copyright 1997
The place was a wreck. Papers scattered everywhere, an open bottle of wine precariously balanced on the edge of the sink, dishes piled around it. A year after her foster parents' car accident, the apartment felt so empty. Mari still couldn't go into their bedroom.
She wished they were still alive when she first brought Tom home, so they could have disapproved.
Damn Tom, thought Mari. Forget what I told him. Now I have a perfect reason to dump him. She cursed him silently in Hungarian. The English swear words she'd learned when she was seven, new to the U.S., never quite satisfied.
Mari stepped in and slammed the door, half-hallucinating the soft tread of feet behind her. Lock all the locks, yes, even the stupid useless chain-and-socket one she never used. Seeing it undone made her nervous.
Since her foster parents' death, Mari usually lit candles and sat in semi-darkness. Now she felt funny about lighting candles. Even about semi-darkness. She wanted light -- lots of it. Mari flipped on all the light switches in the apartment until her eyes ached from brightness, leaving no shadow unturned.
Mari put her purse on the kitchen table and walked into her bedroom. Tom no longer frightened her. The cold eyes of the man in the store.... She resisted pronouncing his name. There were plenty of bizarrely dressed people in the East Village, but this man had had a fierce look of otherness that surmounted rationality. If someone had told her he'd come back from the dead, she would have believed it.
All the old folk-legends she had heard in the orphanage, the nuns chiding her: why fill your head with that nonsense? Back then, she couldn't get enough of "that nonsense," an escape from the constant grey drizzle of orphanage life, donated underwear and 30-watt light bulbs. What she couldn't glean from the cleaning women and the other children, she had dug up herself, but she understood the tales only as metaphors, their nightmare characters invisible -- not walking around in the city where she lived.
He was legend, and legend had touched her. The shoulder he'd touched burned as though branded, yet bore no mark, the skin not even red.
Invisible, thought Mari. She got two aspirin from the bathroom cabinet and swallowed them dry.
Cold wind burst against the windows, rattling and whining mournfully. No more Tom. Relief and fear washed over her. Hell, Tom couldn't have protected her against the man in the store anyway. Mari pictured Tom telling him "I'm her boyfriend; buzz off."
In spite of herself, she laughed, and sat down at her piano.
The ideas didn't come right away. She put her hands on the keys, waiting for a communication from her fingers.
Her fingers assembled a half-diminished chord, the left hand poised over a fat octave. A sound from 100 years ago. Modern then. Disappointed, she resolved the half-diminished into a genuinely diminished chord. No inspiration. Mari rode a chromatic series of diminished chords to the top of the keyboard, until her right pinky hit wood.
Mari pushed away from the piano, feeling sick. Putting her hands on her knees, she bowed her head. Stupid, she taunted herself. I'm just upset about Tom; he's the real... vampire. Letting herself think the word, Mari laughed shakily, and put her hands back on the piano. One note, urgent in its isolation, sang out. Reluctantly, it gave way to another, passing the message on to a third. Stretching out over great spaces, leaping upwards, sinking to nothing, a message --
"Stop!" she shouted.
The music is not a message, Mari told herself. Rubbing nervously at the cold ache on her shoulder, she squeezed her eyes shut against the bright light. The music was just music, a search for some beauty in dissonance, an invitation to anachronism. Leaping up from the piano bench, Mari faded the burning lights to perfect blackness: relief. She felt her way back to the windows, and pulled the shade up enough to admit a dim blue ray of moonlight.
Mari sat at the piano again.
Music spilled from her fingers onto the keyboard, polyphonies overlapping each other, deafening in their complexity. The piano spat out brittle tones, each self-conscious note break ing the flow of melody, forceful and chiseled, Mari's fingers possessed by some clumsy demon. Her shoulder throbbed with pain, her head heavy, the pulse of her blood singing in her ears, almost screaming.
Mari pulled her hands from the keyboard and clutched her shoulder, grimacing in pain. She had to lie down. Music still echoed in her ears, though the room was silent. Tottering off the piano bench, Mari fell onto the couch under her loft bed, staring blankly at the tossing patterns the moonlight cast upon the wall, until an uneasy sleep moved in upon her.
3
______________________Gratefully, Mari climbed four flights to her apartment, heart rioting in her chest. She fumbled with the locks; swung open the door.
Chapter 4....