Crescendo Read online

  Is the woman listening? The harp’s body runs down the length of hers, its shoulder pressed against her own. The soundboard sits at the precise place that once held her child. This is no coincidence. The music enters that abandoned house, reconstructs it, makes it livable again. It moves into the deepest part of her, beyond her bones and into her soul. Yes, her soul is still there. The hopeless times are not when it takes flight. They are when it takes root.

  DIRGE. She did not need the book to teach her this after all, nor could she refuse to learn it. The bereaved know it intimately, instinctively. It becomes their entire repertoire; they are virtuosos against their will.

  Her music comes to a rest. So, for a moment, does her misery. The audience members quietly reassemble themselves, tending to the sites where the song has slit them open. Even the hound sprawls on its back and presents its belly for a rub. This time the woman needs no prompting to take the harp with her. She places her hand on the mare’s withers to guide it, and they both step over the harmless pup. The webs, weakened by the spiders’ tears, fall apart at her fingertips, and she and the mare enter the cave. Together they navigate its unlit passages, feeling their way along the walls, oblivious to what lies before them. From the murk comes a voice that cuts through the cold air—

  “Here you are. Do come inside.”

  LESSON 3

  Lament

  The two figures that sit before them say no more. Their massive bodies are carved from the cave and the darkness, shadow and stone. They are made entirely of rock: the spines that hold them erect are a column of boulders, the planes of their faces steep cliffs. Strands of black widows clasp their throats, a living, lethal necklace.

  The mare staggers backward into the unfriendly embrace of stalactites, which dig their bony fingers into its flanks. Its eyes plead with the woman to retreat into the forest, but the entrance to the cave has sealed off, and nothing can pass through it: not light, not life. It turns out that it is not so difficult after all to stumble into the underworld. All one needs to do is follow the breadcrumbs that despair leaves behind.

  Are we dead? the woman mouths to the mare. A flicker of hope kindles within her chest. The antlike being stomps its feet in frustration and puts it out.

  “Are they here?” she asks. No one responds. But where else would her husband and child be?

  She creeps closer to the two enormous monoliths, the king and queen of stone, and kisses the slopes of their toes. This is everything for which she has wished. “Please, are they here?” she cries, throwing herself at the queen’s mountainous feet in desperation, in gratitude. “Let me see them. Return them to me. Let us all leave here together.”

  They are cold, unrelenting. Erosion is accomplished by years, not tears. What could be more stubborn and unyielding, what could be harder and more impenetrable, than stone? Only death. The woman is not being given what she wants, because death does not do that—it takes it. And now that there is neither air nor exit, it is going to take her too.

  “I’m so sorry,” she says to the mare. “I didn’t mean to bring you with me.”

  The mare replies, I would follow you anywhere, for although horses speak in images, they are also fluent in love. What remains unsaid in any language is the haunting knowledge that its breaths are borrowed.

  What does one do while waiting to die? The question applies to us all, though perhaps less acutely. The woman presses on the mare’s back, urging it to lie down, to relax. She sits next to it and traces the contours of its aching leg, its tendons and its muscles, feeling them one last time. In her touch are countless apologies. They belong to the mare, of course, yet also to herself, to a life that had shrunk and atrophied to the point where it was no longer viable. How had she lost such control of it? She imagines herself as a newborn baby, for whom the future was supposed to be an open road stretching into the horizon, not a cave of remorse. I’m sorry, she says to her also. You deserved so much more.

  The air thins. The mare slips into sleep and dreams of its mother. The antlike being is numb. It is petrified. It can’t accept what is coming, but knows it’s coming regardless.

  The woman chooses to fill her last moments with song. Music and silence are intimately connected, complements rather than opposites. Silence is the predecessor; it mates with sound and gives birth to music. This time is different. First she will play the music. Then the silence will follow.

  She takes out her harp and her book, the one her husband had once held in his hands. It is like touching him again. Soon enough, she will be.

  LULLABY, CRESCENDO, CODA—some of the pieces are too complicated, too odd. She does not have the skill to play them yet, and now she supposes she never will. She pages through the earlier sections and comes to a stop on LAMENT.

  A LAMENT IS A SONG FOR THE DYING.

  There is no other instruction. She does not need it. Everyone she has ever loved is dying. Surely she has the skill to play this.

  How strange it is, to perform one’s own funeral song, or maybe it’s less strange than sad. In any case, what choice does she have? No one is left to do it for her.

  She smooths the page and begins. There is little light with which to read, though with her fingers sparking against the strings, with the faint glow floating from the mare’s motionless body as it begins to die, there is enough. Songs of unconsciousness do not use much light. They could not stay unconscious if they did.

  She does not even know what she is asking until the song asks it for her. If I cannot have time with them, then let my own time end. If I cannot leave here with them, I cannot leave at all. You took them both. How could you forget me?

  Her hands sweep across the harp and become the white light, which wings its way to the king and queen. Sorrow takes flight from the strings, a mourning dove. The dove flies between the bars and perches on the notes, teaching the woman its tune. It has never mourned itself before, though that is simply a variation on the melody, a riff. Minor chords are the sound of crows being born. Harmony is the sound of one flying above another. They circle the king and queen and nest in the crags of their bodies.

  The music reaches out to the queen and gently places a heart in the cavern of her chest. Then, with featherlight hands, it lifts the heart back out. Over and over the heart is removed, the heart is restored. This is what songs of sadness do.

  The queen marvels at the sensation. She knows what the woman does not: that death is as dull as rock, no more intelligent nor worthy of grief. Yet the woman knows what the queen, sequestered in her cave for all eternity, does not: that death happens not to the ones who have gone, but to the ones who remain.

  The queen’s new heart grows a hairline crack. The lament seeps inside and widens it. She had always pitied these fleeting humans, doomed to live for hours instead of epochs, to tell time in biology instead of geology. Now one of them stands before her, praying for time to expire. The true misfortune, she begins to understand, is not to be born mortal; it is to love someone born mortal. She considers the flinty expanse of the king as she wonders what loss might mean. Mountains, after all, are seldom mourned.

  Though his face is as blank as slate, something inside him is shifting. A pebble tumbles down the precipice of his cheek and crashes below. The ground crumples. So does he. The impact breaks the earth open. For this reason, songs of sadness must be handled with care; they can trigger disturbances deep below the surface.

  The quake shatters the sealed entrance to the cave. What had once seemed indestructible is now rubble. Air pours in. The mare swallows it, ravenous. The woman scrambles to her feet and grabs hold of the mare’s mane. This is their final chance, for the opening could seal over again at any time. She is astounded by her actions. The antlike being must have woken up. Or perhaps she has.

  They are a step away from the threshold of the cave when the queen speaks. An avalanche of rocks and dirt erupt from her dusty mouth. What she says makes the woman turn around, leave behind all thoughts of leaving. What she says sends a trem
or through her. What she says is: “The child was a girl.”

  The queen clears the debris from her throat. “She was the size of a whisper.”

  “A girl.” It makes the child real. It makes the lament real.

  “You would not be able to see her, not with the kind of eyes you have.”

  “A girl,” the woman repeats, lost in the discovery of her daughter.

  The king, still recovering from his earthquake, adds, “Your husband did not need to come here so soon. You could have had many more years with him.”

  The tectonic plates of the woman’s body slide, threaten to buckle. “What do you mean? He wasn’t supposed to die?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Then why did he?”

  The queen plucks a spider from her neck. She holds it in the broad hills of her hand and brings it toward the woman. Widow to widow, the woman and spider regard one another. The spider, slowly at first, spins its web on the queen’s outstretched hand. A corresponding web takes shape in the woman’s mind. The spider weaves the first strands. The woman sees herself meeting her husband, falling in love. The web expands; they marry, build their home. The spider is frantic, weaving madly, almost flying across the queen, connecting each of the silky pieces in a final, deadly web, and equally rapidly in the woman’s mind the pieces of her husband’s last day come together.

  She lights the candle. The mare calls. She slams the door. The candle tips. She disregards the flash of the flame and continues toward the barn. The web traps prey. The fire traps husband. The house burns. The husband burns. The web falls into place. The web falls apart. The web falls from the woman’s eyes.

  It was she who asked the question, and now it is she who answers it. She lowers her face in shame, understanding that she is not just a widow but a black widow, and tells the king and queen what they already know: “He died because of me.”

  The hand of sadness had followed the woman through the forest, never once letting up its pressure on her back. Now a second hand joins it, the hand of guilt, and the two interlace their terrible fingers. It is difficult, nearly impossible, to bear the weight of grief, but to add the weight of guilt? The human body is not designed for this. The bones will fracture, the brain will flee.

  “No,” she says. No. This cannot have happened.

  “Yes,” the king corrects her. “You caused the fire.” His words are matter-of-fact, and it is their factuality that pains her most. Life should be moldable, malleable. It should allow her to smooth her fingerprints from its surface and start over. Life is not clay, though. It is as solid as rock, set in stone. “The burns were severe, yet it was the smoke that killed him. He could not breathe.”

  The woman empathizes. She, too, cannot breathe.

  “It isn’t true,” she begs. “It can’t be real. What have I done? Please, please—” But death just sits there and stares blankly ahead, stony and silent.

  For every shock there is an aftershock. To survive both is asking too much.

  So, what now? the woman says to the antlike being. How do I live with this guilt? And why should I be allowed to? The antlike being is unsure how to reply. This is a problem, for if it does not have the answer, then how could she?

  She can find no solution. Perhaps she can find a loophole. She runs her mind over her memories, listening for the sour string, the one that, if fine-tuned, would restore her life to harmony.

  She thinks back to the morning before the fire, this time envisioning that she and her husband are far from their house, somewhere else. Anywhere else. Death comes calling, but they aren’t home to answer the door. The electricity falters or it doesn’t; no one is there to see it happen. When they return the next day, it is to a house full of sunlight, and so he goes on living.

  She thinks back to the night of the fire. Instead of ignoring the attraction between the candle and the tablecloth, she rushes to pull them apart, and so he goes on living.

  She thinks back to the evening when they first met, to a glance she doesn’t acknowledge, a smile she doesn’t reciprocate. And so he goes on living.

  She thinks back to an afternoon when she had been cleaning the mare’s stall, and a barn cat ran in with a blue jay in its mouth. She’d cried out, for she loved to watch the birds hopping through the grass, and here was the cat tossing its soft body in the air as if it were a rag doll and not a sacred container of soul. No matter what the cat did to it—picked it up, threw it around, tore its breast apart—the jay stared ahead, stared at nothing. Its eyes were wide open, yet they were vacant. It was this combination that disturbed the woman, that made her unable to look away, when all she wanted to do was look away.

  The eyes. The eyes kept staring at her. What were they asking?

  Now she knows. They weren’t asking anything of her. They were preparing her. They were showing her how the jay’s death—one of the most, if not the most, defining moments of its life—had been circumscribed in the life of the barn cat before either of them had even come into existence. How it had been written into the story of a tomcat brushing past a tabby, in the urgent desire, in the sex, the release, the love. In the kitten that started gestating in the mother, in the destiny that started gestating in the kitten. The jay’s death was decided in a stranger before its life was yet begun. And then on a day just like every other day before it and ultimately unlike any other day before it, its fate collided with the now-grown cat. Don’t condemn the cat, the jay was telling her. It is merely following orders.

  This is what she’d tell the jay: The cat could have walked away. Destiny is the meeting, not the murder. And it, unlike life, is made of clay.

  Before she met her husband, before they had even been born, she was already circling him like a cat. They were drawn to each other—not, as they had thought, to begin a life together, but to end one. Probability is not the same as inevitability, however. There were innumerable days, minutes, moments when she too could have chosen to walk away. If only she could spread them around her like a sea, turn back their tide. Then he would still be alive.

  If only she could touch time, reinvent it, reverse it.

  If only she had never loved him, then she could have saved him.

  If only. If only. If only.

  This is the most familiar song in mankind. Everyone knows it by heart.

  The king and queen are watching a mind crumble to dust. It is inconceivable to them that a creature should be so fragile and soft. Then again, what do they know? They have never had to venture outside the cave or into the crevasses of the psyche. They are not the ones who must struggle like Sisyphus under the weight of accumulating indignities and atrocities. They have not felt the countless ways in which life is heavier than any boulder, a burden greater than stone.

  The two of them reposition themselves on their thrones and turn to each other. The process takes ages, though at last they find themselves face-to-face. Something must be done. They cannot go on witnessing the unraveling of a soul.

  The king speaks for them both. “Your husband has died. We cannot return him to life, but we can return him to you,” he says, “if you will leave here and leave us alone.”

  The woman looks at him in disbelief. Could it be that death is less solid than she had imagined?

  “I will,” she says.

  “He will trail your every step and follow wherever you go. He will be with you always.”

  The relief is physical. It becomes her breath, her bones.

  “There is a condition,” he tells her.

  Her heart is in her throat, in place of her lament. “Yes?”

  “You cannot look back at him.”

  “For how long?”

  “The rest of your life.”

  “Then how will I see him? Or hold him? And how will I know he’s there?”

  No one responds. Death poses such questions; it does not answer them.

  She hesitates. To what, exactly, is she agreeing? To never again see his face, to never feel the body she loved so much that one day,
when she touched it, an entirely new body took form?

  Yet there is no alternative.

  “Give him to me,” she says, and runs with the mare out of the cave before any of them can change their minds.

  LESSON 4

  Time Signature

  Where is the husband? He must be behind her, though his footsteps on the fallen leaves make no sound. Is he back in his burned body or born in another: a gold-eyed fox, a moon half full, a melody come to mind? Would these be any less him—or more than before? Or is he a spirit, intangible and bodiless, a mist and a mystery? His return was promised. His form was not.

  He is with her. This is what she has been told. That he is gone from her line of vision, not her life. Could it be that death does not have the power to separate, only to obscure—that love can be invisible yet indivisible? Then grief, too, would vanish from sight.

  Still, he cannot be seen, touched, heard—only presumed. A person without a body is a belief. How can she know that he is there, that he is real? Can she love someone whom she cannot sense, or is that merely to love his memory? Like him, faith and trust follow somewhere far behind her, somewhere inaccessible. Doubt stays fixed by her side, a talkative companion that monopolizes the conversation, filling the lulls with its incessant questions, as though scared of what the silence might say.

  Sometimes she wonders if he is there and a subtle breeze slides across her shoulders, the way his hands used to, or the trees that she brushes past smell inexplicably of coriander and clove, the way his skin used to. At other times she wonders what the space between them is like. How dense, how impenetrable the distance: if it is as close as a hair’s breadth or as vast as a dimension. She wants to ask him what he has seen, but she is afraid he would answer her with blue-jay eyes or, worse, eyes of fire. That she cannot look back at him is, in some moments, a small mercy.