Beautiful Colours

His slender fingers touched the newly polished keys ever so lightly, ever so soft. Such a slight gesture would be unheard to normal folk, but to Bobby Kay, it was as audible as what he envisioned the steps of a great steel butterfly to sound like. It would flitter its wings in vain, trying to stay in the air, but dragged slowly down, inevitably to crash down upon the hard and unwelcome ground. It was what all sounds were like to him, always thundering in his fine-tuned ears. Everything was noise to Bobby, and most of the time he wore earplugs to attempt to dampen the constant clamor around him. Except with music. Music was his hiding place, his secret garden, and his dream. He poured his living soul into every aspect of every note. It was as if he was courting the heart of music itself, as he played the ivory keys without sight. For Bobby Kay was a blind man, and had been his whole life. The days shifted listlessly, and the world was, as always, a black sea of nothing, in which the waves blended into the background and brought no comfort. Only music broke the endless monotony, with its chords resounding through the darkness.

In a way, he could see the music when he heard it. These finite words cannot begin to describe the feelings and pictures he would visualize through sound. Imagine walking through a mist that has just fallen into a dark pool. All is night around you; the mist is thick and heavy, pulling you down into deeper darkness below. You can see shades of images; they are like grey teardrops of smoke or pallid pictures, blurred by the encircling haze. Everything is coated with a dull shade of grey, and the world folds in on itself, in two and two again, until all the shadows are so miniscule and so huge that nothing makes sense anymore. As if it ever did.

Bobby Kay was blind at birth, so he knew no other way of sight. He was never confused when others spoke about the beauty of the wood, or the colour of the sky. Although he never actually saw these things, he heard them. As before, these constrained words can in no way describe his feelings, hence the human imagination. The vibrations of the objects he heard resounded in his ears, and, just as a dolphin uses sound to “see,” their outlines were just another shadow, slowly sinking in the deepening pool. Instead of complimenting the trees on their colour, he would talk about their shape. “Oh, the trees’ shape is wonderful today,” he would say to himself, on one of his long walks through the wood. Everyday he would walk there, alone. He never spoke to anyone else about his gift of “seeing” other things. It was a rare occasion if he spoke to anyone at all. He was confined to his cell of grey shadows, where all sound was translated into another sunspot of shade.

Except with music. Whenever the melodious waves of sound reached his ears, they sparked into his dark pool bright flares of colour, casting off the black coat and dancing erratically. No shapes formed in these moments, no dull and blurry figures to haunt his darkened dreams. His world was reversed: instead of everything folding and whirl-pooling in on itself, it expanded and spun around, like a toddler experimenting with dizziness. The blackness vomited out colours, purging him of that which was bound within his soul, releasing it upon his mind, again and again, in time with each note, until the song was complete. He hated that black pool, and he played as often as he was able, in order to quell the shadows.

The music freed his feelings, those pent up in his inmost being. When he was in love with the world, he would play a little Parker, and the colours would bounce around in his “vision” like buzzing bees. If he had come home sad or angry, the notes of a Beethoven fugue would allow him to let out his emotions. On occasions when he was tired and wished to sleep, the harmonies of Davis or Jamahl would relax him, sailing him off to coloured dreams. When he came home madly in love, one of Ellington’s ballads would become his medium to pour out his love into. The polished keys of his piano were keys to another dimension, tools to fix his problems, the pathway to his wildest adventure. He had gotten it when he was five. So young, they said, and yet so talented. At the age of seven, he was playing Gillespie and Mozart, Parker and Strauss. The next year, he was writing his own concertos. In his teen years, the papers raved about his “unique and fresh style of intertwining Classical and smooth jazz.” He was on the top, and he could see it all through his all-seeing blindness.

And so the years passed by strangely, and Bobby lost track of time. Some days, nowadays, other days, everyday, every other day, no days, all days, all these days were lost in his endless pool, sometimes broken by the sweet relief of the swirling colours. Forty years later, he still played, but not as often. There was a sort of sadness about him that no one could understand. Bright keys growing dimmer, in his mind’s eye he could see the bottom of his pool. It was growing clearer.

His slender fingers touched the old and dimming keys ever so lightly, ever so soft. He begins an old Charlie Parker tune, one of his first. Washing over him like frothing waves, the expanding colours danced above his pool just like before. But this time the pool was bright. He nears the song’s end. Playing a final chord, he is enveloped in the ecstasy of the music, and is at peace. The beautiful colours sail him away once more to the final dream.