Colby Galliher

When I announced to my father that I planned to pursue a career in science journalism, he accepted my deviation from the family’s research tradition with a few interspersed words of encouragement and mourning. I had expected as much. He and my uncle Reid were the scions of a lineage of chemists, astronomers, and epidemiologists. I remembered my grandfather as a severe, unswerving believer in Western science as the height of human endeavor, a worldview that led him to look at the arts, the humanities, at anything that fell outside the traditional limits of scientific inquiry as extraneous. To him, hobbies or fascinations outside of the lab, those that did not contribute to humans’ quantifiable knowledge of the material vortex into which they found themselves thrust, should follow the same path as other childish foibles, not unlike bed-wetting: They were to be grown out of.

My decision to approach the family trade through writing was borne more of necessity than choice. Despite my upbringing in that crucible of practicing scientists, some tragic genetic mutation or thymine deficiency deprived me of the mathematical skills necessary for a physicist, a biologist, for any wizard who felt more at home with equations than with words. 

While my father settled into a stony resignation about my chosen path, Reid took an interest. He called me to ask what I was working on, to ensure I had seen the latest press release from the mystics in Switzerland who smashed particles together to read in their fleeting vapors the secrets of the cosmos. “Well-funded tarot readers,” he would scoff and chuckle. I sent him my articles before I filed them.

His engagement baffled me. Reid had always struck me as equal to my father in his devotion to quantitative methods, his dismissal of other activities or livelihoods as superfluities. He was a cosmologist; I imagined him emerging from the womb crying not for food and warmth but for an unobstructed view of the stars and a telescope with which to examine them. As a child I listened from the living room as he and my father and grandfather remained at the table after holiday meals and talked about big questions, unknowable things. There was little laughing and many rebuttals of “True enough, but…” Through high school and college courses, I came to know many scientists whose grasp of the quantum foundations of our world unlocked, or attended, a voracious curiosity about the recreational dimensions of human existence. They played in bands, they brewed beer. They wrote magazine articles and books musing on the elegance of equations and lamenting the schism between their fields and the arts. I never counted my uncle, much less my father and grandfather, among that camp of rogues.

Only after I had toiled through my first couple of years in the workplace did I learn that Reid’s curiosity in me reflected a blossoming he was undergoing. And it was more than finding himself with an abundance of time in retirement. Many years had passed since those nights eavesdropping in the living room. My grandfather had died while I was away at college, frowning in his coffin not so much at his own expiration as at some question about genetic drift or dark matter that death had rudely interrupted him from answering. His passing drove my father deeper into his work. He had retired two years prior to Reid but spent most of his days locked up in his spartan office or in his university lounge grilling undergraduates on the meaning of the cosmological constant. For Reid, my grandfather’s death was an exhalation, a weight lifted. A ripe age by then, he and his wife, Diane, comfortable in their finances owing to his decades as a tenured professor and to her success as an executive, he retired to their modest home within two hours’ drive of his longtime university. 

The following summer, Reid and Diane invited us for Labor Day. My parents were due elsewhere, but I drove up for the long weekend. When I pulled into the shade of Reid’s house at the end of their wooded road, the samba swung so loud from the open windows that my radio seemed to go quiet in embarrassment. I got out and stretched my trip-weary legs.

The wooden stairway attached to the side of the house was crowded with pots of mums and other late-summer flowers. From one container a sweet-pea vine sprouted and fanned across hanging latticework, a vast maze of capillaries dotted with flowers like axons. The stairs vibrated with the music. 

The sound cut out in the middle of my climb. There was a rush of footsteps and the screen door at the top of the stairs slid open. Reid vaulted out onto the deck. His arms unfurled in tandem with an ear-to-ear smile.

“Mr. Benjamin,” he boomed, his face flanked by flower-stuffed hanging baskets.

“Hello, Reid,” I laughed.

“Why aren’t you tan?! Are you letting the newsroom get the best of you?”

“Some days,” I shrugged.

He snatched my backpack off my shoulder before I had both feet on the landing. The force of his backslap made me wonder if he had taken up weightlifting. His paunch and the ever-present tube of fat ringing his jaw had shrunk. He looked the healthiest I had ever seen him. His emerald eyes were clearer, less weary, sparkling in a face darkened from its usual sallowness by the sun. But, for one who knew the grooming customs of the men in our line, myself included, the most flashing indication of his transformation was the gray, manicured beard nuzzling his cheeks and mouth.

“Come, come,” he ushered me.

I slipped off my sandals before I stepped into the house. The hardwood floor was cool on my sweaty soles and the cross-breeze presaged autumn. My shoulders relaxed. Windchimes sang from somewhere outside the open windows. The house bubbled with a vivacity unknown in the houses of my father or grandfather. The blazing eye of the scientists had blinked.

“Long week?” he asked as he put my bag on an old beige sofa against the wall.

“Hmm? Oh,” I chuckled. “Nothing out of the ordinary. Just good to get out of the city.”

He studied my face, as though he could tell I was having trouble processing my surroundings. I imagined my grandfather pacing the house, his brow furrowing, evaluating: the jungle of houseplants basking sun-happy beneath the windows, the tantric paintings on the walls that distracted with their gaudy colors, the bare area in the middle of the floor that had been cleared of furniture for dancing. That there was something of sacrilege about the place, about Reid’s beard and his joy, startled me. Perhaps I had absorbed more of my father and grandfather’s mentality than I realized.

“I think I was right about your job getting the best of you,” he remarked, looking at me with concern.

When I turned my head to him, a guitar in its stand against the far wall caught my attention. The instrument seemed to swell in color and size, bending the light around it like a black hole. I hardly noticed the parade of footsteps drumming down the stairs on the other side of the room. Diane descended wearing cut-off khakis and a blue flannel shirt ornamented with smudges and finger-swipes of clay.

“Benjamin!” she exclaimed. She strode barefoot across the floor and hugged me. Even in her retirement pledge to never again don high heels, she still had the powerful stride of an executive.

“How are you, Diane? How’s the pottery?”

“You’re very kind to ask, but I refuse to bore you with the details. I don’t know what I missed you tell Reid, but I demand to hear all about the city and your work,” she said, wiping the moisture from her brow with a rolled-up sleeve. “Have you eaten? Reid, what time is it? I’m afraid the afternoon has gotten away from me.”

“It’s okay, I had something—” 

“Quarter past five,” Reid interjected, putting his arm around my shoulders. “Go on up and get settled. Diane and I will get dinner started. Will you have something to drink?”

“If you will.”

“I have him on a diet. You’ll drink with me, Benjamin,” Diane declared.

I looked at Reid, and he nodded.

“Go on,” she continued. “You know where everything is up there.”

I stepped to the couch to grab my backpack. As I slung it over my shoulder, my eyes were drawn to the guitar. Its wood was the deep red of autumn shadows, ruddy like winter firelight. A maze of etchings decorated the body as though tomes had been carved into the grain. The tuning knobs appeared to be miniature planets, engraved with rings and clouds and oceans. As I admired the artistry, I noticed a low hum emanating from that side of the room. Little painless needles started to prick my fingertips. A pressure built against my back, like a gust was impelling me forward to the instrument.

“Reid,” I blurted out, spellbound. “Is that your gui—”

A pot clattered in the kitchen. I turned to look and noticed Reid watching me, grinning impishly.

“After dinner,” he decreed and went to join Diane. A few moments later, the music lilted in. I stared at the guitar, its sound hole radiating a beguiling darkness. I tore myself from the spot, my feet having turned to concrete, and climbed the stairs.

At dusk the summer drained from the air. I helped bring the dishes inside, slightly off balance thanks to Diane’s daquiris, then went upstairs to change and rest for a moment before returning to the first floor. 

At the base of the stairs my gaze was pulled to the guitar. The stand was empty. I looked into the kitchen. The dishes were clean and stacked beside the sink, the leftovers put away. The house had an air of hasty abandonment, like a deserted village square. There was no music, no trail of conversation. Then, in that twilight silence, the whine of a guitar string being tuned rose from the back patio where we had eaten. Again that feeling of gravity coaxed me, irresistible. I drifted to the back door.

“Hit the kitchen lights, Ben,” a voice ordered from the darkness before my eyes adjusted. The sconce over the patio had been turned off. “To the left of the door.”

I reached an arm back inside and felt for the switch. The kitchen lights shut off, veiling the last glow coming from the house.

“Sit. I want to show you something.”

“I can’t really see, Reid.”

“Listen. Follow the sound.”

I looked down and concentrated. The night bugs and frogs previously so boisterous from their hollows in the trees around the house had gone quiet. I realized that mysterious hum from earlier was vibrating on at a low register, burrowing deeper into my ears. My fingertips crackled with that same tingling. 

Reid angled a patio chair toward me. I sat down.

“Where’s Diane?”

“She’s in her studio out back.”

Reid’s outline blended with the darkness. I couldn’t make out his facial expression. But I could sense the guitar resting on his legs, see it shimmering like a fish scale dipped in onyx, a geode reflecting the paltry starlight. In its center the sound hole pulsated a blackness so heavy, so palpable, that it seemed like I could reach out and cup it in my hands.

“Have you been keeping up your playing?”

I was frozen in my seat. The voice came from nowhere, like the last echo of a shattered planet.

“Yes, when I can,” I lied.

“We’re of the same stock, Ben, so I know that’s not true. I can see that the callouses have gone from your fingertips.” 

He plucked a string and the singular note riveted the night like it was a fragile fabric about to tear. The twang welled in my head so deafeningly, I thought my skull would burst.

“At your age I stored my life away and picked up work. You know how my father was; you see it in your own father, you saw it in me for as long as you’ve known me. I sanded away all the little unique edges of myself because I thought to do so was virtuous.” 

His voice did not break, did not waver. And yet I could hear an elegy in the sinews of his words, cracks in his stoicism like minute fractures in bone. 

“Do you remember your grandparents’ neighbors, the old couple on their left?”

I tried to think back but my head was abuzz with a spitfire darkness.

“Maybe. I’d have to think about it.”

“Arne and Martha. The Jennings. There was an old chestnut tree in their front yard, back before the blight, that was so wide around that we needed four people and just as many fabric tapes to measure it. So tall your father and I used to fantasize about slipping through a portal to heaven — imagine the two of us talking like that — if we ever climbed to the top, scooping a hand through a cloud and coming out with a ball of ice. Arne let us take some of the nut crop every year, and we’d roast them at Christmas. You don’t get trees like that east of the Mississippi now.”

He trailed off and coughed shallowly, pushing out some sad pearl of the past in his throat.

“Anyway, one August a ferocious storm tracked through. Biblical, Martha called it after. As the thunderheads marched in that chestnut, the tallest thing for miles, unbowed, defiant enough to reach up so close to the face of God, watched the approach of its maker.”

The word “God” sounded bizarre coming from Reid’s mouth. I had not thought him capable of talking so much about anything other than science. I tried to imagine him and my father as boys, but I could only conjure two generic adolescents who bore no special likeness to the men I knew.

“And sure enough, when it finally rolled in overhead, that beast of a storm rocked that tree with a missile of lightning so awesome that it split the trunk clean down the middle. The strike blew out the windows in the Jennings’s house and ours, too. The sound, Ben, the sound! You’ve never heard anything like that, the violence of such a cataclysm like the grain of the earth being rent apart. Arne said the killing fissure in the trunk glowed red like the fires of perdition, cooling only when the storm mourned its own destruction with a downpour. 

“The tree had to come down after that. Your brother and I felt like we had lost a good friend. Arne knew it. He likely loved that tree much more than we did. Well, he was a luthier, a craftsman of stringed instruments, and he took a tithe from that massive heap of lumber and bark and made your father a beautiful pair of skis and me, this guitar.”

As he talked the ink-black guitar glimmered with a dusting of cobalt blue, like a nocturnal shore alive with bioluminescence.

“I didn’t know you played.”

“Surreptitiously. Your grandfather might have approved of piano, or the violin, but not the guitar. It wasn’t an instrument to make a master of someone. So I used to smuggle my friend Ed’s starter guitar into my room and play quietly late at night, or out in the backyard when mom and pop were entertaining guests or busy with something. Arne must’ve heard me, must’ve known your grandfather pretty well too, because he gave me this guitar and your father those skis when he knew dad wasn’t home. Never since have I received such a gift. I still remember the wave of bewildering relief that swept through me when I took this instrument in my hands, like I had lost a lung and someone had found a way to put it back in, right where it belonged.”

“It’s a beautiful guitar, Reid. The most beautiful I’ve seen.”

“No, Ben,” he replied, almost defensively. “You don’t understand yet. Look up.”

I obeyed, confused. The darkness glittered, the stars cold in the thin breath of coming autumn. There was no moon and no sound. Reid strummed a single open chord and the firmament rippled like a sheet fluttering periwinkle on a wash line. 

I blinked, thinking it was my head swimming in daquiris. Then Reid picked a lick of several notes, and in the luminous swath of the Milky Way a stepping-stone path of stars lit up and faded with the pluck of each string.

My mouth dropped open and I lurched forward, my feet needing connection to the earth, my face still upturned to heaven. Reid erupted with a laugh that jumped and rollicked with a pure, wondrous joy of which I believed my forefathers incapable. He dashed out a run of phrases and the long galactic runway flashed like a celestial fretboard. He created novel constellations with chords, each star-swelling faithful to its corresponding node on the guitar’s neck. 

I tried to swallow, but my throat and mouth were bone dry. Reid worked through several flourishes up octave after octave until he reached a high note that he drew out in an undulating glow far in the eastern sky. Then he crashed down the guitar’s neck in a crescendo that bejeweled the Milky Way with supernovas. 

The cold sky-flames simmered and cooled after the music had ceased. The dazzling serpent the melody had drawn through the cosmos vanished out in the west, chasing down the sun.

My eyes brimmed with wetness. I collapsed back, staring at the sky. My whole body was limp, my mind wiped clean. I blinked through the film of tears at the night returned to normal. A furrow dug into my brow even as a shallow laugh of disbelief leaked from my open lips.

“This guitar,” Reid began, “this… conduit, resonator, Apollo’s lyre, devil’s fiddle, whatever you please, whatever it pleases, collected dust in my closet for more than half a century. Once I went the way my father wanted, strapped myself in and spurned the other parts of me, I never touched it. I don’t know how many times I rediscovered this instrument in an attic recess and only by luck, or by destiny, did something divert me before I threw it away. The thought torments me. Can you imagine, Ben, a fool, a scientist, a cosmologist, treating something so extraordinary like some expendable distraction? A heathen sharpening his chainsaw on the Hope Diamond. It’s a crime of cosmic proportions.”

I blinked. I attempted to harness words amid my astonishment.

“You didn’t know its power. How could you?” I wiped my eyes. “The thing breaks every law you and my father were taught to be inviolable. If you had told me before showing me, I’d have believed my father’s snickering that you were doing a bit too much ‘experimenting’ in your retirement.”

Reid chuckled. “Old bastard.”

“Frankly, I’m still wondering if Diane slipped something extra into those drinks and that you two are pulling an elaborate prank on me.”

Reid cradled the guitar like a baby, slid to the edge of his chair, and extended the instrument out to me.

“See for yourself.”

I froze. I gulped. The guitar vented a faint bluish aura that pooled in the air around it. The etchings adorning the body whispered in the shadows. They hummed and hummed, almost rising to a choral pitch. I inhaled and reached out to receive the guitar.

I thought the heat would boil the sweat on my palms. As Reid relinquished the guitar into my hands, its weight nearly dragged me off the front of my chair.

“Oh lord—” I exclaimed and hoisted the instrument back up into my lap.

“What?”

“It’s heavy!”

“Huh.”

“And hot! You don’t feel that?”

“Well,” he thought. “Perhaps at first. But not anymore.” He laughed. “Sounds like a white dwarf star in your hands there. Maybe I’m just used to it now.”

“Or it’s used to you. Maybe no one else is supposed to play it.” The guitar’s weight cut off the circulation in my thighs; its vibrations jostled my bones, its heat scalded my flesh through my clothes. “I don’t think this is a good idea.”

“I used to watch you pounce on snakes in your mother’s garden without a shoe or glove in sight and wrangle them with your bare hands. Go on.”

“This isn’t a little garter snake, Reid.”

“Go on.”

I exhaled. I shifted the guitar into playing position, the headstock pointing diagonally into the sky like a weathervane. Ready to receive a lightning bolt that would obliterate me for bringing my profane hands to the gods’ artifact. I shut my eyes.

The weight lessened. The rumble in my bones quieted. I breezed my thumb over the strings above the sound hole and the air quivered. My left hand rose to the guitar’s neck and I drew my neglected fingertips over the runs of string. They beamed with a dark heat, the energy spreading into my palms as spark takes to tinder, indenting the clay of my skin.

Reid watched eagerly. “That’s it. Play something.”

I tried to think up my old favorites, but that corner of my brain stuttered, choked with dust. I bore down, scraped at songs and phrases that floated by out of range. They spurned me for my spurning them. 

“I can’t—”

The strings magnetized my fingertips. They arranged them into a chord formation, the props of some cosmic ventriloquist. The invisible glue of the strings fused tighter. I didn’t resist.

I plucked the chord. Fire shot through my brain like I had been fed a jar of hot mustard. My head floated, my spine zapped awake. And as I reeled with that electric drunkenness, I was faintly aware of my left hand shaping the first chord progression I had ever learned, sneaking to an after-school music class rather than the robotics club I had told my father about. My right hand scatted out the song. The sound hole crooned with a living, violet darkness while the chestnut wood purred. The astro-hum of the guitar superseded the music in my ears. But my fingers kept playing.

A foot nudged my shin. 

Reid was shouting at me as though through glass.

The words were faint.

He leaned forward and pointed upward.

“LOOK UP!”

And again the sky detonated with starry explosions tied to each note, the guitar stitching each chord into the continuum. Pearl necklaces of sharp starlight draped the neck of the Milky Way, each orb a massive lightbulb popping and fizzling its threads into the night around it.

I laugh-choked on tears hot with wonder, with dumb happiness. The old rhythms and the muscle language rediscovered themselves in my sizzling brain. They hurried down and forked into my hands that sliced and danced over the strings. So that soon the music was mine again, the meltwater of a reawakening.

Reid was on his feet. He danced like a blithe, besotted fool, his legs making little kicks, his arms pumping out with palms up in propitiation of the heavens. Odes or praise or prayers flowed from his gaping mouth. Gone was the scientist. His eyes were too flooded to levy scrutiny, his words too slurred with delight to hurl questions. Here was man reenchanted, swaddled in the unburdened simplicity of a child.

My hands tired. As if in deference, the pull of the strings slackened. The heat from the guitar’s body, to which I had unknowingly acclimated, ebbed. The hum sank low in my ears, diminishing into the background. The wood’s blue glow dimmed. I looked up, expecting to see the sky in tatters. But there in their original places those million lamps still hung, basking in a crystalline afterglow.

“Fifty years sealed away, Ben.”

Reid sat down, panting quietly. His body sank into the chair, his limbs flopping like noodles. Sweat gleamed in the shadows of his face. His once-mirthless eyes watered with bliss and exhaustion.

I looked at him, half-grinning, mouth pried open by disbelief.

“How…”

“I haven’t got a clue,” Reid exhaled, rubbing his knees. “The world, the universe I’ve spent my life studying, probing, reducing to intelligible fundamentals just cracked an egg on my head. And I’m inclined to believe that whatever’s out there, whatever funneled some tiny shred of its power into that chestnut tree, whose heartwood absorbed it like rain, prefers it that way.”

The guitar rested in my lap, warm in its faint sea-grotto glow.

“Do other people hear and see what we do? And what about the sky? Stargazers, observatories, anyone happening to glance up at the right time must notice a galactic apocalypse like that, don’t you think?”

“Well, I’ve been out here nearly every night of the summer shredding that poor guitar like a madman, and I haven’t seen anything in Scientific American to suggest the academy is aware. The spooks have yet to show up at my door.”

“So?”

“So, I don’t know. I’d imagine it’s an exclusive show, Ben, maybe put on just to show us the absurd hubris of our long and all-knowing line of proud materialists. I certainly feel like an ass, and I’m thrilled about it. Aren’t you?”

“I suppose. I feel like I need to tell someone.”

“Ha!” Reid laughed. “Go ahead. I’d start with your father! He’ll have us both committed.”

“He really would,” I chuckled and thought of the incredulous expression on my father’s face if I burst into his office with my revelation.

“And you can’t write about it. Not for work. You’d be laughed out of a job in the same way I would be dismissed if I brought this to any of my former colleagues or the journals.”

“Yeah,” I mumbled. “You’re right.” For the first time that evening my mind drifted back to the newsroom, to my deadlines, like I had woken up from a euphoric dream.

Reid smacked my knee. “Things have value beyond their ability to be shoehorned into professional advantage, Ben. I love your father, I loved my father, but I don’t want you to be like us. There is too much in this world to live in it one-dimensionally. Have your career, fine. Succeed. But do not relinquish the rest of yourself to that pursuit. In some not-too-distant reality, I gave this guitar away, threw it in a dumpster, or just let the beetles and ants reduce it to ash.”

He implored me with eyes tired and desperate, pierced by regret distilled from hindsight.

I nodded, looking down. “Okay, Reid.”

He sat back. A sigh from old lungs wisped in the star-dark.

“I have some time to make up with that miracle of an instrument, but when I’m gone, it’s yours. Will you take it?”

I shifted in my seat, sat up straight.

“Of — Of course. Are you sure?”

“There’s no one else. It took to you immediately. My fingertips burned for a week when I started playing it.”

I rubbed my thumbs against the ends of my fingers and realized there was no pain, only a warmth beneath the skin like embers sealed up in glass.

“Thank you, Reid.”

I leaned forward and held the guitar out to him. He stood up with a groan and received it, couching it under his arm.

“You should come without your parents more often. This is the most fun I’ve ever had during one of your visits.”

“With my own guitar next time. We’ll play together,” I said, standing up.

He smiled.

“Good man. I’m going to check on Diane.”

He turned and walked away, shuffling toward the shed out in the back field. In the vacuum left by the guitar, the heat lifted from my body, the autumn-cool laving my arms. On the charcoal sketch of the night, the shining nebulas still refracted, imprinted on my vision, as Reid and his gods’-gift strode high-shouldered and liberated beneath them.

---

Colby Galliher is based in the mid-Atlantic of the United States, having grown up in the Northeast. His short stories have been published in Calliope on the Web and Harrisburg Magazine.

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