This is one of the few stories that I still haven’t forgotten; one of the few that still resonate enough within me to make me repeat it to myself, hoping to find a new clue, a new hidden revelation.
In the early 90s, I studied composition in the music school of San Francisco State University. For a few years prior to enrolling, I had become obsessed with the mysteries of music and sound and I had come to believe that here I would be carefully taught precisely what I needed to learn in order to fully engage with these tantalizing mysteries.
During one otherwise uneventful afternoon (the kind of mildly cool afternoon when the wind was strong enough to shake the trees in Park Merced and I felt content walking to my parked car after class, listening to the branches lightly dancing above me, a kind of peaceful light drone that I found soothing), I met a young man named Gerardo.
***
One of the very first things he said on the first day I met him was that he was able to talk directly with an invisible higher intelligence, something vast and conscious and eager to communicate, or rather, he said that this higher intelligence, this strange overwhelming presence, communicated with him and could possibly speak through him and, using him as a kind of channel, it might be able to reach the rest of us who were unable to communicate with it directly, unable to feel its presence and hear its failed attempts at human speech.
“I close my eyes,” he said in a calm voice, “and I hear all these strange sounds, melodies, noises, rhythms, otherworldy harmonies. I just don’t have the ability to make any of these things happen. I don’t have a way to bring them forth into the world and make them concrete.”
He also told me that he implicitly rejected the modern world and all its assumptions, its metal scarred ideologies, its rusty and broken beliefs made of plastic, rubber and post-it notes. (In the months that followed, he repeated these statements often and I usually nodded at him every time he mentioned them, agreeing with the thought without committing to any particular action.) “In spite of all its many apparent benefits, and of course there are many superficial benefits, becoming part of the modern world always comes with a price and that price is too high for me. I am not willing to pay it. I simply won’t, regardless of the consequences.”
I read a lot of surreal fantasy stories during those years and his way of talking, his casual way of describing supernatural events and visions as if they were the most normal of experiences, as if their reality was a given, as if we all shared a common memory that substantiated their obvious truth; it all seemed to me like an extension of the stories I was reading; he was like a character out of a strange tale and around him, the world itself was twisted out of shape, vibrant with possibilities, glowing with unspoken questions. Through the simple process of becoming his friend, I became a part of this tale as well, I became a part of this nebulous world he inhabited.
In the many years that have passed since I first met him, whenever I read those stories again (and I often do), I still think of him as a character in them; even though I came to know him very well in the months that followed our initial meeting, even though he became a sporadically recurrent figure in my life, the air of unreality that surrounded him never diminished; if anything, it grew with time.
I remember him sitting with me at the student union, in the downstairs cafeteria, eating Chinese food, or on the concrete steps of the pyramidal roof looking down at all our fellow students rushing to class or away from class, and I can still hear him, his strange thoughts, his complex visions, his gentle voice outlining his unbelievable plans for the future and how I would be a part of them, how I would be there to help him to fulfill his plans.
Many years later, when I saw him again, when I saw him much older and surrounded by followers and admirers, carefully explaining his latest visions and apocalyptic prophesies to an eager, curious crowd, I felt the urge to read those old stories all over again; I felt that I could now read them in a way I never could before, having met a being that had managed to escape from those pages, a being who had managed to open a gap between worlds and had allowed me a chance to peek through the veils that separate the different orders of reality.
***
Back when I was a full-time student at the University, I believed in everything and I believed in nothing. I read books focused on skepticism, books that debunked all kinds of beliefs and superstitions, from religious mythology to health food fads, from astrology to psychic healing, from haunted houses to obscure local legends and mysterious half-human creatures that lurked in dark forgotten places away from human eyes. But I also read books of magic and mysticism, books full of direct and final statements indicating the nature of human life, of time, of being and essence and higher perceptions, books that told the finally revealed true stories behind UFO encounters, the real secrets behind vast world-wide conspiracies intent on enslaving humanity or turning us all into transhuman monsters; books that left no doubt as to the absolute certainty behind the heavy weight of their solid metaphysical knowledge. I spent hours arguing with religious fundamentalists, from Jehova’s Witnesses to Mormons to Evangelicals, hours attempting to show them the error of following unsubstantiated dogmas, beliefs without any evidence, thoughts without any logical foundation. I would then turn and argue with various atheists (young rebels who I met through school or through my mother’s political groups) that their materialist ideas lacked vision or meaning, that their empty utilitarian ideologies would eventually lead directly into an inescapable dark void.
I had learned the art of intellectual teleportation through constant ideological shifts, and I had fallen in love with the sheer excitement of a recurring metaphysical and ontological vertigo.
***
That one afternoon, Gerardo stepped unannounced into the electronic music lab where I was working; he looked somewhat distressed, an open question visible in his eyes. I had never seen him before, but he approached me as one approaches a long lost acquaintance.
The lab was a kind of secret sanctuary that only a few had access to. Students needed a special code to even open the door. Before I was granted access, I remember standing in the hallway waiting to see a professor (the music professor offices were only a few feet away from the dead end where the lab was located), I remember sitting on the floor with my textbooks in hand and listening to strange sounds coming from that dark little hallway, from behind the thick closed door with a unique electronic lock. When I finally did earn the right to use the lab, I spent hours there, alone, trying out different sonic and musical experiments, different ideas, often using several synthesizers simultaneously as well as several computers, all working together in unpredictable interconnected pathways. I had a purely aesthetic attraction towards interconnecting many machines in an effort to construct a larger unique body composed of metal, silicone and pure webs of invisible light.
When Gerardo walked into the room, I was at first confused as to how he even got in without a code. Maybe I hadn’t fully closed the door (even though it was a heavy door that basically closed by itself) or maybe another student had opened the door for him.(I had been wearing headphones at the time and I would tend to lose myself completely in my work, so it was conceivable that I had missed someone else opening the door and letting him in.)
He seemed nervous that day, anxious, constantly fidgeting with his hands. He was a bit shorter than me, with a round, slightly pudgy face and short brown hair parted in the middle; he had a hint of Nordic features even though his immediate ancestry was from Latin America (like mine.) What stood out the most were his deep eyes that seemed to dig into yours if you looked at him for too long. I found his fixed gaze somewhat distressing at first but it was tempered by a welcoming smile and a soft friendly voice that established empathy with every syllable that came out of his mouth.
He talked to me in a rush of questions, visions and concepts, music and matter and light, illusions and the fundamental certainty of frequency and sound, the construction of etheric keys out of pure vibration and structure, keys to unimaginable doors that could be found anywhere at any time. At first, I had no idea what he was talking about- he was just a complete stranger ranting at me for no particular reason that I could ascertain; a rush of disconnected phrases rushing away from established meaning at a disconcerting pace. But he seemed so upset and restless that I stopped what I was doing and asked him to sit with me in the lab. We sat next to each other, in front of the main keyboard that faced a large computer screen, both our faces reflected and slightly distorted in that unintended mirror.
I remember playing some random melodies into the synth as we talked for about fifteen minutes; short bits of music that were meant to show him how the keyboard worked, how it was hooked up to the various synthesizers around the room and also to exemplify a few simple musical ideas. (The slow tempo of the melodies I played also had the effect of slowing down his speech, making it gradually more comprehensible to me.)
“I hear so much music all the time, so much pure music,” he said after listening to me for a few moments, “subtle, complex, transcendental, harrowing, dissonant, fearsome, overwhelming. I need to figure out a way to manifest this music I hear into the world, to make it real. I need others to hear what I hear. But I have to admit, I have no technical knowledge, no musical skills at all. All I know is if I could somehow manifest the music that I hear when I close my eyes, it would be revolutionary, it would allow others to rise into an altered state of consciousness through the simple process of listening. I know this for sure. Is there any way that you can help me?”
My first thought was to take him to one of the professors to see what they would suggest. In part, this was a way to pass the problem on to someone else. I felt that I needed to do something for him but I also couldn’t see what I could possibly do to help him myself. There was too much to learn, too much to teach. I had no idea where to begin and I had my own work to focus on.
I walked him over to Professor Lemon’s office, just two doors down the hall. She had been my orchestration teacher for a couple of semesters and I’d seen her conduct the school orchestra several times. She was a friendly but strict middle-aged woman, somewhat sympathetic in a way but also able to take on a very stern manner at a moment’s notice. Professor Lemon welcomed us into her office and listened to his rambling thoughts for about a minute or two and then she went on a very serious long explanation of her own.
“Look, I understand your wish to make music. Isn’t that what we all want here? We all come here because we have a deep relationship with music and want to learn how to make it real. And I do hear what you are saying. It is all very interesting. But writing music is not something that happens overnight. It’s a skill that takes many years to master. And many try to do it and don’t succeed at all. To compose music is to create a particular path through an infinite web of possibilities, making one decision after another, each decision making the path more distinct, more unique. To know about the labyrinth beforehand allows you a chance not only to make more informed decisions but also to see possible pathways; possibilities that would have previously been invisible. You can’t decide to do what you can’t even imagine. First of all, you have to learn how to read and write music fluently, as fluently as you write and read in English. Then you have to learn about harmony, you will have to take several years of harmony at the very least so that you truly understand the underlying structure of music and how to achieve similar goals in your own work. You have to study counterpoint, orchestration, music history- you can’t add something new to a tradition you are not thoroughly familiar with, you have to understand what is already there before you can add anything worthwhile. Otherwise you are just stumbling blindly into a vast region that has already been explored by many others; you are bound to reinvent the wheel and call it a new name. You may then go on to study advanced Schenkerian analysis and deep rhythmic or structural analysis and certain modern composers in great detail. Schoenberg, Webern, Ligeti, Bartok, Stravinsky, Crumb, Stockhausen… at the very least. And maybe then, you would be ready to start writing something. Maybe then you would be ready to make a few attempts at composing. Or maybe by then, you would decide that you don’t have anything new to write… maybe everything you thought was interesting or revolutionary has already been done and done much more beautifully than you ever could…”
We both listened carefully as she talked. She used a very soothing voice as she spoke, but the rhythm of her statements was methodical and almost military in its heaviness. When she made that final statement, when she described a state where someone decides that they have nothing to contribute to such a vast creative tradition, I got the distinct feeling that she was talking about herself. This was precisely the final conclusion she had reached in her own relationship with composition. She now taught music (orchestration, conducting, counterpoint) but she was not a composer and she didn’t intend to become one. Maybe at one time she had hoped to compose, but she had come to a clear decision that the world had no need for her contributions in this direction and she had settled on a more predictable route.
I thanked her for her help and my new friend thanked her as well, both of us were very respectful and polite in our manner. But I walked out of that office feeling a bit deflated. I had been sincerely touched by Gerardo’s enthusiasm when we were together in the lab and her reaction to it seemed completely demoralizing. I felt as if she was purposefully pouring cold water on his red hot urge to create something new.
“You want to get something to drink in the Student Union?” I asked and he readily agreed.
***
For the next few hours, in the cafeteria at the student union, we talked about all kinds of subjects. Of course, we talked about music, about sophisticated modern music, about folk music, about pop music, about electronic music, about dark esoteric music, but we also talked about trance states, radically altered states of consciousness, about magic and shamanism and psychedelics, about secret societies and dark visions of the future, and we talked about the nature of human choices and the possibilities that stemmed from those choices; how and when do we decide what we are to do with our lives, and how do we determine if we can actually do it, if we should do it, when to do it and how to do it.
We ended up talking about the existence of parallel worlds, parallel possibilities spiraling infinitely outward from every single moment of individual choice. It turned out that we were both fans of science fiction and had even read some of the same authors. I mentioned Valis and he nodded aggressively.
“Yes, yes… this is what I am interested in. This is what I want to develop. I had a feeling you would understand.”
I was surprised to learn that he had also been born in Central America, like me. I was born in El Salvador and he was born in Honduras, to be precise. His family had moved to Mexico City when he was very young and he had come to the Bay Area in the 80s and never left. His father was a very successful lawyer in Mexico City and his mother was a respected architect who travelled all over the world and had designed many important buildings in many major cities; both of them were very wealthy. He had grown up surrounded by money, luxury, privilege and endless intellectual discussions.
He was a student at the University, but I had never run into him because he was majoring in philosophy. We talked a bit about Nietzsche and Foucault as I was very interested in both of these thinkers at the time and he showed himself to be impressively knowledgeable about both. He was able to show me connections I had never seen on my own without diminishing my enthusiasm for their writings.
He told me he was supposed to go on a trip to Europe in the next few months, Paris, Munich, Amsterdam; he thought maybe overseas he might be able to find help with his project. When he said the word ‘project’, it had a weight that resonated within me even if I couldn’t quite comprehend what he was referring to. I felt a kind of deep respect for his commitment while at the same time I was more than a bit concerned that he was running fervently into a dead end. Was he committing to a hopeless cause? Was he making the wrong choice? Was my role in this moment to dissuade him (like Professor Lemon had tried to do) or to encourage him regardless of my own unspoken doubts?
He asked me if I thought a person could really learn about music, real music, in a formal school like this one.
“Can someone like Professor Lemon really teach someone else how to compose music?”
I gave him the most honest answer I could find within myself.
“I believe that here you can learn all the fundamental musical skills, and all those skills are really essential in order to compose, at least in this particular manner of composing. Here, you can learn how scales work and how they form the basis for melody and motif, how chords work and how to construct sequences of them that can be both expected and surprising, you can learn how to compose new harmonic structures through the careful movement of multiple individual voices, you can learn about counterpoint and how to create multiple melodies that have an independent life of their own while working with each other to complete a unified whole; and you can learn about orchestration, about all the different instruments of an orchestra and their peculiarities and the ways in which they can function together. But the mystery that lies at the deep hidden heart of music, the deep source of unconscious inner vision from which composing emerges, that you cannot learn here. Maybe you can’t learn it anywhere, definitely nowhere that is as formal and structured as this place. Either you learn that ahead of time, maybe in your childhood through pure intuition or simply through careful deep listening, taking in what others have already done through hours of delicate observation, managing to absorb what is hidden under layers of careful work and sound structure- maybe a certain something still lives in the music as you listen to it and it can be passed on to you directly, without any buffer or explanation… or you can learn it much later, after all this technique has made its way into you and now you have developed the ability and the refined mental structures to visualize compositions that would have been unimaginable before- without the symbolic elements, your mind simply can’t even visualize the many possibilities extending outwards in all directions. I tried to compose music from the very first moment I encountered the possibility of playing an active role in it, when I first sat in front of my mother’s piano without any clue about what the pattern of keys implied, what the black keys meant, what the white keys meant, what notes worked with each other. Without any formal knowledge at all, I felt an urge to do something with this thing that was in front of me. I spent hours improvising long pieces without form or a clear distinct shape or rhythm, just playing and playing without end. That strange urge you cannot learn here, I don’t know if anybody can actually teach that. If someone can, I haven’t met them yet.”
***
A few weeks later, he told me about his plans to create a large working group, a kind of spiritual organization that would focus on music as well as other art forms.
We were smoking pot up on the cliffs north of Ocean Beach, facing the Bay. He was sitting on a thick dead tree that was bent forward towards the cliff edge and I was sitting on a large rock facing him- the clump of short bent trees around us protected us from the wind to some degree. I could see the bay behind him as he spoke, the blueness of the water provided a clear contrast to his brown hair and his deep brown eyes and the rhythmic sound of the wind and the water and the seals moaning and barking was a distinct sound bed on which the melody of his voice could flourish.
“To put a group together is easy, I think,” he said, “I have never done it of course but I have some ideas on how to get people to come to me. Look, this is what I think… if you want to attract the attention of spiritual people, you know the ones I mean? The kind of people that shop at new age stores, get excited about crystals and amulets, people that meditate every day, that go to workshops with various expensive gurus and visit Esalen down the coast whenever they can afford it… If you want to attract these people, then you use spiritual signifiers; you use the words, the symbols, the phrases, the music that they are used to encountering in their lives, the symbols that they seek recurrently, the ones that form the underlying structure of their reality, the forms and shapes that they most identify with. In the same way, if you want to attract political people, the kind of people that are focused on political change, on progressive causes, on changing the economic structure of the world and abolishing the various power hierarchies that rule our lives, then you use political signifiers; you use those words, symbols and forms that they are most familiar with. Political symbols, political music, political slogans. It’s very simple. I just have to work at developing my tools, my approach. Maybe you can help me with this. It will be a lot of detailed work and I can’t do it alone.”
I nodded and smiled without making any commitment. I didn’t want to become involved too deeply in this crazy quest of his but I couldn’t resist feeling flattered that he thought I could somehow help him. (In my mind, I saw a large group of people sitting in a circle, on a cliff overlooking the ocean, singing, dancing, playing various instruments. I wouldn't mind being one of them. I wouldn’t mind leading them and helping them to explore.) I also enjoyed our conversations enormously so I wanted to keep that door open between us by hiding my hesitations. Maybe I would help, maybe I wouldn’t, but I definitely wanted to keep on talking.
“Tell me more about this project that you mention often…” I said.
He smiled and leaned forward.
“It’s hard to describe at this point. I envision a kind of meta machine - a psychedelic structure that transcends the physical plane while being firmly grounded in the world of matter - a metaphysical engine constructed of many people, built from pranic channels and astral formations, thought forms and living manifestations of earnest desire. All of it tied together forming a larger structure, an invisible structure, a kind of spaceship meant to take us to a new place, a secret place that I can’t describe at this time.”
***
The last time I saw him at the school, he was rushing across the courtyard, one piece of luggage in either hand. I immediately got the impression that he was leaving for good and that I might not ever see him again.
From the concrete terrace above the student union, I called to him in a loud voice:
“What happened Gerardo? What happened?”
I repeated it several times.
“What happened?”
But he did not answer. Maybe he didn’t hear me. I was afraid that he had come to the conclusion that I was not willing to help. I was afraid he had seen through my façade.
***
In the years that followed, I had a lot of marvelous ideas and inspirations. I developed interesting psychological and philosophical explanations for everything that happened to me and to people around me; I had shocking insights about the nature of politics and power, about propaganda and ideology and manipulation and violence. All of it was very complex and sophisticated and I was satisfied with myself.
And yet, in spite of my best intentions, in spite of my strong desires, my musical work fell apart, things went wrong, from bad to worse to dismal. I fell into a deep and dark negative place where it was hard to make any move at all, where I couldn’t find a way to make a choice or even imagine the possible paths to follow. In the deepest parts of my soul, something took form, something oppressive and heavy I had not consciously summoned and yet it had come to me, something low and dark and empty, something powerful in its utter lack of meaning. It was darkness itself, it was the powerful shadow of nothingness that necessarily lies under all wishes and goals that a human mind can invent. It destroyed all my dreams in its wake and left me without hope or illusions. What happened to my inspirations? What happened to my ideas? What happened to my unbreakable wish to create?
I dropped out of school and ended up working as a temp downtown, shuffling papers and running meaningless errands. In the endless routine of daily office work, I could find a measure of safety, something to protect me from the overwhelming darkness and despair that threatened to eat me from the inside out; in the superficial warmth of corporate acceptance and recognition, I found a kind of lackluster hope, a sense of security that soon became absolutely impossible to sacrifice. It was a clean prison of formalized daily written memos and polite prepared voice mails, of fake polite gratitude meant to reward fake polite commitment to fake company goals. In the middle of a wealth processing machine painted with signifiers of individual liberty and freedom, I was trapped.
***
One day in 1999, when I was dropping an insurance information package off in the Embarcadero building, I saw my old friend with a group of people. He was sitting at a large round table in a nice Chinese restaurant in the Embarcadero mall, eating dim sum, telling stories and answering questions in the calm and measured voice that I remembered, now more mature and self-assured.
I greeted him from a distance without saying a word, just a wave of my hand from the other side of the restaurant window, a tentative smile on my face. He saw me right away but he didn’t recognize me for a brief moment. (My beard had grown and I had gained a lot of weight. I was also wearing a formal outfit that I would have never worn in the days when we had known each other- a suit and tie were the exact antitheses of everything we believed in when we had been friends at the University.)
When he finally did realize who I was, his eyes opened wider and he waved back at me. He signaled for me to wait. I stood outside the restaurant feeling awkward while he finished the story he was in the middle of telling. After a few long minutes of waiting, during which I contemplated leaving more than once, he excused himself from the table and came over to talk to me. The people that were seated with him all looked in our direction, an open question in their faces. (I noticed they were all very young and looked impossibly innocent to my new cynical eyes- college age men and women eager to find answers, family, acceptance.)
As he approached me, I saw that he was wearing a very expensive suit and a golden watch on his right wrist, a watch so large and shiny that it called attention to itself, even to someone like me that usually wouldn’t notice these signs of luxury. He hugged me with what seemed a kind of vulnerable sincerity, and he expressed how happy he was to see me again. Then he pointed out the strange coincidence of us running into each other like this.
“This is unusual, noteworthy. Don’t you feel that there’s a kind of synchronicity happening here? What are the odds of us running into each other like this?”
I nodded and smiled and then I said:
“But how would we use that? How does it change anything? How does it help us to notice this unusual coincidence?”
He responded with the old glint in his eyes, the same glint that originally made me want to talk to him:
“It doesn’t matter if it helps us or not. That is not the point, right? We just need to observe the coincidence itself, the synchronicity. Beneath it, maybe we can perceive a greater hidden order. It is that hidden order that matters.”
I wasn’t sure what to say to that, how to respond to this vague pronouncement, but it reminded me of the conversations we used to have on the cliffs. We only talked for a few minutes, he asked me some general questions about myself, what was I doing, was I still writing music, where was I working. I answered truthfully and then asked him the same. His answers were very vague.
“The project is moving, there is a strong wind behind its sails…”
Then he gave me his card and went back inside the restaurant. The card said something about the deep exploration of all possibilities near and far, and it included an email and a phone number.
***
That night, alone in my apartment, I thought of contacting him. I went over it again and again. It was clear to me that we were no longer the same people we once were even if we vaguely looked the same, we were only reflections of what we had been, reflections of the two young men that had met in the University and spent countless hours smoking pot and talking about anything that came to mind.
I looked at the card in my hand and flipped it over and over, wondering about Gerardo and his project. We could never be the same, we would never be the same, we could never relate to each other in the same way that we once did. But maybe that’s why I felt a need to talk to him further, to ask him questions, maybe that’s why I wanted to know more about his current life, about his mysterious project; maybe that’s why I needed to know more even if I wasn’t sure of what I was asking or why I needed to ask it.
Around midnight, I finally wrote a very simple email (“It was good to see you today. I hope we can see each other again soon.”) and then fell into a deep sleep.
***
In the morning, I had an answer; a short but friendly email that emphasized how glad he was that we had run into each other. He invited me to visit his new place in Marin and gave me the address and detailed directions.
“Come over any time. You are always welcome. If you can come for a few days, that would be the best. I have many things to show you and we need plenty of time to talk.”
***
I drove up to Marin on a Friday afternoon, prepared to stay for the weekend. His new house was an impressive two-story complex- several wooden structures surrounded by a forest of Douglas firs. The various structures were connected to each other through an unpredictable arrangement of wooden stairwells. I imagined his mother had a hand in this beautiful, distinctive architectural design.
From where I parked, I could see two distinct large open spaces. In the one closest to me, I saw a small group of young college age kids practicing some kind of ritualistic dance in a circle- they were all wearing robes of various colors. I could also see through large open windows into a busy workshop where more young people were working on some kind of handcraft; I couldn’t determine exactly what they were working on from where I was but I could see the attention in their eyes, I could almost hear the light jokes, the small disagreements, the short bursts of laughter.
I walked toward the main doors and Gerardo came out smiling broadly and rushed straight into an open hug. I dropped my small pack at my side and hugged him back a bit awkwardly. That hug lasted for a few minutes, in fact it lasted long enough for me to start feeling comfortable. We then walked into a beautiful living room adorned with large oil paintings and tall black sculptures- bald alien looking people in various poses, frozen in the middle of purposeful movement. We sat for a while, drinking tea and remembering our days at the University.
Later, he introduced me to some of the many young people that lived and worked there with him. Some of them sat with us and we all talked- it was a very relaxed open-ended conversation that easily flowed in unpredictable directions, and everyone seemed very comfortable with gaps of silence, spaces of pure breath and open eyes; they were all so comfortable with these moments of quiet that I quickly began to feel very comfortable as well. Most of them were young women, about five to ten years younger than us. They were all very interested to hear about how I had met Gerardo and what he was like when he was younger. I told them some stories and they all laughed at the appropriate times, including Gerardo himself. We ate and drank and smoked pot for several hours. There was light ambient music playing in the background accompanied by the sound of people working not too far away, in other rooms.
I asked a few tentative questions about their work and again, I was given a few very vague answers- some mentions of the aforementioned “project” and a few allusions to spiritual growth and mind expansion, slippery descriptions that soon were derailed and vanished into another story, another memory, another joke.
Around 11pm, one of the young women (a short Mexican girl wearing a manta shirt and blue jeans) guided me to a room upstairs, a beautiful round room with tall windows on almost all sides. I went to sleep staring at the full moon above the trees and listening to owls and coyotes in the distance.
***
I woke up in the middle of the night with two of the girls I had met earlier lying beside me. One of them, on my right, had short blonde hair and a shy teasing smile, and the other one, on my left, had very long black hair, skin almost unnaturally white and knowing eyes that seemed to shine in the darkness. When they saw that I was awake they both smiled and pressed their bodies against me. I was very surprised and confused.
“It’s ok,” the blonde one said, “it really is…”
I looked down and realized that they were both as naked as I was. I could feel their smooth thighs pressing against mine and their soft flowing breath against the sides of my face. The girl on my left, the brunette, placed her right hand on the center of my chest and the blonde girl touched my forehead with her index finger.
“Breathe slowly… slowly,” the black-haired girl said in a very soft voice, right next to my ear, “This is just one of our little traditions. He asked us to come up here to see you. He wants you to be part of the project. He wants you to know a bit more about it… this is the way for you to begin to understand.”
Then she shifted over me, laying one of her thighs completely over mine, the touch of her smooth flesh an unbearable sensual delight against my own sensitive skin, and she kissed me on the lips very lightly, as if testing the waters, feeling the terrain for my reaction. I wasn’t sure how to respond, I was more than a bit surprised; I was shocked and confused and nervous, but I kissed her back instinctively, her lips and tongue smooth and silky against mine. We held that soft little kiss for a while and then I leaned back, still utterly bewildered. I was breathing heavily and I could feel the intensity of her warm breath as she pressed her face against the side of my chest. Even though she had initiated it, she seemed almost as shocked as I was by the intensity of our desire for each other.
The blond girl kissed me next and I responded as well. As she kissed me, I could feel the body of the brunette insistently pressing against me from the left side. I closed my eyes and surrendered to the experience and they both kissed me, one after the other. One kiss that went on forever and then another and then another.
As I felt their soft tender lips on my own lips, I felt the presence of something new, something that almost made sense. I was slowly but surely shifting into a very altered state, something unusual was happening, something I didn’t understand, something I couldn’t clearly categorize within the set of experiences I associated with normal modern life, within the structural routine of my customary expectations. (Waking up, going to work, coming home, going to a movie, going on a date, going for a walk, reading, talking to a friend, going to the doctor, talking on the phone, watching TV, walking down the sidewalk on a windy afternoon.) It didn’t make sense. I didn’t know why this was or what it was, but I didn’t want it to end.
I opened my eyes and looked at the black-haired girl once again. She smiled sweetly, with just a hint of self-conscious satisfaction, and asked me:
“Can you feel it? The different flavor?”
I said:
“Yes. I don’t know how to describe it but I understand. I do. It’s just different.”
“It’s ok. There is no need to describe it. We just want you to notice the difference. We want you to be aware of it. It’s important that you establish that you can perceive a difference. Your recognition of the difference is all that matters.”
And I kissed them both again, with more confidence this time, alternating between one and the other. Slowly I slid into a kind of trance that removed all preconceptions and left me truly naked and floating in a sea of pure sensations and emotion.
This went on for what seemed like hours. I went from initial shock and shyness to intense excitement and overwhelming desire to a state of open vulnerability where I felt as if I had known both of these girls for years, as if we had lived together so long that we had grown to love and accept every tiny detail of each of our unique habits, both physical and emotional. I lost track of time completely, I couldn’t even remember where I was or what I was doing there. But I knew that I didn’t want to ever leave. A kind of door had been opened, a door I recognized but couldn’t place.
***
On Saturday morning, I woke up to the sound of birds singing and the impressive sight of the bright green tree tops right outside the windows. I quickly got dressed and went downstairs.
I found Gerardo sitting against a wall in one of the large open spaces I had seen the day before. He was observing about twelve people moving slowly to soft droning music- a kind of improvised dance in slow motion, slowly turning clockwise. I called to him in a gentle voice:
“Gerardo? Can we talk?”
He responded immediately but only with hand gestures. He smiled and waved at me, signaling for me to come sit with him. Then, still using only hand gestures, he let me know that he couldn’t talk at the moment. (He pressed his index finger against his lips and then pointed with the same finger at the group dancing in front of us.) I vaguely understood that he had made some kind of choice to not talk during this particular event; he was there to only observe silently. (I understood all of this with a confidence that was as surprising as it was strong.)
I sat next to him for a while but I was restless. I felt the urge to ask him some questions, questions that would be impossible to formulate using only my hands. I walked into the kitchen next door and found a small paper pad and a pen, and I wrote the first questions that came to my mind.
This is what I wrote:
“What is this place? What are you trying to do here? What happened last night with those girls? Did you really ask them to come and see me?”
He closed his eyes for a few minutes after reading my note. I could see his chest moving slowly up and down. Then he wrote something under my questions and handed the paper back to me. This is what he wrote:
“If there is sky and open space beyond the heavy weight of the human dimension then that is the right place for us- that is the secret place.”
Then he smiled and put his attention back on the people that were still moving and dancing in the middle of the large room. I leaned back against the wall and tried to take it all in, while my head swarmed with further questions, questions that I couldn’t even figure out how to state clearly to myself. Some fundamental resting place had been removed from my mind and I was left dangling, unable to express my discomfort but also unable to forget it was there.
***
Early Sunday morning, the black-haired girl that had visited me the previous night came to my room to invite me to a meeting. (We had been introduced on the first night I arrived, but she reminded me her name was Daria. As she did, she kissed me again with the same vulnerable familiarity I had experienced the night before. As I kissed her, I once again felt as if I knew her, as if I had known her for years, as if our contact was implicitly true even if I barely knew who she was.)
It took me some time to get dressed. For about fifteen minutes, I looked out at the top of the trees and observed the small black birds that flew from branch to branch in a constant rush of aimless enthusiasm, all of them singing with a raw force that needed no further justification. (We sing, we fly, and we sing some more. It’s what we do.) For another fifteen minutes, I laid back down and closed my eyes and allowed my mind to wander over all I had seen and felt in the previous twenty-four hours.
When I finally went downstairs, I couldn’t find anybody. I walked around the living room, the kitchen, the two workshops, the terraces. Not a trace of any of the many people I had seen the day before. All the rooms were empty.
I was suddenly afraid; I was overtaken by a cold feeling that told me that they had all left. Wherever they were going, they had left me behind. I searched and searched throughout the large labyrinthine house (discovering even more rooms in the process, several large bedrooms with bunk beds lined up like barracks, a couple of storage rooms, a small meditation room, a wide open basement equipped with recording equipment and many musical instruments.) But I couldn’t find any trace of any of the occupants. I was all alone.
After about an hour spent searching, I decided to leave. I went back up to my room, I put my extra clothes and the few things I had brought with me into my pack and I walked down to the main driveway where my car was parked.
That’s when he finally appeared. He walked down from the terrace (where I had looked for him, for anyone, several times during the previous hour.) He was holding a white duffel bag under his left arm and he was wearing a small black hat. It appeared that he was also about to leave. A moment later, while he was still walking down the stairway, a large SUV drove up the driveway, and the two young people seated at the front waved at him and he waved back.
I walked over towards him and he looked at me for the first time that morning, with a calm smile and wide open eyes- almost as if he was recognizing me once again after years of separation. I’m sure the confusion was obvious on my face.
“I only have a bit of time,” I said, “I have to go back… back to the city. I have to go back to work, back to my regular life. I wish we’d had more time to talk…”
He was clearly surprised to hear me say this and I didn’t know why. (Later, it occurred to me that he expected me to stay there indefinitely; that it would be enough to show me the space and the people and maybe even the girls, and that I would simply stay without any further questions.)
We talked briefly and we made a vague agreement to see each other again soon. It was clear that he was in a hurry to get going. We didn’t set a date or a time for our next meeting. He left with the couple in the SUV and I left in my car. I had so many unanswered questions still pulsating in my mind and, so far, I had failed to get even one clear answer. As I drove south on the Golden Gate Bridge, my memory of the entire weekend was already becoming blurry, like a dream that quickly fades with every minute that passes.
***
The following night, back in my apartment in the avenues, close to Ocean Beach (close enough to hear and smell the waves as they recurrently crashed against the sand,) I had a very distinct dream about Gerardo.
In the dream, I criticized him fiercely. I was full of righteous anger and I talked in a loud aggressive voice - a voice I would never have used in his presence. I criticized what he was doing, all that I had observed while I was visiting his place.
“What are you doing here? Are you trying to set up some kind of cult around yourself? What are you really doing with all these young people? Have you somehow brainwashed them? What have you promised them? What have you told them? What is your ultimate intention? What is really happening here?”
I loudly attacked everything that I had seen; the music he was using for the dances (commercial new age fluff - not worthy of a real musician), the nature of his various practices (the usual pseudo spiritual ideas, a hodgepodge mix of Yoga, Sufism, Castaneda and Thelema.) I criticized his general arrogant manner, not towards me but towards the people there, who looked at him with utter devotion and awe. Blind followers, zombies, I said. I ravaged everything, both what I had actually seen and what I had only imagined; it was a long angry rant without a hint of compassion or any attempt at understanding. All of it, all at once.
By the time I was finished, when I had run out of breath, out of energy, out of outrage, I just stared at him breathing heavily. He was clearly upset with me; I could see it in his eyes which stared at me with a fierce viciousness I had never seen in them before. It was clear that he didn’t like to be criticized in this way, he did not like his work being questioned. He was deeply offended and, worst of all, he seemed profoundly disappointed. Disappointed by my lack of vision, by my lack of understanding, by my lack of intuitive empathy.
I said a few final words before I woke up:
“Remember that I only have very little time. I have very little time to talk with you. I have to say everything I have to say now. And I have to make sure that you hear me. I can’t wait for later. I have to let everything come out now…”
I woke up still feeling some of the overwhelming anger of the dream, but now it was mixed in with a kind of nostalgic sadness, a feeling of loss for something I couldn’t comprehend.
***
A month later, I ran into Daria in a small sandwich shop close to my work downtown. I felt that this random encounter couldn’t be a coincidence but I didn’t point this out. I simply let it happen.
She acted very friendly and casual, as if running into me was the most normal thing in the world. She asked me to sit with her as she ate her sandwich and I agreed. Talking loudly over the sound of pop music and of the many people around us also talking loudly, she told me about a band she wanted to see in San Francisco (some kind of vaguely esoteric English goth rock band that sang lyrics full of references to western magic), and about a new workshop she was planning to design and lead back at their place in Marin. I listened attentively and then managed to ask her about something that had been bothering me ever since my visit.
“Do you know something about what he was asking me the other day? On the first day of my stay at your place, he asked me about the sun, or rather, about the solar system and the arrangement of the planets and how it all connected to a musical scale… and he asked me about chords and resonance… He wanted to know about possible isomorphisms that we could explore in the future, something along the lines of magical correspondences, models of musical language to create new sound structures. Was this also connected to this project that you are all working on? This mysterious project he keeps on referring to…?”
She shook her head and said she didn’t know anything about that.
“I am just there to learn and improve myself, develop my own abilities. I don’t understand everything and I don’t need to understand everything… there’s more going on there than I can see and, for now, I am absolutely fine with that…”
She continued to be very warm and pleasant but she didn’t say very much at all. It was as if we were talking sideways, looking at each other while avoiding a presence just on the edge of our vision. When she was done with her food, she kissed me goodbye, full on the lips; a continuation of the spontaneous intimacy we had shared while I was visiting their place. I saw her walk away down Market street, and I couldn’t help but wonder if this had been some kind of test. If that’s what it was, I wondered if I had completely failed it.
***
I was finally able to meet with him several months later. After a few emails back and forth, we agreed on a time and a place and, a few days later, we got together for dinner at an Italian restaurant in North Beach. He was very forceful this time, much more direct than he had ever been before; his voice was heavier, as if someone else, an older man with an air of inherent authority, was emerging from the depths of his throat, a force intent on overcoming all obstacles, ripping away old tendrils of habit that may get in the way of change. I felt that he had a clear mission this time; he had something distinct that he had to communicate and he didn’t want to be derailed by tangential questions or small talk.
“I want you to come and work with me. I want you to be part of the project. An integral part.”
He said it slowly and with an emphasis on each syllable.
“There it is. Plain and simple. I’ve said it. Come and work with me. Full time. I want us to spend all our time working on the project. You don’t need to worry about food or rent or anything else - all your expenses will be covered. I can’t explain everything all at once - it takes time to even understand how everything works and I myself don’t know how everything works yet. You will help me figure that out. Our work together is part of the project, together we will move faster than either of us alone ever could, together we will further discover what the project ultimately entails.”
I gathered that the “project” had something to do with music and mathematics and art and something akin to astrology or numerology. And magic of course, always magic, even if I couldn’t clearly define what the word meant to him or to me.
In the friendliest tone I could find within myself, I gave him an answer:
“Look, this is why I had to leave that day. This is why I was in such a rush. This is all more than a bit strange to me - it all leaves me unsettled and honestly, very anxious. I don’t understand what you are doing. I just don’t. I don’t understand why you are doing it and I don’t understand why all these other people are there to help you. What are they looking for? What do they think they will get from you? I certainly don’t know. I can’t devote my entire life to something I don’t understand. Honestly, I am tempted… there was something that day, that weekend… something I am curious about… but I need to know more…”
He responded with a statement that sounded very familiar:
“Look, about the people, they are necessary for the project; later you will understand how and why. I was hoping that night when you were there, when the girls came to visit you, some of it would become clear. I was hoping there would be a kind of intuitive communication. Bodies communicate with each other at frequencies that the mind can barely perceive, much less comprehend. Daria said she thought you were starting to sense it, she said she felt you grasping at it. But in any case, whether you understand it or not at this time, they are necessary. They are an essential part of the meta-machine, the bodies, the minds, the pulsing hearts. I have made them come to me. I have invoked them from the chaotic sea of humanity. The process is relatively simple. If I want to attract the attention of spiritual people - people who view themselves as spiritual, then I use spiritual signifiers; I use the words, symbols, paintings, clothing, music that these people associate with themselves, the stuff they are familiar with. If I want to attract the attention of political people, people involved in political causes, people intent on changing the world, changing the way that governments operate, laws, foreign policy, the use of public funds, then I use political signifiers. I use the words, symbols, paintings, clothing, music that this kind of people are familiar with, the kind they identify with themselves and with their causes. That is how they have come to be with me. I have used the right signifiers at the right time. Or in any case, those signifiers give them a way to explain the project to themselves, it gives them an ideological framework that they can refer to, a framework that provides a psychological justification. As I said, it will take a while to fully understand the project. It will take a while for me, for you, for any of us. Not everything is clear at the start. And we are only at the very beginning…”
I was still very confused by all that he was saying. I was even a bit suspicious as to why he was saying it to me at this particular time. There was something else happening, something I couldn’t describe, something I couldn’t fully grasp.
We said goodbye without coming to any solid, definite conclusion. It was clear to him that I was unwilling to commit and it was clear to me that there was no other way with him. Full commitment or nothing. As I walked back to my car, surrounded by the lights and sounds of North Beach – loud music, laughter, someone in the distance cursing, half naked young girls dancing next to huge bodyguards at the dark doorways of strip clubs- I saw us in my mind, I saw us a few moments earlier, Gerardo and me sitting at the restaurant table across from each other, talking; I saw us as vague copies of what we once were, what we were back at the University, what we were when we were much younger: a confused music student with dreams of becoming a composer and an even more confused philosophy student with dreams of fulfilling an indescribable metaphysical mission, a young student looking for esoteric answers way beyond the reach of our limited human language. And maybe that was why we had felt an attraction towards each other back then; it was a recognition of our mutual confused sense of wonder, our mutual thirst for the unspeakable. Maybe that was the only reason. And maybe that was enough.
But now we were no longer the same. After so many years had passed, so many failures, so many disappointments, so many mistakes. Even if we vaguely looked the same as we once did, we had followed distinctly different paths and those different paths had transformed us into very different creatures, very different characters. I couldn’t bring myself to follow him to wherever he was going. I had fallen too much for far too long. I was no longer confused or adrift in an ocean of wonderment, I was much more stunned and pessimistic and disillusioned and I had run out of questions or excuses. Most of all, I was out of gas. I could still hear the sound of the mystery in the distance, but I had no hope of ever seeing it; even if somehow, I found myself standing before it through sheer accident, my eyes were closed and I had no light.
***
A couple of years passed and I didn’t hear from him or anybody else connected to him. I kept on working at my corporate job and I kept on attempting to revive my work with music. Many afternoons from the window of my apartment, sitting on my old green sofa, I stared at the ocean waves until it was too dark to see anything. Then I would turn on the TV so the noise would lull me to sleep.
One day, sometime in 2001, out of nowhere, I got an email inviting me to come to his place once again. As he did before, he asked me to stay for the weekend, using almost the exact same words he had used before. I was somewhat confused with this new invitation or why it came when it did but I accepted.
***
This time the place was mostly empty. There were still a few women around and a couple of young men (all of them dressed in that vaguely new age clothing I had seen before – bright robes, yoga pants, colorful t-shirts, hand-made necklaces and bracelets) but it all felt a bit abandoned, a bit unkempt. Compared to what I had experienced on my first visit, something was definitely missing. The work spaces seemed mostly inactive, the living spaces seemed a bit run down. There was less noise and the noise that there was, was slower, softer, lacking in life.
After a long meandering conversation during and after dinner, a conversation that touched on all of our old favorite subjects and a few new ones, he suddenly told me that he believed that he would be dead soon. The statement fell on me like a pile of bricks and I was knocked out of breath for a moment – I just stared at him as he continued to speak as if he hadn’t said anything remotely unusual.
“In many other possibilities, I am already dead. Long gone and buried. Since we don’t have that much time, I better go straight to the point, no?”
He moved his chair close to mine and tilted his head towards me. Without any further warning, he dived into a slow, careful monologue that left no room for questions or interruptions, a river of words and long sentences that seemed too precise to not have been practiced yet retained a certain hesitancy that betrayed its nature as a flowing improvisation. I felt practically hypnotized by his voice and the constant rhythm of his fantastic statements.
“Through long careful work on the production of subtle magical chambers, work that has involved a lot of sacrifice and a lot of trial and error, I have found a particular pathway into a realm of deep blue sky and wide open space, a realm far beyond the heavy weight of the mechanical world in which we have lived all our lives, this turgid mechanical world in which we have floundered far too long. In this rarefied realm, among many available vistas, I can see the future. I can see the future as clearly as I see you now. But I don’t just see our future, I see all the futures. I can see multiple parallel possibilities that co-exist with our own. All the many presents and all the many pasts and all the many futures. All of it. All at once. A tangled web of infinite causes and effects, of actions and consequences, of fate and choices and accident and unspoken connections that extend over years and decades and centuries. These are all the worlds that didn’t happen - or rather, that didn’t happen to us, here. For example, in one of these possibilities, I am much older than you are; there you see me as an old wise respected teacher and you are awed by my wisdom and my presence. In another one, I am your younger brother and you pay no attention to anything I have to say- what can a young brother say to an older brother after all? In yet another, you meet me until we are both very old and barely able to communicate with each other; we have both crystallized to such an extent that it is impossible to even conceive of magic in any serious way. It is all purely theoretical, just beautiful ideas bounced around between friends, but we still explore these ideas, these endless questions, to the limits of our capabilities. In another, we met as boys in El Salvador and became life-long friends, there we spend a lifetime having long conversations and we manage to do some work together and then we fall apart and drift away from each other never to speak again. In some of these infinite possibilities, I die long before you do. In some, you die very young and I remember you for years to come, always looking back at the time we spent together, always wondering about the hidden potentials hiding in our brief friendship. When I manage to reach the silent spot, when I find myself in this special place that I am describing, this hidden chamber where everything is present and everything is available, where I am able to see all of these possibilities at once… and I find you, I finally find you… I feel so grateful to talk to you again that it is almost painful, since I have mourned for you for so long that it seems impossible that you are actually there in front of me, and I also feel so angry about the many slights and betrayals that happened elsewhere, all the ways in which you broke my trust, the ways in which you tainted our friendship, the ways in which you broke our sacred bond… I feel angry all over again because I can feel their presence, the pain of it, as if they had only just happened, because they did in fact just happen somewhere else, and I feel so sad about the years we spent without any communication, being that I know all we could have done if we had worked together without interruption, and I feel so happy that here and now we are able to talk even if that’s all we can do. Talk. Talking is good. Talking is more than enough. Again, never, forever. This is the right space for me, for us, this is the secret place. This is what we wanted. This is where we belong.”
I listened carefully to everything he said, even if I only had a very vague idea of what he was talking about, of what he was describing. At times I would allow myself to be swept along by the overwhelming vision of an infinite web of realities that intersected each other in all directions, at times I stepped back and saw him as a middle-aged man slowly going insane with the help of these confused young people that had become his followers, that had chosen to go along with him, entangled with him in this long, slow fall into madness. Regardless of its ultimate true nature, regardless of its truth or falsity, I was fascinated by his long speech, by all these strange things he had to say to me, by this vision of an infinite multidimensional reality, and I was very curious to hear more.
“Does this have to do with the allies?” I finally managed to ask.
The magical allies, the psychoactive mushrooms, had been the subject of a lot of our conversations back in the University. They had spoken to me, to us, in their own language, and that language had vibrated through the years, echoing off every surface, speaking of things which were otherwise impossible to imagine. I was eager to understand how they tied in to what he was saying now, how they connected to his magical discoveries.
He smiled and answered calmly:
“You want to know about the allies? You have always been curious about this, right? What do you want to know? Do they still interest me? Yes. Do I believe that they have helped me? Yes. Do I have access to them? Yes. Have I engaged with them recently? Yes. The allies are the allies.”
I said:
“You have to know that this is all dangerous. Very dangerous. There are people that will come after you if you have done something forbidden with this or if you are trying to engage with the allies in this prohibited way. Specially, if you are doing it with all these young people around you, especially if you use them in any kind of ritualistic way, in ways that involve sex and magic and all these forbidden, illegal activities. Any time sex and drugs and the occult intersect, there are people ready to be frightened out of their minds. These frightened people will say: ‘Don’t do this. It’s too dangerous. It’s immoral. It’s simply evil.”
He shrugged and responded:
“These people would never do it themselves; they have no idea what they are talking about, they don’t know enough to have anything worthwhile to say. They literally don’t have the words to talk about the project. The locations we seek don’t exist in their world. They cannot go with us into the secret place. They can never know it exists. For them, it doesn’t. It never did. It never will. The doors are closed for them and they will remain closed. If we cross over, they can’t reach us. When we cross over, we are far beyond their reach. Where they can’t reach, we are safe. Where they can’t go, they don’t exist.”
I left him that weekend and never called him back. I wanted to call many times but something stopped me, something I couldn’t understand. Maybe he had said too much too quickly, and my mind had been utterly overwhelmed by so many metaphysical ideas and psychedelic claims. Or maybe I just couldn’t believe there was anything real in what he was saying, anything that could actually be experienced in the here and now, anything that I could actually witness directly myself. It all remained ephemeral, distant, vague and fleeting, untouchable.
And yet I still felt a distinct temptation to believe, to abandon everything and follow him to the ends of the earth.
In the end, I never called him back and he never called me again either. Everything was left hanging, floating in mid-flight.
***
The years went by, and I did a pretty good job of putting the whole experience behind me, to compartmentalize it enough that I could get away with not thinking much about it for long stretches of time. I kept on working as an administrative assistant. Approximately five years after I first started at the corporation, I was hired permanently, and about a decade later, I was finally promoted to being an account manager. This involved certain privileges, certainly a higher income, but I was still pretty low in the corporate pyramid of power and I still saw the entire job as just something to do, something that would fulfill my need for money but nothing else. A necessary distraction from my real purposes. But unfortunately, those purposes had no future of their own.
Through all those many years, I tried to write new music. I started many projects - string quartets, piano solos, electronic suites, strange electroacoustic experiments mixing different composing techniques, combining synthesizers with samplers and programmed sequences of musical events, but I was rarely able to finish anything. With any given project, once I got about two thirds of the way through, I looked at it, I listened to what I had done, and I became intensely critical. Compared to the composers I admired, this was nothing, this was trash, this was completely worthless. So, beaten by my own harsh judgement, I would stop, hoping that new inspiration would come to allow me to fix the many problems I saw in that particular piece or track, but this new wave of inspiration never came. Instead, a few weeks later, after descending into a dark place where I knew this was yet another project that would never be finished, I would get the urge to do something new, a new piece, a new experiment, something completely different, and the whole cycle would begin all over again.
At times I tried to stop composing altogether, to stop this recurring torture wheel that kept on punishing me endlessly. And I managed to get away from it for a few weeks, maybe even a couple of months; and then, just when I thought I was finally free, some new idea would come to me and I was back at the start of the cycle, trying to at least complete a new piece, something, anything. Maybe this time I would find a way through, maybe now it would work.
Nobody ever listened to these aborted attempts, they were never published anywhere, they were never performed or shown. I didn’t even share them with friends. At the end of two decades of corporate work and secret musical failures, all I had to show for it were two large file cabinets full of musical sketches and outlines and several large hard drives full of misguided attempts.
Every experiment was a failure and every failure was further proof that I was deeply unable to finish anything, much less complete a composition I could be proud of. I certainly loved music but music did not love me. I was an exile in my own mind.
I now had all the skills required to be a composer, I knew all kinds of theories about traditional harmony and the creation of new subtle harmonic structures, about traditional and modern counterpoint and orchestration; I knew all about small and large scale forms, all about underlying structures… But when I closed my eyes, I heard nothing in particular, and when I tried to write, I wrote nothing that I could later appreciate as worthwhile. Notes without meaning, pointless shapes lacking sense or direction or heart. When I looked back at all I had attempted to create and all I had left unfinished, I knew that something was lacking, but I didn’t know what it was; I didn’t know what I was looking for and I was desperately unable to find it. I didn’t even know where to start.
***
One day in 2015, I walked up the wooden stairs that lead up to my apartment and found that the door was open. Wide open. I lived alone so there was no acceptable reason that would explain an open front door. I should have stepped away and called the police immediately. Instead, I remembered him, and I specifically remembered that he had once told me that he could open any locked door by simply stepping up to it and turning the knob with overwhelming confidence, with a clear certainty that the barrier would fall, the obstacle would be removed through the sheer force of his will.
For two decades, I had not seen him nor heard anything from him. But his image came back to me as clear as yesterday the moment I saw the open door. I stepped inside nervously, hoping my intuition was correct.
I walked into the living room and there he was, sitting on my old green sofa, wearing a small black hat and glasses, leaning back and calmly waiting for me, as if waiting here for me was an everyday occurrence. I could see some gray hair under the hat, and his short, trimmed beard had gone completely white. He looked at me with the old intense gaze that had only become more intense with the passing of the years, with the same friendly smile that had first made me want to help him.
“I have decided,” he said, “that it’s time for us to talk. We have waited long enough. We have waited too long. Let’s talk about everything. Let’s talk for as long as it’s necessary. Let’s leave no stone unturned.”
I was very happy to hear this. Maybe I had known this all along, but when he said it, I realized I had been waiting for this moment even as I had tried to forget all about him. It had been a long wait. I agreed immediately.
“Let’s do it. It’s time.”
***
We talked all night, often going in circles around certain subjects, certain ideas, certain memories, and the circles didn’t seem like repetitions but more like gradual expansions of recurring thoughts, rhythmic recapitulations of a basic theme now embellished with new motifs, psychedelic spirals intent on feeding back upon themselves and developing the core themes further.
For the final couple of hours that we had together, when dawn was breaking outside my window and I could hear a bit of traffic along the old great highway and seagulls singing over the rhythmic drone of the ocean waves, greeting the young sun with music, we simply listened to that delicate kind of silence that was all around us, a silence full of raw noise but no particular sound means anything, disturbances without intention over a bed of microscopic vibrant life. We stared into each other’s eyes, eyes that were also full of a particular kind of intense emptiness and that long silence became pregnant with overwhelming possibilities, with hints of what could never be said, things about to emerge, things about to be, the almost was that could never be expressed in words or symbols.
***
“In school, you learned about musical forms from the past, you learned how to construct endless melodies through the use of traditional and modified scales, you learned about harmony and how musical notes built upon each other and how their movements constructed unexpected synchronicities, dissonances and disruptions which emerged, grew and dissolved in time through the careful application of attention, balance and overarching pattern. You learned all these basic skills, all these abilities that would be required in order to be recognized or accepted as a musician, as a member of this invisible guild. But you were really looking for the secret place even if you didn’t know it, you were looking for the hidden passageways that could lead you there… that you would not learn in a music school, that they could not teach you. To compose music is to create a particular path through an infinite web of possibilities making one decision after another, each decision making the path more distinct, more unique. To be familiar with the labyrinth beforehand allows you a chance, not only to make more informed decisions, but to see pathways that would have previously been invisible. You can’t decide to do what you can’t even imagine.”
Most of all, I remember the voice… a voice that could talk for hours and never arrive at a final conclusion, never hint at what might wait at the end of all those interwoven statements, beyond technical knowledge or ability, beyond judgment or criticism, beyond admiration or recognition, beyond ideas and observations, beyond human rationality, in a place that could only be described as hidden, unreachable, secret.
“If you want to attract the attention of musical people,” he finally said, and this is when something became clear, even if only for a moment, something I had never fully believed but I had vaguely suspected in the back of my mind, “if you want to attract musical people, people who view themselves as musicians, composers, performers, songwriters, then you have to use musical signifiers; words, symbols, recordings, instruments, gadgets, computers, pulsing lights, vibrating colors, rhythmic drones.”
As he said it, I saw him back in school, back in the electronic music lab, I saw us both in front of the keyboard, I saw our reflection on the computer screen as I played one incomplete little melody and then another.
“There are a thousand ways to reach the secret place. but you cannot learn of these ways through books or through predetermined formulas. Either you learn it through simple osmosis, by being born in the right place at the right time around the right people… Or you learn it later, much later, through a sly movement towards an unmapped direction, towards a cardinal point without a name.”
***
When I used to read fantastic stories in college, I would think of him laying alone at night, his eyes closed as what he called a higher intelligence sang complex structures into his mind and he visualized them flowering all around him, intricate webs of psychedelic color, astral architecture made of evanescent light and sound.
Now, when I think of him in the middle of a web of mystery, circles of orgonic desire interlaced into impossibly complex structures, I feel the urge to read those fantastic stories all over again, to read them in a way I never read them before, to picture him as a character in one of these stories, a particular character that never learned how to give up, never learned how to surrender to the ordinary.
***
He left around seven in the morning. I asked him to have breakfast with me but he said he had to go. As before, I felt certain I would never see him again.
In the following weeks, I thought of going to his place up in the Marin hills but I was somehow more afraid of the awful certainty of knowing that it wasn’t there anymore; I was afraid to find it abandoned and forgotten, or, even worse, to find it converted into a regular American home where regular American things happened on a daily basis.
That was in fact the last time I saw him. I learned of his death through a mass email sent out by his followers about a year later. I thought of going to the ceremony offered in his honor but in the end, I couldn’t face it. I couldn’t accept the knowledge that he was finally gone for good and that all those mysterious potentials that had hung for years over my head would never be completely revealed. So many mysteries were still unresolved and would now stay unresolved indefinitely.
I stayed at home and went over our various encounters in my mind. I wrote some notes and thought of writing a story about all of it. I had a distinct feeling I would be reviewing these memories for the rest of my life. It would be good to have them all together in one place. I was sure that they would grow in meaning as the years went by. Many questions would certainly never be answered, but enough had been said to keep me asking new questions for a very long time.
Of course, I was very sad when I heard of his death but most of all, I felt an overwhelming sense of wonder. I wondered whether somewhere else, in a different reality, it was me that had died, and if somewhere else, we hadn’t even met yet, we had never even heard of each other, and I wondered what I was thinking in that elsewhere, what I was feeling, what was I afraid of, what did I desire?
Maybe somewhere in the great vast elsewhere, I find a way to avoid the deep black void of emptiness and find a way to make music without imposing so many obstacles on myself, without second guessing every step on the way from ineffable notion to forgotten oblivion. Maybe I even find a way to write this story in a way that makes some kind of sense and reaches some kind of satisfying conclusion or maybe it is someone else that writes it and I am the one who reads it and wonders at its meaning.
***
One night I dreamt that we met again. This was not too long ago, many years after he was gone. In the dream, he was sitting in front of me, with his back to huge tall windows that stretched out as far as I could see. Through these giant windows I could see a gray sky, some clouds and a hint of the ocean in the distance, traces of white waves sliding over the endless blue. He was looking directly at me without speaking or moving his face or body. His eyes were wide open but the expression on his face was so neutral that it felt ominous; there was no sign of anger or aggression but there was something significant about it that I couldn’t define.
I sat there staring at him for a long time and he sat there staring at me. Finally, one of my many questions came to mind and I decided that this was the best time to ask it.
“When will the project be complete, Gerardo? When will it come to an end?”
He nodded, acknowledging my question but still he remained silent. Another long time passed. Then, still with a complete lack of expression, he calmly said:
“Never. Never... Never.”
We stared at each some more and then I slowly woke up.
