Sounds Like Titanic

by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

  The Nose-Picking Section

  New York City, 2002

  After your interview with Becca, you realize that you must face two conflicting facts:

  You have been hired to play violin for a famous composer who performs with the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center.

  You lack the skills to play violin at that level. It would take you at least a decade of nonstop lessons and practice to even approach that level of performance. But you don’t have a decade. You have two days.

  In the face of these truths, you do the only thing you can think of to do: You take out your violin and begin to practice.

  The first thing you notice as you sight-read The Composer’s compositions is their rhythmic simplicity: rows of neat quarter notes march along the sheet music in large print, like rhythmic clapping exercises for senior citizens. The melodies are also simple. Short, undemanding phrases repeat across the page at a slow tempo.

  But then, right in the middle of a simple musical phrase, the notes launch into the violin’s stratosphere—sometimes called the nose-picking section since the violinist’s fingers are so close to the face—where the highest pitches are produced. Playing super-high notes at a slow tempo is a musical tightrope walk. The higher up the violin one goes, the closer together the fingers must be to hit the right note, and the more obvious it is if the fingers are off by even a fraction of a millimeter. Unlike the lower regions of the instrument, where the fingers can vibrato or sway to create a frequency that mathematically averages into the right pitch, the highest notes on a violin are too close together to allow for much, if any, movement. A wayward speck of cuticle crust on a violinist’s finger can cause a high note to become painful to hear—audience members will instinctively reach for their ears.

  You puzzle over these passages, your fingers tapping calculations on the fingerboard. Despite your years of lessons, you never fully mastered the treacherous nose-picking section. You are not even fluent in reading the highest notes, a deficit that forces you to keep playing scales while you practice so that you can climb, as if on a musical safety ladder, to the correct top note.

  Panicked by the sheet music, you lie down on your dorm room bed, your violin resting on your stomach. You close your eyes and focus on listening to one of The Composer’s CDs from start to finish. Simple string melodies sweep into quick climaxes, buttressed by the high wail of an Irish-sounding flute. It is like listening to a synthetic sea—the sound of one wave blending into the next—languid, insistent, and faintly menacing.

  Like movie soundtracks, The Composer’s albums feature one or two distinct melodies that have been slightly altered or rearranged on each track to produce a new “song.” The songs are short and don’t appear to be organized in any particular order, any particular chronology. The feeling you get from listening to them can only be described as watching yourself from a distance, as if you were a character in someone else’s implausibly dramatic movie.

  West Virginia

  1985

  You ask your parents for a violin for your fifth birthday. When no violin arrives, you ask for a violin for Christmas. Then again for your sixth birthday. Seventh. Eighth. There are no violin teachers in your region of West Virginia, your parents explain. Not even Santa can fix this problem.

  You beg your parents to rent Sarah and the Squirrel again from the town’s dusty video rental shop, but they refuse. Eventually the VHS disappears from the rental’s shelves. But the music from Sarah and the Squirrel remains in your head. You think of this music as “Brahms” for nearly a decade, until one day, at thirteen years old, you hear a recording of Vivaldi’s “Winter” and the synapses of musical memory in your brain explode into applause. Another decade later, in your twenties, you find a copy of Sarah and the Squirrel on eBay and confirm that the music is, indeed, Vivaldi’s “Winter.” But before these discoveries, you are vigilant against forgetting this music. You play the music inside of your head each night in bed before falling asleep, your eyes tracing the comet-shaped plaster crevices on your bedroom ceiling. You play the music each night to remember it, because you must remember it. The music makes you feel something that is not quite sadness, but not happiness either. These particular notes that you heard only once make you feel something akin to seriousness. What is this seriousness? you wonder. Eventually you realize: The seriousness of the Sarah music is the same as the seriousness of the adult world. You have found the key—serious music—that will unlock the secrets of being a grown-up.

  Your desire to be grown up is inextricably linked with your desire to do the one thing that is most revered by the adults around you: work. Work is in the Appalachian air you breathe, in the coal smoke of the nearby Mount Storm Power Station, which channels electricity to much of the East Coast, each unit of coal someone’s work, someone’s dinner, someone’s television running all night on low volume until it’s morning and time to return to work. At school you have “workbooks” and “worksheets” and you complete yours as fast as you can, so that you can do more work. You aim to get more work done than any other kid, for this will surely result in you being more loved than any other kid. Minutes after getting off the school bus you set to strong-arming your little brother into “playing school,” a game in which you assign him “homework” and yell at him when he refuses to do it. But the game you most want to play is music, a serious game that even serious adults “play.”

  If you could play the music from Sarah and the Squirrel, you would unlock all adult mysteries. You sense secrets everywhere, perhaps because many of your elementary school friends are going through their own personal versions of Sarah and the Squirrel—lives full of hunger and cold and abuse—though whatever Dickensian nightmare they inhabit survives in your memory only as hazy images: the boy who smells like garbage and scratches his tiny, scab-covered body until he bleeds all over his desk. The pale girl who smells like cigarettes and steals your favorite purple pencil. The boy who wears the same torn-to-hell red sweatsuit every day and screams “JACKASS!” at the gym teacher while kicking the brick school wall with his disintegrating sneaker. The cagey look that makes some of the quieter boys look like frightened rabbits. The names of the kids in your class that invoke mountain fate, branded at birth, an inescapable geographical destiny: Stony, Dusty, Misty.

  As your young ears strain to hear the world’s secrets through a few remembered notes, your parents inhabit a world with too few secrets. Your social worker mom drives up the icy switchbacks of mountainsides to deliver WIC stamps and vaccinations to people living in one-room shacks. She arrives at one home with the intention of teaching a mother how to play with her toddler with toys on the floor, only to discover that the house has no floor—just five inches of tramped-down soot from the wood stove. On another visit, she notices a baby sleeping in a bureau drawer, a few inches away from a coiled copperhead.

  Your dad, a family practice doctor running a clinic for the rural poor, also makes house calls. He carries an actual old-fashioned black doctor’s bag full of tongue depressors and bandage wrap. He treats patients suffering the botched results of mountain-home remedies: abscesses turned gangrenous after being wrapped in deerskin poultices, the bloody infected sockets where rotten teeth once festered before being partially pried out with a farm tool. Then one day a flood sweeps through the gorge and washes your dad’s clinic away. He takes out a large loan, rebuilds the clinic, and works punishing hours, sometimes taking patient payments in jam, beans, and on one occasion a five-gallon bucket of peas—your mom hunches to shell them while nine-months pregnant with your brother.

  One January evening a patient drives up to your house and offers payment in the currency of sweet summer corn, frozen on the cob. Your dad, making the most of the occasion, moves the family supper table to the back porch and, even though it is dark and snowy outside with wind shrieking down the mountainsides, everyone munches salted corncobs while wearing winter coats. The idea is to pretend it’s July.

  And maybe this is why, as you
get older, you increasingly feel that there is something secret and menacing around you: Your parents are working so hard (“You have to work hard” is one of their favorite expressions) to alchemize mountain snow into tropical sunshine, to munch merrily on corncobs, as if your mom isn’t handing out prescriptions for food all day; as if your dad hasn’t just staged a mass rabies inoculation (someone brought a pet raccoon into a trailer park full of kids); as if your teenage babysitter hasn’t attempted suicide by overdosing on pills while she was supposed to be watching you (she was still better than West Virginia day care, your mom points out, years later). You know the sinister music in your head is important because it speaks of something true about your world, something that the adults are attempting to hide from you (It’s summertime! Don’t forget your coat!). No doubt they are doing this to protect you, a child, from the harshness of the Appalachian poverty and despair that surrounds you. What they don’t realize is that their very effort to conceal this harshness is what tips you off to its existence.

  The taste of parsley is one of your earliest memories; your grandmother plucking it from a patch that grows a few feet away from your grandfather’s yard-pile of old broken lightbulbs. This is just the sort of inconsistency—a plentiful, parsley-flavored middle-class life among the broken ruins of coal-fired poverty—that you begin to notice as a kid.

  Picking around the carcass of a wrecked car on a mountainside ravine near your grandparents’ house—in an Appalachian paper mill town where the air has a permanent sulfuric stink—you find a jam jar with an unmarred red gingham label still displaying ripened red strawberries. But the jar is full of dirt. You wonder how the dirt got in there, since the lid of the jar is still sealed tight. You can recognize hypocrisy in a dirt-filled jam jar, taste it in parsley that grows in a trash garden, smell it in the kerosene heat, the cigarette smoke, the paper mill stink, the booze-crazed eyes, the chicken-guts smell that clings to the kids whose parents work at the plant. (“Your kids goin’ to Chicken Plant University?” another doctor asks your dad. “I hear the tuition is cheep cheep!” A not-joking joke in a town where even some of the most well-off kids drop out of high school to work at the plant. One girl your age, who lives a few miles up the road from your grandparents’ house, will witness “chicken-stomping” at this very plant, a practice that disgusts her so much she decides to quit her job there and join the army, figuring that the army can’t be any worse than chicken-stomping. Her name is Lynndie England.)

  You don’t know what to do with the jam jar, the chicken stink, the sinister mountain fog that is everywhere, but the adults pretend to ignore when you are in the room. It seems the only thing you can do is listen for it. You hear it in the four measures of Vivaldi’s “Winter” that you can still remember from Sarah and the Squirrel, and once you make the connection between the music and the mountain fog you play the notes over and over again inside your head.

  You paw up the trash-strewn ravine. The sky is low and gray, the color of the cinder blocks the men in your town manufacture from ash and dust. The dirt-filled strawberry jam jar is in your denim coat pocket. Vivaldi is in your head. The music you hear is like the blaze-orange clothing the men wear on the mountainsides while deer hunting in autumn. The music is like a bulletproof vest, a coiled copperhead, a rabies shot. The music is both a warning and a talisman. The music tells you things: You’re not imagining this. Better children than you die in the snow for no reason.

  The music says: What’s hidden beneath this picture of strawberry jam?

  The music says: This isn’t a Disney movie. Death doesn’t just take the wicked villain. Look at that dirt in the jam jar. It will take you. It will take everyone, and everyone, and everyone.

  The music says: What you feel is real. Follow me. Run.

  New York City

  2002

  You wait for Yevgeny, the Russian violinist, at the northwest corner of 115th and Broadway. You have just gotten off an eight-hour shift as a receptionist for a ritzy uptown spa and are still wearing the mandatory uniform—a white shirt, khakis, and red sneakers. You sip on your dinner: a strawberry milkshake. You recently dyed your black hair to a shade of smoldering maroon, and with your red hair, your red shoes, your mini-backpack, and your pink milkshake, it occurs to you that you look more like a preteen on her way to a babysitting gig than a twenty-one-year-old soon-to-be professional violinist. You ditch the milkshake.

  A white sedan pulls up to the corner and a tall, thin man steps out. Without introducing himself, he points at your small book bag and asks, “That’s all you’re bringing?”

  Having pictured him as the rotund, jolly, bearded father from Fiddler on the Roof, you are surprised that the real Yevgeny is so young—no more than twenty-five years old. He has white-blond hair, pale skin, and a facial expression that suggests resigned gloom.

  You take your place in the passenger seat and he throws a Satellite Radio instruction manual in your lap.

  “Pick some music,” he says as he pulls away from the curb.

  You search for a classical station, thinking that when it comes to long car rides to New Hampshire with gloomy Russian violinists, it’s best to play it safe with the music. As a Berlioz symphony reaches its climax, the frantic entanglements of the Bronx yield to the tunnels of foliage that line Interstate 95 in southern Connecticut. Yevgeny stares at the road ahead of him in a determined silence that makes you feel awkward, as if you have both been forced on a blind date. You make a few attempts to discuss the classical music on the radio, but Yevgeny doesn’t respond. You stare out the window.

  An hour or so into the trip, you ask him what music he likes to listen to, other than classical.

  “Mostly techno,” he says.

  “Oh,” you say, and turn the station from “Symphony Hall” to “Electric Area,” transforming the car from an eighteenth-century Austrian concert hall into a Brooklyn rave circa 1997.

  “So what is this gig like?” you ask, trying to sound like a professional musician who uses the word “gig” casually.

  Yevgeny doesn’t respond to your question for a long time, as if pondering the futility of human speech.

  “What do you want to know?” he finally asks.

  “Um . . . well, I listened to the music on the CDs . . .”

  “And?”

  “It’s nice . . .”

  “You like it?” he demands.

  “Well, I mean, to be honest, I’d never heard of The Composer before I was hired.” You hope this information won’t be used against you.

  Yevgeny hunches over the steering wheel and glares at the road.

  “So, who is he?” you ask timidly. “Who is The Composer?”

  “He writes the music,” Yevgeny says.

  “I know, but who is he?” you insist. “I mean, like, have you met him?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “I don’t know. He’s weird.”

  “Have you worked for him a long time?”

  “A few years.”

  “Where did you study violin?”

  “Moscow Conservatory.”

  “Wow,” you say. “That’s the best . . .”

  “Listen, by tomorrow, you’ll want to quit,” Yevgeny says. He looks at you, and you realize he is actually concerned. “Before this job I worked at a butcher’s shop. I didn’t speak much English. I almost sliced off my fingers . . .” He trails off for a moment.

  “The only reason anyone stays in this job,” he continues, “is because they’re desperate. I doubt that you’re desperate.”

  You want to respond that you are, in fact, plenty desperate; that for the past three years you have been selling everything from long-distance telephone scams to massage oils to your own eggs, which fetch you tens of thousands of dollars on the Upper East Side egg donation market—all to pay for your college tuition. But you don’t say anything about this. Not yet. Instead, you decide to tell Yevgeny the truth about your musical skills.

  “I sho
uld tell you something,” you say carefully. “I’m not a real violinist.”

  Yevgeny doesn’t respond. The setting sun reflects off his white-blond hair, giving him the look of a regal bird.

  “What I mean is,” you say, backpedaling, “I was pretty good in high school but my high school was in the middle of nowhere—like Appalachia? Do you know where it is? Yes? Okay . . . and I’ve barely taken lessons in college and I’d be lucky to make it into the back row of a college orchestra and I haven’t trained at Julliard or Moscow Conservatory and, honestly, I don’t even know why Becca hired me, it must have been a mistake, but I feel so lucky to even be here, so you don’t need to worry about me quitting because I’m the one who should be worried because I mean you’re a real professional . . .”

  Yevgeny is laughing. His laugh is distinctly Russian, more of a sly chuckle than a raucous guffaw, raucous guffaws having been outlawed during Soviet times. Still, making Yevgeny laugh feels like a great accomplishment, even if you have no idea what is so funny.

  “Don’t worry,” he says. “You’re going to do fine. Everything will make sense tomorrow, you’ll see. Don’t worry about it anymore tonight. Are you hungry?”

  “Are you?”

  He pulls into a Burger King, adding that he never allows stops on these road trips because he can’t stand most of the other Ensemble musicians. You beam at this circuitous compliment, at the idea that Yevgeny likes you, or at least finds you less annoying than other people. You order the kid’s meal and it comes with a toy—scratch-and-sniff stickers that look and smell like feet, boogers, and armpits. As you eat, Yevgeny scratches and sniffs each sticker, first with caution, then with increasing glee.

  “It does smell like a fute!” he exclaims, scratching and sniffing the foot sticker over and over. He pronounces “foot” as “fute.” “Try it! Try it! It smells like a fute—a real fute!”