Something about this self-imposed isolation has put me in the mind of 2002. After leaving the Isle of Man that summer I moved to Lille, where I wrote most of the first draft of Riding Man.
It was not the best time for me. I was suffering from post-TT depression, which I’d been warned about and is really a thing. I was living with a hypochondriac who never heard of a disease without suspecting that she had it. Ironically, I was the one who got sicker; my lupus flared up and to make matters worse, I had constant toothaches because I needed two root canals that I could ill afford to have treated.
I was living in a sixth-floor fin de siècle apartment. (I suppose I should say ‘we were living’ though I was often alone.) The Lille Opera house was just up the street. The apartment was huge and fabulous but very run-down. Its back windows looked out over the Vieux Lille’s large and well preserved medieval center.
Somewhere down on that block behind my apartment, there was a dance club that really didn’t get pumping until after midnight. On Friday and Saturday nights the bass thumped up all six floors until three or four in the morning. It crossed my mind every now and then to get up and at least see what was going on at that hour. But before I ever did, someone was stabbed or shot in the club, and the cops closed it. I didn’t miss the soundtrack.
Rolling over in my sleep triggered jolts of pain. So even after the club was padlocked I was often awake at two, or three, or four in the morning. If it was a school night, the city was dead quiet. But I still heard music.
Faintly, faintly. A piano; not a recording; it sounded like someone playing a few bars of music over and over, trying tiny variations. I know little of music but I envisioned a composer sitting at the keyboard writing a piece of music, trying this and that in the same way that I tried one phrase, deleted it and rewrote it, at my own keyboard. And, it was beautiful.
It was so close to the threshold of audibility that I often wondered whether I was hearing it or just imagining it. Some nights, I went to the window and looked out over the medieval quartier, half-expecting to see a lone light in some garret, but it was completely dark.
So I went back to bed and wondered if it wasn’t music at all. Was my subconscious just trying to make sense of faint and far-off sirens; trucks and barges rumbling and burbling on their own schedules; bakers lifting roll shutters; rattled rats scattering trash as they dashed from cats? Any one those sounds individually inaudible, but collectively detectable?
It was unknowable. But in the intervening years I’ve concluded that I heard the work of an anonymous musician–because on my own, my subconscious could not possibly have composed an original score so beautiful.
