(no subject)

In his study he showed me instead of books or maps a large shelf of thin vertical openings he'd made himself. In each was a large piece of twisted, tinted but transparent plastic. He held one up to the light. It was a bit like a mold, but of no recognizable imprint. There were gradual wavings in and out as well as sudden beaks or punctures. It was like a three dimensional, diluted adaptation of an early Kandinsky or a late Monet. It wasn't even clear what colors I was seeing: they fled like those of oil between the old man's shaking hands.

They are lenses, he explained. Not for enlarging or focusing, though they do a bit of that, nor coloring, though that they do a lot of. But these cosmetic changes serve the deeper purpose of modifying feeling. These lenses alter how I see the world.

He moved it between us, distorting my view of his face as it did his of mine. Nothing remarkable occurred from my perspective. He was certainly more yellow, and his chin and left cheek looked like they intended to slingshot partway to outer space and then slump back down across his hairline. But it wasn't unclear where those parts really were. Nothing was new.

Then he smiled and flipped it and the flip destroyed the smile while leaving every one of its teeth. He had hurt me and made too many gestures of repentance for any separate one to be believed. So I would leave him. But not before making him understand just how I felt. But I couldn't tell him how I felt. It needed to be clear from how I acted, but only to someone who knew my actions were intended to convey the unspoken. Someone so sensitive to how I felt he never could have hurt me. I wanted him to prove he couldn't have hurt me by apologizing for hurting me. And then I might kill him. Or leave him alone and sad until his death. Since some things you mustn't forgive.

He flipped it back, I think. It was hard to tell except for the jumping of yellow. A full minute passed before he was again the host against whom I nursed nothing. He sat me down, then had me drink his drink as well as mine.

You see now what I mean by changing how I see the world. It is this that I have striven to perfect across these decades, not my music. The compositions come forth naturally from the changes. You will see that I have numbered these also, and that their number is the same. What you may have trouble guessing is that with any particular lens mounted I could play only its associated song, no matter the piano. Even looking at another piece of music, whether Row Your Boat or Bach. They are that powerful. I suppose you could force my fingers onto other keys, but I wouldn't notice. I would hear the proper song. My blood would sing it.

I asked him how he made the things. He told me that they happened to him. He had learned to arrest certain moods and reactions by pushing his face about roughly, as though handled by an angry ape or lunatic, until what was seen became a series of disconnected glows to the battered sense. He concentrated on these glows and memorized their imprint, then painted them when sight returned in a sort of corn starch batter in a frame. With this he recreated the moment-space's depths, and with a number of tricks and slight visual exaggerations he'd developed even caught the apparition of its motions. The plastic molds were fashioned from this art by a trusted associate at his suburban factory. Since mastering the technique he had made twenty and destroyed two.

I asked how much they cost. He said he wasn't sure, but less than a dollar in materials and little more in labor. The tinting came from the original paint and needed no special processing. It was simply what occurred when a hot but cooling fluid touched a color. It repeated what had happened in himself. All he had truly learned was how to remember what it feels like when a moment occurs that will later be remembered. Every time he said the word moment he looked at me as though to confirm my understanding. The more he looked the more I think I did, remembering how different it had been. How he and I had been.

I asked to see another. He declined, saying he knew that I wished to see a more pleasant one but that there weren't any. The moments he had managed to capture were all toxic. He remembered more than one moment when he remembered to find the memorable when he was happy, even ecstatic, but had always deferred the painful process of memorizing to some later time, preferring instead to enjoy. The later times of course never came. Events distracted or consciousness faltered. He had finally stopped trying to remember to try.

He told me he would burn them in the weeks before his death. They were so flammable that they melted away all at once, in fact turning mostly to vapor. He would hold them between his eyes and a mirror and blast whole lives away with short bursts of acetylene. One a day, he said, in bed and over breakfast. The voice that said it trembled with a wilder note than rage.