Genre Fiction. Page - 349
“Synaesthesia; or Splay Sounds” whispers the lascivious secrets of college Professor Robert Ash’s last day of life through the tongue of his young protégé, Willem Radner—recalling memories from the confines of a cloistered mental institution in Colorado.
Radner recalls: Robert Ash waking, from troubling dreams, to a lonely house, a full garbage can and stacks of books over which he stumbles to an eventual brain-damaging end. However, his newly fractured mind does not prevent him filling the day, conversing with an Italian greyhound mistaken for his brother, urinating in a hallway of the university’s physics building or from receiving visions of a cowboy strutting exceptionally large hands. As the day progresses, the fluttering narrative glides between theater, poetry and prose to match Radner’s literary mind.
As the day concludes, Ash drawing nearer his final collapse, the reflections of master and apprentice coincide in a warped, blistered reality shaped entirely by a distorted existential perception.