The Concert Hall (1 of 2)

Reverie (n.) : (12c., Modern French rêverie), from resver "to dream, wander," a word of uncertain origin (also the source of rave).

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 finally did find one, one empty seat almost too close, in the very first row in fact, so that you needed to stretch your spine and crane your neck to see over the edge of the stage and get a glimpse of 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, my shoulders pressed against the wood, and I could plainly see that 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 and swords and chariots while cavorting with faded goddesses, their hair in perfect faded ringlets in scenes that covered the faded facings of the balconies and looking looking 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 out my arm in the direction of the distant window and announced in an impassioned voice imbued with fine emotion, Then I’ll watch from up there! but my mother’s deafness made it impossible for her to hear me.

The music lovers in the first several rows could hear me quite well however, and just as if I’d lobbed a brick into a sterile pond of warm miasmic boredom, every eye in the first three rows were suddenly 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 at me made me start up again, speaking even louder, with an even more impassioned voice, so that all could clearly hear me, even beyond the seventh row they could hear me announce 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 my eyes fell upon an attractive woman who was sitting just beside Mother (just one among so many fashionable attractive women who were in the house!) and I had a feeling, whether or not it was true, that in the depths of this woman’s warm melancholy eyes there existed a sense of repressed unsated longing.

By this point hundreds of people had noticed me, the attractive kindly-faced woman had noticed me, and this thrilling sensation which was so rare for me in those days electrified my downcast ego, and even more so, my dejected id, and everyone in the theater seemed likewise to have grown more excited or more curious and my own exhilaration about this curiousness and sympathy and the longing in the eyes of the kindly-faced woman got all mixed up together and made me begin shouting once more, using a slightly different syntax with a bigger more booming voice, my by now somewhat tired shtick about the far flung window and the missing shoes, and as I gestured from object to object I knew full well that my finely shaped feet, shod only in my thin expensive dress socks (the black ones that 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, kinesics in which I stood for a few seconds stock still before I squared my shoulders, fiddled with my jacket, never thinking of my mother for even a second—something I realized only later—but enthralled by the murmurings of the crowd, experiencing those murmurings as auditory caresses along with an understanding that their eyes would follow my every move, even my most subtle ones, such as the way I raise my chin when I sweep my hair off my forehead with the flat of my palm, and my provocative style of edging along the front of the stage toward the aisle as 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 while I 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 and the smell of combustion. I pivoted like a soldier then, turned left, and after a few steps, rotated left a second time in a way that also felt symbolic, marched down the narrow alley between the theater and the recently-defunct department store named Giblets, once the premier purveyor of luxury goods in my lately-dilapidated city, and begun to climb up 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 is sheathed in dirty lead, until I reached the single oval window which was just below the central dome of the imposing old theater, crumbling, filthy, covered in bird shit and little rat poops, all of them singular, dry, solitary ovoids, black or rich dark brown, 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, shook off the ones that adhered to my dress sock and, squatting on my haunches before the window, after wiping the dust from the glass with my sleeve, I peered down into the cavernous space where, far away, the musicians were just at that moment prancing in from the wings onto the stage, the male ones in glistening loose metallic-colored high-collared shirts, 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 their 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, although 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 to me, 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, their bodies suspended by the bodies that surrounded them, their faces pressed against the windows, greasy with sabum and other fatty acids produced by their skin, and covered likewise with the graffiti markings of fluorescent pens, looping, exaggerated words, incomprehensible, like fuLk glax tAz soK and zOx, and the passengers were all staring anxiously through these markings directly at me, the only person who was on the sidewalk, and I had the sense of 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 avenue filled with meandering uncertain drivers who drove in the customary pointless style of my city. But also I was aware of voices, timid ones at first, and then louder ones that were more and more demanding, coming from the passengers scrunched all together, I knew, like worms in a little tin box typically manufactured for candies or mints, so that the only part of their anatomies they were able to move were their mouths and maybe their eyes, and with their mouths they were demanding demanding demanding, but I could not understand what it was they were demanding because to my ears it was only cacophony, it was as if a great many worms were all talking at once and I could only keep on 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 of the 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 stretching her face so close to me I could feel the puff puff puff her frenetic breathing on my neck at the same time she was shouting loudly in my ear that everyone on the bus wanted to go to the concert hall. 

Wait. There’s more! The second half of this story appears tomorrow.