The food was pretty good. Better than we get back home. All the vegetables were fresh and crisp. Mickey the attendant stopped by our table to see how we were doing and to invite Weird and Stinky and me on a tour of the car later. When Dad remarked on how good the food was, Mickey told him that most of the veggies had come from the farms hanging just above One-Hour. There were more farms higher up. There were a whole bunch of farms out at Farpoint for seeding the farms of the interplanetary ships.
Mickey said once we reached micro-gravity, we'd be seeing large solar installations hanging off the Line; some would be factories, some would be power generators for local installations that needed to be energy self-sufficient—especially the maintenance stations. If there were ever an emergency, the engineers would be stranded unless they had an independent power supply. There were maintenance stations spaced regularly along the whole length of the Line. If for any reason an elevator car were in trouble, a high-speed maintenance pod could jet down to meet them from the next highest station and be there in less than five minutes. I wondered if a counter-balanced pod would be launched at the other end of the elevator. Probably. Everything else was balanced. Weird said that the cable was strong enough to handle little imbalances, but that the engineers were under orders to balance the load as rigorously as they could along the entire length.
It was okay, I didn't need to find out first-hand. I wanted the trip to be interesting—but not that interesting.
ELEVATOR MUSIC
The thing is, nothing happens on an elevator. It goes up. It comes down. You stand and watch the numbers and nobody talks to anybody. It's the same way on the space elevator, only the numbers are bigger and it takes longer to get to the top. As boring as an elevator ride is, try to imagine one that takes a whole day. It doesn't matter how good the food is or how big the view is—after you've eaten and after you've looked at the view, there's not a whole lot else to do.
Okay, so there's a casino on the bottom level and a game room for the kids and 5000 video and music and game channels and unlimited net access and library functions and ... so what? We have most of that stuff at home—everything except the casino, which I was too young for anyway. But if I didn't care about all those channels at home, why should I care about them here. It's all just bits and bytes and humming phosphors.
Oh, and there's a swimming pool. Actually, it's part of the water-storage system; the water is for ballast and weight-balancing, and it's needed for the production of food and oxygen all up and down the line, but on its way up it's for swimming too. "Have you ever wanted to go swimming in space?" They say the micro-gravity makes it very interesting. The higher you get, the weirder the water moves—except that after a while, it's almost like free fall and then they close the pool area, to keep people from drowning in globules of runaway H2O.
Naturally, Stinky wanted to go swimming. I thought about it, but not for very long. I didn't want to be around Stinky anymore. Or Dad. Or Doug. As much fun as swimming in space might be, going with them guaranteed that it wouldn't be much fun at all.
Of course, when I announced my decision, it started another fight. "Come on, Charles—" Dad said. "We need to do more things together."
"We already do lots of stuff together," I said. "We fight. We run away from each other. We throw tantrums. We blame Chigger for Stinky getting water down the wrong pipe. We pose for the cover of Dysfunctional Family Magazine ... "
Dad looked like he wanted to slug me. Good. It just proved my point. "I'm not going," I repeated. "Blame someone else this time."
"Let him be, Dad," Weird said. "It's not your fault if Chigger wants to be a sociopath. You can blame it on Mom." He said it deadpan.
Dad gave Weird an even dirtier look than the one he'd given me, but instead of arguing, he just sagged and gave in. "I'm tired of fighting," he said. "I don't care anymore. You kids are about as much fun as a visit to the proctologist. Come on, Bobby."
"Huh?" I looked to Weird. "What's a poctorologist?"
"It means you're a pain in the ass," Weird said, and followed after.
"You too—" I shouted, but he didn't hear me. Or didn't care.
I found a dark corner where I could be alone and curled up at one end of a couch, plugged into my music. With my eyes closed, with my headphones turned up, I could try again to climb all the way into the sound. Sometimes I almost made it. And sometimes I even got there. And sometimes—but not very often anymore—I got there and kept going so far into it I couldn't stand it, I had to get up and scream and dance—but ever since Mom and Dad had declared war it was harder and harder to get to the other side, because you can't dance in a battle zone. But even when I did get away from the house, it still didn't work, and if it wasn't the music that wasn't working, then it was me—so now I just wanted to be alone so I could go looking for the music again. Different music. Music that would take me there again.
There was a lot of stuff to listen to—most of it overrated. I clicked through the music, flipping from page to page without interest. As much as I loved all the music Dad had given me, Beethoven and Bach and Brahms and Mozart and Orff and Stravinsky and Mussorgsky and Shostakovich and Mahler and Wagner and all those other dead white Europeans—as much as I loved their music, I didn't want them anymore. That was Dad's music. Not mine. I wanted something that belonged to me, not him; something that I discovered myself.
There was this guy I'd found. Almost by accident. I'd been reading about the history of jazz, and there was this article about him and his influence, how he'd faded from memory and been rediscovered, again and again. The writer had said, "Listen to the music! Turn off the lights and just fall into it. And think about the time and place it came from. This guy Coltrane was so fucking subversive that afterward, nothing else was ever the same!"
I didn't know anything about historical jazz—which is nothing like the stuff they call jazz now—so I listened to something called A Love Supreme. And I hated it. I didn't get it at all. But I kept listening because I wanted to know what that guy meant by "so fucking subversive" that I kept listening and listening, even though all I really wanted to do was rip the headphones off and wash my head out. Except I couldn't—because I couldn't stand the thought of not knowing, so I kept playing it over and over and over. I tried reading a couple of the analytical essays, but they didn't help. They distracted. Knowing that the music wasn't about love for a woman, but love for God, was interesting—but it wasn't the music. And knowing that this part of the music was really Coltrane reciting a psalm through the saxophone was interesting—but that wasn't the music either.
So I'd turned it off and listened to something else—tried listening to something else. Except nothing else worked anymore. Everything sounded shallow.
And that's when I got it—
—not all of it, but enough.
Jazz isn't music. Jazz is what happens when the music disappears and all that's left is the sound and the emotion connected to it. Jazz is a scream or a rant or a sigh. Or whatever else is inside, trying to get out.
And when you listen to it like that, you don't have to understand it. All you have to do is get it. And in the middle of the night, with my headphones clamped to my head, in the middle of a scorching saxophone riff that had to be about anger and love and frustration and hurt all wrapped into one gritty scream of sound, I got it—that sound was about how somebody felt and right now it was about how I felt. And I got it.