The Siren’s Call
Varg could pinpoint the exact moment everything accelerated down to one silky, sensuous summer night. Alone, at dusk, in the same park he had already spent a hundred evenings, the teen was soaking in the wondrous sight of a young woman training her lithe, focused border collie when to fetch and not to fetch. She hardly seemed older than him, two years at most. What struck him was neither her beauty nor the undivided attention she was dedicating to the teaching in progress. From the instant he laid eyes on her, Varg’s reality was never the same.
The outside world disappeared, the background faded to a blur; all he perceived was this subtle dance between girl and dog, master and pet, teacher and student. He heard their motions. Not the expected shouted orders or rustling grass as the dog darted to and fro, rather he directly experienced those actions as music. Faint at first, it then grew thundering as he completely relinquished control of the moment and simply basked in the harmony arising from this impromptu ballet.
As night lazily reclaimed her kingdom, the girl left the park, bringing Varg back to reality. Still in a stunned stupor, laboriously cutting through the thick haze, he instinctively measured the importance of what had just occurred.
Eager to test his theory, he turned his head to a group of college students quietly chatting, supine on a laid-out blanket. As he observed them, Varg heard the low rumble of percussion setting up a stirring, steady beat. Nowhere near the glorious complexity of the girl and her dog, yet there it was, music once more. No instrument in sight; he made sure of it. He knew he wasn’t mad, understood at once this was his true nature, his destiny. A chosen one, a vessel to whom the gods would reveal the underlying symphony of the world.
Keeping his awareness of the students, he leapt up and transferred his attention to an older couple walking hand in hand. This added the bittersweet lament of a violin to the existing beat. Overwhelmed by bliss, he fell back down. His previously dissonant, cacophonous reality had become a harmonious orchestra, of which he was the sole conductor. After testing his newfound ability, he realized he could add and subtract at will those sections to be incorporated into his concerto.
This power was shocking to Varg. Music had forever been at the forefront of his existence, yet his relationship with it was one of constraints. In their frantic attempt to engineer in Varg what they had failed to become, his parents made sure he was constantly subjected to music, long before he even drew his first breath. “Bit of a vibrato on that scream don’t you think?” were the first words he heard his father say. Varg took to classical music in strides, developing a keen ear and an even keener sense for playing the piano as soon as his slowly developing body would allow it. At seven, his first compositions were getting national recognition in his Finnish homeland. Heralded a musical messiah by his proud parents, he toured Scandinavia from the ages of 8 to 12, enrapturing crowds all over, his every hour between concerts carefully planned and accounted for, a cocoon of imposed discipline and limited agency.
Shortly after his 13th birthday came a pivotal turn in his sheltered, straightforward life. The professional soloist scene is the most fickle of mistresses, and her sudden rejection of Varg was a hotchpotch of too many factors too inscrutable to attempt deciphering. Which, naturally, didn’t stop his parents from trying, and, after quite a few bitter months of barely containing their disappointment, they finally let go of their pent-up resentment, and left their son to weave the threads of his own destiny.
This fall from grace proved an immense relief to Varg, whose personality could finally timidly develop after being smothered into impersonal discipline for too many formative years. Before that fateful encounter at the park, he had already been spreading his wings for over a year, experiencing life with a newfound freedom and renewed appetite. That year, while densely packed with delightfully winsome adventures, would have been a touch too embarrassing for Varg to be recounted here.
Synaesthesia is a multifarious beast. Varg’s seemed to have been laying dormant, patiently biding its time before suddenly pouncing out of hibernation the moment it sensed its host could handle and fully revel in the drastic changes to come.
To some synesthetes, the alphabet appears as one colour gradient. Lengthy arrangements of letters are instinctively perceived as intricate paintings where all paragraphs bring depth and detail to the whole picture. Others see numbers and their order as abyssal valleys and dizzying heights. Complex equations turn into scarred, tortuous landscapes where every digit carves its indentation in the conceptual formation of the land. Familiar numbers and problems contribute to creating a mind map of the world and its data. Plenty of artists were enthralled by the all-encompassing complexity of Pi and other infinite, non-repeating numbers, by the intricacies and aesthetic beauty of their labyrinthine representations. Far too many were plunged into madness, drowned by overbearing, sultry Muses, some lurched into crime to fulfill their eccentric drives. The legend even has it of a boy who smelt the essence of man and felt driven to murdering and dissecting girls in his inexorable attempt to recreate it. For better or for worse, Varg was compelled to a rather different fate.
On that auspicious day at the park, Varg truly heard his world for the first time, as if awakening to a new, personal plane of existence. The music that had before been frozen solid by stiff practicing now flowed freely, unconstrained, and ceaseless. That evening, time stretched into an eternity of whirling and twirling to sounds unshackled, propelling him along, blissfully cradled by majestic torrents of melodies.
After the park closed, drunk on power and in mounting awe of these ever-changing compositions, Varg started roaming the city. He could grasp the essence of reality and felt its master. After all, wasn’t the universe serenading him, giving him the reins, nudging him to mold the world to his own will? Overwhelmed, there remained no space for self-doubt in the teen’s mind. His feet were light as they took him further and further away from the suffocating safety of his parents’ flat.
Every neighbourhood flooded Varg with their own cacophonies of sounds and instruments, musical identities far beyond his narrow classical upbringing, bursting open his childhood’s gilded cage, flooding his world with raging, intricate variety. Hopping on thinly coated wax wings of his own, our young Icarus heard the magnificent sun leading him to a crisp embrace and could fathom no possible ground to question that glorious call.
As he soaked up these medleys, relinquishing any vainglorious attempts at conducting them, the compositions strayed ever further away from the conventional, fraying into territories more experimental, more complex the further he got.
Varg could not stop, even as he noticed how late it was when closing in on a rougher part of town he had repeatedly been warned about and would never have dreamt of entering. Streets were emptying fast; most stores were already closing or had closed. The world was getting dark and quiet without people or movement to fuel his internal auditorium. What was before bright and airy, vibrant melodies full of life, turned slower, introspective, with a hint of disquiet. The synaesthesia creature within him reacted to this change, adapted by tuning in to the city’s voice, bleak and raw, unfiltered to human sensibilities. Varg felt hooked, a threatening pull to the unknown, one he had neither the strength nor the impulse to combat. He was made to turn deserted alleys and poorly-lit streets, his growing fears feeding the feral beast, roaring out an ever more enthralling concerto answering the hungering, unleashed city, freed from its framing humanity, its towering buildings cold and uncaring, emanating visceral screams from its jumbled bricks, ravenous asphalt, careening concrete, and sharp steel.
Varg was frantic, fleeing ever forward, at once elated and terrified, the empty street melodies too disturbingly beautiful to bear, yet too enticing to evade. Over anything else, he yearned to bring back a human element to the haunting noise, soften its brutality and regain the control that had empowered him but an hour prior.
The gnawing pit in his stomach grew more discordant until his instinct flared when he finally gleaned a hub of obscured silhouettes around the bend. He tried his best to display confidence when two men advanced towards him with barely concealed ill intent. Varg wanted to run but felt fear’s viscous tentacles rooting him to the pavement. As he contemplated his incoming doom, the most astounding arrangement he had ever heard started playing.
The boy could not identify any structure nor discern instruments as if this simulacrum of a tune couldn’t possibly have emerged from the well-ordained world he had been forced to adopt as his own. Varg was stunned, not out of fear anymore, but as if in an exhilarating trance. Paralysed, he could neither move nor speak when the more imposing figure asked him for the time. His muteness seemed to confuse them for a moment, confusion hastily moving to rage, threats, and pure violence. Varg remained utterly helpless as they pushed him around and brashly pinned him against the wall.
Varg had long lost control over his limbs when the music became even more gripping. He felt no pain when the beating started; if anything, ecstasy and music elated him, reaching new heights of intensity, making him quiver from joy, a debilitating Stendhal syndrome kicking into the tune of a heavenly parade. Suddenly worried the kid was dying, the two thugs emptied his pockets and paced away into the night with their meagre bounty.
Silence came crashing down as a wave, along with it the acute pain of withdrawal. He felt what the son of Daedalus would have in his precipitous fall from the sun, filled with despair, not at his own fall, but at the realization that Melody was about to forever desert him.
Overriding his bodily pain, shattered teeth, and bleeding temple was the unbearable memory of that song. In that moment, Varg would have foregone any treasure or joy but to hear it once more, if only for a few heartbeats. He could not go home. The music was begging to be brought to life. He mustered himself up through painful pangs and trod along limping, battered yet resolute.
To his increased terrified panic, no sound was to be heard for what felt to him an eternity, yet must not have been more than a couple of minutes. The absence of music already felt gut-wrenching, but even more disturbing was the utter lack of police siren or wind, the distinct base of distant traffic or passing subway, none of the infinite background noises of varying levels of intensity the city offers as lullaby to its offspring, unable to rest unless cradled by the soothing multiplicity of a thousand unidentifiable sources.
Rest was the furthest from Varg’s mind at that moment. His craving for sound was an urgent matter of survival, sound or noise, anything to alleviate the loss of that prior masterpiece he had spilled his blood to summon. He felt seized up by the city, by the universe, and knew this juncture to be critical, all the while experiencing his powerlessness in full force, thrown into humble repentance for his hubris at having thought himself maestro when that gift could so easily be taken back, leaving him empty, all the more cruelly poor for having now known riches beyond comprehension and having been deprived of them without warning. He had to move, to show himself worthy of transcendence, of beauty, of Love. His pre-park life suddenly revealed as dull and worthless, there was no point drawing breath immured in silence, the rest of his life would be spent chasing that high, at all possible costs.
Some two blocks further, Varg could scarcely contain himself and his relief as the slightest hum graced his ears and heart once more. Accelerating as much as he could with his severe limp, as the volume increased, he was met with a dangerously beautiful concerto, dispelling all possible doubt, confirming his every delusion. His was the righteous path once more.
That path took him to finally spot three men conspiratorially huddled together. Any rational thought of self-preservation had long fled his entranced mind. All he could notice was the symphony turning exponentially more beauteous as he closed in on the trio. Step by step, he followed his yearning, inching ever closer to Nirvana, Heaven, Valhalla, Eden, or Svargaloka, the underlying euphoric state all faiths futilely attempt to name and thus restrain the scope of, Varg was well on his way to stepping foot in.
One of them finally spotted the boy. Nudging the others to his presence, he broke the circle and jeered:
‘You lost, kid? You need directions, or what?’
Without the slightest care for the danger he was in, Varg kept moving forward, hurled there in his unstoppable quest for the next high, intensifying by the second as time stretched for him, deliciously unbearable, disturbingly delectable.
Seeing Varg still shuffling towards them, they fell deadly silent. No such quietude existed in his mind but an unfathomable hurricane of sounds and feelings, far richer and more potent than anything else ever experienced by man, woman, or gods. Varg fell to his knees, his cheeks torrents of tears, utterly overcome by beatitude. Enraptured, he slowly looked up into the cold eyes of the leading man whose hand was reaching into the back of his jeans. The boy was filled with the absolute certainty that this performance he had been privy to, had been foolish enough to think himself the conductor of, was coming to an end. Varg didn’t know if the lights would be switched on, if there would be any applause, any encore, and what would come after all that, those thoughts finding no bearing in the tempest of his being, as time stretched on ever thinner, grains of sand cascading off the palm of a titanic hand, making an eternity of that final, blissful hour.
