Soundzine

The Complicator has really been going out a lot recently, not that he did not always. He’s had enough relationships to single-handedly provide the script for “As the World Turns” for about a year. Certainly, not all of them have been heterosexual ones, although the scale tends to tip over to that side. I don’t want to get too into his love life, but he’s tried everything that’s been named, and a whole bunch that don’t even have names yet. But his real impetus behind going out seems to be stirring up things in other people’s relationships. And it’s not as though he’s deliberately trying to cause trouble—it just seems to hover around him like a cloud, and I know were the Complicator here, he would berate me for not specifying which kind of cloud, since there are few things he despises more than a vague metaphor, particularly one which is clichéd. In any case, we went to a whole slew of bars the other night—he typically likes to go to a boisterous college frat-boy kind of joint, then maybe head over to a classic Irish pub, then make a jaunt over to a replica of a Jazz Age bar if there’s one available, and order a vintage drink only available there, swing by a Wine Bar, drop into a place like the Cocker-Spaniel, a good old S&M bar, then it’s a smooth segue to the highway and a few hours to a country Roadhouse where old C. can get in his mechanical bull ride.

I’m not explaining it very well, though, because it’s really the psychological maneuvering that is salient here, which renders where we go virtually irrelevant. He’s excellent at cementing incipient relationships, spotting a couple of people that look lonely and bringing them together, offering a few minutes of camaraderie and free drinks while he gets them gabbing and easy with each other, though I hate to use the word “easy.” Of course, if he sees a relationship that’s already thriving, he’s right on in there, at first just making ostensibly-innocuous small talk. It’s as if he’s gently brushing their hair, but soon the knots reveal themselves, and he cracks away at those knots until one or both members of that couple are in severe pain, glaring at one another, seething with rage. “Well, if you could see yourself dating Marjorie, why don’t you give it a try?” “If the phone voice I get with my mother is so irritating, maybe you should be the one to speak to her whenever she calls from now on!” The Complicator himself looks slightly hurt by these jabs—he meant not to provoke hostility, merely to bring latent issues to the surface that he deemed ultimately to be for the health of the relationship. In such moments, usually he fades gradually into the shadows and retrieves me, thumb gesturing, “Roadhouse.” Occasionally, though, he’ll wind up going home with either member of the party he’s just put through counseling, and I’ll be left to make small talk with the other.

The Complicator’s favorite synonym for “small”: “small.” He says it is a fundamental misunderstanding of the vagaries of language to rely upon the thesaurus as a matter of routine.

One of the things that the Complicator did that I really admire was his self-publishing effort. He felt that it was imperative that the Kama Sutra and the Bible both be available in a single volume, as they represented for him the maxima and minima of the expression of erotic activity, or something to that effect. It didn’t take much research for him to figure out that both of the books were in the public domain, and he really had always wanted to do a little bit of publishing. So he did, and a glorious volume it is. The color plates, in particular, are truly exquisite, and his decision to emphasize stained glass as the medium for both religious iconography and the sexual instruction manual section of the book seems to me to be a stroke of genius perhaps unparalleled in illuminated manuscript. It does make it rather difficult to discern, at times, what exactly one is looking at—is that Jonah enveloped in the body of the whale, or is that an extremely acrobatic sexual posture which only a tremendously adept and flexible contortionist could dream of achieving? The lack of clear labeling only exacerbates this sensation of uncomfortable ambiguity. I asked him about it once, and he made it plain that it was meant to be that way. Then he shot me a rare smile that let me know I was still his number one confidante.

Some would say that the Complicator is a hypochondriac—he’d call that labeling, too, though, and dismiss it with disdain. Others would just say his time management skills are enviable. To be able to see, on a monthly basis a general practitioner, a cardiologist, an otolaryngologist, his acupuncturist, a Rolfing specialist, a reflexologist, a Reiki healer, two chiropractors—one Atlas vertebrum specialist and one general, a colon cleanser, a urologist who is considered tops in the tristate area, a craniosacral healer, a Bach flower remedy applicationer, and a physical therapist, would stress me out to the degree that it would outweigh any health benefits that I would be able to glean from such a regimen. I did accompany him once on his “rounds,” curious to know what it would feel like to experience such a smorgasbord of health upkeep—after all, the C. does have that glow that emanates from his skin. “No, thanks!” I exclaimed at every turn when each wondered if I was perhaps interested in receiving a bit of treatment myself. What astounded me was the way in which the Complicator would expound to them at great length on health-related matters. It was as though he really was “broadening paradigms left and right, “as he put it. He’d talk to the cardiologist about skin conductance and its relation to circulation, then practically had the Rolfer pinned down in a chair, riveted by his explication of the meningial tissues and their role in sodium exchange. And who wouldn’t be?

Once I asked the Complicator what sort of music I should get my wife for a birthday gift—after all, he listens to everything from rock to reggae to polka, often simultaneously on CD players he’s set up in various spots around the room.

“You’ve got to get Nancarrow,” he said definitively.

Since I was unaccustomed to having the C. assert anything in such a singular, unequivocal fashion, I questioned him on it in the style which I have, inevitably, absorbed from his example over the years. “And why is that?” I cross-examined him. “Who is this Nancarrow, exactly?”

But the Complicator refused to divulge the substance of the music he was recommending I purchase, merely urged me to get ahold of the Player Piano Studies 1 through 80, and then to give him my honest feedback. “Then,” he said, “and only then, can we discuss it.”

Not one to turn down such an effusive referral, I did indeed order the Nancarrow Studies, which had been recently released on CD. I must say that I found some of them rather charming and elegant, but most were utterly unlistenable. Usually they would start out okay, but something would go completely haywire mid-song, as if a squeamish animal had landed square on the piano keyboard, making itself more and more terrified as it tried to escape, not knowing enough to simply—well, just—leap off. I would have to lunge for the volume and douse it before I was swept up in complete cacophony, verging on madness.

He calmly explained to me that Nancarrow had composed on gargantuan, unwieldy player piano rolls, cutting out the holes that would create musical passages beyond the physical limits of an actual human being. The rhythms, apparently, were too complex and myriad to be performed live. He traced rectangles in the air, cited arcane mathematical formulas. He became more and more animated as he talked of how the composer had hoarded these monumental rolls in his Mexico City apartment, where he’d suffered till his death with an asthmatic condition, simply--rather I should say only--because he found it inconceivable to transfer his office, with its precisely-arranged chaos, elsewhere. I vowed to give it another listen, but I just couldn’t get into it. I once lent the Complicator a CD by John Gorka, a folk performer I had seen in concert with my wife and her friend. He liked it, but said he was going through a phase in which chords and melodies were a bit too tame for his liking. He never did give me back my CD, though, which I’m still a bit miffed about.

Even I had to warn him, though, about the risk factor involved in going into people’s homes to question them on where their clothing came from, and probe the extent of their knowledge about the exploitation of workers and children in various far-flung regions of the world. I know that he found it all too easy—I almost shudder to use the word, so anathemic is it to my sensibility at this point—to charm his way into their living rooms, but the idea of a sort of quiz show where he would lay out the clothes, then have them guess the origin on the label, well, people simply were neither amused, nor did they really hear his point, I think. When he got pummeled up black and blue a couple of times, I think he learned his lesson, but even then he would occasionally stop to ask a person on the street where they got something. When the friendlier ones replied with the name of the store, sounding flattered that he liked their outfit, he would ask, voice asnarl as it uncloaked its irony, “And do you happen to know where they got it?”

It took me a long time to understand the purpose of the Complicator creating what he calls “his own number,” “compli,” he calls it. The number itself is a lot like pi, except it has no practical or theoretical significance beyond the fact that he is creating it. For the first ten digits, it is identical to pi, almost as if he is trying to be difficult about it, but from that point on it just goes all kablooey. He claims that it is an endless number, that it will continue after his own death. Of course, when the Complicator speaks of death, there is little doubt that he will quote extensively from literature, philosophy, religion, and even his roommate at the Mount Hoven School, Dale Mackenzie, who he would stay up late nights talking with, and whom he claims was wiser than any of the prophets. “Wiser than you?” I ask. But the Complicator is lost in reminiscence about a time when life was simpler. He never uses that word, but I know that when he says, “That was a time I felt I could really understand the universe, and that Dale would always be around to understand it, right alongside me,” I’m pretty sure I can see right through the slowly-rising jellyfish skin of his words.

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The Complicator was originally published in the British journal, Seventh Quark.

Tim Horvath's story "The Understory" won the 2006 Raymond Carver Prize, judged by Bill Henderson, who called it "a wonderful story, a first-rate creation by a fine writer"; it was nominated for a Pushcart. His story "Circulation" won the '06 prize of the Society for the Study of the Short Story. His stories are published or forthcoming soon in Carve, Eclectica, pacific REVIEW, Cranky, 3: AM, both print and online versions of Sein und Werden, and elsewhere. He's also a four-time finalist in Glimmer Train competitions.