The Cliché Is the Tool of the Typesetter by Zak Block

Plangent whirled the organ, like it drifted aloft the cathedral, a red velvet air, as Erika ran her fingers along the sounds and the airs and focused on the little surprised child's mouths of pipes working, sputtering dust and dead flies, redistributing them to the talcy hot dampness aloft; whirled, prestidigitatorily, the long, long fingers, from key to key, with the pedals coming in from time to time, but all without order—and without order even in the sense of controlled disorder, as of free jazz, aleatory music, what ha[d] you—with the little “failures,” as she thought of them, and what they sounded like, were they sour notes, dissonances, extemporized but then employed to some purpose, or conceived preemptively to application.

So prestidigitatorily whirled his fingers but they were the fingers of a butcher; strong, and with memories, feeling their way absently along the composition. Then of a sudden was radically altered in a manner not immediately clear to her her own relationship to that music, and what that music was; when she saw that Ralph was merely drawing the weft of popular melodies—the number one song in the country that week, “Irreplaceable” by Beyoncé Knowles; perhaps remarkable for its, at least by the standards of then-contemporary M.O.R. pop music, “structural dynamism”—drawing it through the warp of his own unlovely caterwauling of notes. So then it was, still, an improvisation, albeit of a different nature; closer to a collage.

But what was he was really doing but taking something beautiful speaking and destroying it, smearing something ugly of himself across it, returning it to his captive that she might hate it with and through him.

Unthinking, rising from the bench and, with a squeak of old wood on wood without rubber, rousting it from its original position parallel to the keyboard, leaving the scene as he had not found it; Ralph's attentions were diverted and so he wandered off in pursuit of what had diverted them.

“Have you ever been in one of these?”

“Sure, why not?”

“What can you tell me about it?”

The Cliché Is the Tool of the Typesetter, here partially excerpted, is a chapter from the fifth section of    , a novel forthcoming, by Zak Block