ORACLE - PART 3

In an age where most lives are surveilled in one form or another, it was incomprehensible to the younger generation who had grown up on their phones and tablets for someone to simply go missing. But consigned to the watery depths of the Atlantic ocean, Ghost girl became like a 21st century Marvin Clark or flight 370, an eternal mystery, one that cast an ominous reminder to those of her peers who believed they were immune to the finality of death in the digital age.

Multiple variations of conspiracy theories exploded soon afterwards online, and N3mesis was especially singled out for blame in a large number of them. Although the other guests also on the boat that tragic night attested to his innocence (including Julia), it was too late - the die was cast. N3mesis was now forever perceived as the villain of this tragic story and his brand (which was his livelihood) suffered terribly as a consequence. It was for him the equivalent of losing his voice and he had no way to appeal the decision in the court of public opinion.

From hero to villain, Oracle knew that narrative only too well. His unfiltered mind and mouth had him cancelled numerous times throughout his still relatively young career. In a grimly ironic way, he had now been absolved for past misdemeanours, but at the most heavy cost: a human life. He was newly framed as the tragic hero by the media and even with his penchant for re-invention, this current narrative for his public persona seemed permanent, whether he liked it or not.

He didn’t attend the strange funeral of sorts that her family carried out in her memory. It seemed too eerie and small for his feelings. He felt uncomfortable thinking about it. Oracle had suffered with social awkwardness at times throughout his life and would often go out of his way to avoid certain events he didn’t wish to attend due to anxiety or fear. Somehow, he vowed to find another way to commemorate his love.

In light of the disappearance of Ghost girl, Oracle had become increasingly more introspective than before, retreating like Zarathustra from the world at large to remote mountains, barely leaving his home cum studio in Big Sky Montana, some fifty miles or so from Yellowstone National Park. Living “off-grid”, Oracle was increasingly being spoken of in the past tense by both his fans and the media as he became like a ghost, a hip-hop equivalent of Howard Hughes.

With a back catalogue unrivalled in the modern era, his sanctuary and lifestyle was comfortably paid for by his past successes. Still, the anticipation of the unfinished album “Precipice” became like a great unfinished renaissance art work, its promise ever present but ultimately unfulfilled.

Surrounded by minimal staff, Oracle now led a life of almost peasant simplicity. An adult orphan, the trauma of having lost the three people closest to him made him more determined than ever to be free of attachment to others. He knew instinctively that further pain of similar proportions would break him completely.

Watching the world from a distance, he no longer felt a need to participate in the insane circus of modern life. He’d lost almost complete connection to society and spoke less and less with the staff around him.

The few trusted old friends and acquaintances he had seen found it hard to relate to the severity of their friend’s sadness and the prolonged nature of it. But it was more than grief for Oracle. He was a haunted man. His staff could see it in his sunken eyes, and on the rare occasion he was spotted outside in nature like some rare animal by the occasional hiker, they would keep a distance, so clearly bereft of human happiness did he appear.

In Oracle’s mind, he was to blame for her death. If he hadn’t kept her at distance while he was selfishly creating his album she wouldn’t have even been at that party. She would have been with him, safe and sound. The sacrifice was simply too great for his mind to comprehend and his heart not to break.

No work of art was worth the loss of a loved one.

And what made this seismic tragedy so especially cruel was that he had been in the process of constructing a love song/ode to her that he wanted to share with the entire world, a genuine proclamation of his love for her and perhaps the purest thing he had ever written in his entire life. The only thing left for him now was to salvage from those recording sessions the recorded fragments of her voice that he was sampling for the track. Those same fragments had now become like an obsession to him, one that he almost lived inside like the feeling the painting at MOMA had made him feel. More than all of her online content, which felt impersonal to him, these recordings were made while they were together, deeply in love, away from the artifice of their brands. He’d always spoken passionately about the need for things to be authentic in a disposable age. Now his commitment to that philosophy was being tested to the extreme.

Alone, he would go for long walks by the lakes and in the mountains listening endlessly to her voice through his headphones, as if she were whispering in his ear. Even with all the vast lakes, raging rivers and mountains made out of volcanic glass, nothing in this epic environment could match the pain he felt in his heart.

Sometimes he thought he might just get lost forever in the wilderness and never return to his lonely home in the hills, offering himself as a sacrifice to Mother Nature where he could be somehow re-united with his love in death.

But something deep inside urged him to continue to exist, if only to honour her memory.

As time went on, he continued to make music, reconstructing her recorded voice fragments and shaping them electronically into a musical symphony. He had become hugely pre-occupied with the myth of Orpheus and studied its many permutations in music and art, especially the pivotal moment where Orpheus rescues Eurydice from the underworld, only to lose her forever when he fatally turns back to look at her.

Looking back himself, he desperately regretted all the times he kept Ghost girl at a distance, now realising that was all time lost with her while she was alive, precious moments he could never retrieve.

“You can’t buy back time,” he murmured rhetorically to himself in the darkness of his studio late one night. He could see the dark outlines of mountains through the glass, his gaunt face reflected in them.

The shadow of “Precipice”, the great unfinished work, also haunted Oracle. Would he ever complete it? And if he did, would it live up to the legend it had already promised to the fans and in his own mind? Some days he grimly joked to himself that his suicide would be a far easier concept for him to reconcile with than completing his unfinished album. But at night, when he couldn’t sleep, the only thing to distract him was the music. It called to him and often, over endless days and nights, he would construct his compositional monolith as if he was chiselling each note out of rock.

Channelling his pain through his fractured almost dissonant auto-tune and a Roland TR-808, Oracle had reduced his sound to pure minimalism, no more of the sonic excesses he had become famous for. The only area where the sound fully expanded was where he had created a wall of sound with Ghost girl’s voice, turning her softly spoken vocals into a full, multi-layered choir. The few people who had heard parts of his ‘requiem’ felt instantly overwhelmed by its genius and raw emotion.

The sheer isolation for the staff, working for this eccentric and broken man often made them question their positions. But pity is a strong emotion, and many of them remained loyal to Oracle because they felt sorry for him. Perhaps some had more nefarious reasons, but if they did, they kept them mostly to themselves and Oracle was too wrapped up in his grief to notice. Only on one occasion where a disgruntled member of staff leaked a video of their eccentric employer online did an investigation need to be carried out internally. The video had gone instantly viral and as a result, the guilty party was immediately dismissed, though not by Oracle who was too weak to carry out such a task, like a sedated King whose powers were slowly ebbing away.

Occasionally ambitious journalists would make uninvited pilgrimages to secure an interview with the bizarre figure who refused to speak to anyone, possibly in the hope that Oracle would provide them with the answers the world had been desperately waiting for. The remaining staff had become increasingly hostile to unwanted intruders on the land that belonged to their boss and made sure he was protected from any random approaches from the media or an eccentric fan, desperate to reach out to their hero.

Endlessly seeking a balm for his pain, Oracle resembled the maimed fisher king, except instead of bathing in the holy lake which the grail legend spoke of, Oracle began exploring the buddhist phenomena of Sokushinbutsu.

Oracle became immediately intrigued by this practice of asceticism to the point of death. He researched it extensively and began to adjust his diet and habits accordingly in preparation of some form of personal demise. A final dissolved fade out into oblivion like the turning down of one of his dials on a sound mixer.

One day, seemingly out of the blue, Oracle told all of his staff to leave, much to their great shock and sadness. He paid them all handsomely before they departed and were each gifted a black obsidian stone by Oracle as a crystallised memory of their time in Big Sky.

As the sun set over the mountains, he now remained completely alone in his private retreat.

Over the next weeks and months, all sense of time was becoming lost for Oracle and his mind was starting to dissolve into pure emptiness.

One day, deeply immersed in his daily meditation, an image came to his mind that he couldn’t shake off.

It appeared to him as a vague form at first, its colours and lines hard to define in any great detail.

But as he focused on this emerging image, he began to recognise it.

Many years later, without any promotion or publicity, a private gallery opened in New York where it featured one single exhibit only.

The privately acquired Rothko, Untitled (Black on Grey) 1970, now provided a singular focus for each visitor to concentrate on in their appointed time slot. Sitting before the austere work, they found themselves in the only place on earth where they could now hear the fully completed “Precipice”.

In an age where copies of music were as free flowing as water, it made quite a statement that something as sought after as this record, this “holy grail of hip-hop” could only be heard in this uniquely chosen place. Strict instructions had also been given by a representative of Oracle as to the lighting and temperature requirements of the room so that a complete aesthetic and sensory experience was achieved.

One close friend had privately asserted that this musical tomb appeared to draw upon the Egyptian temple which Oracle had emerged from when he first met Ghost girl; others who knew the story of their first meeting also recognised this poignant reference.

People soon began to flock from all over the world to pay homage to this shrine of music performance. And one visitor, whose face was concealed with a mask. broke down and wept openly at hearing the purity of expression in the work as the celestial sounds filled the cathedral like space.

Never to be replicated or duplicated, this recorded phenomenon brought with it such huge importance because it offered something the world had forgotten.

Immortality.