A cordon assembles around the house. The pound of boots, the sawtooth whine of something electronic.
It’s a fine piano, better than any you’ve ever owned. You try out a few chords. They ring like the brightest future. Your fingers say: Love, let’s not give sadness any more ground. They remember something, your digits, a song you wrote for her mother, way back when, on a dare. After a few stumbles, it comes back. Resurrected.
She laughs in surprise. Oh, no! You didn’t. You didn’t use that.
No; you smile, a little puckish. No, you’re right. It seems important to be as far out of the house as possible when they reach you, as free and clear as you can get. You say, I can’t believe you remember that one.
On the far side of the music rack is a bud vase filled with fresh-cut lily of the valley. It’s ready-made, if a little theatrical. Useful to have something in your hand, and the bud vase will look much like lab glassware in the dark. You pick it up and hold it to you.
You’d be surprised, she says.
You look down at the keys, those twelve repeating black and white prison bars. There’s something in there that you’d still love to jailbreak, even here, even this late, tonight. You will not find the key in this life. But the still-unfolding sounds, the music you felt and lost, the combinations you just missed finding, the dangerous songs still waiting to be made: y así como no tuvo nacimiento no tiene muerte. No birth, and so no death. That river of remembered futures will go on without you, changing nothing but its course, its lips. This love, Love: this love has no end.
Listen, you say. Hear that?
She goes to the window and lifts the curtain. A cry tears out of her. Oh, shit. Her body retreats from the glass and her arms fend off the fact. Shit! Her eyes dull and dilate. Her face goes gray. Daddy, she pleads. No. Oh, please, no.
Sara, you say. Safe though all safety’s lost. Sar? Let’s make something.
She shakes her head, sick with terror. Her eyes search yours: Make what?
Something good. Good loud. Good lively. A rose no one knows.
When she nods, even a little, you’ll head to the door and through it. Run out into a place fresh and green and alert again to whole new dangers. You’ll keep moving, vivace, as far as you can get, your bud vial high, like a conductor readying his baton to cue something luckier than anyone supposes. Downbeat of a little infinity. And at last you will hear how this piece goes.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For my account of the creation and premiere of Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps, I am indebted to Rebecca Rischin’s excellent book For the End of Time.