Ab brought the rented sports car up to speed on the Winnipeg bypass. He pulled his baseball cap down tightly and opened the window. This was a little side trip to visit his mother, who had retired to a home in Steinbach. He wondered how she would react to his decision to change his name: Abraham Van Dyck. If you were going to reclaim your roots, you might as well go deep. Besides the trip would give him a chance to drive to Altona to pick up some genuine local sunflower seeds. Just once, to save for a special occasion. And then maybe up to Saskatoon, where Sarah was now planning to attend veterinary college. He reached to the seat beside him and picked up the cassette which he’d retrieved from the bottom of his luggage. He opened it and stuck it into the car player, then rolled his window back up. The prairie sun was exploding in red and gold and pink shreds and fragments against the clouds at the horizon. That vast, expansive, freeing prairie horizon.
As the gamelan music came on, his chest heaved involuntarily, jerking, gasping for breath, a deep, sharp, pain. Nancy coming out of the water and the moonlight toward him. He pulled over to the shoulder and stopped the car, swallowed, breathing deeply. The bells and gongs and tinkles of the music surrounded him, moved through him.
He opened the car door and stepped outside, leaving the door open behind him so he could hear the music. A pattern with no pattern. An organic, unpremeditated pattern. Water and moonlight. Chaotic pattern, with the rules so deep you’d need a physicist to find them. But there was something more. It was water and moonlight and darkness. Without the background, the light and water were invisible. It was necessary. The music carried within itself, at its base, as its unseen background, a darkness so black it was palpable. The music was all crystal shattering against the hard darkness, a kaleidoscope of moonlit water splashing against a black stone, sprinkling tiny, sharp lights out into the night.