The Man Who Coughed
Paul Toth

I am the man who coughed during Vladimir Horowitz's performance of Franz Liszt's Consolation In E Major S. 172 ®. 12) No. 2. That was the proudest moment of my life, indeed, the only proud moment, for the reason that I cannot stand fidelity.  I've cheated on wives and lovers; I've cheated on those with whom I've cheated; I've cheated on myself, for if one thinks about it, all sexual intercourse is a form of betraying the self when the body provides its own means of gratification; and so forth.  I have lived long enough to hear love songs lose even that once unavoidable but necessary defect to be found in all love affairs: the scratch.  Now music is smooth, smooth as men who don't cheat, the biggest cheaters of all, for life is a game of cheating our senses as best we can.

I have lived to see the birth of the record, tape, laser disk, compact disk.  Not only did I live to see these things, but I predicted their existence.  These were no paranormal occurrences but rather the result of associations even looser then my morals.  One thought led here, another there, as if M.C. Escher were to take a city map and make his 1-D origami of it, then slip it into my ear, where it would reach my cortex and three dimensions.  If I had my choice, I would show what happens in my mind, what I saw on the theater screen of my eyelids.  If I could only insert a micro-camera on each retina, it might be possible to produce a film.  That might get one closer to me than any lover has ever approached.

Still, anatomy does not interest me.  Never have I lusted for a woman.  Instead, I lusted for those special maps they traced in my brain, and the reason I needed one now and another later, often the same day, was that each curve was a highway, every mole a pothole, and so on.

These maps took me to places that do not and do exist, as I cannot prove and can prove this to not be the case and be it.  I mean it was on one such a journey, which no one could witness, and while playing one of the first records as I made -- cough -- love, that I began to imagine every instrument as a producer of infinite numeric variables.

When I walked home, disgusted by myself not for cheating-- I had a wife at the time; well, legally speaking, I had three -- but the betrayal of my body and the inability to get where I needed to go by my own means (the man who never more than masturbates is no angelic virgin but rather the most demonic masterpiece this world can produce and must therefore be destroyed if only to save the rest of us from jealousy of his purity, which is exactly what makes him demonic and what I mean by a smooth operator, too smooth to be true), I thought about what I had seen, that the clusters of numbers blasting from horns were shooting stars, the whirl of violins a black hole as portrayed by a computer, and that the universe would keep Euclid occupied forever if only he were immortal.

I already knew a record was a reduction of numbers, for I had heard recordings of concerts I had attended and the difference was abhorrent, like a beautiful dusk dream ruined by one's scribbling the recalled details on paper.  Yes, a record was no more than a symbol of an event, a disappointment to anyone who had attended the concert and, at best, a pleasant delusion for the rest.

On my walk, I further realized that one day the recorded numbers might be "purified."  If there were any grace in a record, it was to be located in those scratches and pops that defected it back a little closer to the way I heard it while listening to it in the concert hall, irritated by my date's arm around mine.

It was only midnight, and I still had time for a prostitute or two, necessary purchases when all else failed.  I thought one would do the trick, and I was proven correct, as usual.  It was shown to me by her ragged anatomy scratched by muddy fingernails: Imperfections would one day be completely eliminated, but only by reducing the number of numbers.  Again, I do not claim to be Nostradamus, and I could not foresee that everything would come down to ones and zeroes, but I did note the general path and saw that recordings would eventually become whatever is less than a representation, a photograph of a photograph of a photograph of a photograph, in terms of distance, though the metaphor is not exact.

But one cannot be exact about what I mean, and that's exactly what I mean: Exactitude, my friend and enemy, what would happen to an undesired piano key's resonance?  It would be reduced and be made "perfect," or close, too close, empty as an arithmetic textbook self-published by a numerophobic mathematician in the spare time of his insanity.

I withdrew from the situation so quickly that the prostitute balked.  It's important to love one's work and I, gracious to the extent possible for a man like me, threw a tip on her stomach.

At home, I searched the newspaper; surely, an important-and to-be-recorded performance must be approaching.  As it turned out, Vladimir Horowitz was scheduled to play in one month.

I spent the next four weeks in places one might expect to catch cold, such as dank bars, et cetera.  I hardly slept.  I ate the most atrocious food on the market.  I underdressed or overdressed as the weather dictated, so that I was always freezing or feverish.  But as the evening approached, I had failed to make myself ill.  I hadn't even caught a venereal disease, a personal record and a prophetic sign, no doubt caused by a sharpening of my judgement in knowing that I would require bravery and concentration for my task; a burning sensation would not assist me in the way bronchitis might have done.

As the crowd gathered outside the hall, I gave them no sign of the agitation I would provoke in them.  It turned out to be a good thing that I had not become ill, for control would have been lost.  I would have ruined the entire concert.  The recording would be destroyed and my efforts become as useless as the sufferings of the illness I hadn't contracted.

I took my usual seat, alone this time, for the last thing I needed was the precious requirements of another human being to distract me.  This time, I was in the map, knew where I was, where I must go, and how to get there.  It was about waiting, as if for a subway train.  It would arrive, and I would only miss it if forced to turn to my mistress and kiss her cheek, which she would continuously point my way as a ticket to ride.  I already had my ticket.  I have it to this day.

That piano produced numbers like a Catholic mother with birth cycles lasting milliseconds.  Oh, such a glorious and prodigious mother it was with legs spread and numbers spilling out as if all fragments of the big bang had reunited and exploded again.  Christ, I could hardly keep my mind on the shortest of pauses that provided my opportunity to cough, but finally I did so, a few times, just enough so that the pianist was not visibly distracted.

Some time later -- I cannot remember dates, only details -- the record was released, as they say, and there it was, my cough, improving the still-false memory of that concert forever or as long as humankind's production exists.  The record came, one might say, with a permanent defect that forced even the most ridiculous audiophile to curse me for that which I should have been thanked.

Just today, I played a compact disk recording of that concert.  What a courageous cough, unerasable, as vulgar as a prostitute and just as dedicated to being there whenever needed, only mine was a nonprofit if short-lasted career.  I made my point, soon with the record, better still but later with the compact disk.

I am now a chaste old man, and while there is something demonic in my faithfulness to myself, there is something angelic in the fault I provided the world, the hacked numbers of a cough too rough to be smoothed away.  I ask that everyone listen for that cough, for it draws one closer to a concert that otherwise would have been near zero in its representation, a worthless sham, nothing like what I heard along with the quieter numbers: the sighs of the bored; the stifled belches of the drunk; and, most of all, the mother on stage, whom we love all the more for her imperfections.

Paul A. Toth lives in Michigan. His first novel, Fizz, and its successor, Fishnet, are available now. Short fiction credits include The Barcelona Review, Night Train and The Mississippi Review Online. His work in multimedia has appeared on the Iowa Review Web, Drunken Boat and other sites. See www.netpt.tv for more information.