The first time he hears it, he thinks it is just the October night wind wailing at the gates, mournful.

 

When he hears it next, two weeks later, he wonders again if he is not imagining it. A warm thrumming, a metal thwang, three minors capped with a major.

He stares at his nails when his fingers give a warm jolt, the traitors. From high above, a single note echoes, vibrates.

Magnificent.                                                                                                                                                                  

It is just as mournful as before, though.

 

No one else seemed to notice, he reflects, though maybe their hearing and discernment, or just plain their interest, could be subject to scrutiny. Or, he thinks, his brain has joined his body at last. A casualty of war: both harmed beyond repair, both cracking at the edge and splintering towards the middle. Even so, it is music. His heart thumps just a bit stronger in his chest and his fingers tingle.

It is music. It is his.

For once, it’s nice to have such beautiful delusions.  

 

The delusions fail him that night, as the bedcovers, sweat-streaked and tangled, greet him as he gasps awake from hordes of chomping lizards and various flashes of light and pitches of screams. His breath seizes in his throat and he half-sobs, half-grimaces, trying to blur the images and deafen the sound.

In the dark of his room, he imagines the orchestra he might’ve played in, had he now a choice, or perhaps had he a different life. Dazzling spotlights glaring blue-white, stiff red curtains, waxed parquet floors and musicians aligned to a perfect grid, each wielding a bow, each drawing a string. He watches them play, sees their fingers gliding dexterous, their faces tight with concentration: intense, enraptured. But the music fails to sound.

He strains again, in a desperate, vain hope. When it fails, his eyes flood and he shoves his wet bedcovers at them, and at the keen rising in his throat.

Another casualty of war: a tough man, finally broken.

 

The laden plate before him is elbowed to the side. His eyes, schooled for what seems three lifetimes, lift to sweep the hall and survey the crowd for information, for dangers. He’s already frowning at a green clutch featuring a surprising set of students and thinking to follow up on it, before a distant section in his brain nudges him, this war is over.

His duty is over. He knows, but his muscles and reactions and fears – his essence! – they do not. 

He’s not even sure his body and mind and spirit can be found in the same chapter, never mind the same page.

 

He starts wondering what would be a deep sleep, without whispering images come to rustle a stinging haunt with a blare of his agony of guilt and frustrating hopelessness to seep acid deep into his bones and past the far side. To level his entire being to the same page: no part of him will know, your duty is no more.

What would be a deep sleep for a long, long time.

He even has the right instruments, but some section of his brain stays his hand.

 

The hand can be found wandering, returning to its home, where it grazes the cool vial as if to verify that it resided still in the dark of its pocket. Its broken fingers tremble at breakfast, lest this be the day. They stiffen at dinner around a tin goblet. Its owner drifts through the corridors with tumultuous thought driving directionless aim. In the dim light of the shadowed walls, the hand embraces the glass, its wielder aching in his waking doze, with the redundancy – nay, futility – of his strain.  

Fingers curl to unstop the cork as one would grasp a bow. The sigh is released, the muscles, in paradox, both relax and clench: some in fear, some in relief, both in anticipation. The eyes shutter and give jurisdiction to their manual counterpart. The mind cannot but sense their curl, playing its motion in its last song. The instrument of music, one measure of man, against the counter to its existence. One person, performing his orchestra of death.

It was always a paradox.

The mouth opens. The laughter rings vacant and brittle.

Somewhere, music plays.

 

He sits numbly and watches the fire spit sparks of orange while he plays with the small vial, now warmed with his blood. The orchestra plays a haunting yet warm and teasing melody, either in his mind, or somewhere else in the school – he doesn’t quite care – and he sends his brain to strain after the fading sound.

After a long while, he realizes that the silence has been sitting for some time.

His fingers move downward to redeposit their load in his pocket.

It is then that his brain questions, maybe the music was no delusion.

 

He starts listening, trying to hear the notes. He amps his ear and refines his receptors to the bustle of the students and the silence of shadow-darkened corridors. He shakes off his inner monologue, all varying versions of, your duty is no more, trying to tune into the sounds scuttling off the drafty walls.

Trying to hear the music one more time.

 

He listens, and hears the music of the school. The swish of tree branches in the keening wind, the clang of a fork hitting its plate. Thumps of footsteps rushing out of his classroom; the hiss of limeskin tossed into a potion. Distant yelps and shoves – insulted, pained, enraged – of the latest interhouse skirmish.

Liquid sloshing in his pocket.

Once every while, he even starts to hear the walls crooning softly.

He hears the memories, too. The wail of a newly orphaned infant, the slither of a creature, out to hunt. A pleased drawl, an ugly rage.

The cracking youthful voice, eroded with fatigue. Yells, shouts, a hoarse outcry –

The screaming silence of a suspended second –

                – the crackle of fire that erupts in his knuckles

Still, liquid sloshing in his pocket.

But those hauntingly beautiful chords, that ice blue glacier encasing a smoldering flame, tickle the edge of his auditory perception and dart away.  

 

With each new sunrise, his fingers take greater leniency in their journey downward. He watches dully, unable to stop their motion, and pictures them dancing, imagines them flying with a grace they could attain no longer. They twitch in response and suddenly, his feet move to lead the way to the place he knows is comprised of trash, of treasure.

It is only fitting that a broken instrument should serve for broken fingers.

 

In the cavernous halls, he caresses a violin missing a D string and sits at the bench of what is a quaint piano in dire need of a tuning. He brushes the A string, softly, and lifts his chin to the hum hanging in the air. His fingers ply the neck but lack the pressure to find purchase, to determine their placement, to create a varied note. He swipes the A and E string again, even more softly, and closes his eyes.

All at once, a chord rises to existence and suspends mid-hall.

He sits, petrified.

 

The sounds rise to the ceiling and swirl in circles.

The music slows and lifts and crashes from just beyond the long corridor he is at. A complex fingering with lower harmony and intermittent chords vibrates, muffled.

He sits on the creaky bench, not daring to move, too cowardly to open his eyes lest the air fall silent.

He sits until his back aches and his thighs sleep, until his fingers faintly tremble and the last chord fades into wisps.

A guitar, he decides. Rhythmic and bass, like a person singing low in the throat.

 

He wonders who cradles the instrument, who croons to the strings and strokes the glossy wood with callused fingertips. Who rustles the sheet music and props it upright and squints at the small notation.

Which individual bends over the corded steel just a couple of meters distant, making music.

He thinks about it some more.

He wonders –

His feet shuffle, but only to retrace his steps.

 

He waits for his legacy, that stolen birthright, from eve to morning, from dawn to dusk. Through the day, his fingers grip fabric, wrestle-mix various matters of solids and jerkily stir all manner of liquids. They grapple with screwing lids, with straightening lines and steadying vials. They’re wrong to him, removed.

With the descending veil of darkness, he feels them start to warm, their nerves struggling to entwine, to spark and produce. They urge his blood, his ears, his heart, into anticipation.

Listen to the music!

He would almost call them alive.

 

It’s the weekends, he concludes, when three weeks had crested and washed over, leaving a vague recollection of having passed. He has some notion of putting a fork to his mouth, of a stirring rod clutched in his fingers, of flinging himself to bed, perhaps.

He knows that he has stood each Friday evening, each Saturday and Sunday, waiting. Even so, he can only see a nebulous idea, unformed, the edges faded in his brain. Shoulders brushing tapestry or cold stone, fingers brushing cold glass, eyes half-mast, waiting, listening, hoping. A soft hum emerging from his throat, fingers muffled, a soft beat on his black robes. Somewhere far, he knows, the guitar notes mingle with his to create song.

 

Only when the harsh bite of winter declines to prolong its visit does another voice join his.

He’s always closed his mind from venture that there is someone, another human being, conjuring his music. That the privacy of his experience is at the mercy of a being comprised of flesh and blood. But he nods to the beat of the youthful voice, to the whimsical lyrics chasing the strings.

Perhaps its owner, in this way, heralds the spring.

The last gay chord still echoes when the player emerges from the wall. Black hair melds in the shadows, but the cat-like eyes blink green in the twilight. Fingers clutch a guitar –

… Those thieving fingers he knows so well. The ones that pulled the will through their arms, past their wrist and through their sinews, to fling harm outward, to hurl the curse with hate.

He feels the cold shuddering down his spine now, the fire that had shredded the sparks dancing in his fingertips now burning red streaks down his flesh.

How is it that the hands, those same fingers, sound the nectar of divine?

That music is… was his life.

The taint crawls up his skin and coats it in a gritty soot. He senses the scrabble of a thousand insects on his goose bumped arms. Sour congeals in his throat.

How can he share music with the one that has taken it from him?

 

For a long night, he mourns in bed. The clock ticks painfully each minute and the rustle of his bedcovers irritates his nerves. He burrows in them deeper, anyway, and tries to think of every animal he can name except for the black elephant in his dark, dark room.

Eventually, he thinks of the elephant.

He wonders what the best way to ignore that elephant would be.

 

When he revisits his brain babblings in the morning, his mind neatly, helpfully, sorts the solution to a chart:

Ignore the black elephant:

In the wild:         Leave. (He would miss the beautiful sunrise, the streaked sunset, the herds galloping across sun-drenched fields and hardened grass. The hippos lounging in water, muddy, the lions crouching, waiting to pounce, to kill, the b– He would miss them all.)

In civilization:   Avoid the zoo. (Not at all easier, though he wonders why.)

He would find a way to leave the beautiful wilderness of sound.

 

He tries. He really does. He tries to unlearn it, to block his ears and dull his senses. He attempts to barricade the sounds whispering in his eardrums. Endeavors to drown the waves with a mental dialogue, struggles to yank his focus from the boisterous decibels.

But still every morning, the rooster croaks from the village and the goats bleat in their pens. The knives scrape the plates and the milk splashes into goblets. The quills scratch on the parchment, the elbows hit desktops, the boots swish stone. The flames sigh gently; the potions burble over them. Students call and shout and whisper and sniffle and hiss and snark and plead and gossip and giggle; or they just plain talk. Even within his quiet four walls, the teakettle whimpers puffs of steam and the clocks ticks, still painfully.

And when it is very, very, quiet, the walls still croon.

He is not even sure if he is hallucinating when he hears the whoosh of blood pumping up his arteries.

 

It is much easier, he finds, to avert his eyes. Not to look at the raven curls, nor at the lamplight glinting off metal frames.

It is easier than unlearning a habit of four months. A habit of seventeen weeks and change, of one-hundred-twenty-two days, of nearly three thousand hours.  

He has spent more than ten million seconds trying to listen to the music.

It should be easier to ignore elephants with eyes that had never strayed to look at its hide.

It is not easy, though.

 

He is suddenly aware of the brightness of the torches and the dull gleam of the windows. He sees the clusters of students bunched grape-like in the corridors, bosom crests warily pronouncing their allegiance. Flickers of color – gold, green, red, black, yellow – taunt the corners of his vision.

Outside, the bright yellow-white sun mocks his eyeballs and flashes glare in garish green and purple. The vivid tangle of the newly blossoming plants shake their perky leaves; the soaring vultures swoop to him in greeting. Riots of flies assault his robes. His eyes are drawn to the tranquil blue of the lake and the slow ripples swelling across its surface. A toad hops madly at the lakeside, leaving tiny frogprints denting the sand.

He catches the looks, too. The concern mapping his colleagues’ faces, the lines worried into the mouth corners. The guilty glance of a student, as if he had committed a profound wrong to cast a sideways eye at his professor and judge. Judge guilt, judge pity.

He awaits his instruction with a combined fear and thrill. His vision cannot help but stray to those hands, knife flashing as the fingers strike down onto the gurdyroots. Steady a saucer and squeeze the slippery skin of pollolemons for juice, grasp a stirring rod and twirl it lightly.  …Those hands, those fingers, flying over the strings, dancing their rhythm, plucking a magic and disseminating it to sound. Those same fingers, jerking with exhaustion, clutching the instrument of his hurt, his loss.

His own fingers clench. He curls them inward and out, touches his palms, straightens them, exhaling on the creak of the joints. They ghost downward in muscle memory, but he jerks his hands up.

Keep them busy, he orders himself, he orders his fingers, his eyes, keep busy.

He reaches for a student’s knife and bends over to demonstrate the correct deboning procedure for catfish.

 

At dinner he looks over his plate and sees the masses of students eating, the late afternoon sun washing them in shadowed yellow.

A red tie catches his attention, as well as a student spitting pits into a plate, the haphazard line of dishes marching across the table, the students with their legs half-out the bench.

Why, he forces his brain to ponder, to appear uncaring? To leave as soon as dessert disappears?

With a suppressed shock, he realizes he has no answer.

When did he start noticing instead of analyzing?

Think, he urges his brain.

Notice! pushes his mind, warring with his dark, keep busy. Just… Look down. Close your eyes.

He stares down at his plate and finds it empty. White. Did he eat already or not at all? No answer rises to him. He sighs, his fingers reaching up to massage his forehead.

How long could one turn their own brain inside out?

 

Apparently, his feet have hijacked the rest of him, because he has no recall of ordering them upstairs. Nerve damage notwithstanding, he’s pretty sure his spatial awareness consigns the dungeons to the lower levels.

It’s only when he stops does he realize that he’s back at that door.

There’s music inside and this time, it will be his alone.

 

He sits on the same piano bench and picks up the violin, still D-stringless. A whisper; a string flies into his palm. He pinches it between his thumb and forefinger and starts threading it into the tiny hole. It misses; he grunts a curse, tightens his muscles and maneuvers it again. The string trembles in his grip before grudgingly acceding to the tunnel. He pulls it through and roughly bends the excess metal around the peg.

It takes ten full minutes, but after that, the violin is properly strung and tuned, a bow sheened with rosin and his robes sport puffs of white dust.

The first few notes, the bow scrapes the strings, like a mouse scratching inside the wall. Angled slightly, it skitters over the faint notes: the mouse, beadily eying the trap, scampering to escape.

He digs his fingers onto the neck the hardest he’s able. His notes waver clumsily. He pushes through the stanza and emerges shaky. His fingers feel like their joints have been hardened to marbles and then loosely ground into pieces.

But – music. It is his own, which makes it beautiful.

 

The raven curls still bounce in his line of vision: in class, across the corridors, at meals. He tries to avert his gaze, though his eyes commit the deed anyway. You thief, he wants to say, but even in his own head, the accusation is weak.

His fingers curl in his pocket; he lifts them out to study them, those digits that had served him thirty-odd years of pain and war. Just as broken as the rest of his body. Slowly healing, just like all parts of him.

 

 

It’s deep in May when he hears it again. Three major chords with a diminished, a sweet, bantering riff. Slowly, his feet crest the staircases, the echoes of winter guiding their way. The beat grows louder. He notes the door and pauses. Steadies himself. Opens his mouth –

 

If only G-d showed this scene to the angels, with the overhead view: Two individuals, apart, one bent over his instrument, fingering the strings with a hummed murmur; the other, a dark figure leaning against a stone wall awash with sunrays, snatches of notes escaping his lips.

Two individuals, apart, creating music.