Voice Less

This room is one of many rooms on many floors that congregate around a courtyard, an air shaft that during the day is too long to let the sun funnel in and which, at this late hour, is a disquieting blackness.  Earlier, before the tropical rain vainly tried to open windows and strip the lines of bleached white laundry from their queues, somebody several levels lower had managed to pump into the silence the syrup and smoke of an old Percy Faith album, tunes still stingingly familiar even while the words are absent both from the scratchy vinyl and from my mind's itching desire to recall.

Decades ago, we called such tunes elevator music and still, at this late date the melodies manage to rise.  These songs want for the high voices of an Orpheus drunk on helium. He is escaping from this hell.  Soon transformed, he might become Icarus, or Orion pasted in the sky.  Wordless, gasping melodies, I know them.  And they have perpetuated the mute aftermath of memory.  I think they prove, once and for all, that dumb as our tongues may sit, fat and exaggerated in the caverns of our mouths, we are not deaf.  Our senses have not left us.  There remains within the labyrinth of my brain at least the ability to take all of this in. 

This room has no phone (that works), a function of the dozen technologies that have failed us (now a jumble in a very high or very low drawer).  Nothing has been labeled but I believe (in the way one is comforted by belief) that I could find them and revive them if I needed to.  I might start by looking at the book shelves.  They stand like monoliths on either side of the bed.  The sagging planks are still pleased by weight and gravity, still pretending to contain those antique tomes--the yellowed pages, the cracked leather-- that, read once, had then sat hunched over in defeat upon these shelves.               

The cat, the black and white one with the strange markings that distort the lines around his mouth is looking up at me; each eye encircled by a dollop of pigmentation wants something that his mouth cannot articulate.  When he opens it, I can see the jagged razors gaping as if a cat's body has been attached to a very small alligator's mouth, a cayman that can say nothing even while the silenced gesture suggests something:  hunger, anger, expectation, love.  For all of my bemusement, I am still quite capable of ignoring him.  I can look easily past his thin vocabulary.