Free No World Concerto by A. G. Porta Page B

becoming audible as the camera closes in on them. “The clown, in an ecstasy / drinks deeply from the holy chalice to soothe his unrest,” they sing together in unison. A sad lyric, since all the poems the clown recites are sad and desperate. The girl, perhaps, would rather to be singing something else, as she stares vacantly past the opposite bank toward the horizon, her thoughts becalming themselves on a vanishing point in the distance. She should’ve gone to bed early. In a few short hours, she has to do a TV interview and then leave for a recital in her native city. She drank too much and took too many pills, and now she doesn’t really know what it is she wants. She does like the twelve-tone world though, is passionate about it — although the screenwriter dismisses it as a passing fad — a world of pure contrast between dissonance and harmony, in which pleasure is derived merely by finding different ways of resolving the conflict. She sits with her shoes in hand on the bank’s retaining wall reciting a poem, as if wishing to prolong the previous night’s adventure. The humidity around the river could damage her vocal cords, but she’s not thinking about her vocal chords right now. She recites in a style all her own, not in the soprano register, because she wants to surprise her audience. They certainly won’t expect to see her, the virtuoso pianist, swap the piano for voice. Beside her, the brilliant composer is cleaning his glasses on his shirttail, while the young conductor of the orchestra paces up and down in his Institute’s uniform, which he’d been wearing most of the night. He’s had too much to drink, and insists on telling the girl about some last-minute changes to the
No World Symphony
. The girl isn’t listening, though, being too tired and intoxicated to pay attention to his list of finicky alterations, not that she’d even remember or get the chance to rehearse them. She’s no longer jealous, their argument ended some time ago; and, although it’s the beginning of a new day, she feels as if the old one is still drawing to a close. The screenwriter sips the dregs of his glass and continues writing. He doesn’t know what shape these last moments will eventually have, since they only take a few seconds to transpire. He writes whole paragraphs he’ll probably cut from the final script, but he writes them anyway, because they give the story consistency, and because he’s in the moment. He thinks about the significance of that nightmarish work in which a mendacious clown wanders about aimlessly, without purpose or direction. Maybe the girl feels the same, that she too has no purpose or direction, that she too only tells lies. He thinks about when they first began meeting up in secret, far from prying eyes. He’d like her to think about him, even momentarily, as she sits on that riverbank. Maybe she is, he tells himself, before immediately banishing the thought. She knows it’s only part of a game. The screenwriter may not know the rules, but he supposes it’s a game to which she and the young conductor have decided to dedicate their lives, perhaps the brilliant composer too. At times they’re musicians, at other times hustlers or even aliens. Their whole life is part of a game. Sometimes, the screenwriter questions the girl about it, but her answers are always ambiguous. Maybe he’s just jealous, feels powerless for not knowing what to do about it, for not even knowing whether the girl’s desire to be a writer is also only part of a game.
    The girl dreams she’s surrounded by invisible aliens that talk to her incessantly. One of them talks about the planet and its destruction. It’s hard to accept that something which took so much time and effort to build up could disappear in an instant. One supreme instant, the voice says, in which the world blows up and vanishes from sight. The girl looks around, disbelieving. She can’t see them, but she knows the voices aren’t lying. The