Albany, inside the tent, delicious Fall day,
September 25th, 2526
I'm dabbling with the twig and berry juice.
Dangerous.
We're not supposed to be using these materials for just any old thing. We're supposed to "speak truly and plainly" and all of that. Blah, blah, blah. It's OK to express an opinion, to speculate, but somehow, it's not OK just to make stuff up about real people that once walked the earth. There's supposedly some sort of line. Either something is fiction, or it isn't. If it isn't you speak plainly; if it is, you make that clear.
I ate too many blueberries and had to come in here to recuperate from the intestinal blowout. I slept for a little while, but in my head the voices wouldn't let me stay asleep.
To toe the line, and not get my husband in trouble, here's the plain truth: unless new materials come to light, the Hunter Narratives end inconclusively. We know more than we did before, but there's still a trailing off. At these big music festivals, you hear all sorts of stories. One I heard today, sitting with a lovely young man who captivated me with compliments, was about old Bach. It's said he dictated one last work to his son in-law. "Before Thy Throne I Now Appear." How old Bach lay there, turning somersaults in his mind! The young man speculated on the new Hunter materials, how they tail off like the "Art of Fugue." That's a bit of a stretch, I think. The "Art of Fugue" ends with its own spooky majesty. The Hunter Narratives also end without a conclusion. It's the beginning of a life, not the end of one. It is said that you can set anything to music, even an ancient list of names and numbers. I believe this. I can imagine the results to be boring. Many find the Hunter works boring. Many enjoy the narratives for their forthrightness, the vividness of the portraits, and some enter into a relationship with the music from that.
I guess my imagination wants it all to go on endlessly. Maybe the narrative ends with more like a pole vault. It's just up in the air at the moment, and more information will come to light and we'll have cleared the high bar and landed in a whole new pile of shit.
In the meanwhile, I can guess where it ended up. I have the voices in my head that I can't turn off so easily whispering secrets about the end. They dictate this final Chorale Prelude across the span of five hundred years. Before my throne he now appears.
Obviously, Hunter turned in his materials and graduated from music school. He probably needed to blow off some steam so he hit the bus and took the hike. On the hike, on his back in the wilderness, out on some rocky ledge in the mountains, he too heard the voices. He could see the endless stars in the clear air. He could feel how small all of his life struggles were. He would figure out the next step. He'd be leaving Boston and heading West.
It seems clear that he changed apartments in the span of time between the end of the appointment book and the beginning of the journal. He wraps up life in the Cal Crib and moves in down the street with Lucy and Justin.
What prompted the commencement of a journal? Perhaps he finally got the idea that his life was itself enough of a tale in demand of telling. The style of the journal writing differs from the later narratives collected from 'blogs' and 'copies' from 'print-outs' from 'hard-drives.' It is more exuberant, it is more florid, more clumsy and it tells of things in the order of life as it is experienced. It's a mix of poems, fragments of fiction, and a record of events. What we have is but a fragment. My husband (and I) feel sure we'll find more. Former centers of population are just beginning to be pushed into. There's all sorts of junk under the weeds. Archaeologists are forever digging and sifting and they have our interests and concerns at heart. Meanwhile, I have my imagination. I hear him whispering. (It's not hallucination, it's conjecture.)
There were many long goodbyes, and a few short ones. In the end, they stood around in the alley behind the buildings where they'd all hung out and everything had happened. Shuffling their feet, some wept. The "automobile" -that storied ancient conveyance we've outgrown and recycled- was loaded up with possessions and stood ready for the trip to points South, then West and beyond. It was Laird and Cal at last, freed from the Boston orbit. Boston itself, the city, the sights and sounds of people and things in commingled craziness, has impressed itself on his tender psyche with the same symbolic weight that it has always held. Even though it is now mostly rubble, many ghosts still sleep there. He reflects that this city is now to be a memory for him, where once it was full of promise. As he walks to that 'car,' and opens the door and gives the nod to Laird, his voices, his internal dialogue, seek surcease from the awe of future prospects in recounting the failures and triumphs of life as a music student in Boston.
Eve.
