[editor's note: this was published in some literary magazine. It's one of the best stories I've ever written. you should read it. it will tell you a lot about the person who wrote it.]
[author's note: my identical twin and I played in the junior high band for three years. those experiences formed the basic inspiration for this story, which is not factual in any sense whatsoever.]
I was not a child prodigy. I didn’t start playing the cello until age twelve. Towards the end of sixth grade, a charismatic orchestra conductor visited my elementary school to recruit students for the junior high orchestra. His name was Mr. Ardigo. He had a polished bald head and a thin magician’s mustache, and he claimed knowledge of the future when he pledged that those who joined the ranks would be pushed a great deal, which would form something inside called character. Owing to the visitor’s sleight of hand, my twin brother and I confused character with popularity—we both registered for the orchestra for the upcoming school year at Montrose Junior High. From my earliest memories of him clear up to the very end, my twin brother Dallas was always bigger and stronger. Despite our matching DNA, Dallas had received the superior body even down to the size of his lungs, and I, the more reliable brain. When we fought, which was often—that was our way of showing love—he managed me without difficulty whether in wrestling matches or fistfights.
Dallas signed up for the largest of the offered instruments, the tuba, and I for the second largest, the cello. We were shrewd enough to foresee that these contraptions would be highly cumbersome and unpopular, and that only tall shameless persons like ourselves would make such an election, thereby improving our chances of being inimitable within the musical troop, which would in turn somehow lead to admiration, for we had been deceived by the visiting orchestra conductor and by our parents and by ourselves to believe that fame was possible for those adolescents who attained academic excellence. At the age of twelve, we were not shrewd enough to understand that the dream of being admired, together with all other dreams, would be deferred for an unspecified number of years and forever in my brother’s case.
In seventh-grade orchestra, Mr. Ardigo took great care to teach us to count one-two-three-four to the music or one-two and so on, and we’d tap our feet on the carpeted floor—the whole orchestra would—to keep the beat, and it sounded not at all subtle—sixty teenagers tapping their feet in rhythm. Mr. Ardigo introduced us to our instruments. The origins of the cello, Mr. Ardigo told us, were not terribly complicated—the cello simply evolved as a lower, larger version of the violin. The aesthetics of the cello were alluring to me—the scroll, at the end of the neck, wrapped up like a secret, and the wood of the body tight and rippling and glistening and curved, like the pictures of human flesh in our science books when the skin was filleted away. Of course we all laughed to ourselves when Mr. Ardigo told us about the F-Holes in the cello. The cello was a stringed instrument that relied on the power of the reverberations of the strings transferred to the soundbox. Most notably, Mr. Ardigo informed us, the sound of the cello was close in range to that of the human voice. I did not at that time comprehend the full impact of what it might mean for a cello to have a voice, a neck, and a body.
He told us that the tuba was classified as a horn, a two-ended apparatus with one smaller opening into which the player pushed air through vibrated lips, and a larger opening on the other end through which the sound emerged. Mr. Ardigo also said, after puckering up his lips and blowing through what looked like a ram’s horn, that horned instruments had their origins in ancient times in the blowing of air through the horn of an animal. Mr. Ardigo’s whole head, come to think of it, was puckered like a Kalamata olive laid horizontal—his lips were long and flat and his chin thrust forward, giving him the perfect embouchure. My brother, who had become restless again, watched Mr. Ardigo blast air through the horn of the ram. Dallas never said as much, but in the way twins read each other’s minds I knew he imagined himself standing on a green hill in some ancient green land (this was the extent of my geographical imaginations at the time) where life was less regimented, and blowing down his proud animal horn to notify the village of the arrival of an enemy army. Mr. Ardigo put down the ram’s horn and said the tuba could also be categorized with the trombone and the trumpet and so on as part of the brass section due to the typical material from which it was constructed, although horns could be made of bone or wood or other metals, even precious ones, and I knew my brother wondered what it would be like to play a horn of gold sad and true for the village funeral after the enemy army had slaughtered all the village’s adult men. Mr. Ardigo, pushing his luck with the attention span of seventh graders, added that the brass were a subset of the wind instruments along with the voice and the clarinet and the saxophone and so on, meaning that the human playing the device created the sound through the wind of his lungs—another way of saying this was to call the tuba an aerophone. Aerophone—that sounded to my brother like something out of a Jules Verne novel—a bizarre implement that was somehow both futuristic and totally obsolete. I sensed that my brother had difficulty imagining himself in the future.
Above, I wrote that Dallas and I were shameless. I wanted to see how it looked on paper for me and my twin brother to be described that way in those days, and there is the hitch, for we were not shameless at all. We were utterly self-conscious. We were tall and slender, but our sternums jutted out due to some accident of genetics, giving the appearance of an elevated pot belly. To boot, we were curly-haired, fair-skinned, and awkward in every dimensionality. Plus, there were two of us, and that made us stand out all the more. We were boys who had grown up around other boys—biking and adventuring and generally dicking around and taking telephones apart and putting them back together and capturing grasshoppers and lizards and building treehouses—we knew so much about being boys that we knew nothing of growing into men, which we apprehended the very moment seventh grade started, that instant after the opening bell rang out its warning ALL THINGS ARE NEW, but before it stopped reverberating, and the bell’s waves still undulated over and across us. At that moment Dallas and I saw how the castes were constructed, and only two things counted in that new milieu: (1) girls; and (2) football. We didn’t know how to talk to girls and we didn’t play football, but we did apprehend that orchestra, math, literature, and science counted for nothing.
The alarm clock woke us up early on school days. Dallas and I would practice our instruments sitting there on the end of one of our twin beds with our sheet music stuffed into a horizontal slat in the closet to hold it there in front of us. We were so goddamn tired, our bodies were growing a couple of inches per year, and we wanted sleep. We needed sleep. On the weekends, Dallas would sleep all day long. We weren’t enthusiastic about orchestra but we did it day after day. Those mornings when we practiced our instruments, the house around us was silent: our younger sister asleep down the hall; our parents asleep in their room. Dallas and I believed we were paying a great cost for this thing called character. We knew not that the house was silent because our father had already arisen and groomed himself and departed for work, and that our mother did not sleep on account of her anxiety over my brother’s condition. As for our sister—well, years later when there were only four of us and our folks split up and I lived with our mom and her boyfriend, and my sister lived in the old house with our dad, our sister’s bedroom carpet was stained with the contents of the spit valve from my brother’s tuba and replete with little worn spots where I had rested the endpin of my cello. And living in that bedroom with that gross, damaged carpet might have been the largest sacrifice of all.
I do not want to suggest that Dallas and I were on some high road. I do not want to suggest that because we were smart enough to choose giant musical instruments in order to stand out in the school orchestra meant we were mature in other ways; for if you had offered me at that time that I could have sex with a cheerleader on Friday night and score the winning touchdown at the home football game on Saturday morning against our rival Cotton Hills, in exchange for all my future as a concert cellist, I would have done so. I assume Dallas would admit the same but I do not wish to bind him to my confession. Besides, I know not the rules of that other place.
Despite this admission of my sordid preferences, there will be nonetheless a tendency to make apologies for me—that boys will be boys—that if the world made the cello and the tuba and cell biology and crossword puzzles more attractive, that it would be easier for boys to choose the right path. Listen carefully. I tell you now as a grown man that I should be condemned and not excused, because my choice then and my choice still now for my younger self is unchanged—I vow to you, if a time machine transported me back there to seventh grade into the beige-paneled orchestra room and on one chair was my M.F.A. in cello performance, my recordings, and my reputation; and on the other chair was Tiffany Jane Stevenson in her black and gold cheerleading uniform, with her golden shorts pulled to the side to show me her blonde bush, I know what I’d pick. It is not about wrong and right. It’s about—you have one life to live. One and one only. Ask my brother who died before he ever got laid. Ask my brother who received neither the principal nor the interest of his investment.
I need to come clean. It’s a burden to be revered. Here’s the remainder of my confession. The academic path I took—the one you know about—the one that brought me here to play for you at this concert hall tonight—was not by choice, and not because I somehow knew it would give me opportunities and a life so exquisitely beautiful through patience and time. The path I took was the only one available to me. If I had known how to be good at anything else, I would have done that instead. My point is, it should have been my right at age twelve to trade away all this future beauty for one weekend of stupid fleshy glory. God—are you listening? And brother—are you listening from beyond to my words? I testify that I would have thrown away all your beautiful plans for me and all that would devolve to me from loss and denial for one wanton weekend: six points on a touchdown and a romp in the field with the head cheerleader.
Our parents were poor so my brother and I used loaner instruments from the junior high. We’d carry them to and from school each day. It goes without saying that awkward, quiet, tall, slender, curly-haired boys with overgrown sternums carrying tubas and cellos in giant black plastic instrument cases to and from school didn’t score any touchdowns or any girls. On hot days, if Dallas or I had fifty cents, we’d stop at the Pepsi machine in the long central hallway of the school and buy a cold soda. We’d put the soda in my brother’s tuba case in a little faux-fur lined compartment apparently designed for the task. On the walk home on those hot days we’d stop under the shade of a hackberry in front of this light brown bungalow with curtained front windows and we’d make somewhat of a ceremony of opening the tuba case just so, and opening the Pepsi and splitting it between us. In those moments, my brother and I wanted for nothing, for we were unobserved there under the tree—that was a truth we learned—that feeling out of favor and graceless was not absolute, but only in relation to an external standard. When it was just the two of us, we were fine—we were more than fine. We were ourselves. The Pepsi was cold and it would burn our throats and the Pepsi, we knew, would not have tasted any different or any better even if we had had piles of money stuffed into our cases or if my brother’s medication were working better or if we were the stars of the football team or if Tiffany Jean Stevenson knew we existed and thought we were cute. There, under the hackberry’s shade with our musical instruments on the grass, we were not saddled down with our burdens, and we could have walked away and been like the other kids who walked to and from school with their hands empty—their hands not professing their peculiar habits.
We made it through seventh grade but in eighth grade the wheels really came off for Dallas. He could not concentrate and he flunked algebra and grammar. When he wasn’t at school he was sleeping. When the kids in our neighborhood would get together to play steal-the-flag or just fart around outside, Dallas would decline. Somehow, despite this, he kept up with the tuba. Mr. Ardigo said he felt an immediacy when Dallas played the tuba and Mr. Aridgo would sometimes call the attention of the whole class to my brother and how he played like he was calling down an army from the mountain or paving the way for a soul to move from this world to the next. Mr. Ardigo said that Dallas’ gift had to do with the authenticity of the wind Dallas blew into his horn—that he blew just the right amount and flavor of air into the horn, and the horn obliged him by easily mimicking and enlarging the sound. Mr. Ardigo told the class that Dallas was the top student he had ever had. It was hard to make the tuba sound pretty and majestic, Mr. Ardigo said, but Dallas could do it.
Kevin Harris, who had a dark brown bowl cut, and a freckled kid called Potter, and their older fat friend Brett Lawrence one day that next spring approached us under the hackberry tree and told us we were going to pay. I didn’t know my brother sat behind Potter in English class and they had had some encounter in class when Potter teased my brother about being zoned-out and Dallas made fun of how Potter couldn’t read. In any event, Kevin and Potter grabbed my brother there under the hackberry tree. Kevin had a rock in his hand and said he was going to stuff it in my brother’s ear. Brett stood there in case my brother or I fought back. I said nothing and I did nothing. I did not defend my brother. In the end, nothing happened and they let him go, but there was after that this space between me and Dallas, this regret that I had, and this shame that he had, and being twins and reading each other’s minds made the burden twice as heavy, not half as much—for each bore up the full amount of his own burden plus the full amount of the other’s burden. It was like seeing your ugly self in the mirror twice. Something began to unravel for my brother around that time. His gloom drained downwards like the swirl when you open the stop on the bathtub. His lack of standing in the world—his absence in the world—took on a growing dimension and depth, whereas for me there was something in my brain that chemically could hold on to and believe those vague promises—that somehow at the end of this there would be something else. His brain was different. His brain magnified his desolation—it saw only now, it could not see later, past adolescence. The space between us grew and grew, and the space between himself and the world grew and grew. Then arrived the day when he stopped playing his tuba and ceased going to school at all. He would lay in bed all day. After school I would report to him what Tiffany Jean Stevenson wore to school, or how I had seen her running in track shorts with bare feet on the grass and how long her brown legs were, or speculate what if we could watch her shower and what if she knew we were watching her and didn’t care and made a big show of it a private show and splashed water on her tits for us, and what if he were the quarterback and I were the running back and that’s how things were for us on Saturday mornings. Sometimes he’d smile a little at the effort I was making and then our father would say enough James, let him rest. I could no longer read my brother’s mind or rather, I could read it but nothing was inside. My parents talked a lot in quiet tones in the evenings and they would take Dallas to see the doctors—I didn’t know what kind of doctors.
Sometimes in the evenings, it was me watching our younger sister Caroline while my parents took Dallas over to talk to our priest about his condition. I learned that Caroline was a joy. She was different. She is different, I should say. I talk to her nearly every day. Anyway, Caroline lived in yellow and orange and fuzzy stuffed animals in her mind, and she did not seem to be tied up in wires or pressed upon by clouds of black and grey. I remember one night so distinctly—one time when our parents came back with Dallas around nine in the evening, Caroline and I didn’t hear them come in—we were laughing hysterically at this game where we pretended we were making a commercial for diarrhea pills. In the game, one person would make bathroom sounds while the other pretended to be a serious doctor, a doctor we called Doctor M.D. Whoever was the doctor would wear our mom’s white bathrobe and would explain the benefits of this new medication. These pills will stop your farts. They will dry up the smelly wind between your legs. If you get a bad case of the squirts while taking these pills, we guarantee you your money back. Just send your name, address, pharmacy receipt, and a sample of your diarrhea in an envelope to … Dallas came in the kitchen for a drink of water while Caroline and I were laughing, and he saw us. He turned and looked straight at me. I was expecting jealousy. But there was this relief in his face that I had someone else to lean on and not him, and also this resignation that he would never laugh like that again.
It wasn’t two weeks later that our father came and picked me up early from junior high and said my brother was gone and our mother had found him hanging in the coat closet by a belt. I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand why. I didn’t cry. Caroline and I sat there in the front room on the couch watching television speechless for three days it felt like, while our parents made phone calls and arrangements and received visitors out on the front porch. A few days later the funeral was held. Caroline and I saw Dallas for the first time. I leaned over to tell Dallas goodbye and in doing so put my left hand on his chest as a brace and maybe it was imagined, but when in leaning down to say goodbye I pressed on his chest, a breath of air floated out—the air was not stale, it smelled like mountain air, and I moved my mouth over close to his and inhaled deeply.
After Dallas died it was a while before I took up the cello again. When I did, I understood Dallas’ gift had transferred to me. He had somehow bequeathed his gift to me when at his death he still had that unblown wind trapped in his mighty lungs from the belt around his neck and I had inhaled it. His gift was the authenticity of his breath—the contribution to his instrument of a passionate and unique wind at a perfect temperature that minimized the work for his horn. I thought a lot then about what Mr. Ardigo had said about the cello sharing the range and the timbre of the human voice. I had in junior high a Russian class where I learned that the Russian word for wind was vyeter which I pronounced vie-yo-tour. I gave the name Vyotor to my cello in honor of my brother Dallas.
These past nineteen years I have held Vyotor sometimes tightly, sometimes loosely by the neck, and I have wrapped my arms and legs around Vyotor’s body, and I have trained Vyotor to sing forth. With all that has been taken and all that has been denied, I have caused Vyotor to weep and weep and weep, and to thunder like an oncoming infantry, and to hum the wistful ballad of desolation, and to frolic with ripe imagination, or to sit still—quiet and pathetic. This music I play is my brother Dallas’ authentic wind, his voice. His actual voice. That is what my audiences hear and feel and why they come in hordes and why they clap and why their eyes fill with tears. Yet, all that I would pile up like feathers upon some enormous and worthless brass platter, and let a strong gale blow them up, up, and away to mingle forever with the sky, and in its place I swear to you, I swear on my brother’s life—I would be satisfied with one winning touchdown on Saturday morning in junior high school, and one crazy night on Tiffany Jean Stevenson’s sofa with her parents out at some movie.
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