Prelude

It was midnight when Ore heard a ringing reverberating in his head. His room was dimly lit by two flickering candles that were close to going out, and the faint smell of incense still hung oppressively in the air. He rolled over in his bed and felt around for his phone. When on the third ring he found it, he could not make out the caller ID, the numbers, or were they letters, seemed blurry and unstable.

“Hello?”

“Hi, did I wake you?” Yuri’s bittersweet voice flowed into his ear.

“Oh, hey! No…” he answered uncertainly. “What’s up?”

“Not much, was just out for a walk and wanted some company.” She often went for walks to help clear her head, she’d say that it helped her think, like with the peripatetic philosophers of Ancient Greece who conducted their dialogues while “walking around,” the literal meaning of peripatetic. Though for a long time Ore had a suspicion that she was actually running from something, and that frequent change of scenery and constant talking served to keep her distracted from the shadows in her head.

“Have time for a virtual walk?” asked Yuri, a term she reserved for when they couldn’t walk together in person, and had to resort to talking on the phone.

“Sure, yea, I’m not doing anything.” Ore sat up in his bed, his head heavy. It felt warm to hear her voice again, when was the last time they talked? How long has it been since she’s been away? “How are you doing?”

“Bored, or I wouldn’t be calling,” she laughed. From when they first met, Ore was fascinated by her laugh, which was unlike any he heard before, in some ways almost childish, sparked by the most random things, but which also sounded somewhat forced, and with a subtle, but ever present tinge of sadness. He got up and stumbled over to the table with her photograph glowing in the candlelight, that smile he fell in love with, along with those almond eyes crowned by pained furrowed brows, which made him want to protect her. “How is the music going?” she continued.

“It’s going well, I think this new song I’ve been working on may be my best yet.” They had first met when Ore was still a self-styled struggling musician, though Yuri didn’t really believe he was struggling, she knew he was good, and teased him that he was just playing dive bars to cultivate a certain image. Yuri compared his “struggle” to the joke about how arguing with a philosopher is like wrestling with a pig in the mud, after a while you realize the pig is enjoying it. “I’ve been experimenting with this production software, where I take the melody and speed it up like 300x, to the point where it sounds like a single buzzing note, and then use that sample to record the same melody in real-time using pitch adjustment.”

“Oh, like fractal music!” Yuri got it instantly, she loved everything having to do with fractals, rhizomes, and holograms, where each part contains all the information of the whole. “That’s cool, you might want to gradually slow it down and then speed it up in the final recording though, otherwise people might not get what you did there. But I think even without that, one should be able to feel it as a kind of internal reverberation.”

“Totes,” Ore concurred. There were few people who understood him as immediately as Yuri. Before he met her, he felt a little crazy, since most people couldn’t follow his trains of thought, seeing as non sequitors what were actually stops along the same train line. Later, she told him that she was also made to feel the same much of her life. So their love was something of a shared insanity, a collective delusion, a two-way dream. At least during their time together they could feel understood in an overbearing world. “The image I had was of playing Indra’s net like a lyre.”

“No matter where we are, we’re always touching by underground wires.” Yuri quoted Ore’s favorite band to him.

The light started to flicker, something was wrong. Ore felt a familiar anxiety crescendo inside him. He heard a hissing sound, as the candlewicks were nearing their extinction. “Where are you now?” he asked.

“Don’t you remember?” she asked quizzically, with her characteristic melancholy undertone.

“Is it really you?” Ore’s voice started to quiver, but he still wasn’t sure why. He looked again at Yuri’s photo on the table, the erratic light now resembled the flickering of a damaged florescent, the hiss of the burning wax sounded like the static of a bad connection.

“Is that a philosophical question? I’m not sure how one could prove that over the phone.” Yuri teased. Ore was suddenly reminded of the part in Proust, where the narrator talks to his grandmother over the phone for the first time, and is overwhelmed confronted by the weight and pain in her voice, when divorced from her face.

Her face. Ore looked again at the photo on the table. With each flicker, Yuri’s face looked darker, sadder. The erratic light became unnaturally bright, the hissing was deafening, and signs of decomposition became increasingly more pronounced in the photograph with each flash, searing themselves into the back of Ore’s eyes. He realized there were two black ribbons framing the picture, like snakes. It was a memorial photo. Painful recollection flooded his tired brain. Yuri had died weeks ago.

“I’m so sorry,” Ore started to cry into the phone disappearing from his hand as harsh reality tore its way into his dream. “I wasn’t there when you needed me. I miss you so much.”

“Come find me,” Yuri said, right before Ore opened his eyes to find himself alone in his room, the floor cluttered with dirty clothes, occult books, and musical instruments. The last bit of the incense offering next to Yuri’s photo evaporated into smoke. That night, Ore decided to die.