The night of the Red House Fire, Yuri had stood up on one of the benches of the long picnic table in the kitchen, and cut the length of cord from which her circle of fifths had been suspended like a chandelier. The circle of fifths, which produced soft tones when played, required a quiet and unhurried atmosphere. It would surely be inaudible among the band of homeless now heading toward the Eddie Haskell Bunker. And you just knew that anything that had to be played by striking glass bottles very gently and very precisely with a length of pipe would not survive the attentions of the curious refugees. Sooner or later the crack running up the side of the A-flat bottle would get worse and start leaking. Or one of them would be chipped badly enough that she couldn’t bear looking at it and would have to go to the state liquor store and fork out cash for a replacement since she barely knew anyone who drank at all, much less bought Jack Daniels by the fifth and therefore might have an empty lying around.

So out to the garage with Yuri’s circle of fifths, where it hung from a rafter away from noise and busyness and where she might visit it when visited by a reflective mood. Which in the end was just as well. A circle of fifths was fun enough when you were wasted in a college dorm in Ann Arbor. It was useful enough when for the life of you, you couldn’t remember how to construct an F-sharp major chord with a diminished 9th. And when she was alone in the bunker and pensive, it was just the right sort of tool with which to sit in the kitchen and go a little Japanese, using nonstandard intervals and allowing plenty of space between notes. But as a vehicle for conveying any variety of moods, it was simply inadequate.

“Your violin has plenty of mood in it,” offered Phil one night as they got ready for bed.

“I’m thinking I’d like something a little more ambient.”

“Like wind chimes?”

Yuri slept and dreamed of wind chimes playing in modes. “Modes equal moods,” she announced the next morning in the kitchen after June had come down from her new bedroom, thrown up in the bathroom, and poured herself some coffee. “I need to think in terms of wind chimes with a variety of interval patterns, not just the standard scale.”

Phil said to June, “See? You can’t just go and tell someone stuff like that. You have to let them come to the realization on their own, discover it for themselves. Otherwise…” He held out his arms and shrugged.

June smiled at him. “I’m pregnant,” she said. “Would you make me breakfast?”

Yuri cleared a workspace in the garage and after a couple of days spent gathering, had collected a bicycle wheel with no tire, two clothes lines, eight drum sticks – the large kind with the padded ends used on base drums, a length of hollow bamboo, some scrap two-by-fours and a big plastic bucket with a hole in the bottom. For the exorbitant price of having to sit cross legged on the floor of the tipi and listen to a detailed lecture on the proper use of tools, Quinn allowed her to borrow his drill, table saw and whatever else she needed.

“It’s a semi-automated multi-moodal wind chime player,” she explained to Phil when he came home from work the next night and found her in the garage.

“I sort of thought that wind chimes didn’t need a player. I thought it was the wind that played wind chimes.” Phil was absent mindedly turning the bicycle wheel around on its axle that was placed in an open wooden frame.

Yuri considered this. “You’re right, of course. It’s an automated chime player, not a wind chime player.”

“Because … the wind’s not reliable?”

“Yes it isn’t. But not in the way you mean.”

“I have no idea what I mean.”

“The wind can’t be counted on, you see. It comes and goes as it pleases, which is just fine; that’s one of its better qualities. But when it comes, it comes with just no clue in the least about moods. It just passes through and chimes whatever’s hanging around to be chimed. And then it’s gone. It might be the kind of a day that calls for something gossamer and ethereal in the Lydian mode. Or maybe there’s drama afoot and something heavy and Doric is called for. Or maybe what you want is a little scrumptuousness, something in a mid-register Mixolydian. But the wind doesn’t know anything about that. No flexibility, no variability – and those are what’s called for here.”

Phil decided to show his support for the project by returning to the house to make a peanut butter sandwich. Yuri walked out through a sudden heedless gust of twilight summer wind to the truck and drove over the the house of Casey the metal worker. Two days later the first set of chimes were ready.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, the next seven hundred seventy-eight words ought to give the reader a general sense of how an automated multi-moodal chime player operates. It will be necessary to have at least a 778-word understanding in order to follow Yuri’s decision-making when, at 6 AM a couple of mornings later, Quinn and the neighbor across the street began yelling at each other about dandelions loudly enough to risk waking June, who was sleeping for two.

The tireless bicycle wheel was supported by an open wooden frame of roughly the dimensions of a queen size mattress. The wheel turned within the frame. Just above the wheel, one length of clothesline passed from the top left of the frame to the bottom right. Running parallel and separated by a couple of inches was a second length of clothesline from which small cupholder hooks dangled at one-inch intervals. The metal tubes that were the chimes hung from these hooks and because of the large number of hooks, the tubes could be arranged at whatever interval was needed to play any particular tune. The chimes were struck by one of the bass drum drumsticks, suitably modified by attaching a piece of steel to the drumstick’s padded end, turning it into a hammer, and affixing a small wheel to the other end of the drum stick, allowing it to slide down the length of clothesline, striking the hanging chimes as it went. The chime player could be played manually by simply returning the hammer to the top of the clothesline and sending it down again. The automation was accomplished using the wheel, to the rim of which were attached a half dozen sand-weighted sacks.

If that wheel were a clock face, the weighted sacks would be placed between 12 and 6. When the wheel turned clockwise due to the weight of the sacks, it acted exactly like the escapement of a clock. As it turned, one of the short metal rods soldered onto the rim would come around and catch onto the drumstick hammer that was at the end of a series of drum stick hammers lined up at the top of the clothesline, and send it rolling chimewards down the line.

For all of this to work and produce musical tones, the wheel could only be allowed to turn just enough to send off one of the hammers, and then, only once in a while. This is where the hollow bamboo and the bucket with the hole in it came into play. The bamboo, which was rather long, had a thin wooden dowel drilled through it close to one end. The bamboo became like a very off-center see-saw when the dowels were set into two grooves in a wooden support. But then, another piece of steel was attached to the short end of the bamboo so that the bamboo swiveled and came to rest with the short, weighted end on the ground and the long side pointing not quite straight up. And when it pointed almost straight up, it came to rest against one of the small metal protuberances on the rim of the bicycle wheel, preventing the wheel from moving.

Then the plastic bucket with the small hole in the bottom was hung over the open end of the bamboo and filled with water. As the water dripped out, the bamboo slowly filled until the amount of water exceeded the steel weight on the short end. Then the bamboo swiveled around the dowel, releasing the wheel which was pulled around clockwise by the weighted sacks, and as it moved, it knocked loose one of the hammers which began rolling down the clothesline, striking the chimes. When the bamboo tilted over, the water spilled out the open end and it then swiveled up again, catching and stopping the wheel.

Casey the metal worker fashioned the first set of chimes in the Locrian mode, which Yuri had always considered both mysterious and playful. He gave her chimes for the two octaves beginning on middle C and made three chimes in each note in much the same way that Bekka had needed to draw three sets of letters for the Object That Has No Name. Once fully charged up, the automated multi-moodal chime player was good for a half dozen tunes before all the drum stick hammers were at the bottom of the line, the weighted sacks were on the floor and the bucket was nearly empty. But setting it up again wasn’t too much more of a bother than having to go flip a record album you’ve been playing to the other side.

What Yuri wished for, and what she’d taken under advisement with unsatisfactory results, was the problem of how to start the machine automatically in the morning. What she really wanted was to remove the toxic aural after effects of the alarm clock going off by hearing the chime player answer the alarm with a mood-improving melody, but without Yuri’s having to trudge downstairs to the back porch where the player had been installed and set it to moving by filling the bucket.

When Quinn proposed to plant an area of the back yard in dandelions for the dandelion coffee kahlua he produced each year, no one at the bunker thought much of it. There was an unimproved area big enough for a small crop tucked between the almost-lawn, Yuri’s micro wheat field and the entrance to Quinn and Sheila’s tipi. Since it was maybe a little late in the year to start a crop from scratch, Quinn and George drove up to the hill and dug up the crop that was already well underway alongside the burnt out carcass of the Red House for transplantation at the bunker. On the way back, George counselled Quinn.

“You gonna have to keep an eye on those plants, you know. Can’t let ‘em go to seed and scatter every which way.”

“If I let them go to seed I won’t be able to make the kahlua.”

“Did happen couple years back. When you met Sheila. Got all involved in romancing your new soul mate and lost track of your agricultural interests. Whole shebang turned to seed and poof! gone with the wind.”

Quinn snorted. “Won’t happen again. Me and Sheila are pretty used to each other.”

“Thing is, we city folks now. Not country no more, least for a while. And city people got neighbors. And neighbors got lawns. An’ those lawn people be some hard core anti-dandelion.”

Quinn took it to heart and determined not to allow even a single dandelion to go to seed, a determination that would have been welcome news if only the lawn-abiding neighbors had been made aware of it. Instead, one morning at 6 AM Ed from across the street, who tended the sort of quality front lawn usually trod upon only by professional golfers, was passing by the bunker’s back yard while walking his dog and saw Quinn with a very large number of flowering dandelions lying on a canvas tarp. At first he assumed that Quinn was weeding the yard, and began to formulate some sort of neighborly remark, meant not only to convey a vigorous approbation but also to encourage further instances of this same behavior. But before he could say anything, Quinn dropped a large dandelion with a long tap root descending from it into a hole and began packing soil around it.

The discussion that followed woke up Yuri, who went from groggy, to what-time-is-it, to June’s-trying-to-sleep, to furious in what surely would have been shown to be world record time if anyone had asked Ammuna the Hittite to search the authoritative Akashic record. As Phil snored, she stomped down the stairs, threw open the back door and stood on the porch next to the automatic multi-moodal chime player, looking for something to throw at Quinn and Ed. At first she considered one or two of the chime player’s weighted bags, but correctly calculated that she couldn’t be accurate at that distance. So she released the stopper at the bottom of the bucket and watched as the first drops fell into the open mouth of the bamboo. After a few moments the chimes would play and the air would be detoxified of stupid disputes. In the mean time, she stomped through the yard to where Quinn and the neighbor had stopped yelling and turned to watch her come.

By the time she reached them, she had realized that an outburst was going to contribute to the event and not diffuse it. A homeopathic dose of rage was what was needed, she thought. She pointed to back at the house, to June’s upstairs window. She whispered, loud and hoarse. “A pregnant woman is in there, trying to sleep.” Then she jabbed her finger at the two men. “Stop. It. Now.” At which moment a series of clear, beautiful notes sounded – somewhere in timbre between bells and woodwinds. Twelve notes, then a slight pause and four final tones. Yuri turned and walked back to the house. When she got to the top of the stairs her alarm clock went off.