Dr Jew

with the school bus that left you paralyzed from the lips down. I remember reading with rapt joy – both a scientific curiosity and an artistic history of that exhilarating music I have so recently described to you."
    "Yes. That's how that album began."
    "And thank God it did! And – naturally – I don't mean to express merriment at your collision with misfortune… but you must admit, it led to the great musical opus of our era, Music for – say, do you mind if I put it on now?"
    "Well," said Glassdick, "I 'd rather—"
    "I know, working on your new work – you still have to tell me about it – you don 't want to look backward. Always cracking new ground, we artistic types. I do indeed know that feeling, that golden euphoria. So what do you call this next work which I am still waiting for you to describe?"
    Glassdick winced as the first tinklings of Music for Headaches began to play through hidden speakers. "You know, doctor, when I lay in that hospital bed for eleven months I had to listen every waking moment to the emphysemic wheeze of a senile albino in the next cot as he transformed from vegetable to manure –"
    "Ha ha, wonderful!" said Dr. Jew. "I know the story, but please, go on!"
    "Hmm," said Glassdick. "Yes, well, after hearing that wheeze for so long it was driving a musician of my capacity mad. Simply crazy. I longed for anything else. To hear something fresh. Or at least have some silence. I tried. I tried to tell anyone who visited me, any nurse who wiped my ass, any doctor who poked and welded me – I tried to tell them all, for God's sake, put some headphones on me and drown out the old buzzard and his hiss."
    "But they couldn 't understand!" said Dr. Jew.
    "Yes, they couldn 't understand. My lips were as putty and they assumed I wanted more of their hospital grewl. I was a struggling artist in those days and the care I received was less than spectacular. Not a single one of those incompetents, not my girlfriend or children, supposed I – a man who spent ten hours a day listening to and making music – might want to hear a song. Instead they would turn on the evening news and leave me with that man's breath in my ears, that breath that never sped up or slowed down. It just went on and on."
    "Ah, you come to my favorite part of the story now," said Dr. Jew, tilting his head to fully absorb the music.
    "For you perhaps," said Glassdick. "When I hear this album I hear that old man's throat and the air that always went in and out. I would go without sleep for three or four days and look into that breath until… I don't know. To this day, I don't know what happened. I've been told the sound of the old man's wheezing may have entrained my brain to produce delta or theta brainwaves for hours at a time – I don't know. But somehow, at some point in that repetition, a switch tripped in my ears, in my brain, and all the horror I felt turned to bliss that no words do justice."
    " Yes, leave it for us poets. And so you unveiled this heavenly music for all to enjoy. Bravo, sir, bravo, you are indeed a hero for our times. Sometimes when I sit in this chair, this very chair, stroking my arm hair or polishing my Noam Chomsky bracelet, I dare to think that you and I are not so far apart after all. Haven't we both found our true callings? Me, as I restitch the crystalline patterns of bones into winglike structures and perform quote-unquote risky race-change operations – their words, not mine, those anonymous cowards with their feces-laced postcards. These and other hijinks. And you! With your science fiction operas and eight-minute elongations of a single bat shriek… genius. And these are not merely the mythological compliments of a sycophantic fan . I hope you understand."
    "I, too, hope I understand," said Glassdick.
    Dr. Jew arose and went to a glass cabinet and poured liquid in two glasses. He placed one glass in front of Glassdick. "Yes, that one," said Dr. Jew.
    "What?" said Glassdick.
    "Oh, I was just wondering when you'd tell me about this next project you're working on. It seems you mentioned something about poetry."
    "That was you, D octor."
    "Was it? Ha ha. Must be the music. Blurring identities and all that. Effing amazing, how do you do it?"
    "To be honest, D octor, right now I'm all wrapped up with the incidental music for Sergio's picture. I haven't even thought about the next project."
    "Ah," said Dr. Jew. "Ah. Ah. Ah. Yes, of course. Simpatico."
    "The film is months behind schedule as