Jurre
His name was Jurre, for better or worse. He later joked that he should change it to Mohammed. For statistical reasons.
"Busking is the purest form of mass media," was the first thing he told me, before he even gave me his name. "Everything else is targeted now. And when it's not targeted it's filtered. Algorithms assigning people to content. People assigning themselves to radio stations."
I had passed him often. He always played the Harry Potter theme, on violin, accompanied by tinny speakers. I never gave him attention (let alone money) until the day a cancelled train left me with thirty spare minutes.
On that day I looked at him, and I looked at him long enough that I no longer heard him. I looked at his frantic fingers, his face flush with passion for this anodyne sequence of sounds. I've rarely seen anyone else so visibly care about anything. (I was already in love. The fingers helped. I have simple tastes.)
That evening I found him. And I asked him why. Why this, every day, with such ferocity.
"Busking is not unfiltered but it's the closest thing. Everyone uses streets. You don't pick the street because oh, you like the color red. The street finds you. And I find you. I appeal to the—the—" Lowest common denominator, I offered. He snapped his fingers.
He pulled a six-pack from the bushes (he couldn't be seen to have vices, not in plain view, it distracted the audience) and offered me a lukewarm beer.
"It all went to shit with Babel. You know Babel. Babbling Babylonians. We used to understand each other. And then we didn't. And we still don't. And that causes, oh, 80% of the world's problems. Not the natural disasters. But all the problems we could solve if we got along, all the problems we could solve if people would just."
His speech was not rehearsed but it was premeditated. He had been waiting to tell someone. I thought: he had been waiting to tell me.
"It's not only words, it's what we think, it's what we mean. I say words, you hear words, they are the same words, but what they mean to you is not what they meant to me. They don't match up. The odds of them matching up are astronomical."
I said something about beetles in boxes, and he shook his head, he said I didn't get it at all, and then his face changed and he laughed.
"The beetle doesn't have to be in a box. I tell you about an ongedierte, an Ungeziefer, you know what the word means, you have a dictionary, but you still don't know what I mean. You don't know the species, you don't know why I chose that word, you know basically nothing. You have to be there. And you can be there, but if you're there, you can't be somewhere else."
We sat quite close together. He stared into the distance, his eyes occasionally darting to mine, while his rarely-still fingers rap-tapped against the grass. I moved my hand. His fingers rap-tapped against me.
"Music is better. With music everybody knows the words. Music is better but it's not good enough. There's too much of it. There's so much of it that people develop taste. They have music they like and they have music they don't like and it all falls apart."
I walked him home while he gestured under the street lamps.
"This Harry Potter stuff, this movie soundtrack stuff, nobody dislikes it and nobody especially likes it. Nobody knows it because of taste. But everybody does know it. I play it and I know what it will do to people. It's indiscriminate. It's—nobody listens to that of their own initiative, that's why it's good for busking. You want something that everybody knows and everybody likes and that nobody hears every day. That's why it works."
He didn't turn on the lights and I didn't ask. He found everything by touch. He found me with his fingers.
"When two people have the same experience they're the same person. I see it happen. I manage it one time out of one hundred. I look through the crowd and I see the same person twice, staring through two different faces. And then the world is less broken. I'm sure the Buddhists have a word for it."
At dawn I half-asleep watched as he put on his clothes and picked up his equipment and left.
"I'm getting better. I'll be able to do it reliably. To pick out two, three, ten, one hundred people, and make them the same person."
He had a bed. A doorless closet. Abnormally few clothes.
"Then I'll take a plane to the G20, maybe. I'm still figuring it out. First I need to get good enough. Then I can make everyone whole. I can make everyone care about everyone."
I never believed. Of course I never believed.
I loved the man, his tics and mannerisms, his way of talking and of looking at the clouds, his fingers and his hair. His great idea I only liked for what it showed of him, for letting me look inside his head. My sin isn't that I didn't believe, but that I never even took it seriously, that I just played along.
One day, to poke at him, I asked him what he thought of his own music. Did it make him feel the same way that his audience felt? He went very quiet.
The next day he had gotten a bland haircut. The day after, new clothes. His fingers rarely rap-tapped, and when they did, he quickly caught himself.
"I'm trying to split off that part of myself," he told me. "That part of me can play and then I can listen."
Now when he performed his face flickered. He tried to bury his old concentration under bland undiscerning appreciation, the experience he tried to induce in his audience. He managed a passable impression but I knew him too well. Still he kept trying.
It was around this time that he started talking about changing his name.
"I can't be left behind," he said over and over. "When everyone is everyone else I need to be one of them. Or else who will care for me?"
I cared for him. Did I ever tell him that? Didn't it go without saying?
During the final days he flinched at my look. I think because how I looked at him wasn't how I looked at everyone else.
Then he left. I don't know where. He might be in another country with another name and another face and the same grand idea, now kept fully private.
He didn't take his violin.
Sometimes I hear the Harry Potter theme on the street. It's never him. It's another busker who found the same lowest common denominator. I stand and I listen.
And I know no other listener in the world feels the way I feel.