Echo: Chapter 6

 

I was to about to read the second piece out loud, which starts with an epigraph from Jacques Derrida’s A Silkworm of One’s Own, but then suddenly, and painfully, remembering not what I wrote but the style in which I wrote the piece, I stopped. I hoped Bjørn didn’t notice. Let’s put it this way: it was way worse than me harping on and on about the sea when I was younger. No one should be put through that. My youthful pretentiousness is a sight no one should have access to, put under duress or not.

So I settled for the epigraph:

I have promised.

A lapse of time: it was only an interval, almost nothing, the infinite diminution of a music interval, and what a note, what news, what music.

The verdict.

As if suddenly evil never, nothing evil ever, happened again. As though evil would only happen again with death – or only later, too late, so much later.

“Anyway,” I said, echoing him, “what I think of when I do of home is that apartment in Manila ten years ago where I lived among neighbors none of whose names I remember but all of whose sounds I do. It was an actual home, although it didn’t and never felt like that. The roof leaked during typhoon season straight onto my bed. I endured eight of those seasons all throughout my career in Manila. My hatred for the heat of the place was cemented by the rains.”

I continued, “The lines by Derrida, about music, is an echo of what I feel for when I think about home metaphysically. I hesitate to put it this way, but I always think of music and sound when I think of home.”

“Ah. That’s Jakob’s world much more than it is mine.” He turned pensive. “Hey. I never learned what kind of music you like. Give me a song to listen to. Or an entire playlist for when I’m in the Klovn og Tosk,” he amended.

“Okay,” I said, instantly logging in to Spotify. I briefly closed my eyes, imagined Bjørn as a song, and stretched that song into a theme. It was, surprisingly – or was it unsurprisingly? – easy to do.

Fifteen minutes later I had an hour-long playlist, which I promptly sent him the link to.

“I’ll listen to it as I’m doing the laundry. Bye for now.”

5:00 AM. Tuesday, again. Woke up shirtless, again. The Baguio nights are getting warmer the closer we draw to summer. Nestled atop the Cordillera mountain range, Baguio boasts a one thousand five hundred-meter elevation above sea level, and thus has the climes of those heights. It is the coldest urban locale in the country, and as such is inundated with tourists all year long. The four thousand-soul inhabitants swell to an insufferable two million come peak season, around February and March every year. Transient apartments regurgitate tourists nightly.

A new day. Groggy, still. Dishes, again, while again waiting for the water for coffee to boil. Each day and activity being echoed from the last; sense and stability hammered through sheer repetition. I love it. I have but one god, my brain, and these are the only rituals I need.

Some days I am not at all conscious of these repetitive strings of decisions made, as is the natural and logical consequence of the very nature of iteration. When I surface from whatever murky waters I submerged myself in and awaken yet to another echo of a day, I find it easy to appreciate everything.

“I listened to it. Some of it, anyway,” Bjørn said in a call, by way of greeting, four hours upon me waking up.

“Oh? Only some?”

“It got too full of words. Distracts me from my laundry.”

I laughed at that. “What do you mean –“, I started to ask, when his phone rang with a call. “Erik is calling. Talk to you in a bit.”

He cut off my “Okay.” I stared at the screen for a while.