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The following flash fiction piece plays with scientific concepts in the service of one very egomaniacal orchestral conductor.

Kapellmeister, Kapellmeister

            And because the Kapellmeister was not the sort of person to stop when he was not of a mind to, they kept playing, even over and above the cries from the back of the shed:

            “Kapellmeister! Kapellmeister! You must stop going!”

            Someone shouted this from offstage, someone who knew him and who was responsible, as the ambassador of their organization, for his actions on stage and their ramifications in the world. But, while the Kapellmeister was making music, it was impossible to recall him, in mind and body, from the places he had gone to.

            This was a dilemma, because it was the life not just of the Kapellmeister, but of his whole orchestra, that was bound up in this drive to continue. Perhaps it was some strange magic that sealed the bond keeping conductor and orchestra locked together, so that neither the one nor the other had any charge over it. Or perhaps, also, the Kapellmeister had hit upon some unique property of our energetic universe that seemed like magic at the time only for its not being understood.

            The orchestra was in the middle of a Mahler Symphony, and it would be at least an hour before they were going to break for good, because the Kapellmeister took only the briefest of breaks between movements, not ever more than four seconds, and only so he could rest his arms for the slightest moment. Meanwhile, the orchestra manager (who had done the erstwhile screaming) was running around at the back of the shed and on the grass outside. He was surveying the real, or the potential damage, along with his staff, each of whom had come some way to find some means of coping with the – genius – and the particular form of logicality that the Kapellmeister espoused.

            Ironically, though, if one looked into the faces in the audience itself, one would have found no note of worry, no hint of consternation, and not even a mark that anything at all was “wrong.” If you were to have asked one of them what was wrong, you might have received the answer that nothing was wrong, of course nothing was wrong, and please be quiet, because actually what we are doing right now is listening to the music those women and men are playing on the stage, and which that man there is conducting.

            It is not that there actually are, or were, parallel universes, either at that time, or else now. It is only to speculate that, if such things did exist, this might be one of the ways in which they operate. But in these circumstances, you would have to be an outside observer to both universes that are parallel to one another, and also therefore have access to the ability to see into, and see, both of the parallel universes at once.

            The manager, the stage manager, the offstage trumpet who had stopped playing some minutes before, their boss, the owner of the orchestra (who had decided to be present that day) were in one universe.

            Without waiting only for his “subordinates” to do what he must, at one second, have known to be necessary for the salvation of his orchestra, Kapellmeister Jensen, the K., was, anyway, always all the while conducting his orchestra slower and more slowly, even as, if one was looking on the two universes from the “outside,” the other universe was speeding up, immensely so, and, moving at such a pitch, was also beginning, in many cases, to become greatly compacted, or else to burst into flame from apparently out of nowhere. In a very short amount of time, it became impossible for the manager, the stage manager, now also the house manager, the offstage trumpet who had stopped playing, and the boss, the owner, to run around farther than the back of the orchestra (in the audience, I mean), because already that world was speeding up to the point that it was becoming so compacted that, if it did not burst into flame at once and right away, it very well might have done so had someone hit it with a stick – or better (so that it would actually hit), with a mirror image of itself lying on the same dimension and, therefore, also accessible to it by means of contact. I will not detail this for you, because actually this would take 13.9 billion years to do properly, but just believe me when I say that it was an amazing sight, although nobody saw it because everybody was in it, and also nobody who was in it knew that it was happening because for them time was speeding up in direct proportion to the “by much” by which the cosmos was being crushed.

            At the same time, of course, the universe in which K. Jensen was, was slowing down in time in direct proportion to the amount by which the first universe was speeding up, and would, therefore, if they had been able to observe into it, have seemed to have been slowing down even that much the more.

            So, soon, I mean to say, the green lawn (nee of grass) in back of the shed where the orchestra kept playing and its conductor kept conducting always every more slowly (and always ever the same in relation to himself) was soon neither green, nor also any longer a lawn, but only to an outside observer and not, also, to itself and to those on it, because, to it and to them, it was always remaining the same.

            So, K. Jensen kept conducting to the end of the Mahler symphony, which he never actually reached, although he didn’t know this, of course, because to him it seemed that he reached the end of it on time, which to everyone in that second universe (or in one that observed) seemed to take an infinitely long amount of time to reach because he kept on conducting ever more and more slowly.

            What I mean to say, I guess, is that to everyone who was in one of these two universes everything seemed normal, and that it was only to someone who was looking on from the outside that anything seemed to be the matter, so that the stage manager, the manager, the house manager, the offstage trumpet who had stopped playing, the boss (the owner), and myself, were, I think, the only people in this universe to note that anything about it was changing, or split into two. And I myself cannot say exactly why what was happening happened, or what impelled it, but I guess that part of the answer could be that somewhere we hit a black hole, although why we were split in two from it, I really cannot say.