2.
 When all hope was gone, the hospital radiologist introduced me to the physicist, Dr. Meudon. Meudon, a swarthy little intense man with calloused hands, built great gleaming machines out of copper and aluminum, and he told me of his invention. A person, he said, can be broken down into electronic messages consistent with a vast swath of DNA code, and then reconstituted. In the reconstitution, diseased cells can be eliminated.
We worked—I with only my hopes and fervent thoughts, my polyphonies and antiphons and technological ignorance—in the darkened hospital night after night. What a terrible hush lingers in those dreadful places! How the inhalation of alcohol and gauze, blood and floor wax, still resides in my wounded memory!
Meudon superimposed the essential being which was my Petra, wasted and sleeping as she was even then, upon a carrier wave. He spun the fabric of her being around a tune. The song we chose, almost casually, was an old popular hit on night-time radio. It is the kind of music that rises to the stars, filled with the common dreams and loves of young people. This one happened to be suitably complex and polychromatic for the complex double helix that must be coded.
If we had to choose something almost at random, it was a perfect choice. It was a worthy choice—a song that spoke to an age, which was the theme for a fine film, based on a striking, popular novel. Before Erich Segal wrote Love Story, there was Sloan Wilson and A Summer Place. The story was—is, for these things live forever—about young love triumphing over all.
It was a modern composition full of violins and harmonic basses, called Theme from a Summer Place, which won Grammy's Record of the Year in 1960. As it happened, the song was from a 1959 movie by that name, based on a 1958 novel by Sloan Wilson, author of the epochal The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.
The composer was Percy Faith, a Canadian who originated the narcotic music of an age, called Easy Listening Music, which straddled the line between classical and popular musics. It spun off a genre that is often deprecated as 'elevator music,' but it was a form in which many of the most hip musicians could earn their bread and butter while they spent desultory weekend nights in all-night haunts dedicated to bongo and beat. In short, the selection is a reflection of the absolute complexity and interwoven nature of life, the universe, and human culture. It is easy to imagine, just as this music wraps itself around us in airports, elevators, hotel lobbies, shopping malls, and random radio spots while driving, how the music—and Petra—are everywhere and nowhere at all times.
As Meudon and I spun out the codes and sequences of our early DNA composition, something went wrong. We never did learn what happened, what went wrong.
The music went viral. The song went wrong.
Meudon moved on, and died a few years later in some other random event—each a prime number, an island, amid the rich flow of galaxies of nicely sequenced numbers.
|
Thank you for reading. If you love it, tell your friends. Please post a favorable review at Amazon, Good Reads, and other online resources. If you want to thank the author, you may also buy a copy for the low price of a cup of coffee. It's called Read-a-Latte: similar (or lower) price as a latte at your favorite coffeeshop, but the book lasts forever while the beverage is quickly gone. Thank you (JTC).
|
TOP
|
MAIN
Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
|
