THE MAN WHO COULDN’T STOP SINGING:
Dr. Molto Vivace’s Last Paper
Forward:
The International Medical Journal has verified that the following retrospective is indeed the work of Dr. Molto Vivace, once this country’s leading expert on the cause and cure of VTS (Vivace’s Tune Syndrome). The piece was originally written for the Alumni Review of Ohio State University, where Dr. Vivace had accepted an appointment as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Otolaryngology. For reasons that will become clear, the Alumni Review never published the piece, but its editors, Cheryl K. Tinsley and Rodger Bloom, agreed to release it to this journal as a contribution to the ongoing debate about VTS.
We thank Ms. Tinsley and Mr. Bloom for their generosity and trust that the following account will help to clarify some of the issues involved in this complex and unfortunately still rampant social and medical problem. Even as this issue of The International Medical Journal goes to press, reports accrue daily on the prevalence of The Syndrome; cases have turned up in such far-flung places as Malaysia and the Faroe Islands, and, though the Soviet Union denies the existence of The Syndrome inside its borders, both western intelligence and the reports of travellers confirm that The Syndrome has reached epidemic proportions in Moscow. Cases have even been reported among the deaf. For all we know, by the time you read this, there will have been reports of cases among that segment of the world’s population assumed to be at least risk: the dead.
Dr. Vivace’s whereabouts are currently unknown, though the Journal, through the cooperation of the federal government, has reason to believe he is still alive.
Don’t get me wrong. I am very fond of music in all forms and would hate to think of a world in which nobody sang; a world whose music was left to the birds; a world where the phrase “cosmic music of the spheres” was but an abstraction or an occasion for snickers; a shower stall in which nobody was singing “La Donna e Mobile;” an assembly line where nobody was even whistling “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles;” a late night without someone humming from a Mahler symphony.
In fact, I love music and am often sorely distressed that The Syndrome, which bears my name, arouses so much anxiety and confusion. How much better to have discovered some obscure disease, one that lies yellowing in the textbooks, gathering dust in an out-of-the-way medical museum into which a few tourists may accidentally stumble.
But perhaps it was destined that VTS become my life’s work. How else explain my first encounter with the then unnamed, indeed, scarcely acknowledged, Syndrome? Of course, I had heard rumors about it, even in my days as an intern at Massachusetts General Hospital, but like everyone else back then, I shrugged it off. Who could possibly be afflicted with such a need to sing that the person simply could not stop singing, no matter how inappropriate the setting or occasion?
Please understand: I am referring to a time when suddenly to hear someone singing “You Are My Sunshine” at a funeral or the theme from Bach’s Mass in B Minor at a Scouts’ meeting would have been a startling event, not, as today, the occasion for a grim nod of recognition. Of course, researchers now are convinced that VTS existed long before our acknowledgement of The Syndrome. You all know about the skeletal evidence of VTS uncovered in the west of Ireland, a country that has always been more tolerant about VTS than most others, and the recently excavated voice tapes from a village in Cappadoccia. But though the current epidemic is far more widespread than the Black Death, influenza, cholera, and AIDS epidemics put together, systematic scientific research began less than a decade ago.
Were it not for the subsequent events, I would likely have long forgotten that morning in 1992, when I encountered my first case of VTS. I was still practicing in a small clinic outside Granville, Ohio, mostly routine earaches and sore throats, an occasional laryngectomy. In my spare time I played a fair game of tennis at the Granville municipal courts, did a little carpentry, and once in a while joined the students and faculty at Dennison University in a protest against the U.S. invasion of Peru. A pleasant, if uneventful, time–until that morning when Arlene, the receptionist, greeted me with a loud wail–behavior highly uncharacteristic of this most serene woman, may she rest in peace and silence, an early and unsung victim of VTS.
(Editor’s Note: Arlene has been positively identified as Arlene Schramm. She was born in Akron on October 19, 1935, the third of six daughters of Helmut Schramm, a tool and dye maker, and Matilda O’Brien Schramm, housewife. After graduating from high school, she was trained as a medical receptionist by the Winston Careers Institute in Dayton. A family photograph, ca. 1942, shows her to be on the plump side, with curly brown hair and a pleasant smile. Ms. Schramm never married.)
“Doctor, you have to see that man at once,” Arlene said. “He’s driving the whole waiting room crazy. For the past forty minutes he’s been singing that same darn song.”
I must confess that I noticed nothing particularly strange about the patient, a well-nourished man of about fifty-four, who will, henceforth, be known by the name Alex O. However, throughout my examination, he did keep singing bits and snatches of “There’ll Be Bluebirds Over the White Cliffs of Dover.”
Apparently this wasn’t the first time Alex O. had put on such a performance. His wife, a dumpy woman named Minette who had insisted on accompanying him into my examination room, had urged him to see me in the hope that the “problem” –her word–had some connection with his auditory nerve impulses. A theory she was not the only one to assert, if you remember some of the early research efforts into VTS, especially during spring of 1994, when The Syndrome had mysteriously spread throughout the city of Canajoharie, New York. (It was only years later that researchers, including myself, began to suspect the direct involvement of endomorphins and other brain hormones, possibly even peculiarities in the structure of the amygdala.)
Frankly, I thought Alex O. was singing because he was feeling a bit anxious. The song, intermittent as it was, even struck me as moderately appropriate: it was early spring and the bluebirds were indeed returning to Granville. What’s more, my patient didn’t have a bad voice–untrained, to be sure, certainly not Pavarotti or Domingo, but pleasant enough. I even remember being briefly tempted to sing along with him. Who can resist singing when someone else is doing so? Of course, this was long before VTS had reached the epidemic levels of today. It was safe to sing a tune in 1992, safe to use that fine old word–tune–(M.E. tune, a variation of tone) and not invoke either laughter, anxiety, or rage.
Only after I was about to dismiss my patient as perfectly sound did anything remarkable occur. Alex O. suddenly began singing:
there’s no sun up in the sky,
stormy weather …
“You hear that?” Minette said. “When you just said `I don’t know why’ he couldn’t help picking up on that dreadful song.”
In truth, I don’t remember having said “I don’t know why,” but it is entirely possible I did.
“It happens all the time,” Minette said.
Simultaneously, my patient sang:
since my gal and I ain’t together
keeps raining all the time.
“All the time,” Minette repeated, as Alex’s singing grew louder and his eyes took on a dreamy, dark blue glaze.
“We’re at a dinner party and someone says the meat is very juicy and before you know it he’s singing “Meet Me in St. Louis.” Or someone says that she scrubs the floors till they shine, and he’s into “Shine On Harvest Moon.”
“Don’t believe her,” Alex said, breaking off the first few notes of “Moon River,” and shifting into a vaguely melodic chant as he told me that all his wife ever did was whine, whine, whine. “If only she’d leave me alone, all alone by the telephone, I’d be fine. It’s only when she starts to nag and complain—”
Then he shifted into the most beautiful rendition of “Vesti La Giubba” I had ever heard. I regret I did not know much Italian. Pappa did not want my brothers and me to speak it at home”we are Americans now” –and Mamma wasn’t Italian at all; she was from a town across the Swiss border, so I couldn’t even imagine what had triggered the aria. But I almost felt like applauding. Unfortunately, Minette destroyed the moment: “Yeah, yeah. We hear you, we hear you. Tell the doctor what happened in Louisville. Or San Francisco.”
With a slightly Wagnerian lilt, Alex told me about a recent business trip to Louisville when he was caught singing “My Old Kentucky Home” in the Men’s room at the Louisville Airport. In 1992, it was not exactly de rigeur to sing out loud “ . . . ‘tis summer, the darkies are gay.” And in San Francisco. You can easily guess what he did there.
I remember thinking how the little cable cars must have taken him half-way to the stars; it was beginning to become that kind of morning. Little did I dream I was face-to-face with the first certifiable victim of what would, alas, come to be known as The Syndrome that bears my name.
“When did you first become aware of the problem?” I asked. “Only Minette thinks it’s a problem, doctor.”
I told him to come back in three months, and prescribed cotton balls for Minette. He never returned, and one might say his fate would be still unknown had I not received a letter about a year later from Dr. George Boyd, a colleague in Denver:
Dear Molto,
I’ve run across the strangest phenomena. First, a woman who couldn’t stop singing the habanera, or whatever it’s called, from Carmen. Then a man, with no traceable connection to the woman, who throughout my consultation kept singing the same tune. And last week another man, who, while singing something else—I think the name of the song is Sentimental Journey–presented the same clinical picture. Each preferred to sing rather than talk; each was perfectly normal in all other respects; each had tried to keep his preference quiet but at some point had inexplicably lost control and begun to sing at random. I have studied all available data and can find no correlation of diet, environment, mutual friends or family, or genetic profile. The woman returned to me yesterday after threats from her husband, but the scenario was essentially the same, though this time she was singing something else, more like a medley. I’m sorry I can’t give you more specific titles, I’m not especially up on music. Frankly, I’m totally baffled and would appreciate any help you have to offer.
By the way, I hear rumors that you’re planning to get married this summer. Congratulations and best wishes,
Sincerely,
George
As it turned out, George was wrong about my upcoming marriage. I had broken off my romance with Dr. Nancy Fuller, a former classmate at the University of Missouri Medical School, several months earlier; I am afraid that, much to Papa and Mamma’s dismay, I am a confirmed bachelor. Plenty of women friends, yes, but I just could never see tying myself down to any particular one, and my eleven nieces and nephews more than satisfy my need for a family. I suppose I take after my uncle Luigi, who joined the merchant marines at the age of twenty and would send us postcards from all over the world. In any case, I immediately had Arlene contact Alex O.
Minette had left him and he was living alone on a small disability pension. Arlene cajoled him to consult me again by convincing him how she remembered his lovely voice. Would he be willing to participate in an experiment the doctor was conducting on the nexus between music and the sub-cortical neural system? No drugs, no strenuous exercise, no pain, and a small–but obviously to my patient, alluring–cash honorarium.
When I arrived at my office on the day of his appointment, Alex was softly humming “M’Appari” from Marta. A most haunting melody, you will agree, one that Pappa often sang when he was serving his customers in the little grocery in St. Louis. Arlene was humming along with him in a sort of harmony, though it appeared she was not too familiar with the words. Alex would smile, wince, smile again. And then he slumped into a posture characteristic of someone feeling keen disappointment. Of course, I wouldn’t understand the significance of what was going on until several months later.
Alex’s condition had not changed, but he seemed resigned to his fate, He would sing all the time, yes, all the time, because apparently he could not help doing so. I say “apparently” since even now I sometimes have doubts about the biochemical inevitability of The Syndrome. Could it not be analogous to the dance mania that afflicted much of Europe in the 14th century–a combination of delusion and mass hysteria? Who is to say whether the etiology of The Syndrome involves voluntary or involuntary muscles; whether it is rooted in the cerebral cortex or the hippocampus; whether it is a phenomenon of socio-cultural conditioning or is purely physiological or a subtle combination of both? Note, for example, the almost total lack of The Syndrome in China. Could it be that the strong emphasis on tone and pitch in the Chinese language vitiates the need for VTS? Or has The Syndrome been present for centuries in that country and its language itself is but a mutation? Even today, with all of the progress we have made in the War Against VTS, we cannot answer these questions with certitude.
My progress with my patient was agonizingly slow. For the first dozen appointments he merely sang at random, a medley of tunes in all keys and all styles, sometimes in foreign languages. Even if I listened intently, I found it difficult to extract any useful information, so adept was he at shifting from tune to tune, pitch to pitch, even range to range. Sometimes he was a baritone, sometimes a tenor, sometimes even a soprano. Then, quite by accident, as with nearly all such discoveries, we attained a remarkable breakthrough.
My Volvo had broken down on the Interstate and it took the AAA over an hour to respond. By the time I arrived at my office, all of my patients had left, except for Alex, who was sitting in the examination room. Arlene, bless her heart, had tried to assuage him with tea and some Hydrox cookies. Whether Arlene had stayed with Alex out of sheer kindness or a premonition that she was about to help make medical history we will never know. What I do know is that by the time I put on my white jacket she and my patient were harmonizing beautifully to the tune of “Drink To Me Only With Your Eyes,” a melody she was far more familiar with than “M’Appari.”
“My god,” Alex said in a near-normal speaking voice but with great feeling, “that’s all I ever wanted to do all along.”
“Harmonize?” I asked.
“Yes. Harmonize.”
“And up till now you couldn’t get anyone to harmonize with you?”
“Not a soul. I tried everything, even the National Association of Barber Shop Quartets, even a computerized harmony service. Finally, I was driven to harmonize with myself by making some cassette tapes, but you know how unsatisfactory that becomes after a while.”
“Not really,” Arlene said, and blushed the color of a plum.
I couldn’t resist asking for an encore, so she and my patient performed another harmonic sequence, this time to the tune of “Gretchen am Spinnrade.” I was too overcome to notice that my patient’s voice intermittently cracked and even lapsed into a monotone. After they finished, my patient again resumed his normal speaking voice. We had achieved the first cure of VTS in recorded history!
It was not until much later, when I learned that my patient had completely and utterly lost his capacity to sing anything at all, that I understood the significance of “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” and even then it took Arlene to put the pieces together. To cure a patient from VTS, someone had to harmonize with him. But there was an unfortunate side effect–once cured, the patient was extremely unlikely ever to regain the ability to sing. What’s more, the harmonizer, him or herself, almost invariably contracted The Syndrome. In a matter of days, my faithful Arlene could not refrain from singing, and though her voice was pleasant and her choice of music invariably entertaining, she became a distraction to my patients. With much regret I had to fire her, an event that greatly tempered my joy at discovering that VTS was indeed at least in part a socially transmitted disease.
For a while I forgot about the yet unnamed Syndrome.
(Editor’s Note: The next few paragraphs of Dr. Vivace’s paper are unfortunately lost. As far as we, along with editors Tinsley and Bloom of the Ohio State Alumni Review and high-placed government officials, can tell, Dr. Vivace was temporarily distracted at the time by problems related to the explosion of yet another nuclear power plant in southern Indiana. We have reason to believe, however, that he did not entirely lose his interest in VTS, since this was the period when physicians all over the country were placing notices in leading medical journals, including our own, asking for help with the baffling epidemic, which had begun to spread at an exponential rate. Surely Dr. Vivace saw these notices and he was probably contacted directly by several physicians as well as patients, since a letter to the then popular columnist, Ann Landers, from the wife of a VTS victim had been published that summer. On the advice of her Chicago medical experts, Landers had — foolishly, we believe–supplied Dr. Vivace’s name and address and some information about his use of harmony to cure Alex O. Just how the Chicago doctors found out about the cure we do not know, since Vivace has always been a most modest man. All attempts to clarify this situation by contacting both Alex and his former wife, Minette, have gone unanswered. We pick up Dr. Vivace’s narrative with his comments about the growing seriousness of the VTS epidemic.)
By 1993, there were reports that The Syndrome had spread all over the country and into parts of western Europe. So how could I turn down Arlene, who was then living on unemployment and even had to drop out of her bowling league because her constant singing was such a distraction, when she volunteered to travel anywhere necessary and offer her harmonizing abilities to cure victims of The Syndrome?
You may ask at this point why I didn’t try mercifully to harmonize with Arlene myself and cure the poor woman. I confess freely that I simply was not ready to risk getting the disease. And so, with the help of a small grant from NIH, I dispatched Arlene to my colleagues. As some of you might know, she was an enormous success; patient after patient was cured after a single harmonizing session with Arlene.
How much I, and we, owe that woman I cannot adequately express. Never once did she refuse a case. She even set up, with some money she had inherited from an aunt, this nation’s first institute for the training of harmonizers to cure VTS. Furthermore, she insisted upon giving all credit to me for the discovery of the cure and the founding of that first institute, even though I had had only an advisory role. When I won the prestigious Rosenkavalier Prize, I thought the least I could do was have her accompany me to the award ceremony in Vienna. She sang quietly all the time and managed such a lovely smile I was amazed nobody there offered to harmonize with her. I suppose even in Vienna there was emerging a terrible fear of The Syndrome, the beginning of what is now commonly known as tunophobia.
It happened in a cafe off the Ringstrasse our last night in Vienna. Perhaps I had drunk too much Zinfandel, perhaps it was the schlag or the sachertorte, or the mere fact of being in Vienna. Drs. Harte-Schnaupper and Wingelmann, the bestowers of my Rosenkavalier Prize, left us at about midnight and I was alone with Arlene. You may be surprised to learn that though she was singing all the time, she had never once lapsed into a Viennese waltz: clearly there must be different strains of whatever causes VTS and, mercifully, in Arlene’s case, she never was prone to adapt her music to a particular place. No “St. Louis Blues” or “Chattanooga Choo Choo” for her.
Actually, at the moment of my lapse she was singing “The Rose of Washington Square,” a song of which I’m not particularly fond. But, suddenly, I found myself harmonizing; before I could stop myself, I found that I was harmonizing with Arlene. By the time we returned to the hotel it was clear I had contracted My Own Syndrome. In my case, the incubation period lasted but an hour, though there have been several cases where it lasted for months. Let the harmonizer beware! Arlene kept saying how sorry she was and couldn’t we just reverse the situation; she even tried hard to force a harmonic cure on me in order to take back The Syndrome, but it didn’t work. She couldn’t sing at all. I consoled myself with the knowledge that at least Arlene could now get a regular job again; she wouldn’t have to go around the world harmonizing in the name of science and humanity, and I, like other great healers throughout history, could use myself as a laboratory for further research.
You’ve probably heard rumors about that period of my life.
(Editor’s Note: We have no reason to doubt the veracity of Dr, Vivace’s own account of what has come to be known in the VTS literature as The Dark Days. We regret that we cannot reveal the location of his bunker because the federal government still regards that as top classified information.)
Suffice it to say I was miserable, a recluse who spent most of my time sleeping in my bunker, though even in my dreams I could not escape my own music. I kept in touch with the world only through newspapers; with so much music at my disposal, I couldn’t bear to have a radio or television. Ceaselessly, I read about The Syndrome. By now there were thousands of new cases every day; the entire city of Buffalo became an improvisational outdoor concert, as did San Diego and Minneapolis. The special VTS hotline (1-800-SING) received more calls per day than it could count.
People were petitioning their congressmen and marching on the White House, holding hands across America and Western Europe, participating in Demonstrations of Silence to raise money to fight VTS. The largest such demonstration took place on the Mall in Washington. Over three million people, including Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Madonna, and The Punk Chamber Ensemble stood silently for twenty-four hours, and the demonstration was shown on TV throughout the world.
During the same period newspapers reported a rash of tasteless jokes about The Syndrome. You probably remember some of them: how many VTS patients does it take to change a light bulb? Did you hear about the Pole who caught VTS?
(Editor’s Note: It is remarkable how the VTS jokes were a mere recycling of the old AIDS, Challenger, and Chernobyl jokes and precursors of today’s Baskin and Robbins jokes. A worthy subject for future study….)
Despite the good pay for such work, harmonizers were in short supply since word had gotten out about the inevitably contagious consequences. So desperate was the situation becoming, however, that there was evidence people kidnapped and enticed innocent children and old people into volunteering as harmonizers. Other VTS-related crimes soared, especially fraud. Though most people shuddered at the thought of harmonizing, heroin and cocaine addicts tried to convince authorities they had genuine rather than pseudo-VTS just to get some work to support their habit. To think that my dear Arlene had offered her services for free!
Social critics wrung their hands about the loss of cohesiveness: everybody was singing a different tune.
The National Council of Teachers of English complained about the loss of literacy. People were singing, instead of reading; singing, instead of watching TV or playing video games.
Nearly every preacher in the land lamented our inability to censor the sexually explicit and violence-ridden lyrics you could hear now on any street corner. (A few people, however, did welcome what they saw as the return of the ancient bardic tradition. Especially skilled VTS victims were given nicknames like Homer or Super-Scop.)
The stock market plunged. Nobody wanted to buy either cassettes or compact discs anymore. Why should they when they could so easily make their own music? Likewise, sales of musical instruments plummeted; VTS was, and is, strictly an a capella phenomenon.
Even the birth rate dropped. Few people were interested in doing anything but singing.
Then there was the secondary problem of those who either accidentally or deliberately had been cured. Many of them simply could not tolerate the total loss of their capacity to sing. The suicide rate rose alarmingly and not a single psychiatrist in the world could cope with what came to be known as Post VTS Syndrome. During this period, I learned through a letter from her sister about the death of my dear Arlene. From congestive heart failure, the sister said, but I’ll never believe it was not from the failure to be able to make her own music.
I pondered in sheer despair for a long time. Which was worse: to sing uncontrollably at all times or never to be able to sing at all? Once a person had developed The Syndrome, why could he not shift back and forth from music to ordinary speech? (Of course, some people could still make the shift, but they either had a special immunity or were VTS carriers who might at any moment develop the actual disease. Or they were simply lucky.)
In regard to those less fortunate, I kept wondering what satanic force had set the rigid rules, had created this miserable dichotomy: either music or silence. Period. Either life or death. Male or female. Darkness or light. Youth or age. Sterility or fertility. Sorrow or joy … What had happened to yin and yang, the eternally fluent interaction of opposites? What unpardonable sins had been committed by the residents of the late 20th century to merit such a Manichean condition?
Then on one of my bleakest days—I literally could not stand the sound of my own voice, whether I was singing Verdi or Sigmund Romberg, Schumann or an old Pepsi jingle—I received a letter from the White House. In order to share my knowledge as the discoverer of VTS and its only known cure, could I come to Washington to discuss with the Presidential staff the military implications of The Syndrome? If the United States could impose The Syndrome on its enemies, surely it would be a great advantage on the battlefield. Imagine the entire Red Army singing “Meadowland,” while we blithely marched into Moscow and Leningrad; let the PLO chant Arab love songs; the Sandanistas distract themselves with mariachi music…
Imagine, indeed. There I was, totally immobilized with The Syndrome myself. And though I thought their proposals highly dangerous, how could I possibly tell this to the White House if I could not communicate in a normal conversational tone? I suddenly realized that incapacitated as I was, I had a mission. I would have to force someone to harmonize with me so I could be cured; I simply would have to. Not only were our national ethics at stake but the prospects, fragile as they might always have been, for world peace. Not for nothing had I become a charter member of the Physicians for Musical Responsibility and a Sane VTS Policy. So I left my bunker and prowled the late-night streets in search of a harmonizer, using every charm and wile at my command. I am sure you will understand that I only behaved in this morally reprehensible way out of a deep sense of scientific and humanitarian urgency. It didn’t take too long before I found a disheveled street person and with the enticement of some wine and yes, some illegal substances, convinced the poor soul to harmonize with me on “Down By the Old Mill Stream.” Even now it makes me cringe to recall that night, though within minutes I was speaking normally and the very next day I was on a plane to Washington.
When I landed I was surprised to find the entire Washington press corps and representatives from all three networks waiting at the airport; it seemed word of my arrival had been leaked by a reporter on The Washington Post. You may recall seeing me that night on the evening news. At dinner, the President laid out what he called the exciting possibilities. All we had to do was figure out a way to infect our enemies with The Syndrome. Secretly, of course. And painlessly. Money would be no object.
“But we have no idea, Mr. President, what actually causes The Syndrome. We do know that in particular circumstances it is contagious but that doesn’t mean we have the ability—or the right—to inflict The Syndrome on even one person, let alone whole nations. No one at this time knows the long-range dangers of VTS. For all we know, it could destroy civilization as we know it today.”
“Forget about rights. We’re talking about national security. And, most important, about restoring America’s image as the leader of the civilized world. My advisers tell me that if we don’t act soon, the Russians will beat us to it. Let me tell you a little secret,” he whispered over the sorbet. “Already at least six countries have the capacity to inflict VTS. The Soviet Union, of course. France. England. Everybody knows about Israel. And don’t think those are just rumors you hear about Pakistan and South Africa—”
“We’ll never be able to do it, Mr. President.”
“Never say never.”
To my surprise, the after-dinner entertainment consisted of a choral arrangement by the Certified Immune Choir of Indianapolis of “There’ll be Bluebirds Over the White Cliffs of Dover.” My first VTS patient’s first song. Perhaps the President didn’t know that that song had such dreadful connotations. It had also been the first song banned from radio stations in the continental U.S.A. Actually by now most stations had banned music entirely; since the closing of the concert halls and band shells, concerts were performed in secret or in specially licensed premises. After “Bluebirds,” a whispy chanteuse in red sequins sang:
I don’t wanna set the world on fire,
I just wanna start a flame in your heart.
The President insisted on meeting with me the next day at the Oval Office. He showed me a thick portfolio of top secret documents and then called in his chief Pentagon aides who, through charts and complicated diagrams, insisted the Russians were so far ahead we had to get to work on a VTS counter-offensive at once. At the very least we needed to work out a more efficient system of VTS deterrents. And I was the only man with sufficient knowledge of The Syndrome to take on this vital project. I argued and argued, even pleaded at one point that I was in no condition to take on such work since I was still in mourning for Arlene.
“We’ll name the project for her–Project Arlene. What more fitting memorial could she have?” the President said. The man was so damned sincere I felt I had to accept his offer.
So there I was with this shiny laboratory in a secret wing of the National Institutes of Health, a squadron of lab assistants, and a fat grant. The only problem is that I had no idea where to start. It must be some peculiarity of its climate, but of all the major cities in the country, Washington, D.C. had the lowest incidence of VTS, so there were not even enough victims to make it possible to try the old harmonizing strategy, even if I had wanted to. Just so I could look busy: I was still far from convinced of the moral rightness of the scheme, let alone its probability of success. We did run some CAT scans on a few patients, but the results were inconclusive. A young assistant came in all excited one day; he was convinced that The Syndrome had a connection with PMS and insisted we do some trial runs with progesterone. I had to spend the better part of a morning convincing him that The Syndrome was equally distributed between the sexes; women victims were possibly more susceptible during the week prior to menstruation but the overall rate of affliction was no greater than that of males. The only discernible differences were that women were somewhat less likely to try to conceal The Syndrome than men, and women who developed VTS during pregnancy did have a tendency to pass it on to their babies.
The President, himself, dropped into the lab one afternoon en route from one of those routine medical checkups. He was humming an aria from Cosi fan Tutte. My heart leapt, but it was clear he was far from being a victim of The Syndrome, because right afterwards he started talking normally, in that voice with which you are all so familiar. How much longer did we have to wait for results? The situation was becoming critical; according to the latest satellite reports, that very week the Russians had tested a pilot VTS program in Novosibirsk. The residual sound waves had been picked up from as far away as Japan to the east and France to the west.
“Don’t believe everything you hear, Mr. President.”
“But our national prestige is on the line, Dr. Vivace. The leadership of the free world, the future of mankind.”
I suppose I am a very lucky man. A few days later the President’s wife came down with a certifiable case of VTS. If that hadn’t happened, I’d probably still be twiddling my thumbs in the shiny laboratory. Instead, I managed to convince the President that the money should be turned over to a long overdue National Foundation Against the Spread of VTS, of which I immediately became the first director, a position I held until my appointment at Ohio State University.
Let me conclude by noting a number of hard facts about VTS:
1) As far as we know, the situation is permanent. VTS will forever be with us, as long as there is human life on this planet.
2) Some have suggested we attempt to keep the situation under control by training more harmonizers, either through enticement or coercion. The Citizens for Silence, one of the many grassroots organizations that has sprung up in recent years to fight VTS, has lobbied strongly for the drafting and training of all prisoners as potential harmonizers. This notion is unfeasible for at least two reasons: at the rate the epidemic is growing, we would soon run out of prisoners. And even if, by some miracle, we did have a wider pool of prisoners (it is true that the number of VTS-related crimes has dramatically increased), who is to decide whom it is worth curing? Is there any ethical way to resolve such a dilemma?
3) Clearly the answer is no. We must simply tolerate the situation and recognize that there is no Final Solution. I know this may come as a shock, but I say LET THOSE WHO HAVE VTS ENJOY THEIR CONDITION. At the same time we must recognize that the true aim of most victims is to get someone to harmonize with them. To minimize this risk we should
4) Quarantine all VTS patients and be extremely prudent. Do not, I repeat, do not sing at all, lest you accidentally harmonize with a victim. Remember, one person’s melody may easily be another person’s harmony.
5) Furthermore, we must be eternally vigilant about VTS carriers. And I must remind you that we are all potential carriers, my dear reader, even should The Syndrome appear to go into long periods of remission. As Albert Camus’ Dr. Rieux says at the end of The Plague: He “knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books; that the plague bacillus never disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day will come when, for the bane and enlightenment of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.”
6) As for myself, I have decided it is better by far to have VTS than to be condemned to a life in which one is utterly shut off from one’s own music. And by a sheer act of will, I shall, yes, I shall, reinfect myself as soon as possible, so help me God. If it takes the last drop of my energy and intelligence, I shall find a way to achieve this feat, to rediscover the glories of my own music.
So I take this opportunity to offer my resignation to Ohio State University. I shall spend the rest of my life singing what, when, how, and where I damn please, avoiding all potential harmonizers lest I accidentally be “cured” again. I am convinced that sooner or later I shall achieve this splendid goal and pass on my secret to all who would choose to do likewise. How can I fail to succeed? How, indeed?
And long after I am reinfected, when That Day all of us on this planet so dread finally comes, I know just how I’ll greet it:
I don’t wanna set the world on fire,
I just wanna start a flame in your heart.
Molto Vivace, M.D.