A migraine plagued Brian as he hunched over the mixing console.

Getting up that morning, a great noise burned through his mind in perfect geometric harmony. The details of the dream that birthed the vision was now lost, overwhelmed by the sine waves which had oscillated into being the moment Brian became aware of the sun shining brightly through the immense east window. Like the sun the noise had birthed beauty into the morning, carrying him through mundanity — a cup of coffee and a bowl of oatmeal, pet the dog, let it out — aware of the complexities of his mind, consciously constructing the high-level structure of the piece and subconsciously composing his perfect hymn, line-by-line. Many times in the past few months he had woken to a rapturous noise, convinced that he had done It again, found another song that would short-circuit streaming services and unify the world’s harshest critics and disinterested amateurs in its beauty. Enthusiasm would carry him through the morning into his studio, built as an add-on extending over the slope from the beach’s soft golden sands and morning tide.

Once in the studio, the noise would begin to fade, without fail. The brilliant patterns resounding so recently in his thoughts thought better of it, leaving Brian staring blankly through the control room windows at the guitars, kalimba, upright piano in the dark corner away from the sun, synthesizers, drums in the corner opposite the piano, various percussive affects strewn about the room, and wires from the countless mics carefully routed and bolted along the ceiling to the console blinking underneath his hands. In these haunting moments Brian would remember his role as conduit. Of course he didn’t do it again, of course, he never did it in the first place — the divine dreams had found him and he failed them, again and again. He would sit impotent like a broken lightning rod longing for the days when it was struck until the next mania.

Today, in whatever part of his consciousness that experienced the sound that filled the rest, Brian had held off dread as he made his way to the studio with coffee in hand. The mug, plain white and filled to the brim, lapped up and out as he walked nervously across the room between the kitchen and the studio. It might’ve burnt his hand had his mind not already been so filled with fire. I can do it, of course I can, he thought. The song will flow from dream to thought to the mics and through the wires, landing in virtual tracks for Brian to combine into the New One. The coffee bounced up and down, a fifth of it left in drops on the floor behind him.

He had set the mug on the board in the control room, booted up the computer, and made his way into the studio. Five minutes of wire checking and power switching and he’s back in the control room, waiting for the DAW to open. Outside, the dog trotted down the hill to the beach, where it’ll lay for an hour or so before wandering back to the shade. Sipping the cooled coffee and bouncing his leg, Brian saw him through the window between the piano and drum set. He saw but did not notice. On autopilot he had gone through the setup, and the part of him above or outside the noise diminished by the moment, compressed by the pressure building and building.

Hours later, the whining at the side door near the kitchen went unheard. Both hands pushed against the sides of his head and squeezed his temples, trying to press Heaven’s Hell out of his head.

It had begun so well: The layered synthesizers took little tuning to match the dream, a simple repeating kick drum pattern composed the entire rhythm section, and what Brian had sung into the mic, eyes closed and hot from the sun shining in through the window, matched so perfectly his mind’s composition that Brian was sure upon playback he would not be able to tell the difference.

He couldn’t. Tears in his eyes he had made his way back to the control room, astonished at the sublimity he had channeled. His hands shaking, coffee mug empty on the console, he had stopped the recording and moved the cursor to the beginning of the song. He could have wept from awe at the ease at which the song had manifested itself. The Hit, written in the five minutes between waking up from a nap and forgetting a dream, had taken six months to record and three more to mix. But this… this was no Hit. The instrumentation is bare, the harmony divinely complex, and the vocal melody is sung in the lilt of angels. Awe then, and fear. For this could only be Revelation, delivered and translated by and through spirit, not meant to be a hit but to be a grace, a song of theosis and judgment, conceived first in God’s mind and birthed in pure sound through Brian as the fire of the age. The Hit is juvenilia now, he had thought as moved to play the tracks, finger hovering over the spacebar. All music has been juvenelia. Fire.

The speakers vibrated the air. There was no distinction between the waves pushed against his eardrums and translated by his brain and the great swelling that had traveled in the opposite direction. In unbelievable unison, the orchestra of dream and reality became one. Imperfect representation of thought, the artist’s eternal failure, was entirely overcome, and the boundary between Brian’s mind and reality was irrevocably broken. The song plays in eternity, on a loop Brian didn’t remember setting. When his horror had finally overwhelmed his awe, he had reached over and stopped playback — but the sound remained. The speakers halted their vibrations, but the sound remained.

The heat outside was becoming unbearable for the dog, who, between anxious shuffling steps and whines on the doorstep, sought shelter in a bush, desperate enough to push through the thorns pushing past its fur and into skin. A pool of blood, growing as the morning hours dragged towards noon, saturated the soil. Periodically the dog would reemerge from the bush’s thorns to whine and scratch at the door. A red trail traced the dog’s path. As the trail thickened, the dog’s determination dulled. The heat enveloped its will, melting it into the soil and boiling out in its blood, until all the dog could muster was a final trot into the thorns, where not even the shade could protect it from the heat that came not from the sun or the air, but from the horrible sound coming from its own head.

Brian did not notice the whining had stopped, let alone that it had ever begun. He did not notice the sun tracking its way across the sky, the bruises beginning to form under his palms, and the dry urine that had soaked through his sweatpants. After the first playback, that tiny self-conscious witness inside Brian had been lost among the exponential increases in volume. His grasp of internal-external distinctions was gone, replaced only by harmony and its pain. He hunched further over the mixing board, and pressed his hands harder against his head.

Across the street from Brian’s house, a boy watched the growing heat haze through a window. Brian’s home appeared illusory, waving and melting into the sea, the sand, the lawn. The boy stood with his two hands placed on the window pane in the front room, entranced by the recurring patterns that he began to hear just as he saw. He stared until the sound was loud enough to move him. The boy barely knew beauty, knowing only its association with his mother, as all boys do. Yet the sound was beauty, the voice the same as his mother’s, inspiring in the boy experience he had never had, and would never have again. Too young to give aesthetic considerations coherence, the boy wept. Tears found their way into his mouth and slipped through the gaps in his young teeth. The boy turned from the window; any louder and he would not be able to do what the sound asked of him. He moved slowly into the kitchen, eyes seeing but not noticing the cup of water on the table, which had begun its own illusory waving and shifting. The tears, thick and heavy, left drops sizzling on the wood floor he trudged across. His hand fished around in the junk drawer, higher than him by an inch and a half, until they found the small match book, the only one in the house. Sluggish now from the weight of revelation, the boy slumped against the wooden paneling under the drawer and held the matches in front of him. He flipped open the book. He couldn’t see, his tears evaporating upon secretion. His eyes stung. A little part of him, the dwindling witness, wondered why his mother wouldn’t help him, why she didn’t also hear. Her fingernails were melting into the carpet of the master bedroom above him. With a stilted movement, the boy drew out a match from the box and flicked it against the starter. It lit, slowly, far slower than it should; even the boy knew that, intuitively, although he had never seen a match struck. He held it in his hands and watched the flame grow. It did not stop when it reached its tear-shaped boundary. It did not stop when it was the size of a baseball. The boy’s hand disappeared into a bowling ball and he whimpered, barely conscious of the fury before him. Soon he was gone, and the orb was eating through the waving and melting that had made its way down to the seashore and deep into the surrounding neighborhood.

Even before the many orbs slowly consuming Brian’s neighbors had touched it, the tar on the street had melted into the asphalt. The dog was dead, the sea boiled, the sand was turning to glass, and Brian’s temples had perfect, symmetrical, ugly bruises.