"Dinner's ready."
She looked at him from her armchair, legs curled under her, sheet music open in her lap, eyes wide and surprised.
"You cooked?" Zione folded his apron and hung it over the back of his chair, place set neatly before it with meal and wine before answering.
"This surprises you?"
He knew the answer, even before she looked over his shoulder to the kitchen, still steamy from bubbling pots and rich with food-smells that wafted around the house. He would have known even if she hadn't reacted as she did every day; the sunlight in the living room had faded long ago, just after he had come home, but the lamp beside her chair had remained switched off until Zione had seen to it, as he always did. She was too busy inside her own head to notice small things like twilight, or food, or Zione. Not until it was too dark to see, anyway. And so, even as she opened her mouth for her next question, he answered, "Seven o' clock. Dinnertime. Tear yourself away if you can."
She could, of course.
They ate and drank, and then they talked as the candles burnt down till all Zione could see was her eyes, shining with her enthusiasm. Rather, she talked, and Zione watched, and listened.
She talked of Chopin, elegant scales and brilliant notes ringing in the ear; of Beethoven, of grand harmony and personal tragedy and engaging anger; of Schumann, and his terrible high A; of her own music, how it was always there, how it filled, made, composed - as it were - her life. The rhythms of her movement, the melodies of her speech, the unlearned and terrifying score of other people.
Finally, shyly, she spoke of Zione's music, counterpoint to her own. Slowly, stutteringly, she tried to explain the significance of an opposite yet complementary melody. The difference it made to a piece of music. The depth, the colour, it added.
All the while he filled her glass when it emptied and her voice began to crack; ensured she knew where all her favourite dishes were and that she ate moderate portions of those she didn't like but needed, asked the right questions and nodded encouraginly when she flagged. When she looked to him for approval, he allowed the silence to stretch out a moment, then asked her to play for him.
Zione sat in her armchair, too tall and too leggy to curl up, catlike, as she did. She eased herself onto the cracked leather piano stool, worn with fond use, and spread long fingers easily across black and white keys, lightly resting.
Silence. Then a long run of treble notes as she settled into the music, eyes closing with a soft smile as quiet bass sounded and supported. So it ran; graceful melody, stolid bass that climbed higher and higher as the melody expounded, till at last it settled again and faded away into quiet, a single pure note of resolution resting on the mind.
Zione waited, savouring it. She sat back upright, hands folded on her lap. At last he rose and kissed her a thank you. She went to bed pleased while he tidied away the dinner things.
He woke far too soon.
Heart pounding in a chest painfully tight with fear, he tore down the stairs in pursuit of the scream that was rapidly – too rapidly – fading away. Down, into the music room and through to a kitchen where the last dischord still jarred on the ear and where there was a room no longer, replaced instead with blackness and lights – eyes- and he desperately tried to stop, to turn back and find her, but a hand as dark as the room that wasn't there reached to and through him and his heart turned to ice and his mind aflame with pain and the need to find her only his body was stone and no longer his and the pain was a wrenching in his chest which still clenched around the need to find her – that, he had to hold to – a wrenching that grew more distant with every passing moment of pain in heart and body and mind and soon it passed from him altogether, and the pain of it leaving, something as necessary to him – him the person – being as breathing, was so unbearable that everything began to fade away from him save the blessed relief of blackness around him, and the need to find her. Always that.
It ended, eventually.
Someone followed the music through darkness. Someone followed the
music because it was all they knew how to do. Someone arrived in a
castle taller than possibility, beneath an impossibly moon, in a city
that lived without people. Someone walked dark streets to the
ringing of strings, someone found a neon tower and was no longer
alone. Someone fought, and won, and drove away an opponent who came
unprepared to face their fury at being delayed. Someone followed the
other to a grey castle in the sky where the music was. Someone found
a musician, but not the right one. Someone realised they felt
nothing because of this.
Someone realised they were Nobody.