Journal of X

He’d played the trumpet since he was seven. His grandmother had found it in a trunk when her sister passed away. She’d given it to him as a present. He was a quiet child with large eyes and small ears. Before he’d been given it, he would usually spend all of his time sitting by a window in the back room of his family’s house. When he received the horn, he saw it for what it was and set out directly to learn how to play it. He practiced it every day and would sleep with it curled up next to him at night.

His grandmother often saw him wandering in the cornfield behind the bridge road, two miles from his house. She would say nothing to his parents but she would ask him later where he went. And he would go through the patch of trees on the far side of the field and practice down by the water. It gradually became his voice, so much so that by age fourteen when people outside his family would ask him questions he would raise it to his lips and respond with spontaneous cacophonic solos that made sense to no one. This behavior was difficult for people to accept, so they spoke to him less and less. The boy’s parents didn’t know what to do, and his mind continued to change as he grew. He would make strange creaking noises at the breakfast table in the mornings and sometimes, he would talk about a reoccurring dream of being struck by lightning.

Then one day he stopped talking altogether. These eccentricities all seemed to revolve around the trumpet and be the result of a certain malformation in the boy’s mind. His parents took him to see many different doctors but they could find nothing physically that explained what was wrong with him. They’d examine his body, while he would rock back and forth with the instrument clutched to his chest.

Finally one day, while he was alone, he climbed the branches of the big oak tree out in the front yard. He climbed very high up in the branches and began to play to the birds. His family called an asylum, in fear of what to do. They craned their necks up at where the boy sat and waited for someone to come. He sat very near the top of the tree between a large branch and the trunk. There were crows everywhere in the tree. More landed on the uppermost branches as he continued to play. The boy played softly with his eyes closed and his head back. Two men who worked for the hospital arrived. They awkwardly climbed up the trunk holding big nets at the end of long wooden poles. When they had climbed close enough to catch him, the boy suddenly opened his eyes. He looked calmly at the men with his eyes that seemed to see everything, then swiftly leapt to the ground. The world dove into darkness. And the fall broke both his legs.
Weeks later he awoke in the hospital and saw that his hands were tied and his horn was nowhere in sight. He was silent for three days and then on the third day a nurse was observing him. When she was standing close to him, he quietly asked her for his time engine. She told him he couldn’t play it unless he started to speak again. She asked him why he needed his trumpet. He stared at her in silence until she walked away. As the days past, the boy began to talk a bit. It was only in the dead of night, the nurses would hear him while they were doing their rounds. He would whisper with different voices conversations to himself, laughing and crying, about something that had to come any moment now. Finally after the boy had been in the hospital for many weeks, it rained and rained for 10 days. The boy grew silent again and listened to the rain. When it stopped he spoke to his doctors. The first thing he said to them directly was, “may I have my trumpet back, please”. The doctors asked the boy his name, and if he knew where he was. The boy said yes. The doctors asked him what he thought about his instrument and why he wanted it back. The boy said, “It’s so pure to do that. To purge the thoughts in the sound of air escaping from the lungs, through the curved space and breaking into my eardrums. It’s how I found the infinite root. I felt it instantly but it wasn’t until I learned to play that one day I just danced in and out of that single moment. That single moment that waits beyond, or before., this starts and this ends.” The doctors listened as the boy explained that he understood now that he should not have believed what he heard and saw while playing the instrument. The boy said that his mind had been confused and what had seemed so clear was not in fact real. The doctors listened and went away.

When they returned, they removed the ties around the boy’s wrists. They asked him if he might continue to tell them about his instrument and what it did. The boy thought for a moment or two before responding. He wanted them to understand that he did not exactly know what his instrument appeared to do. He only knew his experience playing it. It had taken years of practice to calibrate it
perfectly but he would stretch it each day as though it were a bow and his breathe the arrow. An arrow to be fired into the sun.

After speaking for many days about his experience with the instrument, he finally admitted his single fundamental belief. He had really thought that it could repel TIME. “The instrument“, he said solemnly, “knew something sacred about space”. He explained that when he played only the right notes, fire and smoke would start to pour out of the horn. The knobs would become translucent and clock faces would surface on the knobs. As his song grew, the clocks would begin spinning wildly. He said that everything in the world around him would begin to hum and glow from the inside. At this point, his trumpet’s song would rise into a roar which when it reached a specific point would in a single instant fall silent. Then everything appeared to slow down and become indescribably still until it all stopped. Its there that he would start to feel it: the presence of something completely unknown. He said that his breathe would become locked into a current and it was as though his ears would suddenly bloom and search the silence. During these episodes he would play to the birds because he though he could hear something coming from the birds, it sounded almost as though their hearts were speaking to one another. They seem to understand and wanted to tell him something too.

That’s what he was doing that day up in the tree. He was waiting for it to be said.