It was unfortunate to be arriving for the concert slightly late when the hall was already packed to the gills and to be pushing pushing pushing through the anxious hoards of music lovers who were also looking for seats but we found one finally, one empty seat almost too close, in the very first row in fact, so you’d have to stretch your spine and crane your neck to peek at the bottom of the frayed and dirty curtain and my mother sat down immediately, she’s somewhat unsure on her feet these days, while I stood facing her with my shoulders pressed against the front of the stage, and everyone in the massive auditorium had found a seat but me.
Row upon row of music lovers were fiddling with their overcoats their gloves their woolen hats, studying their little programs made of paper, while others, I could see the bluish glow emanating from their laps, were staring down at their phones with the look of being hypnotized.
The poor old theater had seen better days, I’d heard it was slated to be demolished in the spring, and all the murals covering the walls and ceilings were tarnished and faded, faded cherubs clutching faded harps with faded stubby fingers blew on faded bugles with faded bulging cheeks, greek gods, faded to near invisibility, sported faded squarish beards swords chariots, cavorted with faded goddesses their hair in perfect faded ringlets in scenes that covered the faded facings of the balconies and looking, beyond all these faded architectural elements, up past the loge the dress circle the grand circle the faded upper circle and the upper upper one, I could see a single oval-shaped window at the highest point that framed a small portion of the darkening sky.
My mother was snoozing by then clutching her purse on her lap, and as I glanced down at her a peculiar feeling took hold of me, inspired by the spirit of the old theater perhaps, who knows, but roused by this mysterious emotion without any sort of forethought, I flung my arm out furiously in the direction of the distant window and announced in an impassioned voice imbued with fine emotion, Then I will watch it from there! but due to my mother’s deafness it was impossible for her to hear me.
The music lovers in the first several rows could hear me quite well however and it was as if I’d tossed a pebble into a lake of warm miasmic anticipatory boredom that filled the enormous room and in the first three rows every eyeball was upon me, in the fifth through seventh rows well over seventy-five percent looked up from their phones, my effect diminished beyond the seventh row but the sudden excitement I felt from all these eyeballs looking looking looking made me start again, speaking even louder with an even more imposing voice, I announced to my mother, but in actuality to all my newfound followers, that besides being seatless, I’ve lost my shoes, and just as this declaration left my lips I noticed a very attractive woman who was sitting just beside Mother, there were so many attractive women there and I had a feeling, whether or not it was true, that in the lovely melancholy of this woman’s warm hazel eyes there existed a slight feeling of pity.
By this point hundreds of people had noticed me, the attractive kindly-faced woman had certainly noticed me, and this thrilling sensation which was so rare for me in those days electrified my ego and probably my id and everyone in the theater seemed likewise to have grown more excited or more curious and my own exhilaration about this curiousness and the sympathy and the slight pity in the eyes of the attractive kindly woman got all mixed up together and made me begin shouting it out once more, using a slightly different syntax with a bigger more booming voice, my by now somewhat tired shtick about the far flung window, the missing shoes, and as I gestured from object to object I knew full well that my thin but expensive dress socks on my finally shaped feet, the black ones that tended to show very little dirt, were well within the sight line of the attractive empathetic woman.
I turned away from my followers then, I turned my back with a determined almost heroic individual style of kinesics in which I squared my shoulders fiddled with my jacket, never thinking of my mother for even a second something I only realized much later, I focused on the murmurings of the crowd, believed that their murmurings were caressing me, their eyes following my every move even my most subtle ones, like the way I raise my chin when I sweep my hair off my forehead with the flat of my palm, and as I edged my way along the front of the stage in the direction of the aisle, the music lovers of the first row, one after another pulled in their feet to let me pass and excuse me I said excuse me excuse me excuse me excuse me excuse me excuse me with a pleasing cadence, not quite as loud as the voice I’d used before but not so quietly either.
Everything I did was demonstrative and calculated and when I reached the aisle I kept my eyes straight in front of me marched up the gentle incline in my socks bounded up the carpeted stairs strode through the lobby onto the street which was clogged with the traffic of early evening, reverberant with noise, the smell of combustion, and I pivoted like a soldier, turned left a second time in a way that also felt symbolic, marched down the narrow alley between the theater and the long-defunct department store named Giblets, once the premier purveyor of luxury goods in my city, and began to climb the theater wall with its conveniently positioned drainpipe, very high up I went eight stories at least and it was not difficult, I was surprised how undifficult scaling the wall was for me, and I raced across the sloping roof which was sheathed in dirty lead, until I reached the single oval window which was just below the central dome of the imposing theater crumbling filthy covered in bird shit and little rat poops, all of them singular dry solitary ovoids, black or rich dark brown, tiny, never clumped, and which appear to vibrate and sometimes roll around in the wind and I immediately cleared away some of them with my foot, shaking off the ones that adhered to my sock, and squatting on my haunches before the window, wiping dust from the glass with my sleeve, I peered down through the cavernous space where far away the musicians were just at that moment prancing from the wings onto the stage, the male ones in glistening loose metallic-colored shirts high collars skinny pants pointy boots, the female ones in skin-tight sequined camisoles nearly naked long skinny legs bulging bosoms willowy arms, all of them without instruments waving waving waving just phones aglow, these colorful phones which they were swinging in the air in unison and bringing to their mouths in unison to sing, and suddenly I understood that though I could see everything I could not hear the music I could not hear the singing I realized I could not hear anything.
And as I lowered myself back down the drainpipe the pavement appeared to come closer which of course is a perfectly natural phenomenon and as I went back out through the alley I noticed a city bus parked at the end of it, a really big one the kind that bends in the middle, it hadn’t been there before, and it was idling with its doors open packed with passengers many of them standing leaning against the others packed in so tight that quite a number of them were horizontal suspended by the bodies that surrounded them faces pressed against the greasy-looking windows with the graffiti markings of fluorescent pens looping exaggerated words incomprehensible like fuLk glax tAz soK and zOx, the passengers all staring anxiously through these markings directly at me the only person on the sidewalk and I sensed their eyes cajoling me, an almost physical sensation, and I felt more alive than ever before and I realized the driver’s seat was empty there was no driver on this bus and there was no one else for the passengers to look at or turn to and I was the only one, I was the only one who was capable of helping them I was the only one, but if I was to help them I needed to help them quickly, I needed to help them as fast as possible in order to be able to catch the grand finale of the concert and retrieve my mother, and so I vaulted up the steps ducked under the chrome metal bar into the driver’s compartment, pushed the toggle switch to shut the doors and deftly pulled the bus onto the busiest street of this frenzied and not insignificant city.
And as I drove I could still feel them watching me and I felt how admiring they were, how impressed they were by my skill at manipulating the long articulating bus, so talented was I the way I weaved it back and forth on the congested street filled with meandering uncertain drivers who drive in that customary style of my city, but also I was aware of voices timid ones at first and then louder ones with tones that were more and more demanding, they were scrunched all together I knew like worms in a little tin box typically manufactured for candies or mints, the only part of their anatomies they were able to move were their mouths and maybe their eyes a little and with their mouths they were demanding demanding demanding but I could not understand what it was they were demanding because it was only cacophony, it was many many worms all talking at once and I could only keep driving I could only keep threading worming through the traffic as I opened and shut the little sliding window beside my seat to shake my fist at the most incompetent drivers whenever that was called for, and I could not understand why all these passengers were yelling yelling yelling at me until one woman, whose arm had apparently broken through the worm-jam, grabbed my shoulder and stretched her face towards me and very clearly, I felt her breath in my ear, explained that everyone on the bus wanted me to take them to the concert hall.
Captivating. The movement's surrealism, mixed with formal elegance and the daring superciliousness of the narrator, feel to me like deconstruction of many 19th-century novels I grew up on. It's balletic!
Adored by women, admired by men, but shoeless. In any event, you kept your pants on.