I don't know anything

Revy found he couldn’t fly, which made no sense at all. He could always fly in dreams.

He had never seen flying as a special power or anything. Just, sometimes, he would jump, and float, and keep floating, and then maybe find himself soaring over places like dark landscapes and light turquoise waters.

The oceans of his dreams, calm and almost green, were always far less cold to the touch than expected.

A warmth and tingling swarming out in circles from his neck became a signal bouncing to relaunch itself from towers across his body…

Kisses.

Jodie’s fiery breath beneath the covers.

“Come on.” It was a rough plead. “I have to go already. Wake up!”

Revy slowly roused himself to hands and knees, then turned away. The motion was as peaceful and basic as a nod between former acquaintances who never knew each other well. An inward racing seemed to slow after his movement like a frantic river emptying to a large, unmoving sea.

He ran fingers deep through his thick mop of hair, welcoming the sting as more than a night’s worth of knots were met and challenged. The pain was invigorating. He tugged a fraction more, feeling his fingers tremble for an instant before his eyes almost clouded over. In a flash, he and the moment itself were aligned to a scene from some book he’d read as a kid about a creature being broken free from the sedating allure of witchcraft by the shock of simple, real physical pain.

“What’s wrong?” muttered Jodie, bolting up and shifting to a more neutral edge of the bed as if prompted to guard something cherished at the corner.

“Nothing,” said Revy dismissively, shrugging. He might as well have said, “Never mind.”

He smiled as she stood and paced out of the room like a slow, beautiful tank, her head tilted slightly back. He searched for any memory of her having told him what she might be up to that day. Nothing came.

Slipping in his trusty ear-pods as carelessly as one might slip on a pair of socks, Revy reached to fidget with the iun on his end table until he saw the coded title of his recording from the day before.

He grimaced, listening through hiss to the beginnings of himself plinking, circling, and sliding through the notes of three slightly jazzed-up chords. Deep secrets were betrayed in the sound, he knew. For nothing new was there. But if anyone else listened, he wondered, would they pick up on the fact that Revy was a total musical fraud, incapable of anything but the barest of twists to mask an endless array of purely meat-and-potatoes arrangements? Would it be obvious he had no real musical knowledge at all? Did it matter?

Should he choose another piece to work on?

His mind took its quick and standard inventory tour through every major incomplete stab at brilliance he had failed to nourish into a song. Each had its own reason not to be pursued, leaving a series of recognizable bad tastes in his mouth.

So, he might as well hammer at this new one for a while.

Shuffling to the top of the bed, he wriggled like an invalid without using his hands until the thick duvet covered his bare legs.

Squeaky lyrics cut in through the pods, resting like an alien cherry atop his juvenile, guit-box shuffling. Revy bobbed his head as he heard someone a little like himself sing a few loose lines. The words he could make out seemed to be about . . . freedom…?

He removed the pods and reached to pull his faithful guitar from its stand, drawing it high over the covers to his lap. This would be his default position for the morning (maybe the day).

Slowly plucking in to catch and carry his previous work, he felt somewhat like a child near too old to still be playing with toys.

Nothing sounded wrong.

He tested his voice, letting it rise and nestle up upon the pleasant melody his fingers were contributing.

Was that Jodie sighing in the other room? Or, a growl, maybe?

He continued to work his voice into the mix like wispy yeast through lumps of dough. He let it roll in the shapes of whichever throwaway words it chose, which was fine and easy.

But…

Were lyrics meant to merely serenade their own sound in song, like some sort of solipsistic half-duet?

He shook his head. After so many years, Revy was baffled to somehow still expect actual answers to the sorts of questions he had been asking himself all along.

Grabbing a chewed pencil by its eraser, he scribbled across the top lines of his open notebook, hoping to catch something close to what he had just heard himself sing.

He looks about from in and out…

No.

He walks about to seek the sound, lost in hills of ghosts and…

What?

…of ghosts and…

No.

He walks about your secret town, lost in hills of ghosts and sounds. Turning over pages…

No.

There was a clear point of entry. A familiar shifting. A drawing back. A jumping ahead. But all just to construct what might end up a first verse…?

As always, each recognizable motion felt far too contrived and careful, like the methodical precautions a crew might make all morning to safely spackle a floor’s worth of ceilings that afternoon.

He kept going, only for lack of enough lifespan left to continue prospecting options.

If this current mess would indeed be morphed into a song, he reasoned from what he could read of the words he had caught so far that it might want to be about a man searching for a woman who finds a new way to express herself.

And that could connect to… But that would just be the story leading up to the…

There was no chorus. Shouldn’t that come first, and serve as a sort of flagship goal for the rest to find its way back to?

And what about a second verse? The ridiculous rigmarole of forcing himself to double-back and reenter the same sonic and poetic space he was still pushing to make his first full round through seemed about as unnatural and unenjoyable as teaching a dog another language.

Why did songs always need that strict back-and-forth delivery in their parts?

Words of advice gleaned from a hodgepodge mix of sources came to encourage Revy to persist for the sake of catchiness . . . that he had to play and win the game if he ever hoped to move it forward, or at least eventually play in ways more fun for him.

Should he go on? Or should he scratch off the page, count his losses, and start over again (yet again)?

Words…

Revy saw himself in lights, being praised for spouting such mysteriously deep, spacey, ripe importance. Yet he knew he, at least, would always know the truth . . . how all his ramblings were but sparkling echo reflections of the silly, small, everyday goings on of his dull, unappealing life.

It would be easy. It would be fake. And no one would probably ever know. Was that all art was? How disappointing.

How nicely a pinch from his designer stash would soften some edges about now. It would sure make him okay with letting more nothing words say whatever about anything at all.

But a life of sobriety loomed, tall and twitchy.

And his work had to be about something. It had to.

Or, Revy figured, he could always suck it up and go lead a cruise ship band or something. At least that would mean performing and income.

But where he found himself staring into the sibling faces of unmade songs and pissed-through gift drugs could only ever stack up to be survivable (and redeemable) if…

He had to find a way to matter, even though nothing of his had mattered the right way yet. And the various senses of time running out and staying gone forever were as close as the breath passing a little too fast through his lungs.

If he could just drift away and be overtaken by the beautiful, true language of his music, basic as it was, without the need to bring some extra layer of meaning in. But despite all lack of evidence, he couldn’t help but still believe there must be something there to find . . . a hidden sun around which to assemble a whole new solar system.

Sweat tickled the central tip of his brow.

There’s got to be a way to get more pills. Of course I could…

Reluctantly, Revy glanced back at the open pad before him, to a page of mostly crossed-out letters threatening to kill and hide the body of whatever lifeform this most current creation seemed to want to be. And there weren’t that many blank pages left.

So, what would the searching man in the song say?

No . . . not him.

Revy sang again, rising from the easy sway of his unfinished verse to another chord that came from nowhere to delicately flatter the first set without him noticing.

“I’ll be your woman.”

He repeated the line over and over until he no longer heard himself. His mind wandered then, soothed by its own brand of elevator music.

He might have sensed Dale close by.

Without knowing why, he fumbled to jot across the bottom of the page:

This one happens more naturally than the other, and it shows the other where it comes from.

“Okay, I’m leaving,” called Jodie from the kitchen, her gruff voice tearing through the very center of more than just Revy’s would-be masterpiece.

But he didn’t care. He just went right back to singing.

“I’ll be your woman.”