ORACLE - PART 1

Oracle couldn’t sing a note straight without going off-key. His nervous, pinched tenor never made the cut in the school choir, but he knew from an early age that he had music in him, this was just as much a fact to him as the blood coursing through his veins. He understood that music was energy and that it could be harnessed just like the force in Star Wars.

A self-described Jedi Knight of hip-hop, he had become an instant icon based on his ability to assemble sounds and mix them into order, much like a sonic alchemist. He had cut beats for some of the biggest names in the music game, but he always remained the perpetual outsider and he wouldn’t have it any other way. He needed to be on the periphery of everything to make sense of both the zeitgeist and the eternal timelessness that existed outside of it. He neither wanted to belong to his generation or fail at being the voice of it simultaneously. He was the fiercest of paradoxes and one who split opinion to an extreme degree. Some saw him as a dangerous egomaniac who demonstrated the very worst characteristics of the male celebrity artist, while others saw him as a visionary idiot savant, similar to that of Mozart and felt he should be made allowances for in order to serve his genius. In an age of progressive moral uniformity, he resembled something closer to Frankenstein’s monster, occasionally escaping from the music lab to wreak havoc on social media and the world at large, before returning to the place where he felt most safe. The studio.

Since his breakout debut album “Foretold”, which he had produced and featured on as a rapper, Oracle had been showered with praise from all four corners of the globe. He had turned the hip-hop genre on its head and challenged the many generic assumptions of the form. The glass ceiling had been well and truly smashed and the fractured shards had fallen all about his peers.

The escalation from being the shy introverted kid behind the mixing desk to performing at stadiums was swift. With every album, there was a recognisable evolution, an image change. Starting out as the outsider drop out, to braggadocios genius, and eventually to visionary loner, Oracle was demonstrating in real time that celebrity inevitably corrodes the innocence of the young artist. Textures were becoming heavier, thicker, more complex, utilising the entire soundboard of the music world, including samples, orchestras, choirs etc. His maximalist productions were expanding like his ego with each one under threat of being torpedoed by the sheer monstrous size of his own colossal ambition.

And then his personal singularity collapsed and with it, any remaining semblance of reality he still had left to hold onto.

And all because of a girl.

Ghost girl.

They had first met at a listening party for his fourth album launch. Oracle had increasingly begun to find idiosyncratic ways to promote his albums via deliberately frustrating and protracted roll-outs with treasure hunt like preparedness. In an age where authentic excitement for new albums had been waning, Oracle knew how to expertly grow and conduct feverish anticipation from his fans. Ghost girl was no exception. She was just as excited as anyone else about the latest album, especially as her friend had tipped her off about Oracle’s exclusive listening party under the Brooklyn bridge.

“Don’t be a fan girl. Just be yourself,” her gregarious friend Julia insisted firmly.

Ghost girl nodded earnestly, but inside she felt butterflies unleashed.

Amidst the hoards of shadowy figures listening intently under the iconic bridge, heavenly sounds echoed against the granite arches, bouncing the minimalist beats and making them sound like African drums. Ghost Girl was already intoxicated with Oracle’s genius. Every placement of every note on every track only made her fall harder for him. She tried to spot him amongst the crowd, but he remained supernaturally elusive.

Until that is, when she returned to her mid-town apartment later that night and received an enigmatic text message on her phone.

“I’m telepathic. And yes, I would love to spend some time together.”

Uncertain at first at who had sent this cryptic message, Ghost Girl wrote her initial replies with extreme caution until she suddenly realised who it was she was messaging.

She began to reply with increasing confidence.

“If you can read my mind so well, you’ll know where my favourite morning place in NY is.”

To that, there was no immediate reply from Oracle.

But the silence was deafening.

The following morning, standing before the Temple of Dendur in the sleek glass wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ghost girl waited, hoping that Oracle would arrive to meet her.

She waited twenty minutes before doubts began to creep in. She hadn’t given him much to work with, although there was an obscure interview she’d given online that supplied the answer he may or may not have been looking for.

Eventually he appeared from within the small temple like a Pharoah who’d just awoken from a thousand year sleep.

She waved at him as if she was meeting him outside the gates of her old school.

At first, they just communicated with their eyes, afraid to break the spell of their attraction to each other with words that might disappoint.

And then the silence was broken.

“What do Pharaohs eat for breakfast?”

“I’m no expert but I’m guessing pancakes.”

Oracle flashed a mouthful of diamond encrusted teeth as his smile lit up the overcast glass panelled gallery.

With the ice truly broken, the couple walked off in search of sustenance.

The rest, like the temple, was history.

Months later, they would meet at another gallery, MOMA, where a Rothko retrospective was taking place.

Oracle tried to explain to Ghost girl why he loved the emptiness that the Rothko paintings made him feel.

“It calms my ego down and makes me feel small again.”

Perhaps, talking to anyone else, that might have sounded pretentious and silly, but Ghost girl knew that Oracle could say things like this in earnest and be totally sincere in doing so.

Something about the bleak atmosphere of one particular painting, Untitled (Black on Grey) 1970, unsettled Ghost girl as she watched Oracle almost dissolve into the image, so concentrated was he on it.

“Have you ever wanted to crawl inside an image and stay there?”

She shook her head. “I sometimes felt like that about films I liked. I wanted to hang out with the characters and live inside the cool scenes with them.”

Oracle continued with his train of thought, almost ignoring her answer to his question which didn’t register a blip on his radar. Others may have found it rude; she just thought it was autistic.

“I want to be inside this painting so I can get away from everything and be perfectly still.”

Sometimes Ghost girl didn’t know whether or not to laugh in derision at his thinking out loud thoughts, the type of thoughts most people might vet in their own head before speaking them out in public.

“Or you know, like that scene in Superman Returns when he takes a time out, suspended above the World. Only it’s not long before his peace is shattered by the sound of all the human suffering down below on Earth.”

“It can’t be easy being Superman. So much responsibility.”

Ghost girl tried to understand the abstract painting better as she felt its true meaning was eluding her.

“It isn’t easy.”

She almost laughed, but somehow she did feel he was a superhero of sorts, albeit one who was plagued with extreme highs and crater-like lows.

Although she had traded on a sense of the gothic with her own online branding, she was truly a happy go lucky kind of person, one that tried not to dwell too much on sadness, sickness and death.

But her avoidance of these things wasn’t because she was shallow, more because she had known the dangerous schisms celebrities often found after achieving a certain stratospheric level of success at an early age. She’d already lost one boyfriend to suicide. She still had nightmares about finding him dead in the electric blue swimming pool where they had been on vacation in Belize. She didn’t want a similar fate to befall Oracle.

Ghost girl loved Oracle, of that there was no doubt. But sometimes she felt increasingly sidelined by the sheer magnitude of his life and his ego that it truly scared her. It was like being in the shadow of a tsunami, one that threatened to wash away everything it engulfed in its wake. The more he pursued her, the more she felt caught in the gravitational pull of his tractor beam.

What was it that held her so spellbound to him?

Mystery. And his child-like sense of wonder. Every day he seemed to find something new to be excited about. From art and design to philosophy and architecture there often didn’t seem enough hours in the day to absorb all the things he was interested in exploring.

He wanted to share all of his discoveries with her, just like an excited child. And yet, it wasn’t just her he wanted to share his precious things with.

It was also the world at large.

It was one year later, almost to the day when they had stood in front of the Rothko, Oracle was working late at the studio, adding some last minute touches to the final tracks of his fifth album, Precipice.

He had become so absorbed in his latest project that he had lost all sense of conventional time and was now existing in a stream of consciousness that appeared to have no ending and no beginning. He was lost in his music, searching for a way toward the finish line, which seemed tantalisingly close but impossibly elusive to reach.

At the same time, Ghost girl had been immersed in her various business operations. The longer they had been together, the less time they seemed to share together. It made her sad but resolved. In an age where relationships seemed fleeting and tenuous, she craved longevity, something which had the weight of time to vindicate its significance.

And yet, there was no denying she had almost forgotten what it was like to be close to Oracle over these past four months while he had been creating his magnum opus.

When Julia casually suggested she come along to a party later that night, she would have no idea of its later significance.