Oboe

He wouldn’t shut up about the oboe.

I’m not one to point out other people’s mistakes, so I was willing to let it slide. At first, I mean. Oboe, clarinet, what’s the difference, right? Who cares if he thought there was an oboe in the orchestra? Who cares if the wind instrument in question was really a clarinet?

But he wouldn’t let it go. He kept going on about the oboe. “No wonder the sound has so much body,” he said, exalted. “Do you know the difference between a mediocre orchestra and a really good orchestra is? You guessed it. The oboe.” Things like that.

“I think you have some food in your teeth,” I said, not because he had food in his teeth. He didn’t. I was desperate to change the subject.

“But I haven’t eaten in hours. The last time I ate was with you. At Bambuc,” he countered.

“Just a little piece. Little green thing. On the downslope of the incisor. Wedged in the crook there.” I signaled to the place in my own mouth with the nail of my pinky finger. 

“Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” he protested.

“The concert was three hours. I’m just noticing it now.”

He rubbed his teeth vigorously with the sleeve of his button-up shirt. Too vigorously. He did everything with the same intensity. The same exaltation. No matter the time of day. As if it were nine o’clock in the morning and he had just had a thermos of mate. As if we hadn’t been out and about for the past ten hours. As if the concert wasn’t the end of a rather long day on the town.

He showed me his teeth again. Teeth and gums. “Did I get it?”

I tried to get the words out, but they didn’t come. I nodded up and down apprehensively, uncertain whether the diversion had been justified.

“Such a rich sound, the oboe,” he said, without missing a beat. My heart sank.

The oboe, of course, wasn’t just an oboe. With him, it couldn’t be. It had to be something more. He was deeply invested in the idea of it, emotionally. Intellectually too. A fulcrum, it bore the weight of his argument. The public theater was a worthy institution. Better, in fact, than the private ones. It deserved to be funded. More so than at present. The musicians were the best in their field. Better than the ones at the private theaters. They deserved to be compensated for their expertise. At a higher rate than they presently are. The public, too, deserved to have access to cultural institutions, to an aesthetic formation, especially the youth, ourselves included.

It was an argument that I happened to agree with. And not in a casual way, mind you. With a good deal of conviction, not quite as much as him perhaps, but a good deal anyhow. But I just didn’t feel that it was necessary to make the oboe bear the weight of the argument. Especially when there was no oboe to begin with. Couldn’t he have made his point without the oboe? With, say, a clarinet?

But that’s exactly the point. For him, it had to be the oboe. He always took the extra step. Even when it wasn’t necessary. And there is something there in the slippage. Something about his personality. A predisposition maybe.

Looking back, it makes sense, the slippage, the reckless misrecognition of a musical instrument, all the pressure that he put on that one word, oboe, testing its limits, its breaking point. It is tempting to interpret it as a sign, knowing what we know now, that is, knowing how things turned out.

As far as I know, I was the only one to visit him on the other side. We had lost touch for many years. It took me forever to track him down. Social media was just taking off at the time. And he wouldn’t have used his real name anyhow. Not a chance. He changed his name many times over the years. It was hard to keep up as it was, without social media coming along to complicate things. I ran into his brother at Luca’s funeral and walked out with an email address scribbled on a small piece of paper, between a photo of Luca and a short text with a eulogy and a Bible verse, not related in any way, of course, to the Luca that we grew up with.

I had just finished night school and wanted to celebrate somehow, so I wrote an email and got on a plane. He was waiting at the airport. It had been over fifteen years since we last saw each other. He hadn’t changed a bit. That same look in his eyes. The same intensity. The same exaltation. The same predisposition. As if he was looking right through you to something else. As if his gaze was tethered to something just out of sight. God, he was holding on so tight. I never knew what would happen if he let go. Now we know, I guess.

He brought me back to his apartment. Two in the morning. Or thereabouts. It was just as I imagined it. One step away from homelessness. He lived in a shoebox apartment above a motorcycle repair shop. Toilet in the corner. Floor drain at the base of the toilet, showerhead above it. No hot water, of course. Mold on the walls. Not just stains but spores, hairlike and protruding, some pretty burly shit. There was a mattress on the floor opposite from the toilet. Otherwise, piles of books on the floor, a few milkcrates full of clothes, and a folding chair that you could only use if you rolled up the floor mattress.

Naturally, we spent most of the time on the rooftop. There was an abandoned building next door, covered in the vines. You could access it from the rooftop. He had a folding table and chair in there. A few candles. A thermos, beaten up pretty bad. He said that it was where he got most of his work done.

I can’t say that I was surprised when I stepped into that shoebox apartment for the first time. He had been moving in that direction for years. Even in Chicago. The last place he lived before skipping town, before pulling his disappearing act, was down by Eckhart Park, in Ukrainian Village, just off Augusta, by the highway. His roommates were activists. Bike messengers. Multi-media artists. Welders. Bird watchers. Bike mechanics. You know the type. He had worked out an arrangement with them to rent out a walk-in closet. No windows. Just books, clothes, a mat on the floor. At least there wasn’t any mold on the walls.

Ten days of this, I thought to myself. What have I gotten myself into? Yeah, I panicked at first. But, by the second or third day, I wished that I was saying longer. The only hard part was remembering to call him by his new name.

He had created this little world. Libraries. Used bookstores. Rooftops. Theaters. Community centers. Lecture halls. Shortcuts along the train tracks. Coffeehouses, the old kind, long forgotten. Dim corner tables at dive bars. A small circle of talented artists, intellectuals, and activists. A shoebox apartment. Once inside this world, everything made sense. It was imbued with harsh beauty. It had its own logic. Its own system of equivalences. In the end, an argumentative structure. In it, for example, an oboe was the same as a clarinet. In a few days, of course, after the return flight, it would all be unintelligible, or mostly unintelligible. But, while I was there, it was all perfectly coherent, everything except the oboe.

I guess that’s the difference. I’m committed. I roll up my sleeves when I have to. I get my hands dirty. I’ve spent my time down in the trenches. And I have the scars to show for it. But, for me, an oboe is oboe and a clarinet, a clarinet. I told him so. That night at the theater.

“You know that it’s a clarinet, don’t you?”

“Can a clarinet really have so much body?” His voice faltered. The worry lines on his forehead got deeper, more pronounced. His eyes narrowed.

“A baritone clarinet can, apparently, judging from the concert we just attended,” I said in an offhand fashion, to soften the blow.

“A clarinet? Wait, a clarinet?” His voice was shrill, not unlike a poorly tuned oboe. He looked disoriented, untethered, lost. He withdrew into his own thoughts for what seemed like a long time. “Well, you’re the musician, not me,” he conceded, his voice trailing off.

In a few minutes we would return to the shoebox apartment, to the rooftop of the abandoned building next door, to the world he had created, impossible in so many ways, where we would talk late into the night, just like the old days.

But for an instant, there on the steps of the theater, not adequately funded, as we all agreed, he was momentarily transformed. He was outside, extinguished, unenchanted, unexalted, unintelligible, almost homeless. It was as if he were on the other side again. I suddenly realized, right then and there, that he couldn’t go back. For him, there could be no going back. You can’t undo something like that, what he had done, such an elaborate oeuvre.

“They’re both woodwind instruments,” I said contritely. “It’s just a matter of register, really.”

He was far away. My words didn’t seem to reach him.

There was something there in that distance, something in those small slippages, something that explains what happened later, something that confirms what we now know, something that confirms why things couldn’t have ended differently.