The Gathering. Sky

A Story by Robert Brooks

After hearing a lovely Metheny piece on my morning commute, I thought of this. Listen to the first two and a half minutes.

Pat and Ludwig glide down the Massachusetts coastline in a dark blue ’73 Torino, with Highway 6A and Mayflower Heights in the rear view. The windows are open and Pat drives, of course. The fresh salt air and the not-yet-warm Cape Cod sunshine splash over both of them, and Pat’s silver sunglasses glint East Harbor’s hopeful, blinding reflection. Underneath the rims beams Pat’s amiable, slightly goofy smile.

Ludwig has polished off his second New England lobster roll this morning, succulent, buttery and rife with flavors and textures he’s never known. Whatever and wherever this “New” England is, the food is way better, and the people nicer - and healthier.

“Pat,” begins Ludwig, waving his hand with a flourish over the water, out the car’s window, “my music speaks to people on a grand scale. If you want to know if it’s possible to distill the grazing pastures high in the Alps, a verdant Teutonic forest, the redolent décolletage of a beautiful young lady, and the indomitable spirit of an entire people in the span of a mere few minutes, without ever saying a word, simply listen to my 7th and you will know that it is!”

Pat’s grin never left his face as he turned to his passenger and nodded gamely and enthusiastically, his salt and pepper mop of hair nodding right along. At any given moment, someone in the back seat of the Torino would be forgiven for thinking that his next word would always be dude. Or man.

Flaky crumbs stick to the corner of Ludwig’s mouth as he looks at the headliner and ponders, pursing his lips slightly, continuing, “Or hell, even the 5th, too. Maybe more so.”

Pat’s face turns only a little wistful and he faces the windshield again and speaks, with casual Midwest gainliness, “Oh yeah it’s true, man. Even in your most intimate passages, like the Pathetique, one gets a sense of grounded connectivity even as one feels lofted above it all -organic, and contemporaneous yet timeless.”

“Haha! Ya!” “And then there’s the Emperor! Nothing today comes close. Well, fine, maybeHendrix.” Ludwig’s face screws up a little as he affects a countenance of one evaluating melons at a market. “But let’s face it, in terms of importance and yet accessibility, the Emperor rocks!”

Ludwig blinked at that last, not letting himself ponder too much that whatever miracle brought him here and furthermore allowed him even to hear his fellow traveler also gave him rudimentary command of the inner workings and colloquialisms of an unknown, oddly familiar, and admittedly powerful language.

Pat hunched closer to the wheel and looked out his window a little. “But Ludes, man, the 9th was a mess. I mean, what the hell….”

Ludwig gave Pat a very characteristic scowl, known to many generations and literally billions of music lovers.

Pat went on, “Ludes, your music moves people by the truckloads. In a very real sense it isthe journey. But sometimes it’s important to let the journey be the journey and let the music be the passenger. And while we proceed on said journey? We let the passenger provide the inner soundtrack.”

Ludwig nodded reflectively, noting with quiet mystified glee that he knew what both a truckload and a soundtrack were.

“We’re never alone that way, Ludes. Our ever-present companion thus exhorts and comforts us yet never controls us, and it’s never the same thing twice, you see. You can practice The Appassionata enough to make it damn near perfect, and once perfect it becomes an iconic little archive of humanity �" a beautiful artifact. But the inner soundtrack changes as you do, as you age, as you suffer, as you love, as you drink too much, as you exalt, as you fail, and as you do whatever you don’t know you’re going to do yet.

You practice, of course. You practice furiously, but you’re really just in a language primer of sorts so that you can give a lovely dissertation, the likes of which you don’t know what will be until you actually give it.”

“Observe.” Pat flicks on the car’s stereo, light years ahead of anything Ludwig knew but decades old for him. The Gathering Sky commences, and the morning soundtrack begins.

And they are in Kansas, doing an unwieldy pas de deux with laughing strangers. And they are excitedly shushing each other as the lights go down in Manhattan as they face the stage. And they are at an Ojai barbeque where Pat motions to Ludwig that he has stained his Polo shirt, and Ludwig shouts that he loves that he knows what a Polo shirt is. And they are in a Washington Metro. And they are agog at the transformatively deep North Dakota night sky. And they wilt under the Virginia shade. And they are yet again cresting over some great highway somewhere with only their belts holding them fast to their seats. And smiling, sunglassed, tanned Ludwig is hoisting a Sam Adams to the stark, hot blue sky, his blue-jeaned legs and bare feet dipped in the Galveston water while Pat motions everyone to come over.

And that was just the first two and a half minutes.

“Heilige Scheiße!”

Ludwig giggles like a drunk surfer, albeit one with a decidedly old-world European accent. “Pat! Your music is like your language is like your culture is like your land, and who knows what the hell that is?! Hah! Wonderful! Wunderbar!”

He settles in a little, and then adds “it’s not necessarily timeless per se because it’s so ephemeral; it expands to fill whatever space it’s in and thereby changes, at least a little, but maybe not enough to change its identity altogether.” Ludwig pauses to adjust in his seat, straightening his brand new Chinos, and adds as a benediction, “And so we trade places a little, my dear Pat: what I do describes the human condition, but your stuff is the human condition.” The last was delivered with a good-natured, self-satisfied smirk and happy, squinting eyes, incongruous, Pat thought, with the countenance of one of the (if not the) world’s most profound musical geniuses.

They drive for a few miles, enjoying yet another music emanating from the front of the car. This is Ludwig’s first encounter with internal combustion and the V-8’s thrum, alien as it is, feels oddly fitting to him. "But, you know? I kind like being the journey. I like being, how do you say? A big fish in a small pond." More squinty smiling.

Their journey, and the journey, continues for miles. Ludwig and Pat channel surf, laughing at some, recoiling from others, pausing more than once on NPR with its classical selections.

"By the way, Ludes, I noticed that when they brought you here there were literally dozens of others milling around. I think that you were the only musician, though. Wait, maybe there was one other, but it was someone you’d not know. I think it was Prokofiev. Yeah, that’s it. When you left the chamber that they brought you here in, did you notice a guy named Sergei there? Sergei Prokofiev? Bald guy. Glasses."

“Ya, I met him.” Ludwig scoffed, his accent growing thicker. “Ach du lieber. Whatta crybaby.”