Francis Fernandes

​Out of Tune
 
They’re crying “Tear it down” outside the window and I’m listening to Girolamo Frescobaldi canzonas, some of the first intricate instrumental music, here for cello and harpsichord, from the 17th century, a century in the process of waking up and asking why this and why that and how this and how that and wasn’t afraid to go for baroque. Does anyone today still know what a harpsichord is? My daughter, who plays her loud strident music well into the night, certainly doesn’t. When I was a kid, I’d listen to the ballgame on my clacking flip number clock radio well into the night, and then dream of tossing a no-hitter in a stadium with natural grass and where I could ignore the crowd and just hone in on the catcher’s signs and the space between us that stretched and bent like a blackhole whose forces and dimensions I alone controlled, like a god. My parents and teachers spent hours discussing my lack of focus. I’d be practising scales, my fingers jogging diligently up and down the fretboard, and I’d be thinking of the sequence of pitches most likely to catch Mike Schmidt and Wade Boggs and their ilk off guard, and they knew exactly where it was I faltered, where my intonation flagged and my attention wandered. They’re yelling “Silence is violence!” outside the window and I’m listening to the innovative Girolamo Frescobaldi while the numbers on my screen do their jaunty little profit margin squeeze-play merry-go-round dance the board of directors love to tap their feet to, and the thing to keep in mind about the harpsichord is that it looks like a small piano but sounds like an ocean freight container filled with finger-picking acoustic guitarists, what with the steel strings inside the box being plucked rather than struck, and I’ve always wondered if the equations of Isaac Newton – who was born a mere three months before Frescobaldi died, and could think outside the box, and could easily improvise on the flute – if his calculus might not be used to determine the flight path of a slider pitch given the exact positioning of the fingers on the seams and the force and motion of the delivery, and now I ask myself how easily a putative AI batter with bionic eyes – for example my teenage daughter, who no longer picks up her glove and shows me what her slider is up to and instead loves to attend rallies and hold up signs with scathing slogans – how easily they’d figure out whether to swing or lay off. They’re definitely making a racket out there, and I’m starting to wonder, underneath these noise-cancellation headphones, with the diminished speed that my synaptic neuro-transmission activity has dipped to over the years, whether Adam Smith, who was born a mere three years before Newton died and who developed the idea that synchrony is fundamental to human sympathy and cooperation and therefore fundamental to well-being (think of an infield turning a double play) – hell, yes, I’m starting to wonder, as the batteries on these darned things run low, why it is in all the years since the Enlightenment we haven’t been able to come up with a Frescobaldi-Newton-Smithian generated algorithm to filter out the best parts of our constitution, those miraculous quantum supernovas at the cell level, and thereby bequeath them to the next at bat (so to speak) and in this way render misunderstandings and remonstrations such as the ones outside these squeaky-clean windows obscene and irrelevant. 

**
 
Rain
 
It’s been so dry you’d think we were in the Sahara. But the trees are swaying back and forth, the skies are thick and black. You can smell rain. But you can’t see it. Or hear it. Or feel it. Pretty soon the wind dies down, the clouds pass, and I’m standing there with this hulk of a Yucca facing me reproachfully. The stems on the lower trunk are leaning over, like purposeless drunks draped over an invisible fence. There’s that. The taller trunk is fine. Green, lush. A crown of health. So this is what I do: I take the largest knife from the kitchen and cut off the wobbly stems. I look at them in my fist. Hopeless, disgraceful. Then, since the sliding windows are wide open, I fling the suckers out into the creeping dusk. It’s quiet and the neighbours downstairs wouldn’t have noticed. They have a catatonic daughter who screams obscenities every now and then, and their shades are always drawn. Anyway, they would have landed somewhere in the rhododendrons. So now there’s this small trunk with nothing on it and a tall trunk in full leaf. When my bandmates show up for rehearsal we all stand side-by-side staring at the lopsided pair. I wonder out loud why I didn’t just uproot the corrupted half. John, the bassist, believes I should leave it. Who knows what might happen. Marty, the drummer, is for chucking it: airing out the soil, giving the healthy stalk more room. I think about it as we move into the studio, get settled, and launch into the shortest of our pieces, an instrumental version of My Foolish Heart. My picking is dead on, and I’m bending the strings with just the right aplomb. Then, somewhere in the second chorus, it’s not her I’m thinking about. In fact, it’s not anything. First time in weeks. I’m looking straight ahead. The music rises and fills the room with what seems like the fruit of all our practice sessions. I don’t even hear the rain outside. 

**
 
Feckless
 
The outfielder, who happened to be a rookie and had been called up for his first big league game, gently scooped up the small bird with his big outfielder’s glove, shielding it with his free hand, then went over to the bullpen where a coach or a stadium employee carefully gathered up the fluttering soul in a towel. As though a ball had burst forth with life in the grass. The centre fielder wanted nothing to do with the fallen creature, so it was up to the right fielder to take charge, in this his first major league game. (Later on, in the bottom of the eighth, he would get his first major league hit, as though Mercury and Saint Francis and company were looking out for him.) Anyway, this still being spring and early May, I can only assume the fledgling bird was having flight issues. I too should have used my baseball glove. It’s always lying somewhere near the entrance (that waft of cowhide leather whenever I come in the door). But I didn’t. I went straight for the towel. This was the previous spring, long before that ballgame in Cleveland, and in a way I too was a rookie. Just not as clear-headed a one. It had flown into the bedroom and thrashed about for a while in a kind of confused panic. My idea was to guide it back to the window. But I must have stunned it or clipped a wing or something: it sank to the floor and shrank into a corner under the bed, chirping helplessly, like a lost soul in the night. But that was me. I know that’s me – ever since you left. But it doesn’t matter. Because that’s when I did the stupidest thing. It’s how I always deal with daddy-long-legs and lady birds and such. Except now I was holding that damn towel. And with it I crouched down and seized the poor thing and at the window simply released it into the air beyond the ledge. It didn’t fly away, of course. It dropped straight down. The bugger had come in through the open window, defying the unknown, the dark forbidden space of the square frame, master of its destiny, like Orpheus diving into the underworld after Eurydice. And now something as obscene as gravity was pulling its meagre weight towards the concrete walkway without any fanfare at all. As you know, I live up on the second floor. I didn’t hear the sound of the impact. That’s how light it was. I ran down to see what I’d done. It lay there, completely still. And before I knew it, the neighbour’s cat streaked past my misshapen form – me: bent over, crooked, heedless – and snatched the thing in its jaws and scampered off. You know, it’s weird. You act, you go through a series of trivial steps, each one of which requires a decision that must be made, and in the end the net result is you are a convicted felon, a cad, a murderer. How does this happen? That time you disappeared, a similar line of questioning went through my head: and like the heaviness of a muggy day in August, it left me motionless and dismayed.  

**
 
In the Company of Saints
 
You are late, but the train is even later. The silence down the aisle means the game is over. At least she said it was over. You grit your teeth and wear your cap at an angle like a pitcher sixty feet from all souls on the last day of October. A hundred other passengers riding this very slow train, each one hiding a world of joys and sorrows behind a sanitary void. Outside the window, up past the sky, if you look, billions of stars fill the darkness of space, maybe one for every friend who freely shared their sparkle. You used to own a big German Shepherd who dragged you into a ditch when you were six because you wouldn't let go of the leash. Sillier, meaner things have happened in this life. Most people just pretend. Dylan's Slow Train Coming was dismissed as an aberration. The fact is, tireless birds fly past our windows, mending their twig-and-leaf homes at all hours of the day, but we hardly notice. When you take your empties to the bottle shop, a guy with a sagging grey moustache and one arm keeps greeting you from his wheelchair. You stop, drop some loose change in his cup, and talk about yesterday's ball game for a minute or so. There's a woman who with agony, long ago, willed you into this world: she now lies in a care home half-wondering what it is she still remembers. When you call her up and say who it is, she says she knows someone by that name. No, you are not really alone, though you squint your eyes like a center fielder with one hand on the wall and a heart full of zeal, four-hundred feet from home plate. Once, your shallow pop-up to the opposite field was bobbled and dropped, which put you on second base with the only double ever credited to your name. The shame, for once, not yours. Standing there with that rare view from the other side, one week after Bella was put down. A tiny miracle, that. Merciful. Took something off the bat's blistering sting.

**
​
Ode to Boredom
 
Did you hear about that gallery watchman who downed a vodka and then, when no one was looking, drew two pairs of tiny circles on the canvas of one of the paintings he was supposed to be guarding? That’s right, two pairs of eyes on two of the artist’s faceless figures. So why would he do this? Maybe he disagreed with the artist’s central premise that we live in a vacuous society, oppressed by the jarring silence of the masses. (Actually, I have no idea what the artist was getting at.) Maybe he just got bored from staring at so many framed paeans to idiomatic motionlessness and anonymity – so bored that he had to transform his watching into action, his duty into rebellion, his numbing passiveness into a blunt utterance. It’s possible – though I am no expert on the behaviour of delinquent security guards – that this transgression of his was a way to proclaim a belief in an omniscient deity: the weight of his professional burden having grown too great for him to endure for all the hours of his shift – much like Jesus’s buddies while He agonized in the garden of Gethsemane – so that the misdemeanour was nothing less than a prayer, a humble abdication of his own will to the light behind this endless universe. In any case, he faces a sentence of up to three months in prison for doing what he did. I like to imagine he’ll be doodling on the walls of his cell in that time, dashing off more tiny circular eyes to fill the hours of his disgrace. His creative urge might even grow to the point where he graduates to lines and curves, subtle shading, elaborate schemes of form and pattern. And, then, who knows, vague visionary intimations might blossom inside his thoughts and dreams, culminating with the flower of an inkling that caring for a gallery’s treasures and drinking shots of vodka and picking up the groceries on the way home and reading the newspaper and listening to a Mendelssohn concerto and taking a bouquet of roses to your mother in the senior home and ambling through a crowd of painted faces and gazing at the sunset on a river and writing a poem and catching the loamy scent of spring in the air one mild afternoon in early March – that all of these things could, each in their own mysterious way, without causing too much of a nuisance, embody the potential for something new, odd, perplexing – yes, even free 
 
                                                            and 
 
                             mischievous. 
 
**

Francis Fernandes grew up and studied in Montréal, Canada. Since spring 2020, his writing has appeared in over thirty literary journals, including Jerry Jazz Musician, Saint Katherine Review, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Third Wednesday, and The Brussels Review. He lives in Frankfurt, Germany, where he devotes his time to writing and teaching.