Hallucination in D Minor

Reading in The New Yorker (November 7, 2011) that the highly acclaimed pianist, Helene Grimaud, ranks Brahms Piano Concerto in D Minor one of her favorite pieces, a work I have been obsessed with since I first became acquainted with it thirty years ago, I’ve reprinted here a short story I wrote incorporating that Concerto, originally published in Marginalia, the literary journal of Western State College of Colorado.

Hallucination in D Minor
By Jason Makansi

Only a second or two separates the dream from what is on the other side of it, another meeting. Up here in the clouds, above the city of New York, almost everything is dreamy. You never forget about the magnificence. If there was a cloud in the sky, it would be undulating. Every gaze you steal out the window is like peering through a slit of space-time continuum.

Except when you meet the eyes of the honcho at the head of the table sipping coffee, his supervisors to his either side. You and the other direct reports line up and down the sides of the long table. Paper is passed around. The honcho clears his throat, cracks a joke, compels everyone to get started, and the discussion about some dull engineering project begins. You look past him at, well, nothing, nothing in the sky but one tone of blue, with something huge barreling through it toward you.

After a few seconds, the tremolo opening chord sounds, the violent strings descend two notes, then a short hop and back up, reaching, for what? The ominous roll of the tympani completes the phrase, and the stylist in your hand is on automatic, like a pen recorder, tracing the modulations of Brahms First Piano Concerto on a tablet of graph paper. Then it escalates. You are a member of a Philharmonic. What is coming at you in the window disappears.

How many times during these meetings have you found your left hand clamping your right hand to the table so it wouldn’t obey the subconscious signals from your brain to conduct the music that you hear, as clearly as the solid blue you see out the window? This is one of those times.

You see other musicians separating from you, physically sliding away. Instead of looking at the floor, you turn to look at the principal French horn player. She looks vaguely like a woman who had been sitting near you, who has captured the lusty ventricle of your heart. You’ve longed for her the way the ram-like curly-cues of that horn are nurtured by the cashmere fabric folding in delightful patterns around her breasts. And her lips, oh her lips. They are red, puckered from her craft. You want your lips to be where her musty breath is before it is transmogrified into the bittersweet sounds coming from that horn. How delicate a kiss must be, like the lighting of a butterfly, so she doesn’t feel pain.

Her horn sounds the clarion call after the notes from the strings extend, despairing to hang on, only to slip, descending level by level, like a body falling, hitting sections of building on the way down, back into the depths of the base.

On the other side, expressions of horror and fear float around the room, separated from their owners, but on this side, your French horn player only looks puzzled, as if she had just played a wrong measure, as if the conductor is tapping the stand, and admonishing her. In a fragment of a second after she glances at you, she acknowledges the melodic bond between you.
Instinctively, you move towards her, but then you notice that you are moving away too. The orchestra is spreading apart quickly. Your organs accelerate into your throat, the same sensation as when the elevator in this building rises very fast, whisking its occupants to the stratosphere. Your music stand falls over but the music pages defy gravity. They hang suspended in front of your eyes, like an image on film in a darkened room.

Flames vaporize the bits and pieces of everything on the other side of this dream. Your piece of graph paper, though, is floating somewhere over the city. Parts of you, and parts of others, are ahead of other parts, behind, to the side, above, and below. There are parts of the imaginary musicians floating amongst the parts of everyone sitting here a moment ago. All are just the parts of the sum now. There is no cashmere-cloaked horn player, and no you, yet you still hear.

Pages of music defy gravity, defy relativity. Just when what is left of your mind praises the resistance of the music to this calamity, the air where your hand was grasps at the music, something to hang onto, in the absence of a person, the horn player, anyone. Then the glue and string of the spine explode, the pages drift away, and the paper dissolves. Still, the notes of the concerto hang in the air, intact, each one where it is supposed to be relative to the other ones. They appear like organized dots between your eyelids and your eyeballs.

The concerto continues. The unbearably sweet but firm entrance of the piano, “I am here now,” it seems to say, coquettishly, the triads and chords ascending up, then down, back up, and ending on the same notes as the melody begins, a pause, then the melody in a long ascending rush. The shrink and swell, the outline of the horn player’s small, powerful frame flows through her instrument. But she is not there.

Finally, the notes disintegrate. Now you know what is the last sense to survive. But, as the propagation of your last brain pulses crash toward the asymptotic zero, it comes to you, the years you’ve been in love with this concerto, its tortured path from the composer’s brain to notes on the page, the microsecond you’ve embraced the empty space that was once this woman. You glide on a bed of air, the serenity of the piano’s melody, the gentle perpetual breath, a conveyance away from the rebellious tonality collapsing underneath. At the final moment, a weak human bond suspended on a melody is better than no bond at all. Maybe Brahms knew that.