If loneliness doesn’t break your heart, everything freezes inside and gets locked away. If loneliness does break your heart, then several things tumble out: beautiful poems, searching music, probing thoughts, and acts of love. --- From The Witless Wisdom of Rolland Fletcher

Philip Townhill has worked out method of using flower from fantasy planet to bring me to planet at will. Townhill speculates that planet is natural material for virtual reality. I ask Townhill if planet is real or fantasy. He answers that reality does not matter. I figure if green babies and religious order can be transported there, than planet is as real as it needs to be.

I have now made my first trip to planet without Townhill’s aid. Transition was a frightening moment I wish never to experience again. I found myself standing on moving terrain as before. Horrid musical sounds surrounded me. I told terrain to stop moving so much and to shut up. I felt protest, but also felt approbation. It seems that half the planet wants to do what I want and half doesn’t want to cooperate with me. There’s nothing like playing political games with green rock to make your day. Terrain finally became more stable. My side seems to be winning interplanetary struggle. If planet stabilizes, planet should be suitable for proposed settlement. I spend time with voices that want stable planet. That seems to help. Only remaining hurdle is to make field clear for project of finding a home for babies while research on them is done. That will give us time to get a handle on this crisis before it is too late. Hurdle should be easy to jump as I know how to handle patient.

Thus resolved, I visited Patient’s room in psych. ward. No improvement since committal. Reports say Patient plays invisible guitar day and night and sings wild, incoherent songs to inaudible accompaniment. I ask patient if he still visits fantasy world. Patient says last visit was so disappointing that he might not go back. Patient reported that planet is freezing up. There were no waves to play with. Music seems to be driven underground. Everything Patient says confirms my hopes. I ask Patient if he thinks frantic playing with invisible guitar and frantic singing will bring planet back to life. Patient replies that real guitar will be more efficacious than invisible, fantasy guitar. That’s a good reason not to let him have his real guitar.

Next day, I brought a distraught woman with her green baby into Patient’s room. Patient failed to respond with coherent replies and seemed confused by fantasy projections. I told Patient that this baby was the result of his fantasy projections. Patient recoiled in horror at sight of baby born with green skin. Mother wept in front of Patient and offered many recriminations. I explained to Patient that his fantasy projection has caused this birth deformation in six other babies so far. By end of interview, it appears I have cured Patient of trying to re-enter fantasy projection ever again. I impressed upon Patient the necessity of giving up all music. Music was cause of all woes caused by his fantasy planet. Patient promised never to play music again. It seems possible that showing patient the green baby has sent Patient into a psychotic fit. Psychotic fit is a small price to pay for solving a greater problem. Should be able to bring Patient round to condition where he can live useful life, not complicated by music or fantasy planet.

I’m so sorry I haven’t written you all this time. With my schedule I can’t get to the computer room available to me and when I do, I have to spend much of my time correcting my students’ work. I am sure you know how I’ve gotten so oriented to e-mail that I have trouble getting around to doing correspondence in any other way. I wish I could be a better mother to you, but I’m sure your father is taking care of you adequately. (He’d better!)

I am having a most fruitful time here in the Czech Republic. The work is hard, but I think it will be productive in the end. I often don’t know if the students here appreciate being tutored in English or not. They don’t speak to me if they can help it. Maybe that’s because they are just beginning to learn English and I don’t know their language much less than they know mine.

An amusing thing happened a couple of days ago that you might like to know about. When I came to the school for work, I found that a rather odd mound of greenish rock had been placed just next to the steps. Actually, it overlapped the steps just enough to make it hard for people to get around it and it was causing some interesting traffic jams. This work of art, or whatever it is, has a rather odd shape that is hard to describe. You could interpret it as a pair of hands raised in supplication or a pair of hands raised in welcome. It could also be that the two limbs are raised in a threatening gesture. I guess the truth is in the eye of the beholder as it usually is. Interestingly, this piece of sculpture seems to have the power of expanding on its own. Today, it covers even more of the steps than it did yesterday and the traffic jams were correspondingly worse this. Students will be pranksters, won’t they, darling? I hope you are more respectful of your school than some of the students here are of theirs.

Keep well and have a good time. When I come home to see you, I’ll be sure to bring a souvenir that you will really like.

Mark Bellinger and Lilly and I stayed up pretty late listening to all the cassettes we’d made of our interviews. That got Mark caught up with us and it gave us a good review to help us think about how we were going to find Rolland Fletcher. We didn’t solve the problem right then and there but the way Mark asked questions and talked about Rolland got me thinking that with his help, we will find him for sure and get him to help the Planet Orpheus. Another thing is that when it came to approaching Rolland, once we found him, it will be a big help to have somebody who already knows Rolland and isn’t be a total stranger like me or Lilly.

I thought I would have a real hard time sleeping between being in a strange place, being worried about Dr. Redford finding us, and being all keyed up about what we were doing, but I was so tired that I fell asleep pretty quickly. Having Mark sleeping in the same room helped a lot because I really liked having him around. Even his soft snoring seemed to make me feel better about everything and it helped lull me to sleep.

When I got up the next morning, Mark was already up and out of the room. I put on a set of clothes that had been bought for me. They didn’t fit all that well, but they could have been worse. I might not have minded quite so much if I wasn’t planning on going to church for the first time in my life and I didn’t really want to go looking like a scarecrow. I thought of the outfit I’ve got back home that I would rather have worn and that got me upset with my Dad all over again for what he’d done to me.

I logged on my e-mail and I’d gotten a letter from my Mom and one from my Dad. I was kind of amused that my mother was meeting an Orphean without knowing it all the way in the Czech Republic. My Dad said he was sorry. That did me a lot of good now that the damage was done. But he had an interesting attachment so I printed that out along with the letter from my Mom. It made me mad all over again that Dad could have given me the first half of that story several days ago if he wasn’t such a creep.

The kitchen was filling up nicely with smoke from the pancakes and sausages Lilly was frying with help from Ms. Hoffman. Mr. Nedrick and Mark Bellinger were at the table gulping down huge mugs of coffee. I put my new printouts on the table.

“I got an interesting e-mail from my Mom from the Czech Republic,” I told everybody.

“She’s teaching English over there, isn’t she?” said Ms. Hoffman, trying to smooth things over.

“Woah!” said Lilly. “Do you mean the planet Orpheus is starting to pop up everywhere?”

Lilly and Ms. Hoffman put platters of pancakes and sausages on the table and we got started with breakfast.

Suddenly my throat got real tight and I took another bite of pancakes doused with a ton of maple syrup to keep myself from choking. I was afraid I was going to cry my head off every day for the rest of my life over what my Dad had done.

“Looks like he sent you something about Orpheus,” said Lilly as she looked it over.

“I really think your Daddy just didn’t know what he was doing when he talked to Dr. Redford,” said Mr. Nedrick.

“HE COULD HAVE TRIED BELIEVING ME INSTEAD OF BLABBING OFF ABOUT ME TO THE NEAREST PSYCHIATRIST!” I yelled.

“I would say your father was feeling pretty rotten about myself by yesterday afternoon,” said Ms. Hoffman.

“You know Kevin,” said Mr. Nedrick, “it’s just too bad your Daddy didn’t talk to me a day sooner. If he had, things would be a lot easier for us right now.”

“If Dad didn’t like treating me like I belong in the nut house, all this wouldn’t have happened.”

“Let me tell you. As you know, I’ve gotten some pretty insensitive treatment from my parents. The worst time of all was when I got so much grief over singing in Rolland’s Cantata. When so many people treated me like dirt in public, I needed their support real bad. I never got it and to this day, it hasn’t occurred to them how badly they hurt me when everybody else was hurting me. It would have helped a lot if ever they had seen the problem and apologized to me and even tried to help. As it was, I even had trouble getting rides to my counselor and I needed her real bad at the time. So, your father has done what mine hasn’t done and probably never will. See the point?”

I understood Mark’s point loud and clear. I thought I wasn’t in the mood for hearing it just then and I got on with my breakfast with no intention of changing my mind. The truth was, though, that I knew Mark knew how hard it was for me to get treated by my Dad like I was and he wasn’t telling me to do something he wouldn’t be willing to do if he ever got the chance.

“I felt like stuffing your father in a deep fat fryer yesterday,” said Ms. Hoffman, “but the truth is that I’m not in a very good position to denounce him as I would like to be. You see, I sent my own son to that same doctor before he disappeared. Now I’m wondering what Dr. Redford might have said or done to make Tommy run away.”

Ms. Hoffman was on the verge of tears. That was embarrassing but I didn’t blame her. I was tempted to say something about Tommy right then but a look from Lilly made it clear she would bake me in the next batch of pancake batter if I said anything and so I didn’t.

“I’ve had to dodge as many monkey wrenches as you because of what your Daddy’s done,” said Lilly, “and I’m still mad as—as that place down under—about it. Bbut I have to forgive him now that he’s apologized because the Bible says I have to.”

Since my dad didn’t believe in the Bible, it made me laugh inside to think that it had might have just saved his life.

“Okay, I’ll forgive him—I mean I’ll try to,” I said, amazed with how calm I felt all of a sudden in spite of what had just happened.

“If you’re gonna go to church and snoop around that choirmaster,” said Lilly, “we’d both better be trying to forgive your Daddy or we might get in trouble with God.”

“You bet he is,” said Lilly, “and God doesn’t need you throwing red hot coals at your Daddy when he can do that all by himself if He wants to.”

“Speaking of which,” said Ms. Hoffman, “ we don’t have a lot of time if we’re going to get all the way down to Moorton in time for the service. Are all of you going?”

“I’d rather go to my own church,” said Mr. Nedrick, “but Lilly says we’d better not go to our usual church where people might be on the lookout for us.”

“And I don’t want to miss out on the chance to interview Br. Brendan, if that’s who this choirmaster is,” said Lilly.

“I wouldn’t know,” said Ms. Hoffman, “but Brent Parker has only been at St. Hugh’s for about two years and there’s no question that he has built up an incredible music program in that time. He has three choirs that took turns at major services: an adult choir, a boys’ choir and a girls’ choir. I think we’re going to get the boys’ choir at the eleven o’clock today.”

“Of course I’ll come,” said Mark. “I didn’t come all this way for any other purpose than to stick with you guys until we find Rolland.”

“Janet’s already at Mass at a Catholic church nearby,” said Ms. Hoffman, “so I assume she’s not coming.”

“Before you go out on quests of daring do,” said Dr. Nedrick, “The time has come for me to tell my little girl something, and the rest of you need to know it, too.”

“This is what I told Kevin’s Daddy on yesterday. And what I said made Kevin’s Daddy real sorry for talking to that psychiatrist.”

Then Mr. Nedrick, looking all solemn, told Lilly all about his own younger daughter and how Lilly’s mother had gone into exile on the Planet Orpheus so that she could be with her baby. He showed all of us the last e-mail from his wife, the same one he showed my father. It made me think I didn’t have as much to cry about as I thought. Dr. Redford had tried to kidnap me and Lilly and failed, but Dr. Redford had separated Mr. Nedrick from his wife and daughter for about ten years.

“Was it my own sister who made this, then?" Lilly asked, fingering her neck piece.

“Why didn’t you take me there when my Momma and my sister got sent to that planet so that we could all live together?”

“I just wasn’t ready to make that kind of choice for you when you were so little,” said Mr. Nedrick. “Now I know that I should have done just that and I will make sure we get our family back together again, no matter where we have to live.”

“I’ll live anywhere to be with my sister and my Mommy!” Lilly promised, “and I’ll make sure she doesn’t have to be a slave of Gerald Manwaring or anybody else.”

Then she gave her father a big hug. I still couldn’t imagine doing that with either of my parents.

“That’s my great big little girl,” said Dr. Nedrick with obvious admiration.

Ms. Hoffman drove us down to Moorton to the church. It was a pretty long way but not a lot of people go anywhere Sunday morning, not even to church, so traffic was light and Ms. Hoffman could drive pretty fast. Since I had never been to church before, I kind of had a feeling that I was entering a room I’d been forbidden to enter all my life. I wrote my Dad a short letter to tell him I would try speaking to him again sometime, but I didn’t tell him where I was going that morning. In the car, Mark told me the story about the Last Supper of Jesus and how the service was a little bit like a acting out that story all over again. That helped me make some sense of the service. Mark helped me follow along in the prayer book and that helped, too. The sermon didn’t have any fire and brimstone like what Dad said preachers were always threatening people with. I didn’t understand whatever the priest was talking about, so he was kind of boring, but at least he didn’t sound like he’d be mean to somebody like Rolland Fletcher the way his pastor was. I perked up every time the choir sang because I wanted to take a good look at Brent Parker. I thought the boys sang pretty good for a bunch of kids like me. Mr. Parker looked like he really knew how to relate to kids, so I took that as a reason for thinking he’d taught music to the green children on Orpheus for a while. Lilly and I both looked around to see if anybody was spying on us, but we didn’t see anybody who made us suspicious. There was no question about who my body guards were. Besides them, there were only two or three Afro-Americans and they didn’t wear dread locks.

After the service, we went downstairs where they have coffee hour. They had this big platter of sweet rolls and cookies and I stocked up on that in spite of the big breakfast I had before coming. Ms. Hoffman got cornered by a couple of people wearing large badges that read “Welcoming Committee.” Nobody welcomed me. I guess that’s because I’m a kid. A couple of boys gave me and Lilly and Mark a curious look but they didn’t seem interested in introducing themselves or anything. That was okay since I didn’t want to get sidetracked in my purpose in coming. Even my bodyguards got approached by somebody else on the welcoming committee. The guy who did that looked uncomfortable, but I still thought it was nice of him to try and talk to somebody who didn’t seem to belong there. Seeing all that, Mr. Nedrick went over to join them and that seemed to put everybody at ease a little more.

Then the choirmaster, Brent Parker, came along. Ms. Hoffman politely broke away from the welcoming committee and introduced herself to him. When she told him she was a music prof. at Woodward College, he got real interested in talking to her and they got going pretty hot and heavy about music. Lilly and Mark and I drifted over and stood around, waiting for a chance to do some detective work.

“No, but they are good friends of mine who wanted to come along with me this morning.”

“At the risk of seeming to have a one-track mind,” said Mr. Parker, “I’ll ask you straight-out if any of you can sing.”

“I don’t think so,” I answered him. “My friend Mark can sing real good, but he’s from out of town.”

“Then you must be quite a budding musician,” said Mr. Parker. “What are you studying?”

“Mark went to St. Dunstan’s choir school before going to Boston,” said Lilly.

“Yes,” said Mark. “That was quite an experience in music education. We did a lot interesting music, including the Matthias anthem you did this morning. One of my favorite pieces, though, was the Five Biblical Outbursts by Rolland Fletcher.”

Mr. Parker jumped half a mile and almost spilled his coffee at the mention of Rolland Fletcher so we were pretty sure that we had the man we were looking for.

“Are you thinking of having your boys’ choir here sing it?” asked Mark. “Or would the rector censure it?”

“I think Father Madden and Mother LeMaster would be sympathetic, but I don’t know about some of the members of the parish.”

“Mark sang in the first performance of Rolland Fletcher’s The Boy Jesus in the Temple,” I said.

Mark blushed and looked away, but Mr. Parker looked like he was cornered already.

“Well, I must congratulate you on your achievement,” said Mr. Parker. “I have the CD. Your singing was superb.”

“Actually, all three of these young people are doing a project on Rolland Fletcher,” said Ms. Hoffman.

“Really now?” asked Mr. Parker. “It’s—well it’s nice to hear that. Most people seem to have forgotten him already.”

By this time, I was tired of beating around the bush and so I decided to let Mr. Parker have it. I had decided that being subtle the way Lilly wanted me to be just made it easy for him to evade our questions.

“We aren’t just studying Rolland Fletcher’s music,” I said, “though that has been fun, too. We’re trying to find him.”

“Well—er—Rolland’s been out of circulation for three or four years. What makes you think you can find him?”

“We’ve been talking to some people who knew Rolland before he disappeared,” said Lilly. “Not only did Mark Bellinger tell us about his friendship with Rolland, he came here to help us find him. This afternoon, we’re going to see Darrell Stewart, Rolland’s composition teacher.”

“Well, I’m sure that will be most interesting. I don’t understand why you should approach me about Rolland Fletcher. I never knew him before he disappeared.”

The four of us looked at each other and we decided to go for the kill. That meant they were ready to turn me loose.

“What makes you think I ever met Rolland Fletcher?” he asked, looking pretty desperate for a way out and knowing he wasn’t going to find one.

“In our research, we found out about a planet called Orpheus where there’s a monastery that takes care of some children that got kicked off our own planet,” I explained. “The — the people on the Planet Orpheus are natural computer hacks and they’ve given us some files to help us find Rolland. Some of these files they hacked are from the diary of the superior of the community and a Br. Brendan is one of the monks he writes about.”

“Mr. Parker, please don’t think that we came here to give you a bad time about what you’ve done. What’s come to light is that you got a rotten deal and you still worked hard to help the children exiled on that planet, and that’s a lot more than some of the monks and nuns did.”

“Thank you for saying that,” said Mr. Parker. “But, I would assume, then that you know that Rolland Fletcher is at the monastery.”

“Well, that is disturbing news,” said Mr. Parker. “I’m afraid I haven’t the foggiest notion of where Rolland might be if he isn’t there.”

“Mr. Parker,” said Lilly. “It might help if you could tell us about Rolland Fletcher when you knew him at the monastery. It might give us some more clues that will help us find him.”

“I can treat you to brunch if you are willing to come along with us,” said Ms. Hoffman.

“I guess I’d better,” said a pretty subdued Mr. Parker. “Yes, I’ll tell you what I can.”

We dragged Lilly’s father away from the guys he was talking to and headed out for a restaurant Brent Parker knew about for the brunch we promised him.

I’m sure you appreciate what a shock it was for me to be ripped away from a promising career as a musician and thrust into a way of life that meant nothing to me. The first few days, I was so depressed I planned on making a quick exit from both that planet and my life. My only solace was the collection of CDs that Fr. Columba stuffed in my arms with a portable player before sending me off. Undoubtedly he was acting out of a guilty conscience. When I had my first look at the children, I didn’t think I would be able to stand looking at them for another minute, let alone the rest of my life. After Sister Margaret and a few others told me how musical the children were, I was horrified the first time I heard them sing and play their instruments. I spent the next several hours, lying on my bed, shaking with rage, fear, and God knows what else. It was obvious to me that the superior, Father Aidan, hated the place and everybody in it, so there was no way he was going to be any help to me. People like Sister Ita, who did seem to like it, were so manic that I assumed they wouldn’t understand me, either. When Father Cadwallader came to my cell, I wished I was strong enough to strangle him. I braced myself for a garrulous monologue about how wonderful it was to give everything up to God but, to my surprise, he sat there for the longest time without saying anything. When his presence had calmed me down a little, he stood up to go.

“Just keep an ear open and there’s no telling what you’ll hear,” he said to me on his way out the door.

To my surprise, I learned to like the music the children were singing after I gave it a few more tries and it started to make sense on its own terms. Maybe my study of some pretty strange contemporary music helped train my ear to understand the music of the children. The funny thing was that the more I understood the children’s music, the more I started to hear music inside my head. Since it wasn’t music I could have been made up or remembered, I concluded that the music was coming from somewhere inside the planet and that the children made music the way they did because they were hearing the same music from the planet. It was a disappointment, though, when it became clear that I would never be able to teach them any of the classics I hold so dear. I don’t think they were intentionally thwarting me; it was more a case that they instinctively filtered Mozart or William Byrd through the music they had absorbed from the planet. The upside of that was that although I never got to hear them sing a William Byrd motet as I knew it, their twisted versions of the music was a rare treat that nobody from my own world would ever hear. I took some satisfaction in the love these children showed for music and their enjoyment of it. I even fell into the temptation of giving myself some credit for their accomplishments although I have to admit that the children taught themselves and each other much more than they learned from me. I often had the feeling that I was tolerated more than revered as a driving force of their music making.

Except for the music. living in the monastery was pretty terrible for me. I was never cut out to be a monk, I tell you. Community life was quite the opposite of a support for me. The music the children sang in church came under attack to the point where I was blamed for everything that was wrong with the liturgy. An exiled bishop in the community accused me of egging on the children just to torment everybody else. Another monk, who hated the place as much as I did, once came up to me halfway through a Eucharist and tried to pull me off the organ bench. That didn’t stop the music. The children just sang louder and the bigger boys came to my defense so that my assailant had to run away. Sister Margaret was the only one who liked me at all, and she had mixed feelings about the music, much as she wanted to affirm the pleasure the children took in it. As a result, I couldn’t feel close to her as a colleague, let alone as a friend. Father Cadwallader would shoot one-liners at me once in a while. Sometimes they were helpful, sometimes they were irritating. It didn’t add up to a friendship. Mother Hilda, an ordained woman in the community, went out of her way to give me comfort and encouragement. That was helpful as far as it went, but she seemed to be on such a high plane spiritually that I couldn’t relate to her very well. In general, it was about as alienating a community as you could get. It wasn’t a case of my being left out of warm friendships going on all around me. There were no quality relationships to be left out of. Prayer was no consolation. I was a church musician because I liked church music, not because I cared much for church. For that matter, I could tell that prayer wasn’t helping very many of the monks and nuns in that community, not even those who said they believed in it. If prayer didn’t help believers, why should it help me?

I never wanted to be a single person or a celibate. I have my standards, though, and I’m still more ashamed than I can say about my lapse with Sherry Harwood. I was caught off guard in a way. I was lonely and she was lonely after being uprooted from the life she knew. She was the only child who knew anything about music as I knew it, and so it made sense that we would spend more and more time making music together. She was an amazing flutist. I cried buckets the first time I heard her play the old song “Waly, Waly.” I’m sure she had no idea of what the words of the song were about. She was so innocent and my heart was so clogged with misery! My loneliness, combined with her loneliness were more than either of us could stand. Father Aidan, so expert in having no idea what was going on in his monastery was bright enough to see the guilt in my face and confront me with what I had done once Sherry’s pregnancy could no longer be overlooked. It wasn’t comforting to listen to the riot act from a man who couldn’t do anything else about a pretty monstrous act.

It was both a joy and a torment for me to see little Cynthia growing up. I felt so guilty that I didn’t want to come near her. Sherry still wanted to spend time with me and the baby and they must have been profoundly hurt when I stayed away from them. There is no way they could understand my problem. Why should they, innocent as they were? It was hard on me when I realized that the other children seemed not to like Cynthia. I wanted to make up for the loneliness she suffered, but I could not bring myself to do that. One day, Sherry brought Cynthia into the church when I was practicing on the Cassio keyboard Dan McCarthy had brought me. Cynthia carried a beat up viola that was never claimed by any of the other children. She held her viola upright, in front of her, as if it were a cello and then played it cello style. I tried to set her right, but the viola was just a little too big for her to hold the proper way. Since the musical world of the children was wacky anyway, I let it go. By hindsight, I can see she was a born cellist, and right from the start, her playing would break my heart many times over, even when played the wrong way on a viola. When, a couple of years later, a wacky girl roared in with a truckload of really good musical instruments, a cello was drawn to Cynthia’s hands like a magnet and the two have been inseparable ever since. It was quite an exquisite torture when Cynthia rehearsed with me or played a solo in church. I felt reproached for my sin and yet I marveled at what a wonderful talent I had brought into the world.

You can imagine what a musical ecstasy it was for me when Mark Terrell, who was later baptized as Matthew Taylor, came along. I felt torn apart by the bad treatment that Matthew shared with Cynthia, but I reveled in his amazing musicianship and the rapport he had with Cynthia. With Matthew already knowing some of the repertoire from my own planet, he was able to help me teach it to Cynthia so that we could include this music in our performances in church. In a way, Matthew was a buffer between Cynthia and the guilt I felt over her existence. With him around, I felt okay making music with both of them.

One day, I was rehearsing with Matthew and Cynthia in the practice room when a scrawny boy appeared in the doorway. His clothes were a bit ragged and at least one size too small and his shoes were on the verge of falling apart. He clutched some handwritten music against his chest and he had that look on his face that you only see with a young composer who thinks he’s great but is afraid he isn’t. To my even greater surprise, Matthew and Cynthia both stopped in the middle of the piece we were playing, went up to this strange boy, and threw their arms around him. I wondered what this boy had done to get the affection from my own little girl that I never could bring myself to receive from her. I was to learn later that this boy’s relationship with the planet went back to several years and, among other things, the boy was responsible for our having the grand piano I was using.

“Let’s say I’m the Interplanetary Composer of the Divine Reconciliation,” was the boy’s reply.

The boy sauntered over to the piano, apparently expecting me to move off the bench so that he could have it.

“I took a shortcut loop through a wormhole that’s tuned to the key of G-sharp minor.”

Both Matthew and Cynthia giggled. I decided not to bait the smart alec any further. When he took another step closer to the piano, I graciously slid off the bench and offered it to him. I could see from the look in the eyes of both Cynthia and Matthew that they already had their hearts set on rehearsing with him.

“With the help of this planet, yes,” the boy answered, obviously relishing the chance to challenge my view of reality. “I think the planet Orpheus is depending on me to present its musical case to the other worlds. You see, much of the planet’s music is locked up inside. Just enough escapes to my ear for me to write it down. Matthew and Cynthia, like all the children here, hear the planet’s music even better than I do. This trio we’re trying out is our latest collaborative effort.”

I took a seat and listened with some amazement as Rolland, as I came to know him, played through the violin part and then the cello part. Each time, Matthew, and then Cynthia played it back, note for note, by memory. Not only that, but they played with a weird intonation that was not playable on the piano, but which Rolland seemed to expect from them. Hearing the trio movement piecemeal, however, did not prepare me for what I was to hear when they all played it together. The movement was built on a tension between attempts by some voices to speed up the tempo and by some other voices to hold it back. This lead to a wild climax that just about knocked me out of my chair until the force of movement broke free — almost. The main theme became quite dance-like in a rock n’ roll sort of way, but even then, loud discords intervened in an attempt to hold back the dance, and the piece ended with the tension not fully resolved. I was impressed and I said so. There was no question that Rolland had picked up a lot of the planet’s music and listening to his compositions over time helped increase my appreciation of the music produced by the children.

“Well, why not have the best?” I replied. “Does he appreciate your work?”

“I find him encouraging. He and Marguerite Toland are the only people on my planet who think there’s any hope for me.”

“Well, if God doesn’t like your music than God isn’t all that She’s cracked up to be.”

“Thank you for your gracious response,” said Rolland with equal amounts of irony and gratitude.

Rolland’s irregular visits became valued moments of time in a mostly miserable life. Since he was well on the way to becoming an accomplished pianist, he could treat me to live performances of works that I otherwise only heard on CD. More important, he was one person I could talk to about music as he knew a lot about it, was interested in learning bits and pieces from me, and he thought about music more than most anybody else I’d ever met. Even so, Rolland surprised me one day with an overt show of human sympathy for somebody besides himself.

“I get the impression that living here is hard for you,” said Rolland after we had been shooting musical bull for some time.

“You’ve done a great job as far as I can tell,” said Rolland. “The kids are glad you’re here.”

“How do you know?” I asked, never having seen a hint of gratitude on their parts.

“Thank you for saying that,” I replied, almost choking on my words. “It has been hard.”

That was the abrupt end of that conversation. I appreciated the sentiment but I didn’t really expect anything to come of it. But the next day, I returned to my cell after a raucous Eucharist to find a new portable CD player, complete with headset, on my bed and a stack of CD’s of music I had been dying to hear again for years.

By hindsight, I can see there was a tacit belief that sooner or later Matthew and Cynthia would be taken away from the community and the planet. It was clear that Rolland had his sights on a career on his native planet and it was too painful to see the way those two children were treated by the others. One day, when Matthew was the object of a rare act of violence at the hands of a couple of other boys, Rolland whisked them away. I missed Matthew and Cynthia, of course, but I couldn’t blame them for wanting to get away. My consolation was receiving the CD’s they made of Rolland’s music when they became famous. As a bonus, I also received bunches of reviews, some of which demonstrated the obtuseness of the reviewer. So the years passed, as they had passed before. I had become fairly resigned to my lot in life and I just tried to make the best of it. With time, the music performances seemed to improve and, at times, were even satisfying.

My deliverance came to me out of the blue just as much as my entrapment at the beginning. When I entered my cell one evening, expecting to retire for the night I was confronted with Rolland Fletcher, Matthew Taylor, and Cynthia Harwood all sitting on my bed!

“Good evening, yourself,” I returned. “Have you given up your career for the monastic life?”

“Yes,” Rolland answered. “It’s too long a long story for me to tell right now, so it will have to be told another time. Would you like to get out of here, or would you like to stay?”

“Sure. It’s up to you. I don’t want to spoil anybody’s monastic vocation. And then again, I don’t want to spoil a nice musical career in Chicago, either.”

That put me on the spot, but I knew I had to decide right away and I knew what the decision had to be. Although there was a certain level of contentment to my life in the monastery, it was accompanied by a chronic ache over everything I had been deprived of without my ever consenting to give it up. I knew that if I passed up this chance of freedom, I would regret it the rest of my life.

“I don’t know about becoming a monk,” said Rolland with that charmingly wicked smile of his, “but I’ve decided to stay here a while and make music with my friends here and the children.”

I gathered my CD’s and a few other possessions and then followed Rolland some distance from the monastery to where a Volkswagen bus was waiting for me. The girl who made flighty appearances with goodies that Dan McCarthy couldn’t get was at the wheel.

“You might want to have a name to identify yourself with. Then we can invent an ID for it. Just don’t use a name you’ve used before.”

After being Brother Brendan for so long, I wanted to keep a bit of that name. Parker was my middle name and I wanted to reclaim a piece of the identity I had before I was nabbed by Father Columba Craghan.

With that agreed on, I got into the Volkswagon, waved to Rolland and Matthew and then leaned back for a scare fire ride through the space warp to Chicago. Lena took me right to an apartment that was already rented for me and dropped me off. Before I left her, she gave me a thick score and a CD. It was Rolland’s last work to date, The Boy Jesus in the Temple.

I find it hard to believe that Rolland would leave the monastery and the children. I haven’t had any contact with him since he sprang me from there so I really don’t know what might have caused his departure. Given his deep dedication to the children, it must have taken a pretty traumatic event to cause to drive him away. I wouldn’t be surprised if he got treated by the members of the community the same way I did, but Rolland thrives on that sort of hostility so that probably isn’t it. I am convinced that Rolland is a lot more brittle psychologically that he lets on, but my hunch is that it takes someone who knows just the right wedge to use against him. Nobody in the community has that kind of instinct, so it is more likely to be somebody else who has reason to intervene in his life in a destructive way.

As you can see, it’s been hard for me to tell you all this, but I’m feeling better now for having done it. After returning to so-called normal life, there has been nobody for me to turn to. I could use a lot of therapy to help me recover, but how could I tell a therapist the truth of what really happened to me? I am grateful that I was able to tell the five of you.