Monoliths

Patrick was mindlessly sweeping the back office, humming a tune he couldn’t name, when he heard the tinkling bell at the front door signal an incoming patron. He let out a soft groan and threw the broom into the corner.

Sweeping was the one thing Patrick had that kept him sane. He wasn’t sure the sweeping actually did any good as far as cleanliness was concerned (he couldn’t recall a single day where he spotted even a mote of dust in this place), but the routine helped him maintain a sense of time – another thing this place lacked. After years (he assumed) of trial and error, he had finally timed it so perfectly that it took precisely 58.5 minutes to sweep the entire building, allotting himself a minute and a half to getting out and putting away his supplies. He would then use the rest of his time to daydream, stare into the void, lay flat on his face, or anything else that tickled his fancy, while humming approximately 391 songs to himself, which took up about 23 hours. And then it was time to sweep again. It was a comfortable routine made science, one that doubled both as a form of therapy and a built in calendar, and the only times Patrick broke from it was when he was working with a client – which, let’s face it, was few and far between these days – or, more often than not, when Jimmy decided to poke his round, punchable face inside and start poking around.

“I’m gonna kill him. It’s not like there will be any witnesses. It’s the perfect crime,” he muttered to himself. He stormed through the narrow hallway, his heavy footfalls echoing off of the hardwood floors.

“I swear on my grave, Jimmy, you cherubic sonofabitch, if you so much as breathe on one of my monoliths, I will wring your neck until you–“

Patrick stopped mid-stride when he didn’t see Jimmy and his chubby mitts pawing at his display, but rather a young woman standing at one of the shelves lining the walls, idly staring at a kabuki mask. She didn’t turn to look at him when she said, “Who’s Jimmy?”

“Oh, jeez. I am so sorry. It’s been a while since anyone has been in here, so I just assumed–” He moved towards her, winding his way through the low shelves in the center of the room. “Jimmy is… well, he’s an asshole, that’s about all there is to it.”

“Concise,” she said to the room. “This is a pretty cool place, Jimmy not withstanding. Very cozy, especially with the hardwood floors.”

“Thank you. There’s no way to actually get real wood here, so it took centuries to get it to look and sound just right. It’s still not great, but it’s not bad.“ He tapped the floor lightly with the heel of his boot.

“I think it’s lovely. Everywhere else was just pure white and clean and…”

“Sterile?”

The girl nodded. “I mean, I know it’s just giving people what they expect, but–“ She shivered. Her stare never left the shelves full of odds and ends, her eyes drifting from the kabuki mask to a toy car to a single bullet, every item separately displayed with a small placard baring a single name. “So I assume these are the monoliths, eh? I thought a monolith was some sort of giant rock or black brick thing from space or something.” She broke her stare and turned to face Patrick. “This just looks like junk.”

“You mean of all of the things you could choose to be, you wouldn’t want to be reincarnated as a knick-knack found in a garage sale? Tsk, tsk. You, my dear, have no taste.”

The young woman smiled and rolled her eyes. “Ha ha. Very funny. Seriously, what is this? I imagine these were all people. Are these my options?”

Patrick teetered his hand back and forth and grimaced. “Not really. These are more interpretations of their marks, of what they will become. I didn’t turn anybody into these items. These just represent what I saw and what I felt when I heard them.”

She stared at Patrick intently. “Heard them…?” She moved her hand in a circular motion, urging him to continue.

He laughed and said, “No, no. That was the end of that sentence.”

She raised an eyebrow and nodded in confusion. She meandered between the shelves, her eyes drifting over a small coffin, a burning tree, a portrait of a woman. Patrick lagged behind her, careful to give her plenty of space, until she finally stopped in front of what looked like a neon power tool covered in rhinestones.

“This is… interesting,” she said.

Patrick chuckled. “To say the least. That’s one of my favorites, actually. I like to call it ‘Candy-Covered Chainsaw.’ That person’s sound was sweet, but chaotic. Almost guttural, I guess you could say. It was not at all what I was expecting. He was so unassuming.”

“So you turn people into art? That’s kinda cool. I think I’d be pretty avant-garde, myself. Almost expressionistic, in a way.”

Patrick bit his lip. He was doing this all wrong. If he didn’t say something soon, he would lose another one.

He started, “That’s not really it either, to be honest. Like I said, this isn’t anybody. This is just how I remember them, how they came across in my mind.”

“So, what, you essentially make caricatures of people and make them disappear?”

“No, I–“

“Because that’s what it sounds like. In which case, why would I give you my essence for nothing in return, when I could just go down to the end of this road and step out into oblivion where I could also become nothing and leave it at that? It’s the same thing, isn’t it?”

“If you’d just give me a minute, I could–“

“Look, man, you’re not making this easy for me. Every other place was super clear and upfront. ‘Come through here and become an animal!’ ‘Enter here and become a flower!’ ‘Wait in this line for eternity and go back to being part of the world’s population problem!’ But all I’m getting from you is that you’ll listen to me and, I don’t know, have some arts and crafts time, I guess?”

“It’s more complicated than that. If you’ll just–“

“No. Tell me. Why should I trust you with the remainder of my existence?”

Patrick sighed and scratched his head. He always hated this part.

“I put a person’s essence into music.”

The young woman’s face went slack and her shoulders dropped. “That’s it?” She threw her arms up in the air. “Then just say that! The giant warehouse up the street does the same thing and they’re not all coy about it.”

“Song Styles of Beyond? No, they make a song out of you and then they inject it into some sorry sap on earth who has to belt it out and claim it as their own, for better or worse. And, believe me, it’s usually for worse. Occasionally someone will come out the other end a one-hit-wonder, but that place goes through so many beings that it’s all repetitive bullshit. Which says as much about the people they’re transferring as it does their industry, but–“ Patrick waved away his train of thought, took a breath, and continued. “I don’t make you into a song. I sort of make you part of one.”

The girl crossed her arms, leaned lightly against the shelf next to her, and slightly nodded: Proceed.

Patrick cleared his throat.

“Have you ever heard a song for the first time and you immediately knew you were in love with it? Where you couldn’t exactly place why, but you knew it spoke to you on an almost chemical level? To the point where you could just listen to it on repeat for hours?”

The girl nodded.

“Who hasn’t, right? Now I want you to take that one step further. In at least one of those songs, I can almost guarantee that you picked up on the slightest of flourishes that, in your mind, made the song ten times better. Be it a sudden key change, a guitar lick, a harmony, a turn of phrase, something. It was small. But it stood out. And it reminded you of something or someone or at least made you feel something… special.”

The girl nodded slowly. “You make people part of a song,” she said.

Patrick groaned and started walking backwards through the maze of shelves without ever breaking eye contact with his potential client. “This is where it gets complicated. One of the biggest problems with Song Styles of Beyond is that they let everyone dictate what type of song they want to be. They choose the genre, the instruments, the key, everything. That’s why you hear so many songs that not only sound the same, but also sound phony. There is no inspiration. It’s all forced. Which is exactly what I strive to not do.”

He stopped at a pedestal covered in a blanket and motioned the young woman over. She obliged, her face blank as she wound her way through the array of shelves, and stopped at Patrick’s side.

“This is what I do.” Patrick grabbed the corner of the blanket hanging by his hand and gently pulled.

As the veil slowly slid to the floor, the room illuminated with harsh white light. The young woman’s mouth dropped. “Yeah,” Patrick said, “I like it, too.”

Inside the glass case was a sun the size of a basketball, small clouds drifting and billowing around it. The girl shielded her eyes, but would not look away.

“If you work with me,” Patrick continued, “you won’t become a song. Hell, I won’t even make you into music. Instead, you will become inspiration for that small, profound moment found in the best of songs. That’s what’s on all of these shelves. The inspiration that creates the music.”

Patrick looked at the young woman’s face, searching for any hint of response, but after several minutes of her staring in silence, he gathered the blanket back into his arms and threw it over the case. The second the light was fully shielded, she turned to him.

“How does it work? What do you need? You said you listen, right?”

Her sudden enthusiasm caught Patrick off guard and he took an involuntary step back. “Yeah, but–“

“I’ll tell you everything. My name is Holly Parker. I’m 28 years old. Well, I was 28 years old. I grew up in Huntsville, Texas. I had three older brothers. My mom left when I was eight. I–“

“No, no, we just have to–“

“Do you need to know how I died? Here, I’ll show you.” Holly began pulling up her shirt and Patrick immediately yanked it back down.

“That’s not–,” he stammered. “I don’t–“

Patrick took a deep breath, grabbed Holly by the arms, and looked into her eyes. “I don’t need to know how it happened. It already bummed me out to see how young you were when I stormed in here like an idiot. I don’t need any of that, okay?”

Holly nodded and forced a smile. “Sorry, I just… got excited, I guess.”

“Which is amazing. You’re the first person to say that, to be honest. Just,” he motioned down the narrow hallway at the back of the room, “follow me.”

Their footsteps shrank from loud, echoing smacks, to dark, hollow thuds as they made their way further into the corridor and the light receded behind them. Patrick knew the whole building like the back of his mind. He ducked beneath fake cobwebs he hung from the ceiling, dodged loose, squeaky floorboards he planted decades before, and hugged tight corners that were completely unnecessary. He was moving at a brisk pace, happy to have his first someone new to work with in months. They walked on deeper than any building should have permitted, and for a brief moment, Patrick forgot how disorienting it would be to someone unfamiliar with the layout until he heard Holly breathing heavily as she rushed to keep up, her short legs moving at twice the pace. He shortened his step and they moved leisurely through the hall, Holly’s breath slowly evening out. They moved in silence until Holly’s voice emanated from behind Patrick.

“So why don’t more people come by here? It seems like a pretty awesome deal to me.”

He shrugged. “A myriad of reasons, I guess. People with any sort of strong belief about the afterlife automatically get thrown into whatever it is they’re expecting, which cuts out a sizable chunk of the population. That leaves people who don’t really know. They’re then put down a one-way road, which you’ve obviously seen, that gives them their options. The caveat is that they can’t turn back, which means if someone passes on something they sort of like to see the other options they have, they may very well be shooting themselves in the foot. And if they pass everything by, all that’s left is the void at the end of the road.”

“You can’t turn back?”

“Didn’t they tell you that? I thought the gatekeepers were supposed to tell everyone.”

“Well, excuse me for still being freaked out over the fact that I had quite recently kicked the bucket.”

Patrick chuckled. “People panic when they’re limited. They get scared when they’re given one choice and they’re afraid to miss out on something better. It’s why all of the big ones are at the beginning of the road. Human reincarnation, animal reincarnation, nature, space, all of it.”

They turned one final corner and stopped in front of a large wooden door. Patrick fumbled around in his pocket for the keys.

“This isn’t going to end up being some sort of kinky torture chamber where I’ll rot for the rest of eternity, is it?” Holly peaked back around the corner. “I mean, we did walk for an inordinate amount of time.”

Patrick finally pulled the keys from his pocket, grabbed a small key glowing neon green, and turned the lock on the door.

“We need the silence,” he said, turning the doorknob. “It’s easier to tap in.”

“To what?”

Patrick opened the door and walked into the pitch-black room. Holly lingered back. For the first time, she was afraid to follow. What if it really was some sort of torture chamber? What if this was actually the gateway to hell or purgatory? She couldn’t feel any heat emanating from the darkness or smell sulfur (she didn’t believe in hell, but she didn’t really believe in an afterlife, either, and here she was), but her hesitance remained. Sounds of Patrick mumbling to himself emanated from the darkness and Holly peeked back down the hallway. If she started now, she should be able to beat him back to the front door. His stride was twice as long as hers, but she could be fast when under pressure. A loud bang erupted from the darkness and Holly took a step back.

“Fuck!” Patrick shouted.

Holly edged towards the corner. If she could just make it around the bend, she knew she could make it. Her shoe followed the wall until it gave to open air. Her heart was racing. One quick move and she was gone.

There was one more loud bang, a whirring of what Holly assumed were motors (although she felt them more than heard them), and the hallway around her was bathed in a soft light. Patrick stepped out into the hall.

“Sorry. I really don’t know why I didn’t just put a light switch next to the door. I guess the kid in me always wanted one giant power switch that controlled everything.” He stepped to the side and extended an arm into the room. “Come in.”

Holly peered inside and her heart immediately eased. “Whoa,” she muttered.

She had never had the chance to enter a recording studio, but Holly had seen plenty of pictures and she had never seen anything like this. She doubted anything like it even existed on Earth.

The mixing console in the center of the room held the standard sliders, buttons, and switches Holly recognized, but there were also knobs, levers, dials, and cranks. And wires. So many wires. They connected pieces of hardware, ran to the enormous speakers lining the walls, disappeared into the floorboards. Some wires even just dangled with nowhere to go. It was a veritable mess, but Holly could tell it was a logical one, the kind that makes sense to the user, the person who sits in the worn leather chair at the center of everything.

She approached the console, but was careful to keep her hands at her sides.

“This is…” She trailed off, unable to find the words.

“Atrocious, I know,” Patrick said. “But it works. You, however, will be in there.”

Patrick quickly punched two small buttons and a large room illuminated behind a wall of glass in front of the console. At the side of the room, a door slowly opened. Sitting perfectly in the center was nothing but a single wooden stool.

“Shouldn’t there be a mic or something?” Holly asked.

“They’re built into the walls,” Patrick replied. “Go ahead.”

Holly slowly made her way through the side door and sat on the stool at the center of the room. She watched Patrick on the other side of the glass punch a button and the side door slowly closed, making a sound like it was being vacuum-sealed: shoompf. Holly fidgeted on the stool.

“Alright, this will probably take a couple minutes,” Patrick said over the intercom. “I just need to find the correct frequency and then we’ll get going.”

Holly nodded and watched as he played with knobs and dials. She could feel her nerves clenching and her stomach turning. Her mind was at a gallop, jumping from memory to memory, recalling the brief life she had and the people she loved.

“So how does this work exactly?” she asked. “You said I become inspiration and that inspiration becomes part of a song. Right?”

Patrick’s eyes never left the console as he replied, “Basically. Those walls are lined with super sensitive microphones that pick up on a very specific frequency you emit. Once I find it and tap into it, I listen, harness the energy, and put it into… whatever it is I feel or sense or see.”

“And then whoever is actually creating the music back on Earth finds that inspiration and puts it into a song?”

“A piece of a song, correct.”

Holly’s hand involuntarily went to her side and she could feel the wound, remembered the pain. “Will my family hear it? My loved ones?”

“Potentially, assuming they’re around when the song is.” Patrick fiddled with a large dial and stopped to look in at Holly. “Mostly it’ll be strangers. They’ll key in to something minor, something they can’t quite place, but they’ll know it’s special. That it means something.”

Holly dropped her hand from her side. “That’s beautiful. How do you not have a line of people winding around the building?”

Patrick guffawed and continued messing with the console, occasionally pausing to inspect his work. “This far down the road, most people aren’t interested in something as small as what I have to offer. Nobody wants to be something slight, but memorable. Lately it seems like all people want is the biggest, grandest showcase they could put on that proves they were not mundane, that their life meant something. Nobody wants a bit part. All anybody wants is their own shitty reality show.”

Holly shrugged. “I don’t know. Had I lived longer, maybe I would’ve wanted the same thing. But where I was at the time, my life was basically heading for something small, anyways. Which is what I wanted. I wanted a family, kids, a house. Maybe a dog, I don’t know. I get the appeal of having a grandiose monument stating that you were important, but maybe making any impact, no matter how small, is monument enough. It may not be as shiny or glamorous, but it’s more intimate, you know?” She felt herself calming down and rocked her dangling feet back and forth. “So do I get to hear it?”

“Hold on. I almost got it.” Patrick threw a couple switches, adjusted some sliders, and turned a dial just a hair. “There. What?”

“Do I get to hear it? The song?”

Patrick stared at her, sitting alone in a giant room, her feet slowly, gently kicking the air in front of her, and smiled. “Once. You ready?”

She nodded.

Patrick connected a dangling cord to the console, moved a slider up, and a low, pulsing synth slowly filled the silence. Holly’s face gradually lit up as a bass line came in, holding the rhythm alongside a drum machine, followed quickly by woozy harmonies and bleeps and bloops. It was unlike anything Patrick had ever heard and his mind was immediately awash in imagery.

“What is this?” Holly asked, her face breaking out into a huge grin.

He shushed her and they sat and listened as the lyrics came in. Patrick studied what was being sung, almost crooned. It was invariably a love song, but the accompanying music and the delivery of the lyrics were tinged with sadness, a longing for something just out of reach.

As the song broke into what was essentially a chorus with no lyrics, Patrick listened intently. He could feel the moment coming up, where the inspiration would strike. Behind the main synthesizer, the bass, and the drum machine, he picked up on a faint backing track, soft bloops accenting the melody. He waited, biting his lip, when he heard it. An even softer trill of synth accented the bloops and he had an unfathomably strong image in his mind of fingers intertwining for the first time, the rush of a heart skipping a beat, and the fear that it would not last.

“That was it, wasn’t it?” Holly asked. “I felt it! It was… warm.”

Patrick did not look up. Instead, he simply nodded and held a finger up to his lips. All that was left was to let the song play out. He committed every note, every line, and every intricacy to memory and stored it in his mind’s vault. He couldn’t tell how many of these he had done, but he knew this was one that would stick.

A soft, deep bell signaled the end of the song and Patrick looked up from his console into the now empty room in front of him. He punched a button to open the door and slowly made his way inside. Holly was gone and in her place on the stool was a single photograph of two hands almost touching. He picked it up, left the room, and shut it all down.

He made his way back to the shop front and stopped behind the counter. He picked up a pedestal and a gold placard that already had Holly’s name printed on it, and placed them both prominently on the counter in front of him. He had seen people leave statues, mountains, and whole planets (all miniaturized, mind you), artifacts that were truly monolithic. But sometimes the smallest thing left the biggest impact.

The song without a name he had just heard began to replay in his head. He hummed along as he stepped into the back room and grabbed his broom. He didn’t know how much time had passed, but he didn’t really care. Once again, it was time to start over.