaps the first time in my young life that I had sustained an emotional evolution. I grew to despise that kid, to dread school on Fridays, to malign the pompousness that would allow a seven year old to have so limited a repertoire, and be so blasted proud of it. I decided at some point that I would learn to play something on the piano, and it would be something better than his “Entertainer”.
And I did.
Today I can play Hindemith’s Second Piano Sonata. I can play at by memory. I can play it by touch in the dark, which I often do. I play it at all hours of the day and night.
It is the only thing I can play.
Undoubtedly, that boy who so aggravated me by playing the same piece over and over every Friday is no longer seven. He has gone off into the world somewhere. It is very likely that he no longer remembers his Friday glories of his youth. Or, perhaps, on drunken Thanksgivings, coaxed by family members; then, perhaps coaxed is not the right word: they ask him to play knowing that he will play whether they like it or not, this being a ritual of Thanksgiving, and they, being family, will do the right, nice, and honorable thing in asking him to play his fumbling version of that Joplin rag, if only to make him feel better, to make him feel that they like it, even; and if they are truly a religious family, they might say a collective prayer under their collective breath that, thank God, Thanksgiving only comes once a year, and this is the only time on the current journey around the sun that they have to appease this tipsy mediocrity.
Satisfied that all was well in my apartment, I went down the steps and on about my business.
I went out through the heavy glass front door of the building, pausing to check my mail. I was somewhat annoyed that the first day card I had ordered from Tristan de Cunha had not arrived yet. I turned left on Ninth Street and walked up to Market Street. Here I turned left and walked until I found the familiar steps down into the earth which announced a Station of the San Francisco Municipal Railway. For eighty-five cents I could ride the N Judah train back and forth as long as I wanted. I spent many afternoons shuttling endlessly between the Ferry Building at one extreme, and the Pacific Ocean at the other. Thinking, always thinking. There existed no less expensive, or more expansive, form of solitude in all the City.
There, you are all reminded. Now, please do not let me stray too far from your mind in all this about Walt and Tristan. I shall fade back into the wings of this story now, for I don’t want to keep poor Mrs. Wilkins waiting.
Oh, before I go, I should note that Tristan de Cunha is the most remote spot on this planet that we call home. It is more than two thousand miles from any other bit of land big enough to stand on and habitable by human beings. Some writers who have never visited the island imagine it to be the loneliest place on Earth.
III
W
hen she returned
it was with an enormous armload of records. She had determined that the music playing in Walt’s head was within her particular field of specialization. She felt that, on the basis of what Walt had said, she could safely narrow the choices down to about two hundred possibilities, all but two of which were in her collection. The thirty or so records under her arm comprised what she felt to be the most likely candidates.
For the next three hours Mrs. Wilkins was like the wind. She threw records on the turntable, playing a few seconds of each at maximum volume until Walt shook his head no, signaling her to tear it off the still-turning platform, more often than not scratching the record in the process.
They covered a huge range of music. Walt had been fairly sure that the words were in English, so she had concentrated primarily on British and American groups. Others gradually made their way into the mix though; Canadian bands, South African bands, groups from all over the Caribbean, the Philippines, Asian Bands, South-, East-, and Central-European bands. Even one power trio from Uruguay that did a few numbers in English did not escape.
As the hours wore on, Walt found himself feeling worse and worse. He experienced in the extreme the displacement any listener feels on hearing two dissimilar pieces of music played at once. The ever-changing audio barrage thrown at him by Mrs. Wilkins frightened him. In contrast, the music in his head seemed serenely safe and familiar. Of course he did not know what it was, that was what he was here to find out, but it was beginning to feel almost a part of him.
He was also beginning to feel faint. It took some time until he realized that this was from hunger. Judging from the looks of his shack, he had last night vomited up everything he had eaten for the last several weeks, as well as several vital internal organs. He knew he was already strained far beyond the few social skills he had mastered. He knew of no way to ask Mrs. Wilkins for food and, unless he went out on his boat today, which he knew he was totally incapable of doing, he would have no fish to eat or any money to buy other food.
The aural vertigo conspired with the cacophony in his body. He felt himself swaying involuntarily from side to side. His shoulders slipped forward. His vision became grey, then black around the edges. He knew that he was about to lose consciousness again.
As he pitched forward from his chair down to the floor he heard a sound. If he had had the musical vocabulary he would have known that it was a very familiar electric guitar repeatedly sounding the interval of a major third. As it was, all he knew was that it was the beginning of the cycle of the endlessly repeating music in his head. He wondered if it could just be an echo in his mind of the music that tormented him. As he lay face down on the floor, his weight on his right shoulder with his still-vomit-saturated sweaters making squishy noises on the planking, he realized that the same music was coming from the speakers as from inside his head. For the first time he was hearing this music with his ears.
He managed a wordless scream to Mrs. Wilkins over the music. Somehow he was suddenly on his feet, arms out at angles he did not understand, dancing stiff-legged around the room.
He crashed around the room, breaking several small items swept from tables and countertops. He crashed into walls, leaving putrid stains. He shouted that this was the right music, that he knew he had been right all along: he could not have made up this music, it belonged to someone else.
Then he did faint.
IV
W
alt woke up after
an indefinite amount of time. He was lying in a feather bed, with real blankets, and with an actual pillow under his head. In his own shack he used only tattered tarpaulins and fishing nets for bedding and a bundle of sweaters that refused to adhere to his body any longer on which to rest his head.
Mrs. Wilkins was gently dabbing his forehead with a moist facecloth. As his eyes began to focus, he saw that he was in a place which he had before seen only through the window: Leonore’s bedroom. Leonore herself was nowhere to be seen.
Walt felt weaker then at any previous moment in his life. Mrs. Wilkins explained to him that he had been unconscious for three days. He opened his mouth and tried to speak, but found his tongue welded to his palate with dried mucous. As he had expected, the music continued to play in his head.
Mrs. Wilkins dipped the cloth into a basin of water and squeezed a few drops onto Walt’s tongue. The relief was immense. When he was able to speak he told her that he was very thirsty, and hungry too. She left him to rest and went out to the kitchen.
She returned a few minutes later with weak tea, toast, and a soft boiled egg. She actually fed him part of the egg with a spoon and held the teacup for him until he was strong enough to sit up.
When Walt was able to pull himself up to a sitting position, he took over feeding himself. With every bite he felt his strength, and his hunger, increasing. By the time he had eaten all the toast he was ravenous. He asked Mrs. Wilkins to please bring him more food. He licked the plate the toast had been on. Mrs. Wilkins hurried out of the bedroom.
She was gone longer this time. Walt’s stomach was roaring. He chewed his knuckles, his bedsheet, he would have chewed the sole of his rubber boots if he had been able to locate them.
Finally, after an impossible length of time, Mrs. Wilkins returned, heavily laden with food. She had a large bowl of oatmeal, four pancakes, thick slices of homemade bread, a whole pot of stronger tea, a jar of berry jam that she had made herself the previous spring, and three eggs, scrambled.
Walt spread the plates far and wide over the bed. He sampled each one in turn. He played games, eating two bites from each plate moving in a clockwise direction, then four bites from each in a counter-clockwise direction. Soon enough the food was gone. Walt was anything but full. Mrs. Wilkins now looked truly terrified. She ran out of the room, then out of the house. Walt heard the front door bang behind her.
He stayed in bed, not knowing what else to do. He lay on the edge of sleep when Mrs. Wilkins returned with three neighbor women. All of them carried large trays of food. Walt lost track of the things he was eating. He stopped noticing tastes and textures. His hands were a blur of motion, spooning brown liquids, stabbing green things with a fork, picking up everything with his hand and forcing it into his mouth. He ate the way he had once seen a group of sharks eat a pair of seals into a bloody nothingness.
When he stopped to breathe and look up, he saw that the women were covered in spray. As he raised his eyes to meet theirs, the neighbor ladies turned as one and ran screaming out of the house. Only Mrs. Wilkins remained by his side, and she was looking awfully perplexed and more than a little worried. She asked him if he had had enough to eat and he replied that he was in fact feeling quite full now.
Full yes, but not satisfied. Mrs. Wilkins still had not told him what the music was. He asked her. She seemed perplexed, her wandering mind showed through her eyes.
After a pause of several seconds that a better educated Walt would have recognized as a symptom of shock, her head snapped on her neck: she had realized what he was talking about.
She told him that he had responded to a recording by the Easybeats. Even with her vast knowledge of the music of that era of human history, she was unaware of any other recordings of this group. It was as if they had banded together for the exclusive purpose of one song, then disappeared off the face of the earth. However, she added that their one song, “Friday on my Mind”, was a masterpiece, perhaps among the five best works to come out of the entire movement.
From Mrs. Wilkins this was extraordinarily high praise. Not only was she the world’s foremost authority on the music of the 1960’s, her personal tastes would have led her to attribute to Strawberry Alarm Clock at least four of the top five spots. In any case, she liked the Easybeats.
Walt felt relief in finally having a name for the sounds in his head. It was odd somehow; knowing what the music was did not change its being in his head, but somehow made it much easier to bear. The worry was greatly lessened. For example, he now had absolutely no desire to get drunk. He knew that the music would not keep him awake torturously as it had before. In giving it a name, he felt that he could perhaps live with it.
He finally asked a question which would have no doubt have occurred to most people much sooner: where was Leonore? She had been conspicuously absent during the almost four days that Walt had been in the Wilkins home.
By the way, “conspicuously” is my word and not Walt’s. It is very doubtful that he could have pronounced a word with that many twisty vowels and syllables. Forgive me, I intrude again. I realize that I need not remind the reader so often of my existence, yet the urge is overpowering.
Mrs. Wilkins said that Leonore had been nervous seeing Walt approach the house again after such a long period of absence. She had initially retreated to the room that they were now in. That would, of course, account for the familiar clang of the slammed shutters that Walt had heard as he approached the house. She added that Leonore had stayed many hours at Walt’s side during his period of catatonic sleep and had been called away shortly before he woke to the home of an elderly maiden aunt for whom she frequently did mending. Mrs. Wilkins attributed Leonore’s initial fear of Walt’s return to her girlish immaturity and skittishness, qualities which she was no longer young enough to properly claim.
Of course, this account was only partially true. She could not be expected to tell Walt the entire story of what had happened while he was dead to the world, but even Walt might find fault with the credibility of a story as thin as this one.
One perceptive, if intrusive, question he could have asked was this: just what sort of emergency seamstressing task could have taken as long as Leonore had been gone, especially when the owner of the wardrobe involved was a seventy year old Tristanian virgin of, at best, moderate means?
But Walt did not ask this, or any, question. Instead, he said that he felt that he was well enough to go home now. He thanked Mrs. Wilkins as best he could, pushed back the blankets and stood up to discover, and display, that his pants were missing.
Mortified, Walt dove head-first back into the bed, beneath the covers. He curled himself into a fetal position, feeling the intensity of the blush on his face and hearing the blood pound in his ears.
Walt felt a shame more profound than any feeling he had ever imagined to be within the realm of human emotion. He wished that he did not have to endure the minutes that he felt must follow. He rocked gently back and forth, wishing destruction upon the world, hoping that he would never have to see Mrs. Wilkins again.
Mrs. Wilkins observed this scene with a look a knowing amusement. For the first time during the course of this narrative, she smiled. She turned lightly on her heel and left the room feeling years younger than she had just days before.