Crescendo

by Amy Weiss

  Four notes, she thinks, to build every body, to compose every opus.

  She rearranges the notation, returning it to the human. She removes entire measures and then, her fingers on the strings, takes it from the top. The very old body transforms into a very young one. It lengthens and silkens, becomes as smooth as her song. The more she plays, the more it grows younger, then smaller, until it is that of a newborn taking its first breath, and the soul leaves the stars and swoops back into the body to be that breath, and its life, like its song, begins again.

  She and the mare travel from patient to patient. The mare presses its warm muzzle against muscles that have forgotten how to move. The woman matches the pulse of patient and song. She regulates vital rhythms, attends to any erratic syncopation. Her steady hands and harp keep the beat for those who cannot. Her tones are a tuning fork with which their cells resonate. And on the occasions when their spirits leave to swim inside a glimmering expanse of sky, she accompanies them with her music, with her memories of that floating freedom, and sings them a happy birthday.

  One day, a nurse stops to observe her. At the end of the session, she pats the woman’s shoulder, pleased.

  “I understand now,” the woman says to her. “I’m preparing for the work I’ll do in another life as a doctor.”

  “No,” the nurse replies. “This is preparation for your work as a musician.”

  The nurse’s warm touch melts the woman; her fears seep out. “I know that I can stay here and spend the rest of my days caring for those in pain, just as you do. But is this meant to be my way—is this meant to be my life? Sleeping alone under the stars, dreaming dreams that disappear, playing someone else’s music instead of making my own? I worry that I’ve not found my footing, that I never will.”

  “Why worry? The notes you play don’t worry about what will come next; they just let themselves ring out. They trust that the musician knows how the song is supposed to sound.”

  The fears, however, keep flowing. “I worry that I’ll only be able to heal the others, and not myself.”

  “Healing the others,” says the nurse, “is another name for healing yourself.”

  An opera singer and a glass resonate at different frequencies. The singer raises her voice; she raises her volume. She changes her wavelength, hits the highest note she can. Now she and the glass sing the same song. The glass absorbs her energy, is shattered by the intensity. It can no longer bear to be what it was—solid, physical, vibrating by its lonesome. It bursts with excitement into a new state of being.

  If a soul, like a singer, decided to raise its vibration and its volume, to grow in amplitude, to elevate itself until it resonated at the frequency of love, who in its presence could ever stay the same? Would they not be lifted to its level? And could the world contain such magnificence, or might it shatter with the energy and break open into something new?

  PLAY THE A ABOVE MIDDLE C.

  The woman does.

  THIS IS CALLED CONCERT A. IT IS THE STANDARD FOR TUNING INSTRUMENTS. IT HAS A FREQUENCY OF 440 HZ. NOW PLAY IT AN OCTAVE HIGHER.

  Her fingers climb seven strings and pluck the note.

  DESCRIBE THE DIFFERENCE YOU HEAR IN THE NOTES.

  I don’t hear any.

  THIS PHENOMENON IS CALLED OCTAVE EQUIVALENCE. THE NOTES SOUND THE SAME, BUT THE LATTER RESONATES AT 880 HZ, DOUBLE THE FREQUENCY OF THE FORMER. THEY ARE ONE NOTE, VIBRATING AT DIFFERENT LEVELS. NAME THAT NOTE.

  The note is A.

  TRY AGAIN.

  The note is love.

  Every note is love.

  It can be played in the octave of romantic love, in the octave of familial love, or in the highest octave, universal love, which often lies beyond the perception of the human ear.

  To become enamored with another person, to sing together so sweetly that you leave the world behind, to see the eyes of God looking out through the eyes of a man: the woman understands that some beings take on a body for this reason alone. After all, is she not one of them? She and her husband have spent eons making music, dipping into time again and again to continue their duet.

  But this is only one form of love.

  Others take on life in order to create life, to bear the body of a child and the crosses of a parent; she knows this also, having attempted it herself. And this is no minor undertaking. One day the heart will evolve in size, will grow large enough to comfortably contain a mother’s love. Until then, it may rupture with the pressure.

  But this, too, is only one form.

  A person may be infatuated with a mountain’s contours, a riverbed’s curves. With the paintbrush or prayer book in her hands. With the earnest stare of his dog, the depths of devotion in its gaze. The expression depends on the particular instrument; some will have a limited range, while others can span several octaves. This does not mean that one is inferior or superior to another. It simply means that they produce different sounds.

  Eventually, the body is taken on to love the all as well as the you, and the life taken on to love not one person but every person. Not your child but every child. Not the lives connected to yours but all lives, because all lives are connected to yours. To serve every soul, whether it be played in the octave of maple leaf, of mare, of man, knowing that they are all made of music, that they are the same one note—that there is only one note, vibrating at varying rates—and that the note is ineffably, incomprehensibly beautiful.

  WITH ENOUGH PRACTICE, THE DISTINCTION BECOMES CLEAR.

  FORM A CHORD COMPRISED OF THE SAME NOTE IN THREE SEPARATE OCTAVES.

  Using both hands, the woman strikes the notes at once—romantic love, familial love, and the love beyond that, which is a love beyond everything. Her patients have been listening, and they begin to sing along. The chorus of their compassion fills her with emotion, sends her frequency surging. She takes her fingers off the first two strings. Perhaps it is all right if those notes are missing, if they are silent. She can make the same sound with the third.

  THE OCTAVE IS CALLED THE BASIC MIRACLE OF MUSIC.

  When really it is the basic miracle of life.

  THIS CONCLUDES THE LESSON.

  CONGRATULATIONS.

  YOU HAVE COME TO THE END OF THE BOOK.

  YOUR STUDIES ARE NEARLY FINISHED.

  YOUR MUSIC LESSONS ARE COMING TO A CLOSE.

  BUT FIRST, THERE IS ONE FINAL PIECE YOU MUST LEARN.

  ONCE YOU MASTER IT, YOU WILL HAVE COMPLETED YOUR ASSIGNMENT.

  IT IS THE SONG THAT WILL GIVE YOUR LIFE ITS MEANING.

  IT IS THE SONG FOR WHICH YOU HAVE BEEN SEARCHING ALL THIS TIME.

  IT IS THE SONG OF YOUR SOUL.

  KEEP READING.

  YOU ARE ALMOST THERE.

  LESSON 12

  Interlude

  As is every page after that.

  The woman flips furiously through the rest of the book, through the empty pages that contain no instruction, no notation, neither song nor secret.

  “Where is it?” she demands. The mare does not answer.

  “Where is it?” she says again, but the mare cannot answer. Only the woman can.

  All this time she has been traveling with no direction, running away instead of toward, and now direction appears before her and stands at command. She will find the author of Music Lessons, will tell this deranged Anonymous that a book once begun, like a marriage, like a life, cannot end in sudden silence. A sonata must have its coda. The swan must have its song. How can the creator of something so unbearably beautiful as music—and as man—not know this most basic rule?

  The nurse and the patients tilt their heads and listen, for intention, like sound, carries through the air and grows amplified with energy. They gather around her. The sight of their concerned faces makes the woman stop short.

  “How can I leave them?” she asks the nurse. “They need my help, my healing.”

  “Healing yourself,” says the nurse, “is another name for healing the others.”

  One by one the patients shuffle past h
er and say good-bye, shaking her hand, humming a tune she has taught them, petting the mare’s nose. Then the last in line walks away, and there is no one left to treat and nothing more to play. She has given them all the music she has. Now she must find the missing piece.

  She must find the song of her soul.

  She leads the mare away from the hospital and hops on its back. It sprints until its muscles gasp for air, and then sprints faster. The outside world is encased in snow and ice, though inside the woman is a fire—not one of death but of life. It lights her, it lights the mare beneath her and the ice beneath the mare. The mare is powered by its newly restored legs, by the euphoria of motion freed from confinement; the woman by something else, something internal, something unfamiliar.

  Something like hope.

  How do you find what you are looking for when you have no idea where to look for it?

  Can movement that gets nowhere be considered movement at all?

  The days run together, or perhaps it is simply one day, frozen in place. The cold is three-dimensional. It surrounds the mare and the woman and shadows their every step, an unshakable companion. They huddle together to keep warm, to keep the fire inside them from dying out. The smoke plumes they exhale are the only evidence that it still burns.

  They ride on, pausing solely for the mare to drink the snow. The woman looks around while the mare fills itself with fallen clouds. In a nearby tree, an eagle dozes in its nest, its eyelids descending in increments. Silently, smoothly, the wind sneaks through its feathers, lifting them and lowering them, over and over. She watches, transfixed by the soundless rhythm of the earth breathing a bird in and out.

  Above their heads, Orion stalks the stars for his prey. His migration is constant, his hunt endless. Night after night, instead of resting, he perseveres. In this way, he is like the woman. With each passing year, the pieces of him separate and shift. Eventually, he will be misshapen, unrecognizable. Then his hunt must become for himself, for the errant parts that will make him whole once more.

  In this way, too, they are alike.

  Their run slows to a walk, the walk to a crawl, the hope to dismay. The earth sheds it winter coat, too warm to wear it any longer. Blades of grass rise on its body like beads of sweat. Nature pops its head out from underground. The sun is meek at first, then overbearing. The crickets sing it to sleep. The mare and the woman keep moving.

  One leaf keels over and dies, and the rest follow suit. The flowers turn to frost, the streams to ice, the bears to sleep. The moon weaves its web of months around them; the sun becomes snared in the trap, and the world calls this winter. The mare and the woman keep moving.

  Snow and weeks crunch beneath their feet. The days press on the woman’s face and create furrows. Gravity presses on her back and shortens her spine. Her skin grows as brittle and speckled as a quail’s egg. There is so much walking yet no finding. This presses on the heart. And somehow, despite the force, the mare and the woman keep moving.

  They come, at last, to a river covered in ice. It might support the weight of their bodies, but not of their disappointment. They could wait for it to thaw, although that too offers little opportunity to cross. The river is no gentle lake of time; there are rapids lying in wait below its surface, and hibernation will have made them hungry.

  It is a dead end. They can go no farther. There is only backward, or so the woman thinks, not realizing that backward can also be forward.

  She sinks to her knees in the snow and lowers her face into her hands. She should have stayed at the hospital. Her life had purpose there. So what if she never found its meaning, its completion? At least she wouldn’t have to keep looking for it.

  I’ve chosen the wrong path, she thinks. Why is it always the wrong path?

  But impassable—and even impossible—is not the same as wrong.

  The woman and the mare reverse direction. They walk anywhere, everywhere.

  Spring closes in on winter; summer trails behind, hot on its heels. Far off in the shimmering haze, a movement catches the mare’s attention. It is inconsequential, a cloud of dragonflies changing course in the air. But to the mare, having watched the woman die, every dragonfly is a flying dragon in disguise; all things have the potential to turn snake. It snorts and stares, vigilant in its anxiety. I must contain this threat and anticipate the next, or else we may get hurt.

  The woman can see the situation from a higher perspective, a better vantage point. She knows that the dragonflies won’t come any closer, and that they would pose no danger if they did. “Relax,” she says, stroking the mare’s mane, wishing to calm its needless fear. “You’re perfectly safe. Everything is fine. Nothing will harm you.”

  At that moment, a rustle of the grasses, the same words in her own ear.

  The days grow short. The woman grows weary.

  To be by her side every step of the way: this is what her husband had promised her, both with body and without. But when there is no way, and the steps are incalculable—what then? “Please,” she begs him, “guide me. Instead of standing behind, walk in front. Lead me to the one who knows my song, my end.”

  She would give anything to see footprints, track marks, some sign of his that she could follow. Only the birches, shivering in the cold, make their presence known. They are worn down to skeletons, their bony branches revealing nests that were once homes, now husks.

  She has watched it happen every year, the systematic approach of the starkest season. The leaves blush and swoon, the wind bites and stings, the birds fade away. Yet birdless days do not mean a birdless world; to disappear from sight is not to disappear from existence. They are simply in another place, a warmer one. And they always return in time.

  It would be foolish to grieve the bird that has flown south; it would be criminal to grab hold of its legs and confine it to the earth. Then why, she must ask herself, does she insist that her husband walk with her? She cannot keep asking this of him, not anymore. It is her turn to take the lead.

  Give him back to me, she had insisted once. And now, I will give him back to you.

  She turns her face to the frozen sky. “Fly on home,” she tells him, and with a whisper of wings he is gone, soaring higher and higher toward the light, until he is the light.

  The woman stops walking and indicates the mare should do the same. She takes out her harp. She will cover ground in a different way, set forth with her fingers instead of footsteps, spirit instead of body. Music allows this—in fact, demands it.

  She opens to the first page of Music Lessons and begins to play her book and her life from start to finish, until she comes to those blank pages that sent her hunting for the song that would fill them. The harp is an instrument of translation as well as of music. It tells the story of her pain in another voice, in the language of the strings, where the word for sorrow is the same as the one for beauty.

  A sob rises above the melodies, as if trying to harmonize with them. The mare’s eyes are dry, and horses weep with their tails, not their tears. It must be coming from somewhere else. It must be coming from her.

  Her intention had been to summon an author. Instead, she casts out a demon. All her anger and all her failure come rolling out in chords, in a downward-spiraling glissando. Defeat, despair: they are made of lead—gray, dense, dangerous—but the music lends them feathers. As they make their way outside her and away from her, the woman, freed from their weight, feels as if she too might rise into the air. Sound is strong enough to do this. It is nearly as powerful as love and often indistinguishable from it, for much of love is sound and sound love: a cat’s purr, a mother’s coo, a bride’s beating heart. And then there is the most powerful sound of all.

  She puts down her harp, holds the book in both hands, and, one last time, studies its empty pages for an answer. But there is no answer, and that is the answer. Music is the sound that is sculpted from silence, and so to find the music, one must first find the silence. It is time to be quiet. It is time to rest. It is time to call off the se
arch. She will never find what she is looking for. And this is when she finally finds what she is looking for, because you can only find yourself when you stop moving and become still.

  LESSON 13

  Crescendo

  “Here you are,” her higher self says. “What took you so long?”

  The woman stands face-to-face with her own face. All those years, all those miles, in search of the one thing that had been with her everywhere she went? She is suddenly tired, feeling that she has spent her life walking in circles. As though progress could only be linear; as though a circle were an error, and not a revolution.

  “The ice—the snow—the grief—they take a long time to plow through.”

  “If you say so.”

  Astounded and delighted, the mare rushes over to its new old friend for a nuzzle. The woman, breathless with exhaustion, with need, thrusts Music Lessons into the higher self ’s hands, shows her the empty pages of which she is already well aware. It was she who wrote it, after all; she who, a thief in reverse, slipped into the barn one night and hid it in the hay for the woman to find and use as a guide. That is what higher selves do. They steal into unlit places, light them on fire, leave the ashes behind as a trail.

  “What is the song that gives my life its meaning, the song of my soul? How does it go?” the woman asks.

  “You tell me.”

  “I must know the ending of the book.”

  “Then write it.”

  That is the task of the author, not the reader! The woman falls silent again, but her silence is loud with frustration.

  “You are the writer of your story. You are the creator of your song.” The higher self ’s eyes are recognizable to the woman as her own, though they are also foreign—softer, deeper. “You are a composer, and life is your greatest work of art.”