The Graceful Ghost Rag

By Matthew Lee

 

Alex was alone in the cafe, because it was a small cafe that not many knew about and because it was near closing time. There was the barista too, of course, but the barista was good at his job, and part of his job was to ensure that he was always in the background, as if he wasn’t there at all.

Alex spun his latte around in his mug until there was a small whirlwind. He placed the mug back on the saucer and watched the coffee spin and spin, until it slowed and finally settled. He peered at his distorted reflection. His hair was getting a little too long, spilling over his shoulder in uneven locks. He ran his hands through his hair and tucked the loose strands behind his ear, but they immediately dislodged and fell back into disarray.

It was as he was raising the mug to take another sip that the fateful song began playing over the speakers. Alex placed the mug back in its saucer and looked up.

It was a simple piano rag. Alex found the melody familiar, which was strange considering that he had little interest in ragtime. He continued to listen, head raised and mouth slightly open, and the more he listened the more he felt drawn into the ambiguous rhythm of the piece, played straight but almost palpably desperate to be swung.

As if the notes were incarcerated in a structure of their own making, ruggedly pushing on in their march, shouting out the freedom of jazz but not allowing a single step out of time.

And now already the piece was repeating its theme, and the sudden familiarity of the melody made Alex’s heart well up with such fierce emotion that it startled him. He wasn’t the type of person to be caught up in paroxysmal bursts like these.

He steadied himself by closing his eyes and breathing out slowly. But then the theme played once more and he found that he couldn’t contain his tears. The tears emerged hesitantly at first, but soon enough began to flow freely down his face and down his neck, staining his collar.

If this had happened in some public place, Alex would have immediately hid his face and wiped down his tears.

But here, Alex was alone (or at least he felt alone, not once reminded of the barista’s presence throughout all of this) and could simply sit and wallow in his tears. And in the midst of this wallowing, he asked himself the simple question — why was he crying?

Now’s an apt moment to introduce a third character to this scene, and that’s me, the author. Neither Alex nor the barista knew it, but I had been there the whole time, watching. My skill in falling into the background is unparalleled, even by the barista.

By this point I had been watching Alex for a long time. Since he was born, in fact. I was there in the room as he was delivered by half a dozen eager hands. It was there that I, by whim, decided that I wanted to follow him throughout his whole life.

Little did I know then that I had chosen the dullest little child to follow! Nothing ever happened to him and he never did anything. For twenty-two years I had waited for some rogue current of life to shock him out of his complacency, to destabilise him, so that he might live out some more eventful circumstances for me to watch and record. But no, he simply floated along his days, skimming only their surfaces.

I decided it was time to take matters into my own hands. It was I who played the ragtime piece at the cafe. The title of the piece was “Graceful Ghost Rag”. It was composed by William Bolcom. I played this piece because Alex had heard this piece once before, though he didn’t remember it.

It was when he was seven. Her mother, who was beautiful then, was playing the piece on the piano. She wasn’t a pianist by profession and had only played as a hobby during her university years, but with her long, slender fingers and straight, dark hair she certainly looked the part.

Little Alex was peeking from the hallway as she played. He loved watching her play the piano, because she would smile in a way she usually wouldn’t otherwise.

But that day, playing the Graceful Ghost Rag, she wasn’t smiling. She looked like a different person, with her thinly-pressed lips and distant stare. Then Alex saw large tears fall from his mother’s eyes and onto the keys below. His mother didn’t stop playing.

She went on, weeping, until the completion of the piece. Alex didn’t know why she was crying. Even I didn’t know why she was crying. That was my first time seeing her play this piece. I didn’t know where she learned the piece, or what memories this piece brought up for her.

It was probably memories from her university years, or even from high school, before I first met her. The first time I met her was at a housewarming party, where she came along with one of my friends. I was the host. As it happens, she also met Alex’s father for the first time that day.

But back to the story. Though Alex didn’t remember this moment consciously, the song still roused up his unconscious memories and swept him up with such intense emotions. Now these were the kinds of observations I wanted! How mysterious is our memory! Alex wasn’t aware of the memory itself, only the viscous trail of emotion that followed it.

He couldn’t even ascertain what kind of emotion it was. Though we love placing emotions into categories such as happiness or sadness or anger or disgust, if one strips that emotion naked, takes away all its contexts, and leaves just the physiological response, not even the most astute of psychologists can put a finger on what emotion it is.

This isn’t a comforting thought. We seek explanations, and Alex was no exception. He came to the reasonable conclusion that if he knew what song was playing (or now finishing, and transitioning to another rag which roused no sentiment in Alex), he would know what emotion he was experiencing and could therefore act accordingly.

Alex remembered the presence of the barista. The barista had been watching Alex, just as I have (but more discretely than I), and noticed his weeping, but he wasn’t one to wonder about his customers’ private moments. He made coffee, and that was all.

And so the barista went about rearranging the cups in the cabinets and pretended not to see Alex as he wiped his face dry with some napkins and strode up to the counter. Only when Alex reached the counter did the barista turn around and say, in the most neutral of voices imaginable, “can I help you?”

“Yes,” said Alex. “What’s the piece called? The one you just played? Over the speaker?”

The barista was taken aback by this question. It horrified him to think that a customer was suggesting that his selection of music was what caused him his sorrow.

Then, remembering his role, he stepped back, realised that there was nothing at all that he should be upset about, and said, again in that neutral voice, “I don’t know. It’s a compilation album, I think.”

Seeing the alarm on Alex’s face, the barista said, “I can go check for you, sir, if you’d like.”
“No, no,” said Alex. “It’s not a worry. Well. Um.”

The barista waited for Alex to say something, but Alex felt as if the barista, the counter, and the whole world were receding from him. There are moments such as these which inflict our lives, where we are ripped away from the current of the world and are made acutely aware of our awkward position in relation to the world, standing as such, speaking as such, and yet, and yet…

Anyway, Alex was experiencing one such episode of existential vertigo. For a moment, he had broken the surface, was suspended in the murky depths of life, where nothing can be grasped or made sense of. There’s nothing one can do to resolve one of these episodes other than seek solitude to recalibrate one’s phenomenological compass.

And so Alex stepped away from the counter and left the cafe.

The barista shook away the bizarreness of that encounter with a shudder and tended to the cleanliness of the coffee machine. He had successfully remained within the current of life. On and on he would go, but I can say nothing more of his fate because I had to hurriedly leave the cafe to follow Alex.

I found him in a nearby park, which was blossoming with the colours of autumn. The decline into winter hadn’t yet begun, and the last of summer’s vibrancy was conducting its final dance.

Alex sat down at a large stone fountain which bore at its centre a statue of Orpheus, reaching out towards an invisible Euridice. From the tip of his outstretched finger sprang a small spout of water. Another spout of water came from the tip of his harp, which was tucked at his waist.

But Alex wasn’t looking up at the statue. He was trying to will some concrete thought that might help him name, categorise, and give meaning to the event in the cafe. But his mind produced nothing, and he could feel that the moment, without a name to anchor it into his hall of memory, was already drifting into the amorphous haze that had already swallowed up most of his life, never to be remembered again.

Alex looked up in desperation. He didn’t know it, but he was looking straight at me. I felt uncomfortable. His gaze penetrated through his long and unruly hair with startling intent. It reminded me that he could do whatever he wished, at any moment, and there was nothing I could do about it.

I gave one of the branches beside me a shake, and one of its brown leaves fell off.

Alex and I watched as the leaf fell, slowly, gave a twirl, then landed onto the water. We watched the water ripple ever so slightly, distorting the reflection of the multicoloured leaves above. Then the leaf was still. It didn’t break the surface.

Alex looked away from the leaf. He felt that he might begin crying again. He thought about the cafe once more, and the piano rag, but found that he could no longer recall its melody.

“No,” said Alex, but there was nothing he could do.

Matthew Lee is a writer living with cancer in Melbourne, Australia. His work can be found or is forthcoming in Farrago Magazine, Neologism Poetry Journal, Five on the Fifth, Literally Stories, and Academy of the Heart and Mind.