by Amy Weiss
They are the eyes of her daughter.
She had never seen them, not in this lifetime. The daughter had reversed direction, drifted upstream instead of down, raised herself from time’s depths rather than submerging in them. But the woman had once held the daughter’s body inside hers, and she knew it as well as she did her own. Besides, recognition is a sense that lies beyond sight.
In the light they behold each other, and they are both each other’s child, and each other’s mother.
“Love,” the woman says, and the word, the first she has ever spoken to her child, comes barreling out with force from behind a dam of grief.
“Love,” the child replies, swaddling the woman with its cashmere softness.
“Loss,” the woman says, curling her fist around the child’s fingers, feeling them inside hers.
The child nods as she rests her palms on the woman’s belly, that sweet, velvet house.
The woman lowers her eyes and says, “Guilt.” Her voice breaks as she turns her head and adds, “Shame.” The disintegration of her child has been an unsolvable riddle. Why would death not spare something so pure? Her husband had at least lived out some of his days. Her child had lived none and could not be to blame. So where else could the blame lie?
The child knows that it is no riddle, no accident; that she is the cause and not the casualty. She gently lifts the woman’s chin. The woman looks up at her daughter—how could she have pulled away from her, even for a second? What strength there is in shame, to turn your face from someone you love—and watches as time unfurls in her eyes. The woman sees herself with her husband in a bed glowing with moonlight. Sees how a kiss opens the floodgates, grants permission for one soul to enter the other. Hears the song she sings in his ear, the song he sings inside her; how their bodies are exquisite instruments that, with the breath, the lips, the fingertips, can too be made to sing; how, when played together, the music they make is written in the key of God. Their bodies remain in bed while their spirits rise, coming close to a silvery being who stands outside a lake, so close that they can almost touch her. Instead, the music does. The being becomes enchanted with it, knowing that the melody is meant for her. It beckons her into the water. She slips inside and glides through time, searching for the source of her song.
She enters time but does not yet belong to it. She enters the mother but does not yet belong to her, either. Momentum builds within the lake. Time takes shape, grows faster. So does her body. The current picks up speed. It sweeps the being along, flowing ever forward to reach the open ocean of the night sky. There it leaves her to swim among the stars with the other babies-to-be, all those willing to exchange their wings for wisdom.
The woman had always known of the cord tethering baby to mother, though not of the cord tethering baby to sky. This is how the beings shuttle between the stars and the wombs, from one temporary home to another. They flit along the cord until they are born, entering and exiting their mothers each night, as diaphanous as dreams. Meanwhile, the mothers work hard in their sleep, silently knitting the babies’ bones together, embroidering a pattern of vessels and veins, stitching the cells. Sometimes the material snags, the seams rip. A baby tries on the body and finds that it is unwearable. No, this will not do. My light will leak. A new one must be started from scratch. And so, tenderly, tranquilly, it severs the cord and floats away. Or the body is fine, but the baby is never meant to be a baby: it is a teacher. Or it may be the mother who cuts the cord to release the baby back to the stars and back to the lake, where it rests on the shores, peaceful and free. In this case also, the baby is often a teacher.
The child takes the woman deeper into her eyes, and the woman sees that the child is no child; she is ancient, older than the woman, older than fire. One warm summer night, she saw the woman scream, the house burn down, and the husband rise like a plume of smoke, and she lowered herself along the cord to see what the commotion was about. She and the husband met briefly in the air, he on his way up, she on her way down.
“Love,” he cried, as he swept around and through his daughter.
“Love,” she agreed, rushing inside him.
He gazed upon his wife, sobbing in the grass. “Compassion,” he said, and it was not a description but a direction. The child felt the word, its down-feather fabric, and knew what she had to do. She clenched the cord until it withered and returned herself to the sky, to guide the woman from above rather than within. Compassion, to cease being her child? No, compassion to become her North Star.
“Love,” the child says now to the woman. Her voice is insistent, almost pleading. Don’t you see?
As the child holds the woman in her arms, the woman holds the child in her arms. They are one; they have never been otherwise. The woman had herself once stood on the banks of time, listening for two voices to harmonize. The pieces of her body were then quilted together and a little egg sewn into the cloth. Inside that egg was her child, some intrinsic form or fragment of her. To grieve something that has not—that cannot—ever be separated from her: it is nonsense. Mother and child have never been apart. Child has always been in mother, part of mother, even when mother is child. Mother has held child forever. And death is powerless, it is meaningless, against forever.
The woman yawns, exhausted from dying, from being born. She fights sleep, not wanting to miss a moment of her child. She has lost too many already. She cannot risk waking up to discover that the most heavenly of all the daughter universes has disappeared before her eyes.
The child places her hands on the woman’s heart and soothes its skittish beat. “Love,” she sings, and it is the only lyric in her song.
The woman reaches for the word, brings it to her cheek, buries her face in its warmth. Memorize how this feels, she commands herself. Arrange this fabric into notes. Touch it, and let it touch us. Teach the others this most beautiful of all the music lessons: that death is a lullaby.
There are no lessons though, not anymore. There is nothing to be memorized. All that exists is her child, with whom she has an eternity to spend. And once you realize that you have eternity, you no longer need memory, its crude substitute.
The thought relaxes her. “Love,” she mumbles as she drifts off, drowsy with bliss, lost in the clouds of her child’s voice. She falls into a slumber so deep that she does not even stir when the nurses come to lift her from her daughter and carry her away.
LESSON 11
8va
The woman emerges from a wormhole of unconsciousness. The warmth recedes.
The love does too. In their place is an immense abyss, which enters and overtakes her field of vision, filling it completely. It is as black as the night sky in which she swam, though, unlike the sky, it quivers with a nervous energy. The energy fixates on her, invites her inside, swallows her whole. She tries to look away. It follows her. It will not let go of her. She slowly moves her head and, with enough distance, discovers that she is staring into the black hole of the mare’s eye, which stares back at her, unblinking.
The mare. The thought brings her a brief joy, and then the joy turns to something else, something with teeth. The mare, but not my daughter.
It is comfortable to slide back inside one’s old body, in the same way that it is comfortable to sink into well-worn bedsheets. But nothing could ever be as comfortable or as soft as her daughter’s arms.
The woman’s blurry surroundings begin to take form. One becomes a table, on which Music Lessons sits. Another is the harp resting on the floor. On both sides are rows and rows of hospital beds, one of which contains her. She does not know exactly where she is. All that matters is where she is not. This place has dissonance. It has coldness. It has that thing shooting through her, shocking her. What is that thing? Oh yes, she remembers now. It is pain.
The pain of a child slipping through her grasping fingers, over and over again.
The pain of more endless, empty days.
She inspects her ankle. Instead of bite marks, she finds two perfectly par
allel freckles, which will remain with her for the rest of her life. That very word—life—is another puncture wound, one deeper and rawer. If she must resume her life, why not her daughter and her husband? Why is she tethered to this weighty body when they are allowed to fly free? Even her prayers cannot ascend. Their wings have been broken. They just fall and lie crumpled at her feet.
A thousand times she has let go of grief, and it has returned to her a thousand more. She had not known that, like the universe, it could clone itself. That loss is a hall of mirrors, that its face would appear no matter where she turned. Now that she has held her child, any desire she might have had to go on living without her is gone. The antlike being has chosen to stay behind in the sea of stars, enraptured by that which it had resisted for so long. She yearns to join it, to go back to wherever she was. Being taken from there feels like a curse, a cruelty.
To her friend, though, it is pure relief. The days of a horse pass differently from those of a human; they gallop. The mare does not know how long it has spent waiting by her side, watching for any movement, forsaking its own. For each moment her eyes stayed closed, it kept its own open. Now, seeing her rise, it can rest. It lays its head, heavy with the sleeps that it has sacrificed, upon her chest. Finally its dreams are allowed to run loose and wild, reined in only by the gates of its eyelashes.
A breeze drifts by the bed, tousles the mare’s mane, blows the curtains in and out. What now, what now, it whispers.
The woman glances around, finds only a shadow of the wind. “You brought me back from the dead,” she says to no one, to anyone. “How?” The next question is even more important and mysterious: “Why?”
The answer to both is the same. The breeze sweeps past her book and ruffles its pages. It glides between the strings of the harp, creating a tune which the woman has never before heard yet which feels as familiar to her, as deeply a part of her, as a cradlesong from her childhood.
Then it brushes past the woman’s ears and opens them. Instantly, she can hear everything: the hum of the vibrating walls, beds, people; the high-pitched chatter of the cells inside her; the harmony of the mare’s sighs, of its liquid eyes.
“What? What is it?” she asks, but the breeze has already spoken, and it slips away.
Her body has been restored. The mare witnessed the effort this took, how the nurses stood over her and chanted in unison above her ankle. How they dove into the waters of time to stop the snake from tearing into her skin. How their unearthly voices charmed it with song and convinced it not to strike, knowing that where there is music, there can be no bite. How the hands that took her from her daughter were the same ones that plunged into her chest and reset the rhythm of her heart.
The heart, the heart—that is where the real work begins.
She has no idea how to revive this one part of her that still lies dead. Death is no longer a question once you have been through it, once you have been born on the other side of it. The question becomes, rather, life. Specifically: If all you want is to return to the place where your dead child is, then what makes you live? How do you go about creating a life in which you have no interest in participating?
The woman looks around, as though the walls held the answers. They reveal nothing. Her eyes fall in frustration and catch sight of Music Lessons, lying open to the page bookmarked by the breeze.
SONG OF HEALING
She lifts the harp from the floor. This effort alone is an exertion—dying is demanding on the body, it asks everything of it—yet there is something about music that eases pain even as it causes it. She tries the piece in front of her. The melody passes from the paper to her fingers, and when it reaches her ears she does not believe them. It is the same song composed by the wind as it blew between the strings.
The white light spins around her hands. And they are no longer only her hands. Her daughter’s are wrapped around them. This is the secret of great musicians: they do not play alone.
A man lies in the bed next to her, listening to the sound of four hands acting as two, of two souls acting as one. His own longs to join them, though his motionless body cannot comply. So the notes come to him. They touch him. They fill him until he is made of music, and he finds that he can move, because the music moves him.
As she watches this, something numb inside the woman also begins to awaken. She gives the paralyzed man a dance. He gives the paralyzed woman a purpose. The song of healing is for them both. It’s a miracle, she thinks, looking at him, but a miracle is simply love at its most audible.
She rifles through the book, searching for more. SONG OF WEDDING WILDFLOWERS. The notes are dormant, buried somewhere deep inside her, yet as she plays them they break into bloom. They climb the trellis of the musical staff and transform into lotuses—wildflowers live for seasons, lotuses for centuries. PSALM, which means “plucking of the harp strings.” Every sound she makes is sacred. SONG OF A LITTLE BIRD (“Why oh why so blue? Because it ate a blue fruit”). And then, for the little bird that has grown: SONG OF A PHOENIX, BORN FROM THE ASHES OF FIRE.
The pieces that had once seemed impossible now unfold effortlessly beneath her fingers. The skills and the drills. The lessons, the lifetimes.
The dance of ecstasy taking place before her eyes.
She has come back to master them all.
Each night the woman sits under the planets and listens to their slow, arcane music. She searches the skies for her husband and finds him blazing past the clouds, igniting the darkness, a man turned meteor. Her ears unlocked, she hears him everywhere. “Sing me a love song,” he once asked of her, yet now it is he who serenades her, and in a hundred voices: the trembling of aspens, a katydid choir, the murmur of April rain. She transcribes the sounds in the margins of Music Lessons.With starlight as her reading lamp, she loses herself in the book’s pages, in the secrets of its songs.
Each morning she walks the wards of the field hospital with her harp, ministering to the sick and ailing, to those not as easily extricated from death as she. And there are always more and more people streaming in who need her help: people that groan and people that bleed and people with souls that refuse to budge or that remain connected by only the slightest string. To tend to all of them would take years, though the woman has plenty of those to spare. Her days, and soon her repertoire, become ceaseless.
Some will die, for to heal is not necessarily the same as to cure. With fright they watch her approach, expecting a dirge yet hearing a lullaby. This, she thinks, must be another reason why the nurses saved her and why she had to return: to sing of death’s sweetness, to tuck its blanket of comfort around the patients’ shoulders. After all, how many times had death laid its music at her feet? Why else would it have spared the musician, except to share its sound?
An elderly man arrives, leaning his limbs on a wooden stick, and slowly disassembles himself bone by bone as he climbs into a bed. The woman stands beside his gnarled legs and helps smooth out his body so that it is supine. As her hands move over him, they unfasten his joints, gaining entry to the suffering stored within. The motion she makes reminds her of something that she cannot quite place. It takes her a moment to recognize it as the same technique the wartime doctor used on her patients. A recollection of a future already experienced—an inverse déjà vu.
The man curls up like a fetus, resembling an ancient baby. For him she plays SONG OF LOVE. All music derives from it. It is older than the song of grief that she had sung that long-ago day in the forest, for grief can only occur if love precedes it. There is a single lyric, just as her daughter has taught her.
The piece does not come to an end; a song of love knows no limits. But the man has heard what he needs to hear. He hops off the bed, walks away, leaves the stick behind.
An infant’s skin is burned and inflamed. The woman understands her distress, for she too has been scarred by fire. She applies a poultice of strings and nursery rhymes to the sore flesh. The skin becomes calm. The infant’s eyes, mouth, and breath form a triad of su
rprise. The sight of it causes the woman to laugh with joy.
Laughter. It has been so long since the mare heard her make this noise. The melody of the sound soothes its injured leg, and the discomfort that has accompanied its every step now disappears. Elated, it prances around the infant’s bed. To walk again is freedom, to laugh again even more so.
The woman’s heart soars to see her friend rid of its pointless pain. The mare looks at the woman, feels the same.
The woman encounters a body that has almost no soul left inside it. The body is so old and threadbare that the soul spends most of its time on the outside, living between the stars rather than under them. Neither body nor soul will mind what the woman is about to do.
She musters her strength, thrusts her white-light hands into the abdomen, and extracts the DNA. The strands coil around her fingers, and she watches in amazement as the double helix unfurls and lies flat in her palm. Once it is two-dimensional, its shape becomes unmistakable: it is a musical staff. Each nucleotide is a note arranged on a line, each base pair an interval. People, the woman realizes, are nothing more than—no, nothing less than—a symphony.
In one hand she holds the molecules, in the other she holds her harp. And then she combines them and plays the ballad of the body. The opening notes are silvery and birdlike, dipping into and out of common time. The tempo increases. The treble of boyhood deepens into bass. Here comes the jazz of a young man’s city nights, the blues of an old man waking too early, too alone. Broken chords and promises and bones. A sudden pause in the piece and the sound does not flow; a sudden pause of the heart and the blood does not flow. The brain turns to silence. The soul turns to the stars.
Every musician knows how to improvise. The woman studies the genes and, after some thought, chooses a new mode. She modulates the key, phrases things a different way. Now the music belongs not to the man in the bed but to a falcon in an egg. She hears the determined eighth notes as it pecks its way out, the falsetto of its flight, the chord progression from small, shelled being into ruler of the skies.