The music is beautiful

“The music is beautiful,” Chet Partikov said. He was sat in a black polythene swivel chair, utterly still, in an office with a thick glossy slab desk and drab gray walls.

“What?” mumbled Jack Rambles. He was spinning about in his desk chair.

“Can’t you hear it?” Chet asked.

“No? It’s utterly silent in here, Partikov.”

Chet clenched his jaw at Rambles. Damn it, Jack. Chet knew he was right, and that Jack was wrong. But Chet knew that if he chose to press the issue that Jack would call him a set jawed, bulldoggish man who it was a damn pity he was been forced to work alongside. Whether it was true or not, no matter how wrong Rambles may be, that assault on his senses wasn’t quite damned worth it.

For a moment, Chet stared viciously into Rambles’ turtled rounded lenses, that old man, scanned his sharp, stretched features and his eyes filled with some otherworldly, cataracted wisdom, but didn’t speak.

“Martha Lacy died this week,” Rambles said quietly.

“No?” Chet said. “I saw her at the bakery.”

Rambles looked back at Chet, and with a strangeness, the tune increased. “That music!” Chet exclaimed crazed, and clutched at the air with manicured fingers. “What is that, now?”

“There is no music,” Rambles spat.

Chet got tichy, swelled, barked back, “No, I swear to God. It’s there.” He pressed his bullish fingers into his lap, tried and struggled to articulate it, pressing them together and becoming frustrated at the clumsy, fat way his fingers rubbed together. “Rambles, it’s the most beautiful hymn and–” his voice hitched- “Rhythm! Coming from right over that hill, where the poppycocks sway gently in the sunglitter and the long weed fronds tremble and dance in their constant, mystical tanglings and untanglings.” At this point Chet’s voice became swimmy, and it became clear to Rambles that his colleague was seeing all of this clearly in his head. Jack Rambles stared at Chet oddly, and Chet kept on, “Over there, past the bending boughs and billowing leaves sparkling yes too in the sunshine, and the tremendous bog. That’s where the music is coming from.”

“No, Chet, it isn’t,” Rambles said carefully, but his eyes shimmered, screamed otherwise.

“Yes it is,” Chet spat back, in that childish way Jack hated.

With careful, ever so carefully spoken words, the other man hissed, “No, it isn’t. That isn’t where the music is coming from, Chet."

A camera swivelled at the top corner of the work room.

For a moment, Chet seemed to get it, eyes glittering, and Rambles looked at him desperately under his turtle-rimmed glasses. But then it was clear that Chet didn’t clue it, as he opened his jaws wide to spat out more. Rambles grabbed his friend and mouthed, “Jesus, Partikov, you’re going to get us in trouble.”

However, Chet couldn’t read lips, so he had no idea. “You don’t believe me!” Chet cried. “Nuts to you!”

Rambles looked at Chet, half bewildered and half exasperated, and put his face in his hands.

“Blast it,” Chet said suddenly, “I’m going anyway, I don’t care,” and he stormed off, slammed the door behind him, and followed the graceful pull of that peculiar music and the twinkling of the sun.

Sunshimmer on his skin. Off Chet sped across the sizzling tar, onto the hill and over its crest. And it got louder, that beautiful hymn, and it was the jingling of bells long gone cold upon the paraffin wax of a corpse tagged and frozen. The music folded like petals, yeah, creased out the smell of crisp white flowers shearing their pollen to eager nectar-touched pollinators. The backing was the drumming of deers' hooves crashing against the ground, splintering to painful tearing of muscle, and a golden herd of buffalo slamming across a hunter’s dream.

Hark! It was a symphony as Chet clumsily crashed through the overgrowth. He heard and felt himself to be disruptive, a discord, jangling and flapping uselessly out of sync. “I’m a mess!” Chet cried, and the music synchronized to this even, and he felt sobs growing under below his throat, “Oh, dear God, please forgive me!”

“What a bumbling idiot,” Rambles with the rounded glasses spat to himself, staring out the window with his hands paused hovering over the keyboard, squinted and peered over the countryside, and drank his steaming coffee. “God! And he’s left me with so much work.”

His eyes flicked quickly to the camera and back.

Then Chet again, thumping through the woodland. And the orchestra increased. It was everlasting and strange, it was stronger now and now fading, it was waves of swelling music and falling armies and it was life. Now it became a rolling, chorusing of angel’s voices, as Chet stumbled weakly over the breathing grass roaring up and down, it was the endless crashing of glass-worn ocean-waves as his breath became ragged. It was the beating of a pale, weakened heart.

Chet felt that his strength was sapping, more and more, as this infinite eternity crashed through him like an avalanche of a hundred tsunamis built-up and slamming-down into the broken glass seas, and he became it, that waving.

Presently Chet was become one with the grass, stumbling down to sit in it, cross legged, and the vines and leaves gently tickled him and secured him down. Evening passed by on gentle fingers, then sunk in, clawing dark trails across the sky.

“Fucking bastard!” the old man Rambles hissed to himself back at the office, pacing back and forth, checking his golden watch a-glimmer, “DAMNIT!” he cried and left to get a coffee and a pastry before closing time.

And Chet sat there in the woods, pale and sickly. The song was an aaawing, and a hemming and a hawing, and Chet faded until he was it, he was the song, he was the infinite beating heart of destiny.

Night fell, and upon a return and a car door slam, Mr. Rambles clocked out, muttering belligerently to himself about unfinished work and grabbing his keys with a scrape and a jar of the table, and starting off into the sunset. Luridly, his eyes passed up cast in pale yellow and blood red as the peak of sunset passed to deep purple near the tree-line, a bruised purple-black mess, and he felt a grazing sense of dread as he hurried down off to his car. Rambles stared over the horizon, muttered, "blast it, fucking nuts!" and started off over towards Chet’s peculiar hill.

Rambles found Chet Partikof in a gentle wooded clearing, paced, nostrils flaring, furious.

Thin white lips parted; a bulldog's layers wobbled. "Have we met before?" Chet muttered. Lips sealed, glued, fused shut.

“Nuts to you!” Jack cried suddenly, staring at Chet there, that man now caked with dirt and vines and such. “Where have you been all day?”

The vines twisted silently, tightening around Chet and he remained quiet. To Chet, the gentle hem and haw of the universe and the creaking of the stars were busy twirling. The sky blasted music upon itself, for only itself, while fortunate Chet let it pool and fill his ears.

“Fucking hell!” Rambles spat. “You left me all alone at work." Jack began pacing back and forth, counting off his fingers, “And you know we’re short staffed we are as it is, you peculiar freak, oh you inconsiderate… wench! Damned! Prick! Oh, with the spreadsheets and the quarterly report and the personnel checks and the…”

Rambles trailed off. Then, finally flaring his chest rudely, he talked at Chet: “You’re not even listening.”

Chet Partikof opened an eye.

“So you are listening,” he spat exasperatedly, drew his woolen coat in closer to himself, and unbuttoned it, fumbled with the button, rebuttoned it and then stamped at the ground like a wild horse. “So when are you coming back to work?” he asked half sternly, half pleadingly, and his eyes shone like twin marbles, or peeled grapes with the seeds popping forward.

“No, I won’t be,” Chet said, in perfect rhythm. “

"What?"

"This is me now.”

Partikof looked at Chet queerly, and sat on the rock for a long time.

“This is what I am now," Partikof repeated contentedly.

“Are you going to collect your paycheck?” Jack snapped.