I. Allegro
Chauffeur driven to broad steps: the Morgil Building, Marine Boulevard, West Dunnsea.
To glimmering brass and brown smoked glass he ascends like a caesar with a cell phone
held to his right ear. The stance, a salute to doors that will swish him in, but first he has to light a cigar.
He doesn't smoke, yet must enter with a cell phone salute, top quality suit, jacket folded once and looped through a handle, lightweight like the monogrammed brief case -- NM, and stop at the top of broad steps as white as his teeth, fumble for his big cigar and his lacquered lighter. Then he can march in with curls of his presence blossoming into cherubic clouds, advertising, teasing senses in a vast purified atrium even though there are no smoking signs on each marble wall, because he can, because he owns the no smoking signs, the marble and a mansion in the Heights with a pool he had built for a song, and while some ethnics sweated all the daylight hours for a few semi quavers, he took his family to a beach in Grenada.
So they stare, some scrape the ground with their greetings as he marches, confident wide strides to the elevator, each footfall a crack, a bark, caught by every obedient crystal in the great chandelier centerpiece.
He enters the elevator alone, checks the time, feels his breakfast (fresh caught baked herring) bite his insides while outside the Berlin Philharmonic plays Vivaldi, barely pianissimo, and all that life, all that accumulation billows out of him faster than a Wall Street Crash. He folds like a hunted animal, indecorous in the corner of a mirrored coffin to the hushed strains of "The Four Seasons -- Winter". It doesn't matter anymore, the cigar, the sprightly march across marble tiles. He catches a mental picture of his children, and for once he does not joke with himself about how much they'd fetch on an open market.
He grabs for his hurting heart, but finds his wallet and squeezes the life out of it, out of himself at just forty-nine.
At the same time?
II. Largo
They crowd his white cold, iron bed and he manages a smile, small, a tree frog face that suits his amphibious lips, his turtle neck and terrapin nose. The weak affirmation of a very old man lights the ward in the belly of East Dunnsea Charity Hospital. It flattens the sterile odors against the walls. It's a limp twitch of muscle, yet it's a ball of magnesium glow that widens the window on urban green below, a genetically altered carpet stretching almost to the concrete hills that span the small divide.
He remembers the old bridge, cast, flat and green, a landmark before the days of his fifteen great grandchildren, and his one great great grandchild, when he was the kiosk man, famed man, trusted for his doughnuts, toffee apple and his sea front disposition. A lifetime filled with simplicity, sounds of the sea, children's voices, his children's voices, seaside music of rides and gulls, when daylight was sweeter before the new palmed boulevard swept clean. His kiosk and the simple souls were driven east to make room for white shirts, clean fast cars, a jogging, roller-blading, lycra crowd, cruising a new chiseled landscape of measured lawns, ingot steps of marble, granite, slate and fake waterfalls.
New music: the second movement flutters into the aseptic ward where it modulates to a minor key and each note is an astral butterfly (or bee). Some notes fail. Children scrape violins and spit into brass - vinegar on cheesecake. He wrestled his lungs for breath but smiled some more. "Beautiful, beautiful music," he wheezed. He was a dab hand on the accordion so he knew a bit about music, just as he understood business, seaside trade, doughnut crumbs and crabs, uncomplicated like a life he was now letting slip after almost a century.
The school band was playing his favorite tune on the lawn. His great granddaughter struck her triangle in the salt breeze. A great bell that clanged. It lifted out of all the other sounds, so that it was the last note he heard before angels lifted his soul to the strains of, Oh I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside.
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