“Fuck him. Fuck him like a bus full of prom queens entering the Johnson Tunnel.”
The Coördinator was angry. It wasn’t the awkward swearing — he swore like that pretty much all the time — but his habit of picking up whatever object was in his reach, and then quickly breaking it or tearing it in half. This time it was some poor guy’s pen. The Composer, sitting on the adjacent chair, made the right decision to focus on removing his phone from the desk and putting it in his pocket, instead of cross-checking where the Johnson Tunnel might actually be.
Right now he had time to do both. It was bound to happen. They started a week earlier and everything went rather smoothly so far. The track listing taped to the table in front of the Composer (and indeed, in many other places around the studio), read:
“Eden”
Two of those titles were now crossed out. The current predicament — the Pianist getting stuck in London’s traffic and being late for at least… must have been an hour by now, the Composer thought — was the first that made the Coördinator start taking it out on inanimate objects. Although, the Composer guessed, possibly not the last.
He looked around the old room. The Percussionist was already eating one of his disgusting sandwiches. The Bass Player was flirting with the Violinist and it looked today that his persistence was actually paying off a bit; she quit pretending to have to practice. The String Section was playing bridge. They did that during most of the breaks. “Isn’t it hilarious? The String Section playing bridge? Do you get it?” the Technician exclaimed one day to the Composer; he laughed but no, he did not get it, and also didn’t particularly care that he did not. It too was the String Section that already had a running poll on the Bass Player actually hooking up with the Violinist by the end of the project. The Coördinator was running around screaming on his phone and crumpling a piece of paper in his other hand. “We might have to start printing everything twice from now on,” the Composer made a mental note.
By all accounts, it was an unusual project. “Let me get this straight,” the Producer asked the Composer as they were starting. “You’re recording a soundtrack to a movie that never existed, based on an East-European book from 1950s no one cares about and that most likely would be unfilmable to boot anyway?” By that time — they’ve known each other for a while — the Composer didn’t even need to nod. “Well, it’s your money,” the Producer concluded after a longer pause, and the Composer never figured out whether the look he gave him indicated he thought he was crazy, or he wished he was as crazy himself. “But you did not only erect a fourth wall here, but the ceiling too, and then wrapped it all in a box.”
“I’m gonna start World War Three, and then I’ll fuck you like on its V-Day,” the Coördinator muttered in present time as he strolled by, seemingly to no one in particular. The Composer suspected he spent large parts of his evenings coming up with those nonsensical invectives. Needless to say, he himself preferred talking to the Producer.
None of the people in the studio knew anything about “Eden.” They were professionals, after all (although you really could not tell right now, with most of them channeling their high school recess selves), convening every day at 8 in the morning to play, and to be gone the minute the vintage wall clock showed 4. They could care less about the Composer who hasn’t seen his apartment in a week, and how it was still impossible for him to look at these eleven tracks and not think of that time decades ago when he became fascinated with movie soundtracks, and this irrational pet project that he conceived of many years before he started playing piano, and even more before he started composing. And of the ironically-named “Eden” itself, that bleak book describing a world never to be understood, in a way that changed him forever.
Once in a while, he recalled reading it for the first time, finishing in the middle of the night, and starting re-reading it straight afterwards, as if trying to pretend that the book never ended. It was too good to end. He remembered giving his first copy, by then battered, yellowed — and also autographed — to his first girlfriend, believing then that he wouldn’t ever regret that, even though everyone told him he would. (Time proved them wrong.)
The peripheral notice of the Coördinator putting down the Conductor’s vintage watch filled the Composer with relief almost instinctively, while he was still reminiscing. A quick glance up to the entrance confirmed that the Pianist was finally there, sweaty and disheveled, apologizing profusely; the small orchestra already started finishing their temporary activities.
Given the length of this whole endeavour — the idea must have sparked in the Composer’s head some two decades ago — it was somewhat surprising how little time did he spend thinking of the irony of trying so desperately to bring to life this one world he couldn’t comprehend, in another world that he didn’t really understand any better. “We all escape somewhere,” the Producer said to him after agreeing to the project, “but you always travel the farthest.” In all honesty, he never quite figured out his motives; these days he preferred composing to soul-searching. “Or, should I say, the strangest.”
The Composer put his phone back on the table. Some fifteen minutes later, the whole orchestra started playing “The visit,” for the first time ever taking his notes existing only on paper and filling out the room with them. The Coördinator finally sat down and whispered “Good thing that fucker came. I would’ve put you on the piano if he was late ten more minutes.” A brief pause before the next sentence seemed like him taking a mental inventory of what he already said that day. “I’m sure you would fuck this piano like the rain season of 2013 fucked the bees in Nicaragua.”
But the Composer wasn’t listening. He closed his eyes, smiled for the first time today, and imagined that fictional, frightening, fascinating, beautiful planet of Eden that he first visited so many years ago. Right now he was there, with those men who crash-landed on its surface and while desperately trying to run away, learned more about themselves than they suspected possible. Maybe he was holding on to an impossible dream, that somehow through this experience he would understand himself better.
At this very moment, he wasn’t thinking about it, and neither of this really mattered. The biggest irony of them all might have really just been how hearing depressing music illustrating a bleak world from within a forgotten book could make one person so truly happy.
— Central Park, July 2010.