Crescendo

by Amy Weiss

  THIS IS AN EXERCISE IN COMPOSITION, NOT PERFORMANCE.

  Still skeptical, she plucks the A string. The sound skips across the lake and reaches the silvery spirits on the banks, who become motionless upon hearing it. It reminds them of sadness. They had forgotten about sadness. Without human bodies, without human lives, sorrow is unheard of; tears, like all water, dry as soon as they lift themselves from the lake. The music makes it materialize once more. It passes through them like a ghost—invisible, insidious—and haunts them with feelings laid to rest long ago. In this way, sound is supernatural. It resurrects the heart, brings memories back from the dead.

  Like these saddened souls, the universe has just been torn apart. In one, the woman plays the D note, which makes the listeners weep. In another she plays both notes together, and in another she can’t decide which to choose and so plays nothing, and the universe splits anyway because to not make a decision is to make a decision.

  She plays another note. And another. And the universe splits on . . .

  And on . . .

  And on . . .

  THAT IS JUST A NOTE. IMAGINE A WHOLE SONG.

  THAT IS JUST A SONG. IMAGINE A WHOLE LIFE.

  Her mind catches sight of infinity but, once glimpsed, it skitters away. Perhaps the instruction is not as basic as she had believed. Perhaps the entire symphony lies inside the single note.

  THERE IS A THEORY THAT EXPLAINS HOW ALL THESE UNIVERSES COME TO BE.

  She reads on while continuing to play, her fingertips stroking the harp, conjuring forth new realms.

  IT IS CALLED STRING THEORY.

  Music is a universe of sound, constantly expanding and dividing. Compositions are carved into movements and passages. A half note branches off into quarter notes, sixteenth notes—the same tone, yet held for a different duration, a different effect. A harmony of multiple notes, a counterpoint of multiple melodies, an orchestra of multiple instruments: separate spheres, playing in parallel.

  A composer must make order out of this hopeless profusion of noise. To play every note at once—one big, all-encompassing dot—would produce chaos. To play none would produce silence. But to space them out artfully on a staff of time: that would produce a masterpiece.

  And so the composer splits the piece into measures and meter. The notes are held tight within bar lines, told when to ring out and when to die out, when to attack and when to decay. They are given finite boundaries. You will last for eight breaths, and no more. To them, time is fixed; to the composer, it is fluid. She could speed it up, slow it down, change duple meter to triple meter or a march to a waltz. She knows that the beauty lies not in how long the note lasts, but in the sound that it makes while it does.

  Maybe, the woman thinks, our composer has done the same with us. Lest eternity seem too long and infinity too loud, she imposes measures on our existence, divides it into years, generations, incarnations. We count beats and birthdays. We emerge from the silence, and we fade back into it. This is not a punishment or a curse, any more than it is to assign a time signature to a song. After all, if there is no beat, how can there be a dance?

  She does not do this to make us suffer. She does this to make us music.

  “There’s a world in which we are having this conversation, and a world in which we aren’t,” the woman says.

  “And the world in which we are having this conversation arises from the world in which your husband dies, for would we have ever met had you not left your house in mourning and ventured into the forest? That’s a trick question, by the way.” The old man sits beside the woman on the grass, letting his gaze wander across time. “What if your husband had lived, and one afternoon you were doing the laundry, and you went to collect it from the clothesline when a wild boar ran up and snatched his yellow sweater from the line, and you went running after it because that was his favorite sweater, and you chased the boar clear through the forest until you finally caught up with it, and when you grabbed the sweater from its snout you saw that it was covered in dirt and hair and so you decided to give it a rinse in the nearby lake, which was, of course, the lake of time, and there I was sitting at its edge, waiting for you? There are certain people you must meet, whether by grief or by boar or some other proxy of fate. Of course, what you do with that meeting is up to you.”

  This must be so, thinks the woman, for when did she ever not encounter her husband in the waters of time? If she can turn left or turn right and find him, dive into her dreams or into the lake and find him, disguise herself in the body of a hunter or the body of a lotus and still find him—then loss is nothing more than an illusion, a riddle of one’s own creation.

  Her blood quickens with excitement. There is a universe in which he escapes the smoke before it smothers him. In which the kitchen door shuts silently. In which it does not, but she sees the flame and rushes to right the fallen candle, the fallen family. In which he and the child live, or he lives and the child does not, or the child lives and he does not, or they live and the woman does not. In untold dimensions they are together, yet her awareness remains firmly fixed inside one in which they are apart. What if she chose to inhabit another? Is that even feasible? Here comes infinity again, emerging from the shadows of her mind to make its presence known.

  The old man sweeps his hands over the clouds. The sun falls through his fingers, and the blue turns into black. The moon and constellations hurry to assume their positions in the darkness. “Suppose that a single star, surrounded by billions of its brothers, presumed itself to be the sole one in all the heavens.” At his words, everything disappears apart from a tiny, blinking orb, meaningless in the vast nothing of space. “You know that it is mistaken, for you have seen the others. Just because they may not be visible to the star does not mean that they are not there. If it were to realize that it is but one of a galaxy . . .” he says, and the night becomes floodlit once more.

  The woman is made mute with possibilities, watching the stars swirl in the skies, in the old man’s eyes. By the time she perceives them, by the time she speaks their names, some have already extinguished themselves. The polite ones quietly turn off the lights. Others, aching for obliteration, collapse into a black hole deeper than any she has known, only to find themselves streaming down the Milky Way to be born again as new stars, or as lilacs, or as her. She sits at some point in the future, which does not even exist, beholding those beautiful bodies that have long since ceased to be. It is light after death, life after death.

  Time is not such a difficult puzzle. Its solution is always right here. And death is not an indomitable obstacle, nor is it made of stone. That is just the perspective of someone who has sealed herself inside a cave of pain. She almost has to laugh. The sky has been showing her the answer all along. There is no end! Even the most massive beings in the cosmos could not snuff out life. What had made her think that she held such power?

  The old man takes her hands in his. As he does, the earth trembles and divides beneath them: a decision has just been made.

  “I suppose that, in one world, we leave you,” she says.

  He smiles and replies, “It’s time.” The lake recedes into a shroud of fog, and then he, too, disappears inside it, leaving the woman and the mare standing by themselves, all alone in the clearing. She nudges the mare, leading it in the direction opposite the forest from which they had arrived. There is no going back now.

  And, strangely, this does not scare her.

  “What is there to fear?” she says to the mare, who treads gingerly on the fallen leaves, reluctant to set forth on its injured leg. The woman has no such hesitation. Her feet and mind race ahead. “You are immortal. I have seen it! My husband, I have found you too. The king and queen told me I could not look back at you, and it is true: I cannot look back. And I cannot look forward. There is only here, there is only now, and you are here, I know that now. They were not warning me. They were teaching me.” She is giddy, her words are airborne. They float upward to the stars, which hear them a trillion years
ago. “There is no such thing as death, and I can never die.”

  No sooner has she finished speaking these words than she steps on a snake, it bites her, and she dies.

  LESSON 9

  Overtones

  A beach. An ocean as silver as her spirit. Cloud sinking into sea, sea ascending to become cloud: the same water, flowing back and forth between bodies. The waves break, then piece themselves back together. The skeletons of snails are reborn as shells. The skeletons of shells are reborn as sand. Death and birth, ebb and flow, an endless tide.

  The woman stands on the shoreline. The surf nibbles her toes. Her feet are little, her footprints shallow. She looks down at them. They are her own, yet they belong to a young girl—one of many years ago. She is inside a memory of which she has no memory, though it has been here all along, silent and patient, awaiting her return.

  The sea is warm and soothing, as is the sound of her mother calling her name. It crosses the shore and the water to reach the ears of the girl, decades and death to reach the ears of the woman. The mother watches the approach of a wave that swells with fury and threatens to drown the girl in its seething anger. “Come, come,” she cries to her daughter, concerned. But the girl is watching a seagull evict and swallow a hermit crab, she is sifting through sand, she is invoking the magical names of the shells—angel wings, bleeding tooth, lion’s paw, baby’s ear—and nothing can move her from this moment.

  The wave closes in. Her father rushes over, scoops her up, and lifts her in the air, so high that she thinks she can cup her hands around the sun. She shrieks with the thrill of flight and of father. He is backlit; she cannot see his face. The face does not matter, the face will change anyway. What matters is what she does see: the silhouette of pure love, that thing which lifts you into the clouds.

  The wave hurls itself upon them. It fails to grab hold of her and recedes with a frustrated roar. The father lowers her. She too is like the tide, rising and receding. She burrows deep into his arms, tasting salt on her lips, listening to the strident chants of the sea and the gulls. This, the woman understands, is why her soul has dipped into time and body: to experience the exhilaration of bare feet in the surf, of falling deliriously into the arms of someone you adore, of a happiness so strong that it must escape the body in laughter or explode the body in pieces.

  Now she feels it once again. Now she knows.

  Now she knows that heaven is not found somewhere else but in those moments when there is nowhere else. That music is the sound of her mother’s voice calling her closer, and no strings could ever replicate its splendor. That her mother, who had cherished the woman’s father for numberless lifetimes, had in this one purposely chosen a body that would decompose while still alive, while still young. That this was an opportunity, not a tragedy; that his taking care of her was a reflection of her love for him, not his love for her. Where better for him to discover the beauty of unconditional love than amid the ugliness of disease? How better to refine his heart, to turn it into something both stronger and softer? And when time finally came to collect his last breath, he found himself, just as his daughter now does, on this very beach, his wife whole and healthy once more, all the illness and pain and loss erased, as if they never happened—and perhaps they never did—for here they are together again, she is windswept and beaming, he is lifting his baby girl up as far as she can go, and then he is rising too, he is soaring, farther, farther, he is somewhere near the sun, or is he the sun?

  Now she knows that her mother, and her own husband, and her unborn child gave up their bodies out of love, and that they are not the only ones. The snails do it, so hermits and humans can delight in their shells. The shells do it, to carpet the beach, turn sharpness into sand. She knows that the crab is a master of love, willingly surrendering itself to the gull to sustain it, to nourish it. That the crab’s eyes shine as it tells the gull, “I lived so that I could die, so that you could live.” That what she calls crab is no less than godstuff packed into a small, sideways body; that what she calls death is merely the time it spends in between shells. While others stand over its old home and weep, the crab rejoices to be rid of the weight upon its back. While others fixate on the empty husk and grieve, the crab streaks wildly across the sky, naked and lustrous and limitless.

  Now she knows that the wave approaches in love, not anger. That its entire life—its birth, its swell, its death—is orchestrated to bring the girl into her father’s arms, to give them this dance together. For if it did not make itself quite so tall, would her father have lifted her quite so high? How else is she to touch the clouds? She knows that it would travel the oceans for this purpose, for this moment. And when the wave is needed no longer, it releases its body unto the shore and dies with a glorious sigh of satisfaction, and the sea enfolds it in its arms and whispers, “Welcome home.”

  Now she knows—now she remembers—that to die is nothing more than to be born to this knowledge: that everything, all along, has always been love.

  LESSON 10

  Lullaby

  The recollection of the beach fades away, for it too has served its purpose. The gulls disperse. The crab fizzles out like a firework. The sea parts to reveal a forest of trees, which huddle around the lifeless human body lying on the ground.

  From above, the woman stares down at herself. Her hair spills onto the mossy floor, the earth her pillow. Her skin turns chameleon, flashing all shades—red, purple—until it finally lands on gray. The mare paces back and forth, limping, frantic. It has lost her too many times over the centuries. It knows death; it refuses it. The mare grows increasingly frenzied. The woman does not. She giggles to herself. This is what people are so afraid of ? Everyday life is far more menacing. Death is nothing more than a house cat; life is the lion, with the deafening roar, the jaws and claws.

  She has died! She has gone ahead and done it. Always she’d wondered what it would be like, what form it might take, and to have the definitive answer is satisfying. Snakebite, of all things! She had danced around so many different possibilities, never recognizing this one as her rightful partner, waiting to lead her through her last steps. She had tended to picture herself shriveled in a bed, her face devoured by age, her life exiting in a polite breath. But hadn’t her husband taught her that death can announce itself in unimaginable ways, and with dazzling pyrotechnics to boot?

  She looks down at herself for the first time, the only time. It is an odd sensation, like passing an unexpected mirror and thinking, for a moment, that her reflection is someone else. She had always felt an attachment to her body; how could she not, it being so relentlessly present? Yet now that she is minutes from it, miles from it, she feels nothing. She is the oak, and the oak does not prostrate itself, weeping, before the acorn that has just burst open.

  The mare neighs its panic. The woman does not hear it—she sees it. Every time the mare opens its mouth, small cubes tumble out and build upon one another, forming a chain of blocks that stretch toward the woman, who is already so far away. She touches the block nearest her, feels its fabric. It is made of fear, its edges sharp and serrated. The chain grows longer and sparser as the mare recedes from sight. Although it saddens her to see her friend in distress, she is grateful to distance herself from such misery. She wonders if her husband thought the same as he wended his own way upward—if he witnessed her lying in the grass, her screams reaching up to him in blocks made of knives and broken glass, and felt nothing but relief to leave behind the pain of being alive.

  The night sky envelops the woman, forming an ocean around her in which she swims. The stars stream past her like silver minnows. She does not float so much as melt. She becomes smaller and smaller until she is the merest piece of herself, no more than the froth borne along the waves. To throw off the tight confines of the body, to become as nothing and as everything as the tiniest speck of sea foam, to dissolve into the water and become not the diver or even the dive but that which is dived into—Oh, my mare, she thinks, if only you could know what
freedom truly is. How selfish she had been in her grief, to summon her husband back from this, to shackle him. Why would he leave this?

  He would leave this for her.

  She continues condensing, turning from person to particle to nothing. She has no thoughts, for she has no self. She is the speed of light and she is the light. And as she becomes the light, she becomes aware of being the light, and of the sea that surrounds her, whose darkness must mean that it is other. With this notion, her consciousness forms once more. The pieces of her are put back together. How long was she insentient? A million years, a mayfly’s life. The staccato and the sustain.

  The ocean compresses and compacts her, molds a body around her light. It throbs with pressure, contracting and relaxing in a primal, percussive rhythm. The tempo accelerates. Each contraction pushes her farther, toward what she does not know. All she can make out is a sound, which grows stronger as it grows closer: the unmistakable music of a child’s laughter.

  The light and the warmth and the school of stars swimming alongside the woman are so beautiful that she starts sobbing. Now she understands the real reason why newborns cry. And if their death day is in fact a birthday, then their birthday must also be a death day: a farewell to the ocean, a lifelong separation from the stars. This, too, makes them cry.

  Everything then explodes into white-blue fire, blinding in the most pleasurable way. The woman cannot see. She does not know whether she has ceased to exist or begun to exist. The nurses grab her by the shoulders. The ocean empties itself of her and unfolds back into the night sky. She is delivered into a pair of arms that have been waiting all this time to hold her. The laughter she heard before bubbles up and spills over into kisses on her face. She blinks. The eyes that meet hers glitter with adoration.