A Famine of Music

The Inventor of Ears
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From the door of the inventor’s apartment, a man with small satellites bolted to the sides of his head ran out into the night. His head low, he stumbled under streetlights and went downtown, homing in on the grind of traffic and noise of the bars. Back inside, the beautiful inventor started work on another.

Her apartment walls were covered in medical posters stolen from doctor’s offices: cross-sections of the inner ear, promotional diagrams of a cochlear implant, ads for hearing aids. Milk-boxes full of components she’d bought wholesale filled most of her living room, aluminum disks and stiff wires piling over the sides, and one box of sixty-six hundred white earbuds she’d bought off of eBay. She would not leave feedback until she had a chance to count them. Under her bed, the neck of a guitar stuck out, covered in dust. A trumpet and a snare drum lay in the darkness beside it.

The inventor stood over a woman on her kitchen counter, mounting the ear-assemblies and attaching them to bone. The inventor’s hair-black and thick like smoke-brushed the face of her patient as she worked. For months, she had used dating websites to bring people to her apartment, hundreds a week. She knew there was nothing wrong with using her beauty for science.

When she finished attaching the woman’s new ears, she helped her sit up on the counter-top. The inventor looked her in the eyes and said, “Tell me what this sounds like.” The inventor kicked the wall, yelled at the ceiling, changed the TV to a fishing channel and turned the volume all the way up.

The sound went into the satellites covering the woman’s ears, vibrated across guitar strings and trumpet valves hidden inside. “Everything is music,” the woman said.

“Go and tell others.” She pushed the woman out into the street, a symphonic night of traffic, sirens, and bar-talk. The inventor cleaned her counter, smoothed her dress, and prepared for the next one.

The Alley Where Music Lived

There was an alley where music lived, and everyone came to see it. But the last few weeks, the musicians had seen the people change. The concert-goers had heavy satellites covering their ears, the metal disks scraping against each other like deer antlers in the wide alley. They each had long strands of black hair lying across their shoulders.

The musicians played anyway. They played burning, low scotch on their saxophones. They played vodka on their trumpets, long and slow and sad. The people cheered and shouted.

The musicians took a break and checked their instruments, a noisy clearing of throats in mics and popping of strings. They shook blots of saliva out of their trumpets. The people cheered just louder. The band members shrugged and picked up their instruments again. In her apartment, the lovely inventor waited for them to come.

One of the musicians took the mic. “We like irony, too,” he said, “but back to business now.” The band pulled out everything they had. The steel guitarists laid down some bourbon on the crowd, while a woman on bongos beat out tequila. A man with two tambourines took his shirt off and threw it, jingling Jagermeister with both hands.

The crowd kept cheering, but some wandered over to a department store, bobbing their heads to the TV displays blaring in the windows. “Something is wrong,” said the man with two tambourines. The band stopped playing and grabbed some people from the crowd. They held the fans by their metal ears. “Who did this?” they asked.

It took the crowd a moment to realize the musicians weren’t still singing. They told them about the lovely inventor, blushing a little and touching the sides of their heads. The musicians slung their instruments over their backs and deployed in taxis to the inventor’s apartment. The concert-goers stayed in the alley, still listening.

The Whores Who Drank the Seas

Away from the alley of music, seven brothers stood on a cliff overlooking the ocean to hear the waves dying on the rocks. They’d been doing this for years. They all had new ears that night, each feeling jealous that his brothers, too, had seen the lovely inventor. They stood under a small piece of moon and listened, and nothing was right.

In their new ears, the waves sounded like birds chirping. The seven brothers left. They took a limousine slowly through the city, windows down and satellite ears straining to hear where the sound of the waves had gone. They heard sirens that sounded like folk songs, murders that sounded like cell phones. They kept driving.

As they drifted down the street, a whore approached the car and called out to them. The brothers yelled for the driver to stop and they pulled her inside. “Money,” she said, and they gave it to her. “What do you want me to do?” They pressed in close to her on the wide leather seat and angled their large ears. “Speak,” they said, “and don’t stop until morning.” The whore spoke until she lost her voice, but others had crowded around the limo and gotten in, pushing against the doors like waves. They spoke in saltwater, like tears. The brothers paid and paid and paid.

The Inventor’s Irreparable Heart

The musicians crowded into the inventor’s apartment. They wanted to be angry with her, but she smiled and it was difficult. She took their hands and they stuttered.

Someone finally spoke. “You killed music.”

The inventor shook her lovely head. “Music is alive everywhere.” She held out her hand for one of the guitars, and a woman gave it to her. The inventor started to play. Her hands yanked the strings, and it was an ugly sound. The musicians heard beer steins shattering. They asked her to stop.

“None of you would teach me,” she said.

“You are very lovely,” they told her, “but we can’t teach you.” They took the guitar from her hands.

“No one will listen to you anymore.”

The musicians wept. The inventor did, too. None of them were satisfied with this.

“What if you give us ears to hear like they do?” a woman asked.

The inventor looked at her carefully, making sure the woman was not as lovely as she was. “You will have to give me your instruments.”

The musicians talked about it and didn’t know what else to do. They handed the inventor their finger-marked drums, their scuffed guitars, their scratched trumpets-all the things they loved most in the world. The inventor broke the instruments over her counter and dug out the parts she needed with a lovely finger. She lay the musicians on the counter one at a time and attached the ear-assemblies. Her black hair swept over their faces as she worked. They watched her eyes and felt her hands stroking their heads. They couldn’t help but forgive her.

When she was done, the inventor pushed them out into the street one by one and locked her door. The musicians got separated and wandered alone in and out of alleys. One of them found a clarinet sticking out of a trash bag and raised it to his lips. Everything he did sounded the same, and he threw the instrument at a wall, yelling curses at the inventor who’d tricked them. The others heard and ran to him, thinking it was singing.

The Famine of Music

No one in the city was interested in radio stations or music stores anymore. These buildings were shoved further and further to edges of the city. Finally, they picked up their concrete shells and crawled away for good, leaving empty parking lots behind them.

It was a new world of sound, and the people felt responsible for it. They spread themselves thin over the city so that no sound would be wasted. Wherever a roach crawled, a bus  braked, or a newspaper blew over the road, at least one pair of satellite ears was there to hear its music. The people watched each other from the opposite ends of streets and wished they could be together.

Then, a rainstorm came, a gray blanket falling over them. There was sound everywhere, lovely and too much of it to be heard. People ran down the sidewalks trying to hear it all, but couldn’t. They found each other in the dark, wet streets, resting their heavy heads together and sharing their regret. Sad lovers went back to their apartments that night, rain hammering their windows, and remembered each other’s bodies. There would be children.

The Guitars on their Backs

Years later, a troop of mariachis broke down in the middle of nowhere. They got out and looked around, saw tall buildings in the distance, the silhouettes shaggy with ivy. Knowing they had no choice, the mariachis slung their guitars over their backs, put on their wide hats and hard boots, and went into the city to find help.

They walked down cracked roads webbed with grass. Since the radio stations left years ago, cars had quit coming here, pulled back by the arms of radio. The mariachis came like heroes out of the trees and into the center of town. There were children spaced evenly down the streets, their small ears pressed against the road or the sides of buildings. Some cupped their hands to hear better and listened to the wind. None of them understood.

Some of the kids saw the mariachis and waved to them. They’d never seen anything like this before, and called for the tall men in their black uniforms to come closer so they could see.

The men smiled at each other and pulled their guitars off their backs. Mariachis did not come when called. They started playing fast, something sandy and rough, something that stuck in the throat, a sound the kids had never heard and weren’t old enough for. Children ran from every part of the city. The mariachis pulled themselves onto an old stage in an alley where music had once lived, and they played, sweeping out their hats to collect money between songs. The kids paid and paid and paid. They called their parents to come bring them money. The parents came, heads bent with the weight of their ears. Seeing the instruments made them feel like they’d lost something, but they couldn’t remember what.

When the mariachis had collected a lot of money, they bowed and started to walk away. They were stopped by the inventor, a little older now, but still lovely. They plucked their strings at each other when they saw her and grinned like dogs.

“I’m sorry,” she told them. “I did an awful thing.”

The mariachis conferred. They said they would forgive her if she gave each of them a kiss. They swept the wide hats from their heads and stared at her, each one wanting the others to die and burning for this woman. The children gathered around and hoped for something to happen. They’d never seen anything like it before.

The inventor went to each man. She put her arms around his neck, leaned over his shoulder, and kissed the neck of the guitar sticking up from his back. The six strings cut into her lips she kissed the instrument so hard. Her hair fell over the mariachi’s shoulder, piling on the back of his neck, and that’s when he knew that she owned him. She went to each man and did the same.

The mariachis tried to speak, but couldn’t. They blushed and stuttered their thanks. They lay their guitars at her feet and told her that she didn’t need to apologize to anyone.

The inventor gave their guitars to the children, keeping one for herself. She turned it over in her hands, looking at how it was put together. “There will be more of these,” she told them. “I’ll make new ones tonight and bring them tomorrow. Things will be better from now on.”

The Strangely Contented Elderly

Satellites from space broke apart the vines and sent radio back into the city. The roads opened again. Everyone got older, and the people put their strange parents away.

In a nursing home built on a cliff over the sea, a ward of elderly with satellite ears sat on couches and in wheelchairs. They shot marbles at each other and slid checkers over paper boards, inclining their heads and thrilling in the sounds. The nurses believed they were the happiest of people.

In another room, the old musicians sat in a circle. They had broken their ears off a long time ago,  bolts and wires sticking out of the sides of their heads, and they were quite deaf. One at a time, a musician placed a guitar in his lap, and the others reached out to touch it. The musician plucked his way through songs, letting the vibrations in his fingers tell him he was doing it right. The others nodded their heads, tasting the wine in it. They grinned at what nurses didn’t know.

Upstairs, a family of seven brothers and seven whores sat in front of the windows looking out on the sea. The whores spoke day and night, their throats hard from years of talking. The brothers watched the waves and patted their wives’ hands, listening.

Down in the lobby, an old woman with long hair, still the loveliest woman anyone knew, sat plucking noise from a guitar. Her satellite ears pushed her hair out in two round bumps on the sides of her head. The nurses didn’t understand why she liked the sound. They asked her, but she would only say that she didn’t need to apologize for anything. The nurses shrugged and believed this was true.