CORRECTION
The choreography needs a silence. Though the enormity of the great stone could be framed within the camera lenses of the tourists, who started taking pictures as soon as they stepped off the bus, the other found it hard to look at. The warm air and the midday sun made him not think twice about abandoning the line and the flashing cameras and the marveling exclamations and disappearing along a gravel path that meandered upward between craggy boulders and golden grasses. On his device, at full volume, he listened to The Band Project album that featured multiple drummers, but couldn’t rid himself of the memory of his mother sighing into the phone, when he told her he’d joined the Anti-Empire.
He stopped humming and sat silently in the precipitous shade of two veins in the rock, removing the water bottle from his backpack. He had climbed without rest until he was face to face with the great stone’s summit. From where he was, there was no trace of the bus or the tourists. He was taking off his shoes when he started to lose his balance, just managing to catch the backpack: the bottle went bouncing down until it was swallowed by the altitude. The other sat down on the hard surface, stretched out his legs, took a deep breath, and began to drift off to sleep. And yet, he repeated to himself, he could no longer feel the shiver the song he was listening to gave him before, the vibrations of the suspended synthesizer, hanging there, waiting for, from one moment to the next, the mentor’s deep voice and the piercing guitar to weave in and out, chasing each other, until finally coming together in the chorus of drums. He couldn’t hear anything. The damp heat and the pain in his back woke him with a start. He looked instinctively for the water bottle, lamenting aloud having lost it. He stared at the huge stone, balanced atop a tiny base, and it made him feel vulnerable. I’m having a nightmare, he thought. He opened the device, blew on the laser, changed the batteries; it played again, but he wasn’t listening. The stone was still there, he couldn’t see it without color and without the possibility of touch, on the brink of weighing more than his body could ever bear, rolling, enduring, and shattering when the tiny pedestal of his body gave way. Everything would break apart, but the monumental rock would remain unfazed: another thousand years of dust, elsewhere now, in another position, another light and another shadow.
He removed his headphones. Of course, he’d put them in wrong that morning: the right in the left ear, the left in the right. Suddenly he heard pebbles scattering, thumps, footsteps. A young man about his own age, tall and dark, appeared before of him. Dressed in worn-out jeans, boots, and no shirt, his bare torso contrasting with the long wavy hair that fell to nape of his neck. The other greeted him, but got no response. He saw that the young man wasn’t carrying a backpack, bag, or water bottle, only a small Bible in one hand, and that he snorted like a horse as he proceeded up the stone path. That was the first time the other saw his vocalist. Then he shut his eyes and fell into a deep sleep, like he hadn’t slept in weeks. The mentor’s baritone faded, then his father’s shouts, the shoves, and the door slamming for the last time. Finally, there was just the stone, alone in all space, solid, immutable until it was shrouded in a kind of fog that also contained a silence in which he didn’t know his name or what language to say it in, whether his mouth was full of a pleasant liquid or if he no longer had mouth or nose or hands or eyes. Hours later, a man with a long gray beard woke him. The sun had gone down and a light rain was starting to fall. They took a shortcut down together, through beer cans and bags of food detritus, flies and fruit peels. The man with the beard told him the tour guides were looking for him. He really preferred the language of the Empire, he confessed, it felt better in his mouth than the anti-imperial hybrid. He talked nonstop: he told the other that he worked for the ex-priests, organizing a festival of ancient choral music; that he was also an ex-believer; that he had come to show the stone to some friends and had caught a vandal in the act of defacing the patrimony—that’s what he called the stone. The other came to the vandal’s defense, asking the man if he hadn’t ever done graffiti. No, no. But the vandal had taken out a pencil and convinced him to write some biblical trivialities at the base of the stone, the man with the beard told him. Some verses no one will ever read, he said, and suggested they hop the tourist fence so he could show him. The other declined, saying he was tired. To tell the truth, his vision clouded over just thinking about getting anywhere near the stone.
The choreography needs three. He, the singer, on tour, tried to ignore the lights in his eyes, the throbbing ache around his waist, and the deafness from all the sound checks, because despite everything he could feel how she, the other, the two bassists, the hired wind sections, the drums and the bongos and the maracas and the gong, all played along with him.
I am he. He, who can no longer be touched without gloves.
She formed a chord with her fingers, let them fall one by one onto the cymbals, warm, embracing the next chord. The other waited for her on his string. The drums thrashing in his temples, on the other hand, announced that the masses, there, ecstatic, would have to go out into the streets and destroy public property if the President remained shut away on the top floor of her palace, unlistening.
He, the star, heard nothing.
“The thrashing in the trees, boy, is not there to hide you,” protested the old mother when he, chasing the kawellu and the blind chicken, smelled in the thunder the trucks that carried away all the dry wood, and asked her for protection.
He, the singer, every time that the thrashing announced itself, gave a single cough. He would prepare by clearing his throat. He would intone an inaudible bronchial hum, until, with electricity, she and the other played the signal simultaneously.
He, the hills facing the sea in his cell, stared out until he saw whether or not it was the other who came to her apartment so that she would open the door, after spending the day motionless in front of her drum set. And yet, in the blink of an eye, the streetlight on the corner went out, the power cut by the bomb blast, the thrashing that the other prisoners gave him, waiting for his voice. His scream.
I, on the other hand, reduce the brightness of this screen and eliminate the names three by three: my blinking, her fingers tracing the nape of my neck when she stays up late reading the score in bed, her touch on the backs of my ears and her index finger tangled in what’s left of my hair. The screech of the other teaching the boy a succession of keening notes, yes my shining sun, on your string. A chord.
He, the star, wanted to continue the tour because that night they were going to be heard in the language of the masses, and that would give him back a scream that would allow him to remember his true name.
“Each bird of morning opens its beak because it is on its branch,” the old mother said before throwing a stone.
“A third is needed to know if this is a call, a break, a warning, an enticement, or a response to one who is far away.” A fourth, she answered in her island, peninsular language, from the hospital bed with the boy in her arms looking up at him and looking up at the other. A fourth.
I, on the other hand, blink open my eyelids just once and three names, three characters, three times are replaced in quick succession.