The Score
The first thing he noticed was the sound. It triggered a random memory of being in an elevator; the shuddering vibration of movement, accompanied by melodies which were at once both familiar and unplaceable. It took more effort than he would have expected to open his eyes. He was sure he was having the Monday of all Mondays, grotesquely hung over and trapped in a stubbornly resistant body. Everything was slow in responding. How long had he been asleep?
Come to think of it, where even was he?
Light slipped between his eyelids like the edge of a blade. An instinctive hiss passed his lips, earning him a calm pat on the back of his hand.
“It’s okay, Mister Taylor,” a woman’s voice said softly. She patted his hand again when he flinched at the unexpected touch. “You prefer Sean, yes?”
The almost painful brightness was already dimming, and a vaguely female form appeared in the midst of it. She reminded him of… someone. An elementary school teacher? A neighbor? Whoever she was, he felt reassurance through a thousand questions that peppered his slowly awakening mind.
“I’m….sorry,” he struggled to form the words, like he was having to remember how to speak at all. “I don’t remember…”
She nodded. “I look like someone you remember, right?”
“Y-yes,” he stammered. “Where…?”
“I’m not anyone you legitimately remember; everyone here just makes you feel that way.” She patted his arm like he was a toddler waking from a nightmare.
“How…?”
She took a small breath, considering how much the new arrival was ready to hear. “We emanate a particular form of energy that is processed in your thoughts through your emotions, creating a perception context that will make you feel comfortable here.”
He struggled to sit up, at last succeeding on the third attempt. “Where am I?”
Another pat on the arm. “Try not to think of it in terms of geography,” she said. “I need to press on, but Angela here has a cup of coffee for you. Triple shot white chocolate mocha, isn’t that right?”
The newly appeared woman held out a Starbucks cup, complete with stir stick and his name, Sean, written in sloppy sharpie on the side, right above the pale brown insulating sleeve. His arm took a couple of tries to coordinate the angle and the woman held the cup still until he was able to secure a grip on it. He gave the cup a swirl before removing the stir stick and licked the end clean before lifting the cup to his lips and taking a slow drink. As the hot, sweetened nectar made its way down his throat, a smile made its way to his lips.
“Heaven,” he sighed.
The two women laughed softly and made brief eye contact before Angela turned and vanished. It seemed to Sean that such a thing shouldn’t be possible, but the coffee was so delicious that he didn’t have the will to condemn its source.
“Well, wherever I am, they have a Starbucks, so I guess it can’t be so bad, right?” He took another long drink, vaguely aware that the cup didn’t seem to be getting any lighter, no matter how much he drank.
“We just want you to feel relaxed,” she explained. “Life on Earth can be so hard, we just want you to know you can finally rest, should you choose to do so.”
Something in her choice of words left an uneasy feeling in his mind. “Why do I feel like you’re about to tell me I’m not on Earth?”
She tapped on the screen of her tablet he couldn’t recollect her having picked up, only giving him a patient nod as an answer.
“You’re ready to adapt your presentation to conform with your will, Mr. Taylor,” she said. “I’m going to need you to imagine yourself as you are most comfortable.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your form and appearance are still aligned with your residual self-image. For example,” she pointed at his wrist, where a hospital ID bracelet and the end of an IV needle remained attached to his wrist.
“Oh, right,” he mumbled, starting to realize that this was not a dream. “Oh. Right.”
She placed a hand against his cheek. “I’m sorry, Mr. Taylor,” she empathized. “But I’m afraid to tell you that you have passed on.”
He stood up from the bed, two bare feet on the tiled floor. “My wife – my kids… are they…?”
“They are fine, of course. They miss you, also of course, because they love you very much.” She motioned for him to sit back down on the bed, which he did. “Mr. Taylor, do you understand where you are?”
Another long pull from his cup of coffee, partly for the comfort of the familiar, but partly to give him time to decide what he really thought about his current status.
“I’m in….heaven?”
Her smile was kind but told him he was wrong.
“Worth a shot.”
She laughed briefly. “Where we are doesn’t have a name in the languages of the living – how could it? No one living can see past the lives you live, and where we are now exists along a different plane of reality. The closest metaphor we use – the one that most people are capable of understanding, really – is that you have lived your life among the threads of a carpet, only perceiving the threads as you pass between them. Where we are here is in the home, standing above and looking down into the pattern of the carpet itself. From here, we can see the workings of the cosmos, from its birth through until it ceases to grow, visible to us because we are not subject to the passage of time, but rather stand beyond the blindness of its path.”
Sean had another long drink of coffee, then paused and looked from the cup to the woman he was speaking with. “Am I going to have to pee?”
Another laugh, kinder and more casual. “No, Mr. Taylor. The coffee isn’t even real, it’s simply a construct of your mind’s grasp of the familiar.”
He let go of the cup and it vanished. When he closed his hand, it once again held the cup. “That’s a fun little trick. Can it do whiskey?”
“I think you might be better off with caffeine until you get a bit more integrated here.”
“You’re probably right.” He glanced down at his wrist again. “Can I do the same thing with my clothes? I don’t think I like this little reminder.”
“You were in the hospital for a long time,” she acknowledged. “It’s only logical that these elements would show up here. But you can change whatever you like. We don’t see it, but you and the others here do, so we encourage you to present yourself as you wish.”
He started to imagine how he wanted to look, then stopped long enough to ask, “Are there nudists here? Because I’m not sure I want to see… all of that.”
“You won’t see anything you don’t choose to see. Anything negatively distracting to you will be… I believe the term used on Earth is Pixelated.”
“Well, now I want to see that. I could use a good laugh.” He concentrated again on his own appearance, remembering fondly of his youth. The wrist band and IV needle vanished, and he felt himself looking once again as he had in his mid-20s, young and vibrant. He lifted his hands to his hair and felt its glorious return. “Oh, wow, I’ve kind of missed this hair. I didn’t care that I never got tattoos or piercings, but I was a little sad when this all fell out.”
“It suits you.”
“Thank you! My wife was always kind about it, but I know she liked my hair too.” He sighed. “Well, I may not know where I am, but this alone was worth the trip.”
He tugged at the lapels of his jacket, standing again to feel the heft and pull of the fabrics against his body. It had, truly, been a while, he realized. How long? He couldn’t say. His memories were fluttering about his mind, making it feel as if he were standing in the center of a butterfly exhibit. It called to mind the advice he had learned there: don’t try to capture a butterfly – remain still and they will come to you. He calmed his mind and felt a small thrill as the memories rushed down over him like a summer rain. As the initial chaos of it all passed, he felt water on his cheeks and discovered that he was crying.
Brushing them from his cheeks, he looked again at the attendant. She simply smiled. “Happy tears, I see,” she said.
He told her she was correct.
“Let’s go outside,” she said, gesturing to her right. “You should take some time, make yourself comfortable. I believe there are some people you were hoping to talk to.”
If he was in fact where he believed himself to be, then he could easily narrow the list of people he wanted to meet down to no less than a hundred. A moment later, he found himself on what appeared to be an old Parisian street, where an assortment of people sat at tables to drink whatever happened to be in their cups as light and joyous music floated past their friendly conversations. The sun had set, and the gas lanterns had only just begun to flicker on, casting the street in a blanket of amber.
A few tables to his left, he saw an empty chair at a table for four. To his amazement, he was sure he recognized each of them. He turned back to the woman at his side. “Is that - - are they - - - I mean, is it all right?”
She nodded kindly. “They are expecting you.”
“Really?”
“I wouldn’t lie to you, Mr. Taylor. They’re all very friendly with people who appreciated their contributions to the world. Go on.”
“Thank you, miss…. I’m afraid I never got your name.”
She touched his hand. “I don’t require one. Good luck, Mr. Taylor. Goodbye.” She vanished as he turned his attention back to the empty chair. One of the men turned and waved him over.
Sean stood behind the seat, gesturing to it and asking, “Is it all right… I mean, do you mind if I…?”
The tall, thin man smiled crookedly. “Of course, Sean. It is Sean, isn’t it?”
“My parents were James Bond fans,” he answered. “The original Bond, I mean.”
One of the other men chuckled. “You should go tell him that, I’m sure he’d love that. I think he’s in an old Irish pub somewhere around here, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Oh my god, you’re….”
“If you’re going to freak out, you should take a seat, my friend.”
Sean nearly tumbled into the chair. “I can’t believe it. I’m… I’m at a table with John Lennon, David Bowie and… I’m sorry, is it okay if I call you Prince?”
Prince nodded. “You don’t have to,” he said softly. “We know who you mean.”
“This is… an honor,” Sean said, but David waved a hand towards him.
“As it was in the music industry, there is no such thing as honor here, my friend. Here we are all near-survivors from a lifetime of… well, living. That we all made it out as well as we have is worthy enough.”
“Well said,” John said, finishing off a small tumbler of dark amber liquid, smiling as it was instantly refilled. “Honestly, why go to a pub when you can get a good glass right here of whatever you want?”
Sean looked down at his Starbucks cup and instantly felt like an idiot. The others saw his expression and laughed.
Prince leaned closer and tapped the edge of the cup. “Never let URself B limited by the limits of memory. Try it now.”
Looking to the others for some hint of a prank, Sean slowly lifted the cup to his lips and took a small taste. His eyes widened and he drank again, this time much deeper. When he finally stopped to let a satisfied gasp of breath escape his lungs, he tried to peer into the small hole on the lid as if to divine the mysteries of what rested within.
Prince chuckled at him. “What does it taste like 2 U?”
Sean struggled to find the words, but finally offered what answer as he could. “It reminded me of the first time I held my son, the first time I made love, the first kiss, the…the first time I was on stage!”
“There it is,” John grinned conspiratorially. “On stage.”
“Tell us about it,” David said, leaning forward in his chair.
It took a moment to get through the waves of emotion-charged memories until he could find the words to describe it. At last, he set the cup down on the table, though his fingertips lingered against the cup’s surface.
“I’d put together a band with a few friends – they were all playing in other groups, but agreed to rehearse some songs I’d written, plus a few covers.”
“Who’d you borrow from?” John asked, a wry smile on his face. “You owe any of us any royalties we need to know about?”
Sean sighed. “I wouldn’t have dared touch any of your songs, guys. I was considering ‘Starman’, but my voice just wasn’t right for it. We did a take on ‘La Grange’ by ZZ top, just because Adam really had the sound for it on his guitar. And we played an acoustic version of ‘Don’t Change’ by INXS, but we shanked the second verse. But whatever. Just don’t tell me Hutchence is around here somewhere, or you can just kill me now.”
John chuckled behind his hand. “He’s still on a stage, somewhere, I think.”
David agreed. “I’m sure he’s dropped the song his own share of times. We all did.”
“I no U aren’t looking @ me,” Prince scowled.
Sean felt himself do a double take. “Seriously, how are you doing that? It’s like I can see the letters and numbers.”
“U can’t do it less U no.”
“That is so weird.”
Prince grinned, and, for a moment, Sean felt like the world might actually be okay for a little while.
The small group laughed briefly before turning the topic back to Sean’s performance, urging him to continue.
“Well, I mean, I’d done little shows with other people, playing the piano or the hand drums – but this was the first really big show I’d done. We had borrowed a friend’s uncle’s theater downtown, and sold tickets, had merch in the lobby, and even had an opening band. We had a fog machine, we worked out the transitions with a friend on the lighting… I mean, it was what I’d always thought a show was, you know?”
“So how many things broke down?” John winked.
Sean laughed. “One of the stage people pulled out the cord to my keyboards, halfway through the opening song.”
The other three laughed sympathetically, eliciting confused looks from the people at the nearby tables.
“And then I had to re-load the whole thing bit by bit through the next two songs. It was…” Sean paused as the memories merged into his new perspective. “It used to crush me. I’d think, man, if this is how all my shows are going to go, I don’t even know why I do this.”
David leaned back, as if reading beyond the expression on his face. “But it wasn’t your last show, of course.”
“No, it wasn’t. I couldn’t stop playing. Or writing. Or singing. I mean, I slowed down after my son was born, but…”
The other musicians exchanged comprehending glances. It was John who spoke next. “That changes you, yeah. I think about it a lot, how things might have been different if I’d stopped after Julian was born. But that’s the funny thing about life, right? You can think about the variables all you like, but at the end of the day…”
“…U get what U get,” Prince finished the thought.
“And all you can do is deal with it,” Sean said softly.
Bowie leaned closer again, tapping the tabletop with a thin index finger. “You can remix the music all you like, but it doesn’t change the song.”
David, John and Prince looked up past Sean to another man who had just appeared. For an instant, Sean was afraid it was Michael Hutchence, summoned by the implication that someone had butchered one of his compositions, but he saw that it was just another person. Again, something oddly familiar about them, helping identify them as one of the attendants here.
“It looks like it’s time to hear it, Sean,” John said cryptically.
“Hear what?”
“UR song,” Prince smiled. “UR 1 great work.”
Seeing his confusion, David waved his hand reassuringly. “It’s fine, you’ll see. Nothing to worry about.”
The attendant nodded their head. “Come with me, please.”
Sean stood and moved to push his chair back in, but his face pled silently to the other men at the table.
John raised his glass, once again full. “It’s fine, friend. We will be around if you’re in the neighborhood. Plus, we never miss a good show.”
The others nodded, all raising their glasses to him. “Break a leg, Sean,” David added. “Cheers.”
Sean picked up his cup and took a drink with the others. “Thank you, gentlemen. Seriously.”
They shared the drink and in a moment Sean found himself in the back of the Fox Theatre, a place he remembered from his youth. He had seen a couple of shows here, though he’d long since lost the concert shirts he’d purchased there.
“Wow, this is…. How are we here?” He instantly realized that the audience was almost completely full, and lowered his voice reflexively. “Are we here?”
The attendant shook their head. “You are fine, Mr. Taylor. Your voice will only carry here in the form of applause, and even then only at the end of a performance.” They led Sean across the back until arriving at a pair of doors leading up some stairs to one of the balcony seats overlooking stage left.
“These are good seats,” Sean marveled.
“Everyone gets the perfect seats,” the attendant replied. “But especially because it is important that you get to hear your song in the manner in which it should be enjoyed.”
“My song? I still don’t understand. Which song? I’ve written a few. I’m just not completely satisfied with any of them.”
“This isn’t like any song you’ll have ever heard before, Mr. Taylor. Here, they are about to play one of the songs now. Please take your seat, relax and listen and I’ll answer your questions after it’s done.”
The lights dimmed and Sean sat in one of the two plush chairs available to him. As the curtains raised, a full brass band was revealed, dressed in powder blue tuxedos with an additional group of musicians covering lead, rhythm and bass guitars with a drummer and full kit. Sean felt he could recognize perhaps half of them but gave up when he remembered what the attendants had been telling him about the familiar faces. Even so, he was pretty sure that was the Jimi Hendrix Experience on some of the electrics.
After a brief but encouraging applause, the audience fell into a deep and respectful anticipatory silence. The conductor appeared on the stage. Even though Sean told himself he was getting used to the sudden appearances and disappearances that people here continued to make, a small part of incredulity remained in his mind; if they were stage magicians, the suddenness of their presence would have been marked – or cloaked, he corrected himself – by a flash of light or smoke. This was not that. Once they were there, it was as if they had always been there, but that he simply hadn’t noticed them. And once they were gone, it felt as though they might never have been there in the first place. They didn’t just poof in or out of existence. They were there one moment and gone the next. Wherever they were before or after just didn’t feel relevant, somehow.
The conductor took no fanfare for themselves. They raised the baton after giving it two small clacks on the music stand, and the instruments followed their lead.
It was an unconventional piece of music, Sean observed. Not really contemporary or classical, though he could pick out influences from a variety of time periods. A few odd notes that felt off-key, and there were times where the volume distracted from what Sean assumed was the intention. It wasn’t as if the musicians were playing the notes wrong, but that the piece itself had some bad notes. After several minutes of this, the song itself began to drag, repeating several stanzas in some sort of awkward coda. It looped back in on itself again, nearly drawing out some poorly-managed melodies from the opening sequences, finally slowing down to an underwhelming finish. Even the two disjointed guitar solos in the break and one of the repeated bridges felt lackluster and tired. And yet, when the last notes were gone, the audience applauded enthusiastically.
A man in the balcony on the opposite side of the theater stood up as a spotlight captured his chair. He bowed awkwardly to the audience and waved his hands for them to give him their attention. He shook his head, gesturing his gratitude towards the stage, but said simply, “I’m not done with that. I’m going to try again!”
The audience applauded again, as did Sean though he wasn’t sure what he was clapping for, exactly. One of the attendants walked up to the other man’s side and touched him on the arm; instantly, both of them disappeared.
“What happened?” Sean asked, after taking his seat again. “What is all of this for?”
His attendant lowered their voice so as not to disturb anyone else. “The man you just saw passed from the world not long before you did. His name was Arnold Jeffries, an accountant from Paramus, New Jersey. He was 72 when he died, after nearly a decade of fighting lung cancer.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that. But… he was a musician too?”
Shaking his head softly, the attendant indicated that he had not been. “Your life – everyone’s life – is a long series of thoughts, actions, hopes and fears. It is of doing, waiting, choice and avoidance. All of it – every bit of the life you live – is a representation of who you are, who you became, over the course of the physical life you led. And here, we turn that representation of your life into a single piece of music, and give you the chance to hear the song your life had become.”
“A song?” Sean felt his mouth hang briefly open. “My life became a song?”
“It is one way to understand it. Are you familiar with the Egyptian gods Osiris and Anubis?”
“I know the names,” Sean admitted. “Why?”
“There was a ritual they were said to perform at the end of one’s life, to judge whether a soul was worthy to enter into the afterlife.”
Sean’s eyes widened. “Oh, wait, I remember this – something about a feather…?”
“Yes, that is it precisely. When Osiris would judge you, Anubis would place your soul on one side of a great scale, with a feather on the other side.”
“Yeah, that always seemed like checking to see if a witch weighed the same as a duck.”
The attendant chuckled softly. “Monty Python. Very funny. Though in this case, the feather was a reference to Maat, the goddess of truth and justice. So, really, what they were suggesting is that your heart was being compared to the amount of injustice they might find there.”
“That does make more sense than it just being some random feather, yeah. But that’s not actually true, is it?”
“It was a metaphor we allowed for a time, until no one cared about it any longer. Metaphors are what we do here – the literal truth of this process would be too alien for you.”
“That should probably terrify me more than it does.”
The attendant patted Sean’s shoulder, but didn’t say anything else about it.
“So, what, do I need to write another song now?”
“No, no,” they told him. “The song has been written, we are just waiting until you’re ready so you can hear it and decide what you want to do about it.”
“What do you mean, what I want to do about it? It’s just a song, right?”
For some inexplicable reason, Sean felt like all the eyes in the theater were on him, and he looked around nervously so as to confirm it wasn’t his imagination. It wasn’t.
Leaning closer, the attendant dropped their voice to nearly a whisper. “You will be given the chance to hear your song played out, and you must listen carefully. Listen for the wrong notes, the poor choices, the thematic inconsistencies. This song represents the life you lived, and only you will know honestly if you will accept the song your life has composed.”
“What… What if I don’t like it?” Sean felt his mouth go dry, but for the moment he kept his cup of coffee in his lap where it was. “That guy didn’t like his song. Did he… die? Or, I mean, I don’t know, is there a hell or someplace you have to go if your song sucks?”
“It isn’t about whether or not your song, as you put it, sucks. It is a question of whether or not you feel that the song is – for you – the best possible song you could have ever written. And if you truly wish it, you have the chance to go back and write a new song.”
“You mean… like reincarnation?”
“After a fashion, yes. Though the concept of reincarnation loses a bit in their failure to adequately understand the notion of space-time. You see, time is not a river. It does not flow in one direction, it flows in all directions. So you may choose to go back and live a new life, but it does not mean you will necessarily go back to a time after the life you lived. You will remember nothing of this time, or of your life. You will simply return to the world and live again.”
“Do I get to choose when?”
“Yes, but you do not need to actually make that decision. The universe knows when things must go together and it does not require our guidance.”
Sean rested his chin in his hands and let that realization slowly integrate into his consciousness until another question rose up through the mental processing of it all. “What…. What happens if I like the song as it is?”
“Then you have no need to return,” said the attendant. There was no sorrow or harshness in their voice. It was simply a quiet fact, as if they had said the sun was shining or the rain was falling. “And you will go on from there.”
“To where? Where do I go?”
“I cannot say.”
“You don’t know? Or you won’t tell me?”
It was clear the attendant had heard these questions before, but to their credit they were patient with the words and made no effort to stifle his concerns.
“Part of this choice involves the acceptance – or otherwise – that you have lived your life as best you can, and find yourself willing to trust in the next steps of the rest of your existence. Not only does this exercise require a quiet degree of faith, but a willingness to accept that time itself was merely the construct required for one of an infinite number of experiences and lessons to be gained. But that this period of time was of a finite nature, and not one in which you would wish to lose yourself in. Others have, you should know. There are souls who have gone back again and again, with no wish to go forward.”
“So they failed?”
“It is not such a simple concept as passing or failing. Life in the cosmos is not such a binary value. Consider your childhood: would you have stayed in elementary school forever?”
“No,” Sean laughed at the idea of it, but realized that he had known one or two people who might have preferred to have spent their entire lives exactly like that. “Okay, I think I see where you’re going with this. So, you’re saying after I hear my song, if I am happy with it, then that’s it. I move on, to whatever is next?”
“Just so.”
The curtains had been pulled back down over the stage and the house lights were dim. As Sean looked down over the audience, he could see a gentle shimmer as one person would vanish, only to be replaced by another, and so on.
“Is it always a song? I mean, that guy was, you said, a… an accountant? So it’s not just like this because I used to be a songwriter?”
“What is it you used to always say about music?”
Sean pondered the question for a moment. “That it’s like magic?”
Smiling kindly, the attendant shook their head. “The other thing you said about music.”
Realization sparked in his mind. “Oh, right – that music is math.”
“Exactly. There are a few other formats that have been tried, but music seems to work best. But I feel that you remain concerned about something you have yet to vocalize.”
“Well, yeah. I mean, there are only so many mathematical configurations. After a bit, don’t the songs get a bit… derivative? I mean, nobody’s going to come after me if my song sounds like theirs?”
“There are no copyright concerns here, if that’s your question.”
“Partly, sure. I mean, I guess there are probably lawyers here, too, in spite of the jokes to the contrary. But I mean, it’s more of a question of what if my song sounds just like someone else’s?”
“Do you want it to sound different than everyone else’s?”
Sean shrugged at that. “I always figured it was like that old saying, good artists borrow…”
“Great artists steal outright,” the attendant finished.
“Right.”
“You misunderstand the purpose here,” they explained. “This is not a moment where anyone else will judge you. Everyone here will listen; your song will remain here, played as often as anyone cares to wait and listen to it, but there is only one person whose opinion will affect the outcome in terms of whether you will continue on or go back to compose again.”
“Me,” Sean answered.
“Precisely. It only truly matters how you feel about this. Will you hear the song of your life and be content, or will you feel it is insufficient?”
Sean couldn’t help but think of the other old saying, about how most art is never finished; it is merely abandoned. He had written hundreds of songs in his life, but he had only recorded a couple of dozen, and even those he had never been truly happy with. Would this be the same?
He sat back in his chair with a soul-wracking sigh. “Fine. When do I hear it?”
“Whenever you wish. Simply say you are ready.”
“I’ll never be ready.”
“Then say you are ready enough.”
Never had a moment felt so full of portent. Regardless, he sighed again, and nodded his head.
“Punch it.”
The lights dimmed. The curtains slowly rose. The audience clapped, most of whom respectfully avoided looking up into the balcony to make eye contact with the composer. It was not so much a matter of established etiquette as it was perhaps some shared sense of the weight that rested on his shoulders. Whatever the case, they allowed him the peace to listen to his life without intrusion.
A different orchestra had appeared this time. A full ensemble with a robust string section, woodwinds and brass with an emphasis on French horns – always his favorite – and an exceptional percussion section filled with timpanis, a hammered dulcimer and even a rhumbaphone. At the rear of the orchestra between the percussion elements stood a full modern set of musicians, with two electric guitarists, one playing Chapman stick and the other Sean was almost positive was none other than Michael Hedges. The bassist was on a fretless, and the drummer had a kit that would have made Neil Peart smile in sincere appreciation. All of this was exceptional enough, but Sean’s breath caught in his throat as a glossy black grand piano appeared on the near side of the stage.
“Who did they find to play that?” he asked the attendant, but they held one finger to their lips and directed him to watch the stage. To his amazement, he saw none other than himself walk out to the stage, glance uncomfortably up at himself in the balcony and half-wave before sitting at the bench.
“Um…” he began, but didn’t quite know how to ask the question, instead falling silent. Probably some kind of time-thing anyway, he thought.
The conductor performed the same routine as he had on the previous piece, drawing the musicians to attention with a wave of his baton and leading them into the tempo. It was a simple 4/4, slow but steady, and opened with the piano in a solo recital of a melody that teased at the back of Sean’s mind. It was a refrain on one of his first songs, a piece he had written after spending a morning on the shore of Pacific Grove in California when he was in his late teens. The song had reminded him of that specific moment of his life, just before going off to college as he contemplated the path he wanted to follow.
The piano continued in an echo of that melody, before the strings and woodwinds joined in. Now he felt the additional influence of bands he had played in, classes that had opened his eyes to the world around him, and by the time the percussion and guitars teased their way around the melody, he heard the song he had written when he first met the woman he would later marry.
Power chords and the full potency of the drum kit launched him into the struggles of corporate life – which had given him career stability and health insurance, even as it threatened the delicate balance of his creative leanings. And just when the tension built to a critical crescendo… all the instruments fell abruptly silent save for a single oboe. Lilting, trilling glissandos fluttered through the air like the song of a butterfly, reminiscent of the stenciled images that dotted their first child’s nursery.
As he listened, Sean found that the thoughts which had often crowded his mind back in those days – that his life as a musician would be over from that day forward – he now realized that this perception had been a false one. Because in those notes he heard songs that his life had been composing all along. First steps. First words. First days of school. Music lessons. Sports practices. Dance recitals. Art classes. Long intimate conversations with the children who would eventually grow, love and prepare to have children of their own. Heart breaks. Dreams realized. Graduations. Life renewed.
The melodies from the introduction returned, as the cycle of life spun towards the last days he would know. The insistent ping of hospital monitors. Tears by his side. The holding of hands. The last, whispered farewells.
The stage blurred before his eyes, as tears streamed down his cheeks. He could barely see his other self, coming to the last echoes of the melody that had started and accompanied the piece. The final note, a simple but elegant center C, hung in the air like the smell of the last drops of rain.
The audience stood as one, clapping and showing the instant affection and deep emotions the song had evoked in him. Sean tried to lift his head, but could not out wrestle the shuddering of his shoulders, wracked with each heavy sob that escaped his lips.
It was a good song, he realized. It had been a good life. There was not one single note he would have changed, not even a faint shiver of a beat fallen wrong.
He could not look up. He could not look to his side, where he could feel the attendant patiently awaiting his answer.
“It was…perfect,” Sean whispered. “I love the song, just the way it is. But…do I have to go on? Can’t I just stay here for a while?”
The attendant placed their hand on his shoulder. “Of course, Mr. Taylor,” they answered. “In fact, you know you stay here, yes? You haven’t yet played your song on stage, as you know you will.”
Sean could only nod wordlessly. It had all felt too rushed. There were conversations he wanted still to have, music he wanted yet to hear and to play.
After all, someone had to play the songs, didn’t they?