I want to tell you about my friend. The first thing you need to know is he's dead. Murdered, in Paris, city of long boulevards and pleasant cafes, a city that always seemed to promise escape. The police never caught whoever did it. I wasn't convinced they tried very hard. He was murdered by a trick. That was the thing about Guy, he never could resist a trick. Any time, any place, if the opportunity arose he was ready. Except, this time, he picked up the wrong person.

I have to pause a while after saying that. You'll understand. I guess we'll never know for sure what happened; it's just one of those mysteries. But like most mysteries it preys on the mind, my mind, to be precise.

I was the person who alerted the police, not that it did any good. We had arranged to meet for a drink and he didn't show up. That wasn't like Guy, he was a punctual man. When he didn't show I called his apartment, left messages on his answering machine, but never got a response. A few days went by and I still couldn't get in touch with him. I bumped into mutual friends and they hadn't seen him either. I got worried. I went round to his place and hammered on the door. Eventually I called the police. They broke in and there he was. And I can't get it out of my mind. And I keep re-playing all my actions over those few days, and imagine him there, lying where they had left him, just there. Oh well, what can one say? I loved him.

The second thing you need to know about my friend is he was a composer. He was a great composer. I know I'm prejudiced but you'll have to take my word for it. He composed like no other. He composed as if his life depended on it, and in many ways it did. He never said that he felt time was running out or anything like that but he worked as if it was. His productivity shamed me. I'm the kind of person who can always think of plenty of things to do other than the thing at hand; and though Guy didn't lead a life free from distractions he was always focused, always working, progressing, creating music whose shining beauty would hit you like a big roller, knocking you off your feet, leaving you gasping for breath. That was how good he was.

The third thing you need to know about my friend is he was an orphan. He was alone in the world in a way that you and I just can't imagine. People who are brought up by their parents, they just have this sense of belonging, this aura of companionship around them, a psychological blanket between them and the cold truth of existence which my friend never had.

Guy was French Canadian, born in Montreal; both his parents were killed in a car crash when he was only five years old. There wasn't any extended family so he was brought up in an orphanage, one of those Catholic orphanages the media made such a fuss about a few years ago; the kind of place where the regime was modelled on Purgatory. Guy was in shock about his parents when he got there. He stayed in shock for a long time. It made him mute. He didn't speak until he was around eight years old. He lived in his own silent universe. Imagine the horror of being five years old and one minute you're wrapped in the warm emotional comfort of two loving parents and the next minute you're all alone; you're nowhere; cast adrift on the sea of existence.

These days I suppose a kid like that would have hordes of therapists swarming around them but in those days he was just left to sort himself out. For a long time he withdrew into his skull and just stared out from behind his barricade of bone, a pair of frightened eyes, waiting for something to happen.

You see, in his mind he thought he had done something wrong to make them go away, so suddenly, permanently. Later he learnt that they had been driving home from a party; they'd had a drop too much to drink and, leaving their hosts with a jolly wave, had headed into the dark night. Headlights blazing on a country road they were almost home when they took a corner too fast and another car happened to be coming the other way, they tried to avoid it but couldn't quite make it; that was how it happened.

Guy couldn't quite believe his parents were never coming back. I always had the feeling he was searching for them, looking for traces, however faint. He couldn't get them out of his mind; they haunted him by their very absence.

He had a fascination for scrap yards and whenever we passed one he would stop and peer in. He could not resist the lure of the tangled metal, the rusty axles, shattered windshields and dented roofs. He would wander among the metal carnage wondering if his parents' car had, by some strange chance, ended up here as scrap-metal. Parts. Car parts. After the screaming, and the squealing brakes, the skidding, the wrenching metal, the snapping bone, the lacerated flesh, that was all that remained—car parts. So he searched for them in junk-yards, among the rust, the oil, the torn upholstery and bent springs, he thought he might find a trace.

In the orphanage he longed for someone to come and rescue him. Images of religious persecution come easily to the lonely and as a child Guy was confronted daily with the feverish dripping of the painted blood on the crucifixes. He searched for his parents in the wounds on the saints' bodies, in the tortures inflicted on the good, among the catalogues of atrocities in the lives of martyrs, but he never found them and no one came for him. From an early age he knew the world wasn't fair, life was random and every day was a new throw of the dice.

I once saw an old photograph of him, taken at the orphanage, aged about ten, dressed in a chorister's outfit. He looked like an angel, his golden hair flopping over his forehead, soft and feathery like wings. But there was something about his eyes, they didn't go with the rest of his face, his eyes were old.

Guy was naturally strong willed. The fathers regarded this as a bad trait and tried to thrash it out of him. It just made him more stubborn. When the priests told him he was evil he believed them. He was glad when they said he would be damned. He wanted to be anything they were not. He rejoiced that some childish prank had placed him on the side of Satan and the fallen angels; he preferred the whiff of brimstone to the suffocating stench of piety.

The one thing he did like about the Catholic ritual was the music; with their voices soaring into the vault of the church, overarching the congregation, rising higher and higher, he felt that anything was possible. Music rose above the people, shattered the architecture, broke through the bonds around him. The world was unveiled by music and there was beauty there after all. All the time he had been waiting for someone to rescue him but instead it wasn't someone it was something—music. It was a way out, both an escape and a destination.

I first met him when he became Composer-in-Residence at the University of California at Berkeley. I was a lecturer in the French department and was passionate about all things French, including Guy. Naturally, he gravitated towards the department, and we gravitated towards him. When we met the rest of him had caught up with his eyes, which no longer looked strangely out of place but rather kindly, amused and gentle. I soon realised he was gay and offered to show him around the local bars; it wasn't an altruistic gesture, but Guy treated it as though it was. We got along fine and when we weren't pairing off with other people we paired off with one another. That was the bit I liked most. We became very close and he started to confide in me. I think I was the first person he felt he could tell a lot of stuff to; if nothing else, I'm a good listener.

He told me he didn't have sex until the age of twenty-two, so he always felt he was making up for lost time. When he was younger, other peoples' bodies were like frightening lands just beyond his horizon, tempting but bewildering. He felt so cut off from other people that the prospect of so close a conjunction seemed impossible. But eventually his desire overcame his fear.

He liked the idea of anonymous sex, the transient episode, full of possibilities and yet with a limitation of desire; with a stranger the loss could never be very great if it should fail. Knowing nothing of the other's life he could concentrate on the body, on the momentary feelings, without reference to the great mesh of social obligations. He would frequent the bars where the like minded gathered and paired off with a series of perfect strangers, most of whom remained strangers, and those who lingered became just friends.

At that time I sometimes went to a leather bar called 'The Cellar' and one weekend when we had become bored by the ordinary bars I took him there. When we went into the backroom, and he saw the St. Andrew's cross, the whipping stools, the slings hanging sluggish from the low ceiling and the chains on the walls I could see his eyes light up. He had come home, he had found a place he had been living in, in his mind, for a long time; after that we used to go there regularly. He liked to push the edge. He wanted to explore the borderline of experience, he knew his parents existed across the border, in another place he could not reach. I got to thinking he was searching for an experience that would overwhelm the pain of existence.

We played regularly while he was at the university; but I knew it wouldn't come to anything permanent. It saddened me but I knew better than to push things. I could never tell him I loved him. I regret that now, but then it seemed an impossible thing to do, I thought he'd run a mile, and he probably would have. It wasn't something you did. It wasn't cool. It smacked of the cosy parental world we were trying to escape from, but all along it was just the way of the world, human nature, that elusive thing that stalks us when we least expect it. There was a restless, nomadic, quality to Guy that told me sooner or later he would move on. Of course, he had to go back to Montreal when his year's residency was up, but we stayed in touch, visiting one another occasionally, when time and money permitted.

When I first heard Guy's music, I wondered why it was so strange. It was only afterwards that I realised that in his music, too, he was searching for his parents, trying to enter another realm closed to us most of the time. He tried to follow them in his music. He conjured rituals and chants for them; he invented new languages to get himself across unknown borders; he split sound to see what was behind it. He looked and he searched like a thorough customs man because it was only by knowing them that he could know himself.

Sometimes I'd watch him and I could tell he was searching for them in the faces of friends and the faces of their parents. He searched but he never found them; like the horizon they were always out of reach. He told me sometimes he thought he could glimpse them, from the corner of his eye, flitting past, scurrying out of view like nocturnal animals. All he wanted to do was hold them, hold them in his mind, but they were always elusive and this saddened him. Still he searched. He hunted them down; his lost parents. He hunted for them in death, where he knew they lived, he courted them in the faces of strangers, in dark alleys and seedy bars he sought them. But they always took refuge in death. Whenever he felt he was getting closer to them they would retreat into that hidden realm where he could not follow.

When he travelled, Guy liked to pick up rough trade. He liked it in alleyways, behind parked trucks, inside derelict buildings, in the dark corners of apartment hall landings. He liked doing it with young men whose eyes glistened with anger. He liked the risk; risk was a place where his parents lived, and that was where he looked for them, he had the bruises to prove it. But no matter how hard he forced his senses into new permutations they remained obstinately blank about his parents.

That last summer Guy was the featured composer in a music festival in Paris. It was a sign that his career as a composer had reached a new level. After a long journey at last he was acknowledged as an outstanding and highly original voice in contemporary music. The critics called his music 'Spectral'; it created sounds that didn't really exist, just by rubbing other sounds together; like a conjuror's trick it amazed me and I didn't really care how it was done.

I was in Paris, doing some research, so we were able to see quite a bit of each other that summer. It was like old times, except Guy seemed strangely preoccupied. A large number of concerts of his works were scheduled and I attended them all. But Guy seemed to be oddly unmoved by all the adulation, almost as if he knew that something was going to go wrong, that life didn't deal out hands of cards this good without some penalty. This was most noticeable at a concert of his last orchestral piece. The orchestra played brilliantly, full of enthusiasm for a new piece mastered, and at the end the audience applauded loudly. The conductor bowed and signalled to the orchestra to stand up and acknowledge the applause, which they did in that bashful way orchestras have. When the conductor gestured for the composer to join them Guy rose mechanically from his seat and climbed onto the stage, acknowledging the fresh surge of applause without enthusiasm.

At the party after the concert, an occasion when Guy usually felt exuberant and loved to expound his pet musical ideas, he seemed strangely empty. I could see he was finding it hard to communicate, as if his language was withering away, as if it had never been, and he was retreating again into that lost and frightened child, back to that private speechless place where none could follow. I could see it happening and I felt helpless, helpless and rejected at the same time. My feelings were clouded by concern for my friend and pity for myself.

He was known for his garrulity and he could see that people were puzzled and disappointed by his lack of enthusiasm. It was painful to watch him struggling to imitate his old self, trying to play a role he knew people expected of him but which he no longer felt able to act well.

I asked him what was wrong but he just shrugged and said he was feeling under the weather. Perhaps he knew he had reached some kind of destination; finally going somewhere no one could follow him. I left the party early and as I walked out the room I looked back and saw him standing there, surrounded by people but utterly alone, and that was the last time I saw him alive.

After we discovered his body I hung around in Paris for a few weeks. I gave up my research and spent most of my time arguing with the police, demanding they make some progress. They looked at me as if I'd dropped in from another planet. Sometimes they humoured me and sometimes they lost patience and said, 'It is too difficult, too random, it could be anybody, why do people have to live like that?'

I wanted to scream at them, 'Don't talk about him like that! Don't dismiss his life because it isn't the same as yours.' But instead I walked away; I was an embarrassment to myself and to them. I thought to myself, if I was in a movie this is the point at which I'd go off and do my own investigation. I'd track down the killers and bring them to justice. But I wasn't in a movie, it was just plain old life, and I didn't know where to begin.

And now I'm due to take the train out to Orly and catch a plane back home. Paris will never be the same. I've checked out and don't intend to come back, but I know it will follow me; I know it will live in my thoughts. Down in the Metro it is noisy on purpose, as if the din were expressive of speedy, efficient travel. Before the trains depart the klaxons sound, doors slam shut with unnecessary vigour, engines whine as if powering jet engines, but nothing really happens; everywhere, always, nothing really happens.

As I sat on the hard plastic seat, trying to remember if I'd picked the right direction, I thought to myself, we change but the world remains the same, always and everywhere indifferent to our small tragedies. It was the indifference of things that finally got to me. I could see my fellow passengers looking at me strangely. Tears were rolling down my face and I hadn't even realised.

Now I'm back home I sometimes wonder if he's happy across the border. Has he found what he was looking for all along? Maybe he's finally somewhere he always wanted to be. But then I reach up, put on a C.D., and listen to his music and I know he's going to live forever.

 

©2003 Colin Pink - Contributor's Bio