Neutrino Blues

Chapter XI

B FLAT MINOR

Matty

I always liked being domestic between tours but now I'm not leaving the house at all. I order food when I get hungry and that's it as far as contact with the outside world is concerned. I told our agent about the accident and that we needed time to recuperate. How long? I don't know. We'll let you know. Don't call. He rings anyway but I don't answer. I'm not even talking to my boy Jimbo which makes me feel bad. At least few times a day I'm trying to summon the strength to give him a call but to no avail. It got even harder for me to talk to him after I've learned that he has the opposite condition to mine – he can't play or listen to music at all as it makes him sick. The very thought sends shivers down my spine; I can't imagine living in silence. Compared to him I'm so much better off, can't complain at all. It's like we're both over the line but in opposite directions. The problem is we can't really hang out, not for long anyway because sooner or later I have to play and he has to beat it.

My family has no idea I even left for Italy; if we'd died there, they would be in no small shock. Somehow I can't be bothered. The shell around me grows thicker and harder as the days go by and I have no idea where I'm headed. I'm also afraid to leave my piano, my savior. Different instruments help me as well but keys are the best. It's kinda weird as pianos are the main torment in my nightmares. It's always the same; I'm in a dark, dilapidated hovel with no doors or windows and there is a piano which is turning into a demon, something really bad lurking on the inside, coming out slowly with bright, psychedelic lights, emitting stride piano tunes with mantric regularity and insistence, the notes turning into invisible nails shot at me with vibrations of the strings, over and over again, getting closer and closer. It happens every night but I can't seem to get used to it, I'm terrified every time anew, so helpless and lonely.

I always liked to stay up late but now I do it for protection against the nightmares. It's so much easier to wake up from a bad dream when it's light, it doesn't make you feel so scared and lonely for the nightmares don't only mess you up when they're on – they linger in your head after you wake up and poison your thoughts. They have this clingy and infectious quality like a super virus you just can't deal with. It's so much easier to just stay awake I figured.

Is it karma, I wonder? All you cared for was music so now your life depends on it, you liked to stay up late so now you have to do it; I mean, what's next? Where am I headed? I wouldn't admit it to anyone but I just don't know. It's like I woke up from a twenty-nine-year-long dream and had no idea what to do. The dream was music. It was all about music, ever since I can remember. I was high on music all my life; now the high is gone and I can see clearly but I don't like what I see. I don't know who I am. I feel like I regressed to embryonic form and have to start fresh, need guidance, need help.

Fortunately, I can afford sitting at home and not going out. I have enough money to go on, not indefinitely but at least for some time, until I get my head straight. Jimbo. How's he doing? I really should call him, this time for real. He must be in pain too, maybe even more so. Call him I will but it's getting more and more difficult to get out of my bubble, my safe and warm inner world. I'm spending most of my time in the den at the grand black piano of mine, a wall of floor-to-ceiling glass between me and my garden, a stack of books next to me. I reread Monroe's trilogy and am pondering on it, playing the most beautiful music in the world and delighting in it, dissolving in it, being it.

It seems incredible to me how you can indulge in Chopin's music all your life and still find novelty in it. The more you know, the more you see. I think that music is a universe of its own and we share it because it let us. Music decided to allow us to feel its magnificence and abundance so we could learn, grow and yearn for more. Chopin must have been an ethereal being who came on earth to show us what really is possible when it came to sound engineering. His music is timeless and spaceless, his sonic architecture unprecedented and inimitable. How deeply in awe I am playing his music and relishing in it, especially the one and only opus nine number one which is his first nocturne ever published and the first piece which made me see beyond the horizon.