V. Whistler’s Fugue in B Minor
I heard the news on a television broadcast, while I was sitting at a diner in Santa Rosa, New Mexico.
“Millionaire cattleman found dead in his West Texas home. Local police suspect foul play.”
I wish the newscaster would have provided more details. At the time, I wanted to know how he died. After all, Levi had me arrange the $10 million bounty so he wouldn’t have to take his own life.
The only reason I agreed to do it was that I figured when the winning candidate learned there was only $300,000 in all of Levi’s accounts, that he’d do me in as well. Two birds, one stone and all.
The police called a day later and asked me to come in for questioning. Jericho is about four hours from Santa Rosa; so I told them I wasn’t sure what help I could offer. They asked me to come in anyway, said there were some loose ends that maybe I could help them with.
The irony of it all – and life is filled with strange and dark bits of cruel irony – was that when we wanted the “puddle jumper” to carry us away, it didn’t. We drove Irene out to the hangar and pulled the old plane out onto the runway. Levi fired her engines and we all rose into the sky thinking that when we landed it would be some place else entirely, another new “parallel”, and hopefully one that would hold a cure for Irene’s cancer. But whatever accidents consolidated to create our ability to walk across the various planes of this universe, time had undone. We must have taken that old plane out thirty or forty times before conceding that it was no longer a conduit for inter-universal travel.
With the options for an unconventional cure removed, Irene died in June of 1998, and I cried like I did before, blubbering and moaning and shivering in my anguish. We were never married, and yes, I blamed Levi for her death. It was irrational to think that he’d done something to make the plane carry us to all of those parallels, but it made me feel better to focus my hate.
In all likelihood, the change had something to do with time and opportunity. Simply put, a window was open for a while and we found our way through it. Then it closed and we were caught, for better or worse in the place we stood when the proverbial music stopped playing.
That same quicksand of time acted strangely on our lives in other ways as well. The near forty year old Levi that left one version of Jericho in 1984 should have looked like a 55 year old man in the Jericho he died in, during the September of 1999. But somehow our years spent travelling between worlds caused us to age differently, almost three years for every one we would have grown otherwise. The result was that an almost eighty year old man – he swore he was only 78! – slipped and fell in that entry way. I once heard it said that it’s the travelling that ages a person, that no one ever grew old from sitting still.
I live alone in a cabin now, out in a stretch of woods that looks like Colorado, but I believe is actually northern New Mexico. At least it is in some version of the known universe. There are spruce trees there, and aspens. Cottonwood, oak, cypress, ash. Pines and willows. A dense wall of foliage, shade and solitude.
I read a lot and watch the birds come and go. Roadrunners, quail, geese, bitterns, hawks, swallows and wrens. Sometimes when I look up, I see planes fly by, and I can’t help but wonder if they’re going some place conventional like Dallas or Denver, or if they are heading to a random parallel, fixed somewhere between all of the other parallel places in this world. Then I wonder if the passengers on that plane know where they are headed, if they planned on crossing over, or just took their chances. It’s a lot to think about for an old man lost in the woods.
The last time I saw Irene she kissed my hand and said thanks for a hundred memories.
“No,” I answered, “Thank you for all the time we spent making them.”
She cried and I held her there in the hospital bed, a tangle of machines and wires, beeping and humming around us.
“I wonder what I will see when I go?” she asked.
“You’ll see home,” I said without hesitating. “No matter where you’ve been, or what you’ve done, we all go home in the end.”
The last time I saw Levi, he begged me to help him die.
“Why?” I asked, thinking it was the logical question for the situation.
“I don’t know,” he said, lighting a cigarillo and easing back in his chair. “I guess I’m just tired of living.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I,” he answered, “But I can’t do the things I used to do anymore. At least not in the same ways that I used to do them, and that makes it not worth doing somehow.” Then he explained his plan to have himself murdered.
Looking back on it now, it was no more strange a thing to hear from that man than any other facet of the Levi Bingham that I knew, but it made me wonder if there wasn’t another Levi Bingham out there in some parallel universe somewhere, a more conservative Levi who heeded every norm and conducted his affairs with some semblance of convention. But after all the things I’d seen, I couldn’t imagine something so benign existing in any of the other combinations of space and time that I had encountered.
The universe must have a sentience inherent in its design somehow. I say that because the whole measure of existence seems to be the work of some cosmic trickster. For example, despite the $10 million bounty on his life, Levi died because he slipped in a puddle of Earl Grey tea and cracked his old bones on the polished stone tiles in the entry way of his ranch in Jericho, Texas. Somewhere that vague notion of reason must have laughed at the particular combination of events.
But that same spirit has a cruel streak as well, because I loved one woman in all my life, and yet I never considered her mine or myself as hers.
***
A few years ago, I went into town to get a haircut and shop for some supplies: coffee, sugar, rice, flour. The few essential things I needed for my solitary existence.
Sitting in the barber’s chair at an old time shop that still offered a shave with a haircut, a hot towel and the brilliant smell of talcum powder, the man in the chair next to me said something about a woman on the news saying that drinking too much coffee would kill a person.
“It causes Alzheimer’s too,” he said in a warped country drawl.
“No, no,” the man next to him and furthest from me countered, “It’s supposed to help with the Alzheimer’s. You got it backwards old man.”
“Well either way,” the first patron continued, “I only drink hot tea with my breakfast.”
Then the second man began telling his barber about the cattleman from England who slipped on his tea and died forty-six hours later from a simple broken hip.
And for my friends, I cried again. I asked the barber to wait a second, then I buried my face in my hands and I cried, because that slip made me the last one of our unlikely trio, the lone whistler chirping the notes of our desperate song, a minor fugue in the greater symphony of the broad universe.
THE END
I heard the news on a television broadcast, while I was sitting at a diner in Santa Rosa, New Mexico.
“Millionaire cattleman found dead in his West Texas home. Local police suspect foul play.”
I wish the newscaster would have provided more details. At the time, I wanted to know how he died. After all, Levi had me arrange the $10 million bounty so he wouldn’t have to take his own life.
The only reason I agreed to do it was that I figured when the winning candidate learned there was only $300,000 in all of Levi’s accounts, that he’d do me in as well. Two birds, one stone and all.
The police called a day later and asked me to come in for questioning. Jericho is about four hours from Santa Rosa; so I told them I wasn’t sure what help I could offer. They asked me to come in anyway, said there were some loose ends that maybe I could help them with.
The irony of it all – and life is filled with strange and dark bits of cruel irony – was that when we wanted the “puddle jumper” to carry us away, it didn’t. We drove Irene out to the hangar and pulled the old plane out onto the runway. Levi fired her engines and we all rose into the sky thinking that when we landed it would be some place else entirely, another new “parallel”, and hopefully one that would hold a cure for Irene’s cancer. But whatever accidents consolidated to create our ability to walk across the various planes of this universe, time had undone. We must have taken that old plane out thirty or forty times before conceding that it was no longer a conduit for inter-universal travel.
With the options for an unconventional cure removed, Irene died in June of 1998, and I cried like I did before, blubbering and moaning and shivering in my anguish. We were never married, and yes, I blamed Levi for her death. It was irrational to think that he’d done something to make the plane carry us to all of those parallels, but it made me feel better to focus my hate.
In all likelihood, the change had something to do with time and opportunity. Simply put, a window was open for a while and we found our way through it. Then it closed and we were caught, for better or worse in the place we stood when the proverbial music stopped playing.
That same quicksand of time acted strangely on our lives in other ways as well. The near forty year old Levi that left one version of Jericho in 1984 should have looked like a 55 year old man in the Jericho he died in, during the September of 1999. But somehow our years spent travelling between worlds caused us to age differently, almost three years for every one we would have grown otherwise. The result was that an almost eighty year old man – he swore he was only 78! – slipped and fell in that entry way. I once heard it said that it’s the travelling that ages a person, that no one ever grew old from sitting still.
I live alone in a cabin now, out in a stretch of woods that looks like Colorado, but I believe is actually northern New Mexico. At least it is in some version of the known universe. There are spruce trees there, and aspens. Cottonwood, oak, cypress, ash. Pines and willows. A dense wall of foliage, shade and solitude.
I read a lot and watch the birds come and go. Roadrunners, quail, geese, bitterns, hawks, swallows and wrens. Sometimes when I look up, I see planes fly by, and I can’t help but wonder if they’re going some place conventional like Dallas or Denver, or if they are heading to a random parallel, fixed somewhere between all of the other parallel places in this world. Then I wonder if the passengers on that plane know where they are headed, if they planned on crossing over, or just took their chances. It’s a lot to think about for an old man lost in the woods.
The last time I saw Irene she kissed my hand and said thanks for a hundred memories.
“No,” I answered, “Thank you for all the time we spent making them.”
She cried and I held her there in the hospital bed, a tangle of machines and wires, beeping and humming around us.
“I wonder what I will see when I go?” she asked.
“You’ll see home,” I said without hesitating. “No matter where you’ve been, or what you’ve done, we all go home in the end.”
The last time I saw Levi, he begged me to help him die.
“Why?” I asked, thinking it was the logical question for the situation.
“I don’t know,” he said, lighting a cigarillo and easing back in his chair. “I guess I’m just tired of living.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I,” he answered, “But I can’t do the things I used to do anymore. At least not in the same ways that I used to do them, and that makes it not worth doing somehow.” Then he explained his plan to have himself murdered.
Looking back on it now, it was no more strange a thing to hear from that man than any other facet of the Levi Bingham that I knew, but it made me wonder if there wasn’t another Levi Bingham out there in some parallel universe somewhere, a more conservative Levi who heeded every norm and conducted his affairs with some semblance of convention. But after all the things I’d seen, I couldn’t imagine something so benign existing in any of the other combinations of space and time that I had encountered.
The universe must have a sentience inherent in its design somehow. I say that because the whole measure of existence seems to be the work of some cosmic trickster. For example, despite the $10 million bounty on his life, Levi died because he slipped in a puddle of Earl Grey tea and cracked his old bones on the polished stone tiles in the entry way of his ranch in Jericho, Texas. Somewhere that vague notion of reason must have laughed at the particular combination of events.
But that same spirit has a cruel streak as well, because I loved one woman in all my life, and yet I never considered her mine or myself as hers.
***
A few years ago, I went into town to get a haircut and shop for some supplies: coffee, sugar, rice, flour. The few essential things I needed for my solitary existence.
Sitting in the barber’s chair at an old time shop that still offered a shave with a haircut, a hot towel and the brilliant smell of talcum powder, the man in the chair next to me said something about a woman on the news saying that drinking too much coffee would kill a person.
“It causes Alzheimer’s too,” he said in a warped country drawl.
“No, no,” the man next to him and furthest from me countered, “It’s supposed to help with the Alzheimer’s. You got it backwards old man.”
“Well either way,” the first patron continued, “I only drink hot tea with my breakfast.”
Then the second man began telling his barber about the cattleman from England who slipped on his tea and died forty-six hours later from a simple broken hip.
And for my friends, I cried again. I asked the barber to wait a second, then I buried my face in my hands and I cried, because that slip made me the last one of our unlikely trio, the lone whistler chirping the notes of our desperate song, a minor fugue in the greater symphony of the broad universe.
THE END
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