‘The one thing these stories have in common, apart from their determination to exist, is a desire to take something familiar and twist it to reveal a different face.’

So says author Sean Williams in his introduction to Uncanny Angles, a collection of short stories by the New York Times bestselling author. Each story in the collection is introduced with a behind-the-scenes sketch of how the story came to be, offering new insights into Sean’s work. At the end of each story, there are tips directing you to others in the collection, inviting readers to choose their own adventure.

We’re pleased to share an edited extract of one of the stories from this collection: ‘Impossible Music’. Read it below.

Banner image features artwork by Shane Bevin

Two personal pillars that are very important to me that don’t often get a mention, if ever, are my love of music and the chronic pain I’ve experienced for nigh on a decade. The former I’ve often described as ‘my other true love’, and I can’t tell you how I pleased I am to have albums of my own out now. The latter has become a permanent fixture of my life, although I very much wish it wasn’t. This journey of discovery for a heavy metal musician who loses his hearing is not so different from my journey in recent times. One inspired the other.

‘How?’

Small word, big question. That’s what Mum says when she’s too tired to answer properly. Only it’s not a small word anymore, not for me. ‘How?’ in Auslan starts with two hands held palm upward, one on top of the other. You slide them apart to create a space between them, and they stay facing up, empty – the idea being, I guess, for someone to metaphorically fill them with knowledge. I think of it as a shrugless ‘huh?’

It’s a big sign, then, rather than a small word, but the question remains huge. I think G knows that, which is why it’s taken her so long to ask.

We’re sitting side by side in a corner of campus I used to avoid because it was too noisy. Everyone complained that the renovations to the science building are taking forever, but I can’t hear them now. All I can feel is the occasional vibration as invisible machines hammer and thunder on the other side of a canvas fence. G has her knees drawn up tight to her chest, scuffed purple Doc Martens jammed hard on the bench as though she’s bracing herself to jump. When she’s not talking, her hands clutch her forearms in a monkey grip, scars a vivid pink like they’ve been drawn on with texta. We’re so close our hips are touching, and I consciously note for the first time that she doesn’t smell like other girls. Where most girls I know are sharp and sweet, she’s pleasantly sour, like lemon in hot tea. With every breath I strain to inhale a bit more of her.

I’m not yet admitting to myself that I’m in love with her. This is just one of many things I can’t put into words. How can I? All I have are shapes in the air, numb approximations bearing no relation at all to sound or language or music, as meaningless as the shape of my fingers on the neck of my guitar …

G nudges me with her shoulder, reminding me of the question, and I nod, reaching into my pocket. Some things are easier to explain by phone, or at least less impossible.

I have brain damage.

She, leaning closer so she can read the words on my phone’s glowing screen, makes a gesture I guess means Tell me something I don’t already know. I scrunch up the left side of my face and keep tapping on the screen.

No really. Bilateral embolic stroke to Heschl’s gyrus.

I haven’t typed the words to anyone before so the phone tries to autocorrect them. ‘Heathland Guru’ sounds like a band but not a good one, a bland purveyor of the kind of Top 40 pop shit that I once loved to hate but now would kill to hear.

Ears work fine but brain deaf as a post.
G snatches the phone from me and types: Hysterical?

I think she’s being ironic before realising the question mark actually means something. Trying not to bristle, I answer: Not imagining it. Can show you the scans if you want. She reaches behind me and puts her hand on my neck, thumb and fingers on either side of my spine, and butts my shoulder with her right temple. The smell of her becomes stronger. I tilt my head and breathe in deeply, clearing my mental sinuses: hair, skin, G. Maybe I’m smelling a bit of her home as well, and suddenly I want to see where she eats, where she watches TV, where she sleeps.

While I’m lost in a pleasantly detailed dream about what might happen if she ever let me darken her doorstep, she takes the phone and types something with her left hand.

Well, thanks to you and your gimpy gyrus I’ve lost a bet.

It’s my turn to make the ‘How?’ sign, which creates a small space between us. Her hand leaves my neck. She sits straight as she taps the words.

Well, duh. Rock god goes deaf. How else would it happen? You wouldn’t say, so we thought you were embarrassed for blowing your eardrums out onstage. As you should have been. So obvious.

I snatch the phone from her.

You think I’m that stupid?

I don’t mention the times I gigged without plugs in or practised solos with my headphones so loud my ears rang for hours afterward.

Being deaf is stupid.

We both stare at those four simple words, and I wonder if she regrets writing them. There’s no denying the truth of our situation, but there’s no point wallowing in it either. Her inner ears aren’t going to magically repair themselves any more than my Heschl’s gyrus is going to hatch like a cocoon to reveal a beautiful butterfly.

How much did you bet?
A round of drinks for the whole class.
When?
That day you didn’t show.

I know which day she means. I was seeing another specialist, and this time the message had actually sunk in, which is ironic: Mum could hear the words better than I could, but she didn’t want to listen.

I’m not angry at G, but it does shit me a little that the rest of the newly deaf in our class discussed me behind my back.

Farid said you showed all the signs of traumatic brain injury.
Everyone agreed.
Except you.
Don’t give me a medal or anything. I still thought you were stupid for playing your amp too loud.

She’s smiling. I can see her expression reflected in the strengthened glass. I need to do something to regain the upper hand.

You ever hear any Blackmod?

That was the name of my last band. I am briefly but immensely relieved it wasn’t one of the others: Ratzinger, InTerrorBang, übertor, Anal Twin …

She signs, No.

I stand and strike a pose: imaginary Gibson SG in left hand, pick held high in right, hair flicked back over my shoulder, grimace. Never forget the grimace. With the sound of remembered drums in my useless ears I bring my right hand down for the opening chord of ‘Intoxicated Tyrants’ and then I’m rapid-fire air-guitaring and head-banging for her in our secluded corner of the campus, playing in time to the hammering going on in the science wing, mouthing the growls and sneering the squeals of my former band mates’ lyrics, and wishing with all my heart that it was more than just a fantasy, this gift I’m giving her. This piece of me I cling to, even though I know it is dead.

Hair sways across my face like a curtain, sticking to my heat-dampened skin. I couldn’t look at her if I wanted, but I wouldn’t anyway until I’m finished. Her laughter will put me off my stride, and I need this as just as much as she does. This mad rain dance to my treacherous brain cells.

Only when I thrash my way through the final syncopated cadence do I flick my hair back and realise she is crying. Triumph turns to shock. Dropping my pose along with the imaginary guitar to the imaginary stage, I kneel in front of her and take her hands, mouthing words neither of us can hear. What did I do? I’m sorry.

There’s a message already typed into the phone.

What you’re doing … That’s how it sounds in my head.

She leans forward and head butts my shoulder again, only this time it is me cupping her neck where shaved hairline meets naked skin. I am still sweating from my performance, and I hope that doesn’t make her feel worse than I already have. But I suppose if it did she would pull away or push me off or somehow make her feelings known. She’s much better at that than I am.

Instead I’m the one who pulls away, taking the phone and scrolling up a screen or two. I select a single word and replace it with another.

Tinnitus is a bitch.

But if you didn’t have it, I don’t add, we would never have met.

♦ ♦ ♦

Her name isn’t really G. It’s George. Not Georgie or Georgina – she made that very clear in our first session together – but no one deaf cares about those extra syllables, or the name her parents gave her, for that matter. They’re just mouth shapes. She, like the rest of us, needed a new name, one for the community to which she now belongs.

Her deaf name comes from the sign for the letter G, right fist on top of left fist, with a circular twist of both hands evoking her love of caffeine via another sign (it looks a bit like someone strangling a chicken). For a while she signed her emails as George-who-loves-coffee, while she got used to the idea. My Native American name, she liked to say. Remember the Alamo. Deaf names are given but they’re not always wanted.

That was how we first got to know each other, via email. It was too hard to talk in class, concentrating as we were on learning the bare minimum needed to survive. Hello. How much? Help! If we were paired to practice what we learned that day, she made it clear she was an unwilling participant. Her hands hung at her sides until she was forced to speak. When she did, her signs would be cursory and hard to read, or so exaggerated when I failed to understand her that they became almost aggressive, chopping and wrenching at the air. I thought her issue was with me, the way I looked perhaps, or something I had unknowingly done. After all, it couldn’t have been anything I said. Only later, when an email from George-who-loves-coffee arrived out of the blue, did I realise that she wasn’t angry at me at all. Just at being deaf.

In the email she asked if I’d like to go see a roller derby match with her. I wasn’t sure if it was a date and was too nervous to ask straight up, but I said yes anyway, from loneliness, but at least partly out of interest. It was impossible not to be curious. Her fringe was pink, then, bright and in your face, not at all like she smells.

She wore straightforward black tights and untucked white shirts, occasionally black jeans and braces if she was meeting friends afterward. (That stopped pretty quickly. Maintaining hearing friendships is hard.) On the inside of her right forearm was a tattoo of a skull. Later, beneath it, she would add the word ‘Deaf’ in bold Gothic script, daring people to think it was a typo. Her square face and broad jaw with a surprisingly small mouth makes her look at times like a prissy Helena Bonham Carter – not my type at all, I would once have said. In the band and at school I always went for skinny blonde girls in tight jeans, the kind who thought being with a too-tall long-haired guitarist was a good look, and whose endless chatter was easy to tune out. G was nothing like them. She did her own thing, and of course I would’ve given anything to hear her talk. Her ears had never once been pierced, an idiosyncrasy she maintained as though it were some kind of revolutionary distinction. Me, I had enough metal in my body for both of us.

♦ ♦ ♦

When you’re talking in sign you’re supposed to focus on someone’s face rather than what the rest of them is doing, but it’s hard for beginners, or maybe I’m a slow learner. On those few occasions I did manage to coax G into responding to my hesitant attempts at conversation in class (Is there a bus stop near here? I really want to know. Why are you being so difficult?), I found myself staring at her hands rather than what she was saying (No. So? Because!). Her fingers were short and tapering, her nails tidy and unpolished, and her palms were surprisingly narrow with wrists to match. But I couldn’t take my eyes off the scars, once I noticed them.

They were waxy and lumpy, like a wrestler’s ear, but they weren’t the work of a cutter – too public, too thick – and they didn’t look like a suicide attempt: they were so thick she would’ve bled out in seconds. I was curious to know their origins. Surgery? Some kind of ritual defacement I’d never seen before? But I never got around to finding the right way to ask.

Instead, over email, we chatted about usual stuff. Our families (struggling to deal with our new way of being), the shitty lag of closed-captioning on TV (no one likes being last in the room to get the joke), what we’re studying at uni (she’s in social work, and I’m still in the music department, crazy though that seems). Small talk, in other words, albeit tangentially revealing. I was pleased I hadn’t done anything specific to piss her off, but understood it remained a possibility. G could be prickly, ending conversations without warning or making sharp remarks I wasn’t one hundred per cent sure were entirely jokes.

I didn’t learn the source of her enigmatic scars until the roller derby maybe-date, the first time we used our phones as visual communication devices. (Sign language gave me a headache when I stuck at it too long, plus we were aware of whole vocabularies we hadn’t learned yet. The only thing we’d become truly proficient at was swearing.)

I was wearing a band T-shirt of The Ubiquitous Pig, and Stanley, their be-starred-and-striped mascot, looked right at home next to G’s unexpectedly vibrant rockabilly look. She even wore red lipstick.

You ever seen a match before?
No.
You?
Heaps. My team’s on tonight. We were champs three years in a row.
You skated?
Hell yes. I was the jammer.
The what?
You don’t know anything. Why did I bring you again?
So you can show off, I’m guessing. Which team was yours?
The Doom Kitten Brawlers.
Wow, my phone did not like that.
Wait until it hears my derby name: Arya Ghostclown.
Seriously?
AKA the Diva Hammer
L
What?
That’s LOL without the OL.
See my face? That’s LOL without the OL or the L
I bet you were a mean skater.
The meanest and the best.
Can you still do it since you-know-what?
Sure, but I fell last year and broke my wrists. Had to have reconstructive surgery. You noticed the scars, right? Everyone does.
Yes. And ouch.
The pain was the easy part. Imagine trying to wipe your bum with both hands in plaster.
TMI!
Wait till I start flirting.
Um yay?
Anyway, my hands are okay now and I’ve still got my strength. Could totally skate if I wanted to. Totally. Be like getting on a bike, albeit a bike that’s trying to beat you up at every turn. If I fall badly on my hands again then how do I talk? Shouting into this thing isn’t a long-term solution. What happens when our voices change? I don’t think Siri has a language setting for deaf as fuck.

Doesn’t matter what your voice sounds like to me. You have the best voice I never heard.
Who’s flirting now?

Maybe I was a bit, but mainly I was trying to change the subject. I knew all about the ‘deaf voice’. My bitchy little sister loved to tell me when I was talking too quietly or too loudly, and that wasn’t the worst of it. People who can’t hear themselves talk steadily lose all the subtlety of intonation that hearing people are used to hearing. One day, I knew, my voice would be flat and monotonous, perhaps even unpleasantly robotic to listen to, and that worried me more than I liked to admit. How could I possibly avoid it – by using my guitar tuner to check my pitch? My bitch sister would just love that.

The skate derby provided a welcome distraction on a highly visceral level. I could feel the crowd pounding and clapping like a herd of wild creatures stampeding around me. I kept my hands at on the chair beside my thighs, relishing the vibrations of the skaters as they went by, the crunch of collision between flesh and bone and the thud of impact on the track. Maybe I was kidding myself, but it seemed I could actually differentiate them. It was like being at a gig, searching for the guitar and vocals through the mud of bass and drums. I was getting better with practice, or at least preferred to believe I was. I had to.

The Doom Kitten Brawlers won decisively and bloodily, with by far the majority of injuries accrued by their opponents. G stood and clapped like a hearing person and her mouth opened and closed in what I assumed were shouts of delight and encouragement. No one pointed and laughed at her. She passed for normal in the crowd. I could see why she liked that.

On the way back to my car she asked me, So what do you do for kicks when you’re not watching girls in skates beat each other up?

Play guitar, I told her. Write music.
But you can’t hear it.
So? That didn’t stop Beethoven.
You think you’re as good as Beethoven?
Well, he thought he was. If he didn’t stop trying, why should I?

G laughed with her eyes and her lips like I’d never seen her laugh before. She was beautiful in an entirely new way, and I was glad when she put her phone away in order to take my hand. I smiled at her as we walked in a bubble of silence, feeling genuinely happy for the first time in a long while. We’d spent the night cheating, but this was real. This, I suddenly felt, was real communication.

♦ ♦ ♦

English has silent letters. What are the silent signs in sign language?

This thought has troubled me ever since I went deaf, and it’s a little hard to explain why. All letters are equally silent to me now because all signs are equally signed. But signs are the equivalent of sound in my aurally empty world, so surely some have greater or lesser degrees of ‘sound-ness’ than others. That makes sense: without pauses music risks becoming relentless noise. The trouble is that words in sign language aren’t combinations of letters: they are their own things, pictograms moving through time and space. Furthermore, whole combinations of words can be encapsulated into one single sign, like ‘How are you?’ or ‘Once upon a time’, and these are even more abstract, even more dense with meaning than the signs for individual letters. If you spelt these phrases and words out using the Auslan alphabet, all the letters would be equally ‘sounded’, so it’s not clear where the compression occurs, which bits are sacrificed in service to linguistic efficiency.

Linguists would say there’s no compression at all, just substitution: one sign for many. I remain convinced, despite this, that some signs are more silent than others.

There are, for instance, thoughts I wish I could express to G (and to myself) in sign. I love you is the most obvious, but there are others. How could you do it? is one, and How does it feel to have scars upon your scars? Sometimes, when I visit her in hospital, I sense she can detect these signs. Maybe she even understands them. How, though, when I make no attempt to express them?

My body betrays me, I usually end up deciding. Just because I have taught myself to speak a new way does not mean I have unlearned one that is very old, maybe a way of speaking that predates all other languages. A language that is simultaneously silent and more honest, perhaps, for someone who can hear it.

Which leads me back to the place I started. When no one hears, perhaps it’s not simply that no one listened or understood, but that some messages are too silent to be sounded at all, even for those trying with all their might.

♦ ♦ ♦

Take me to a concert, she said in an email. You owe me.
Owe you what?
A night out. An experience. A reason to get out of bed this weekend. Pick one.

It wasn’t a big ask. I already had tickets for a show that Friday night. Judd Nelson Overdrive was a melodic death metal band from Canberra I’d wanted to see for years, and I wasn’t going to let a small thing like deafness stop me.

When I told her about it she said, Sure, and I said, Great, and thus it was settled. Or so I thought.

We had kissed briefly after the roller derby but hadn’t seen each other since except for class, which was awkward as usual. This sounded like second date material to me, or another audition. I could tell she was testing me, probing the way forward like a blind person with a cane. (I’m allowed to appropriate disability metaphors now I’m in the club.) And why not? Kissing in complete silence is weird at first, like doing it for the first time all over, and so is getting to know someone without hearing them speak.

Taking G to a gig was something of a test on my part too, to be completely honest. I have been seeing live music since the age of thirteen, and first played on stage at fourteen. For a while after the stroke, I tried to keep playing. The guys in Blackmod were sympathetic and did their best to keep me integrated. We were methodical with set lists and solos. We paid more attention to each other as we rehearsed. We even tried using homegrown hand signals, like Frank Zappa, to communicate during the performance. But it was hard, way harder than gigging ought to be. Things like staying in tune shouldn’t be something you have to worry about every second. You should just be able to hear it, like maintaining a normal speaking tone. It became work for all of us, so I dropped out.

But I could only drop out so far. Giving up sound was necessary – I had no choice, after all – but the rest was optional, and still accessible. The sound of music is just the most obvious part.

The gigs I go to are so loud you can feel the music hitting you like a physical force – which is exactly what sound is, on a molecular level. Pressure waves expand and compress across our bodies, and inside our bodies too if the noise is big enough. Sometimes I stand right up close to the speakers and thrill at the waves of focused energy pouring through me, experiencing them very differently than when I could hear. Then, the vibrations were a secondary experience; now, they are primary, and I have learned to appreciate their nuances, literally in my gut. Sometimes I stand at the back and absorb the muddled wash of echoes as though I’m floating in a gentle surf. Most often I’m in the thick of it, being pummelled by people as well as pressure waves. Gigs are a great leveller on another front, too: I can yell and shout to my heart’s content and no one thinks I’m being too loud or too quiet or saying something the wrong way or whatever. Above a certain volume, we’re all deaf.

Anyway, I wanted G to like it too, and we arranged to meet a couple of blocks away in order to negotiate the door bitch together. People knew I was deaf there. Some even knew my new name: left hand raised in a st except for a crooked little nger (half an ‘S’) combined with right hand strumming an imaginary guitar. I was keen to spare G the hassle and humiliation of passing notes back and forth just to get inside.

But five minutes before she was due she sent me a text saying, Sorry. It’s not going to work tonight.

I tried not to be disappointed.

What’s wrong? Everything okay?

She didn’t reply until I was inside and the gig had started, and the buzz of my phone went unnoticed through the assault of the concert. I felt bad later, but what could I do? If she didn’t want to explain, I couldn’t make her. Phones solved one communications bottleneck, but not all. You can’t make a deaf person talk if they won’t look at you; likewise if they don’t respond to your texts. You can’t wait around forever.

The music was good. Hard, fast, and unpredictable. My ears felt it deep in their fragile bones, even though my brain no longer knew what it was supposed to be. Every other part of a gig – the smell of sweat, the taste of beer, the flashing of lights, the close proximity of people in the mosh pit – was present and accounted for, vital and reviving, almost filling the absence at the centre of my existence.

As I came out of the club, I quickly waved goodnight and peeled away from my friends in order to avoid the awkwardness that inevitably descends when normal speaking rules resume.

Only then did I notice the texts G had sent.

Imagine your least favourite song.
Imagine your least favourite bit of your least favourite song. Now, imagine that bit stuck on a loop, and nothing you do can shake it. It goes around and around, the same few notes, over and over, unchanging, like it’s never going to end. Not until you’re completely fucking crazy.
That’s what I have tonight.
The earworm from hell.
That’s why I didn’t come to the concert. It’s not you, it’s the music. Sorry.

I refused to take that as a blanket rejection of everything I held dear.

I have two words for you: Good Vibrations.
Her reply was instantaneous: Are you trying to kill me?
Never Gonna Give You Up.
You bastard.
The Macarena.
Stop!
… In The Name Of Love? … Hammertime?

She was silent for a while after that, long enough to suggest that maybe I’d been insensitive, joking about something that was obviously a big deal to her. I didn’t really know what tinnitus was like, although of course I’d read about it. Phantom noises, like phantom limbs, could be irritating, even frightening, but could they really be musical? If what she was describing was a literal thing happening in her head right now, then yes, it sounded like a fucking nightmare, maybe one I had carelessly made much worse, and that made me feel bad for her.

But hell, a tiny part of me said in response, it’s still music.

Home was a half-hour walk, a journey that had never spooked me until I was suddenly unable to hear the sound of people creeping up on me. No one ever did, but that didn’t stop me obsessively looking around every few seconds, just in case.

Halfway there, my phone buzzed.

Are you flirting again? (Say yes.)
Yes. (Why?)
Good. (Because it’s distracting.)
We could take it to the next level. (We *should* take it to the next level.)
Which is? (How many levels are there?(Typing in brackets is a pain in the arse!))
What part of ‘Hammertime’ was unclear? (Let’s find out. (Agreed. (But why stop now?)))
I am pulling my ‘That’s so not happening tonight, buster’ face. (But thank you for giving me something else to think about. (Seriously. (Maybe next time. (Goodnight.))))

With that she was gone, and I trudged on alone, feeling the crunch of the pavement under my feet and a cool breeze across my face. I made the sign for her name, the ‘G with a twist’, and admired the ‘sound’ of it. I liked the ‘feel’ of ‘George’. I liked the sound of Maybe next time even better.

♦ ♦ ♦

When I got home I played a thirty-minute solo to put me in the mood for sleep. No one heard it, but it sounded brilliant.

That’s one of the unexpected bonuses of being a deaf lead guitarist. There’s no need for expensive amps and pedals to achieve the ringing awesomeness my timeless licks demand, and no critics, either. Just a guitar in my hands and the opportunity to let rip.

My bitch sister calls it aural wankery. In my darkest hours, I wonder if she’s right. What use is a solo no one hears? About as much use as words in a language no one hears or understands, and isn’t even spoken. Maybe.

Sometimes I record the solos into my laptop and then delete them, to see if that makes a difference. It doesn’t, except as a kind of statement to myself. Hey, see? I don’t care whether I hear it or not. It doesn’t matter to me.

But it does. In my dreams I hear perfectly well: voices, a car backfiring, the wind in trees, a lover’s cry, the bark of my neighbour’s dog. There are mornings that dawn with a thread of melody slipping through my sleep-numbed fingers, a thread that is tugged away no matter how desperately I snatch at it. Jolted back to full wakefulness, I find the world as dull and silent as before, the pulse hammering in my chest with not the slightest sound at all.

It doesn’t seem fair that my brain doesn’t care whether I hear ever again, but it still matters to me. Couldn’t the part that cares about that have been destroyed as well?

At my angriest I rage and storm about the house, making life miserable for everyone. My mother tries her best, but she’s as out of her depth as I am, alone and looking after two teenagers, one of them with a disability, on top of a job she hates but can’t afford to leave. Maybe when we can both sign well enough I’ll be able to tell her how I feel, but what am I going to do now, write her a letter? If I did it would be about how music is something we have always had in common, a point of overlap that has brought us together, much to my sister’s jealous resentment at times. Except that’s all in the past now. Now I want to smash her records and CDs and erase her files so she will know what that feels like. Why should she have the chance to hear new music every day when I can’t? Why should anyone?

Listen with your eyes, my Auslan teacher tells me. Fine, I want to say, but how do I scream with my hands?

The fact that my angst is profoundly selfish doesn’t lessen its impact. It’s lonely here, inside my silent world; all I have to think about is myself. None of us realise how much we rely on the sounds of others to feel part of something larger until those faint echoes are gone. At night when the lights are out, I could be the last person left in the world.

Maybe if I was … maybe then I would stop deleting my solos. Because then it really wouldn’t matter. That’s how I know I’m not really anything like Beethoven, because if he wasn’t crazy when he died, he must’ve been when he wrote the Ninth. Imagine taunting yourself by writing something that everyone but you would hear! That’s worse than leaving a work unfinished when you die, I reckon. To know that it exists in its complete form, but that you will never experience it …? What kind of person would do that to themselves?

Music is a shared experience. If not even the composer can partake of it, there’s no point writing a single note.

You need to read the postmodernists, G tells me during one of my occasional rants on this subject. She’s the only person I can talk to about this. The audience creates their own experience in their minds blah blah.

My groan goes unheard by either of us. I’ve tried reading the postmodernists. They make me want to pluck my eyes out, which, now I think of it, might be a good way to approach their arguments.

Yeah, but what is the source of the audience’s created experience? If two people start with different materials, one sound and one the score, say, how can the different outcomes be considered remotely the same?

I dunno, but if that really matters to you there must be some way to engineer it in advance. You still remember what sound sounds like, right? Use your imagination.

What about people who are born deaf and have never heard a sound at all? What do they experience?

Why are you worried about them all of a sudden?

Because, I sign. This, one of my favourite signs, is way too much work even to attempt describing in words, which maybe says something about how my brain is adapting at this point. But what I am really trying to say is:

Because why should they miss out?
Someone’s always going to miss out.
Not if *everyone* misses out.

That’s when it hits me, the reason why I’ve been casually deleting my solos.

Not because I don’t care. Because it makes things even. A deleted solo disappears, unheard. No one benefits, no one loses. It’s like one of those particles that pops into existence out of nowhere, explodes into a cascade of smaller particles that combine and recombine back into something very much like the original, which then promptly vanishes back into nothingness. I remember hearing about them in physics and thinking it all sounded very Zen.

But it’s not. I see that now. It’s actually about revenge.

If I can’t hear the world’s music, then in return it won’t hear mine.

Very noble, she says when I try to explain this to her. You’re my hero, Sadwig von Hatehoven.

But I’m not really listening to her now. I’m wrapped up in an entirely new thought. Denial is a kind of experience, isn’t it? I certainly feel as though I’m feeling something by being denied music. So maybe the only musical experience a composer could create that could be shared equally by everyone – hearing and non-hearing alike – is one that’s impossible to hear.

Not just recorded and deleted – written so no one could ever experience it. How? I don’t know. The details don’t matter right now. But I’ll work it out. That’s why I haven’t dropped out of the Music Department: on some level I must have known I had unfinished business with the entire human race.

Screw Beethoven, I tell her in a kind of ecstatic trance. I’m going to be the next John Cage.

Good for you.

It only bothers me slightly when she adds, John who?