Note: I have a thing about thirteenth chapters. Somehow they always wind up being significant. Enjoy.
Edward stood at the brink of a new year.
It was like he was back at Discovery Park, standing tall on the bluff looking out into the endless water. But when he looked down, he could see no water playing an eternal game of tag with the shore. He could see no sky covering the sea like a fluffy blanket.
He could see only darkness.
He stood on a cliff staring into a depthless abyss that threatened to swallow him whole, winds raging and clutching at his limbs to drag him down, begging him to let go, to jump. And the music, that elusive music, was growing stronger, louder, swelling within his soul. No longer could he brush it away as easily as buzzing gnats.
The music was a dragon breathing fire into his veins and unhinging its jaw to devour him. There was nothing he could do to stop it.
Miss Bella was already gone.
He could feel himself burning, slipping away.
With a single shudder, Edward spread his arms and fell forward into the abyss. And with a gleeful, gaping grin, music consumed him.
For a while, Edward sat in the obsidian abyss, listening to the music.
While he went through the motions of his life, he listened to the music all around him. He listened to Jasper and the other street musicians spreading their disjointed harmonies like a virus to everyone who passed. He listened to all the music that his money would buy from the local thrift store. He listened to car radios and TV sets and speakers in the stores.
He didn't just hear the music; he listened to it. He listened to the sound the wind made crying at his window each night, begging to be let in. He listened to the rhythm of his footsteps carrying him across the pavement. He listened to the Emerald City breathing and screeching and rattling its cage.
As he listened, his own music maker sat still and silent, a marker on his grave.
As he listened, he found the melodies that had been so elusive to his ear. He found his rhythm in the beating of his heart.
One day, he had listened enough.
It was time to play.
He sat down on his little chair in front of his music maker, and his fingers and thighs and lips trembled in anticipation. He brought the music maker to life, coaxing it from its slumber. He touched a pure, white key—middle C.
As he pressed that single, forlorn key in the middle of an alphabet ocean, a single pinprick of light illuminated the darkness of his abyss.
The light twinkled at him, his little star.
Edward lifted his other fingers to the music maker like a conductor preparing to direct a full orchestra. He pressed the tips of his fingers to the keys in the gentlest caress of a baby's cheek.
Then he began to play.
With each note he played, more pinpricks of light broke through the darkness, rays of light imploding into a dark globe. With his fingers, he dotted the dark heavens with light—single stars and clusters and systems and entire galaxies.
With his fingers, he made the galaxies dance.
Edward threw back his head and laughed.
Miss Bella would hear this music.
Some days, he forgot to go to work. Some days, he forgot to sleep or to eat. But every day, he played the music.
Because the residents of Edward's dilapidated Belltown apartment had been the first to be subjected to Edward's music, it was fitting that they were the first to notice the change.
The evening regulars sat with two chair legs halfway out on their balconies (which were not big enough to accommodate all four chair legs), overlooking what was called a "courtyard" in the flimsy tri-fold that they received as a consolation prize for viewing and/or leasing one of the units. Many of them were arguing; many of them were smoking; all of them were listening for the strains of their evening "serenade."
Before the resident in apartment 108 had purchased his little music-massacring machine, they had bickered among themselves about who was tossing mop water where, what garbage belonged to whom, and what type of clothing was appropriate to dry in the public eye.
An especially popular topic of debate was the lacy undergarments of the aspiring actress named Wanda in 305. The men staunchly defended the right to dry clothes—all clothes—in the breezeway; their wives did not. Unfortunately for the wives, Wanda lived on the top floor, so it was more difficult for said undergarments to "accidentally" get doused in grimy water. Of course, this fact didn't always preclude an especially ambitious woman from trying.
The residents had slowly stopped squabbling with each other, however, as Edward's new daily tradition focused their ire toward a single window on the first floor—specifically, toward the inexplicable dissonance emanating from his little keyboard. How could the resident in 108 possibly be extracting so much fail from so few keys?
When Edward had settled in to play the piano, they settled in to play as well, a game one of the Art Institute students called "Alley Cat." For, as was the common response to the mewling of an alley cat, Edward's playing often compelled residents to toss the nearest object toward the sound.
But one drizzly day, the regulars sat smoking their drug of choice, today's worthless piece of junk a lazy arm's reach away, when they heard it—the familiar melody of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. That the strains of a simple child's song were wafting from the 108 window was not particularly surprising; that the strains wafting from the window were recognizable was.
The next night: Twinkle again,this time with a haunting counterpoint in the left hand that was a single gold thread of sound woven among the cotton of the familiar melody. Impossibly, the simple song transformed from sing-song annoyance to childhood nostalgia. The next day, the housewives found themselves humming the unusual harmony he'd superimposed while they wiped and scrubbed and dumped their buckets into the tub for a change.
Within a week, Edward was regaling his neighbors with simple pieces like Heart and Soul, Für Elise, Minuet in G, and other songs that they could recognize but not name.
For the first time, the small courtyard in Belltown lived up to the marketing hype of being "your own quiet utopia amid the bustling city." When the music began, the grumbling and arguing ceased—the music the water and the petty grievances the oil; the two did not, could not mix. From the time Edward came home from work until he tumbled—spent—into bed, the courtyard exceeded its calling; it became a cathedral of worship to the purity of sound, the innocence of soul that Edward embodied and poured into his burgeoning music.
Edward's neighbors no longer tossed him useless junk to discourage him. Instead, they tossed him other things to beg him to play—notebook paper folded into a square, wadded up, or made into a paper airplane, their favorite song scrawled in its folds.
If Edward recognized the name of the song, he played it on the spot. If not, he would seek out Jasper the following day to teach it to him. When Jasper didn't know the song, Edward interviewed the musicians lining the street until he found one who could at least sing it to him. Whether someone had demonstrated the chord progression to him or had merely hummed the melody, Edward would play the song for his neighbors the following day.
Jasper was therefore the next to notice something different about Edward.
At first, he merely humored Edward's requests to demonstrate increasingly complicated songs on his keyboard. He thought Edward was parroting the song requests from one of his friends or co-workers, and Jasper pitied the poor soul who had to listen to the results.
Nevertheless, he demonstrated whatever song the kid wanted to see.
"Look, but don't touch," he would warn. Edward would nod solemnly and would lean forward on the balls of his feet, listening intently.
Because Jasper couldn't afford to lose any of the credibility he'd worked hard to establish as a Pike's Market musician, he couldn't let Edward try his hand at the keyboard during work hours. Like his fellow artists lining the street, Jasper had been slowly working his way toward the prime real estate where Pike and Pine streets intersected at the world famous Pike's Place Fish Market. The goal of playing in the prime location in front of the Fish Market was called the "Pike Dream." They all shared it, but it was notoriously difficult to get ahead in this elaborate game of king of the hill.
To perform in front of Seattle's premier tourist attraction, you had to pay the right people the right amount of money. Unfortunately, to make the right amount of money as a Seattle street musician, you had to play to as large a number of tourists as possible, the better to increase your chances of getting a tip. The lucky musician playing in front of the Fish Market played to the largest cross section of Seattle tourists and, therefore, received the largest amount of tips, further solidifying everyone else's "Pike Dream" as nothing but a pipe dream.
Granted, over the years, the kings of the hill had a nasty habit of disappearing. The current musician was a wiry fiddler who played a mean Devil Went Down to Georgia and who had who had reigned supreme several months longer than most. He was a dubious fellow with a blonde ponytail whose frequent facial abrasions (bruises, split lips, and the like) showed that he spent considerable time after hours either defending his throne or allowing himself to be beaten silly at the local fight club.
Jasper suspected that the fiery redhead who tap-danced to his fiddling also factored in to the fiddler's unexpected tenure. She had great gams and pouty red lips and had caught the eye of the head fishmonger, who Jasper suspected was more involved in the affairs of the street musicians than you would think from his open smile, hearty singing voice, and ability to prevent even the most slippery of fish from dropping to the floor.
Because Jasper yearned for both the popularity and stable income afforded by Pike's prime spot, he couldn't allow Edward's clumsy fingers to cause him to forfeit his unwritten yet understood slot in the hierarchy. Therefore, Jasper had to perform Edward's requested songs himself. He couldn't sit Edward in front of him and guide his fingers to the correct keys like he could back in the parking garage. He couldn't repeat any of the sections. And he definitely couldn't ask Edward to attempt to play the song back to him. Instead, he asked Edward to stand at the perfect distance—not too far that he couldn't see the keys but far enough to break the ice, to entice other passersby to join him.
People rarely stopped for a street musician flying solo, but they flocked like lemmings to one with an audience. Particularly an audience as appreciative as Edward seemed to be.
Despite Jasper's misgivings about pseudo piano lessons during work hours, Edward never asked him to repeat sections of the songs, and he never showed any inclination to reach for the keys. He merely stood in his perfect spot, a demure statue, and listened.
Oddly, Edward hadn't shown up in the evening for follow-up lessons in over a week. Jasper had noted that Edward had looked more pinched and gaunt than usual. And he hardly ever smiled.
The stoner in Jasper wanted to ignore this change in Edward, but the musician in him could not. Edward seemed to be pulling an increasingly complicated song list out of a black top hat. When Edward requested the quintessential pop piano song—Billy Joel's Piano Man—Jasper decided to follow Edward after working hours to see what he was doing with Jasper's instruction. If nothing else, Jasper wanted to see what Edward planned to do with his assertion that Piano Man could not be played properly without the harmonica in the intro (which Jasper had to borrow from a minor musician several blocks west to demonstrate).
The next time Edward came begging for a song demonstration, Jasper packed up early and followed Edward's beeline back to wherever it was.
As Jasper expected, Edward was so easy to shadow that Jasper could probably have done it blindfolded. He was so focused on his feet and their placement on the sidewalk that he rarely noticed the people he passed, much less someone who might be following. In fact, Edward barely seemed to notice when a couple of career hoodlums dropped their respective shoulders in a classic high school football tackling pose and clotheslined him, knocking him to the ground.
The hoodlums were enjoying a rousing game of 'tard-tipping.
From the warped grins on their faces as they turned to watch Edward scrabble up, stammer a garbled "Sorry," and continue walking, Jasper could tell that they had done this to Edward before.
Jasper immediately strolled between the hoodlums and threw up his elbows as he passed, catching them both in the nose. He was around the corner before they knew what hit them. In a casual glance back, he saw them in paroxysms on the ground like dying spiders, blood gushing from two noses that he hoped were broken.
Jasper hadn't even broken stride. Edward was part of his family now, and Jasper took care of his family. In the future, they would think twice about tipping this 'tard.
He trailed Edward for two more blocks until the kid disappeared into a rundown building that made the parking garage look like the Bellagio. When he reached for the gate, he saw that the locking mechanism was too loose to serve its purpose; he didn't even have to jimmy the door for it to swing open at his touch.
Edward was nowhere to be seen. Jasper followed the trail of cracks and mildew on the wall until the dark corridor vomited him out into a small concrete garden with sky access that allowed at least some of the excrement and garbage stench to dissipate. It was then, as he stood scanning the row of identical green doors for some sign of Edward, that he first heard the music.
Now that he thought about it, the courtyard of the apartment complex had been too still and quiet for your typical Seattle sub-community. When he first walked in to their sanctuary, he had not even noticed nearly every resident at attention on their balconies. But now he saw their still forms partially obscured and then revealed by the billowing sheets hanging across laundry lines above him, their bodies oriented toward the music.
Instinctively, he knew that they had been waiting for this.
The introductory bars of Piano Man played in an eerily perfect reproduction of Jasper's earlier performance in the market, minor flaws and all.
But Edward could not possibly be playing.
The Edward he knew was tone deaf and rhythm deficient. Edward couldn't even play the stair-stepping notes of the easiest of child songs. Edward could not have played Piano Man if his life had depended on it.
When a melancholy harmonica joined in the fray, Jasper gasped and took a single step toward the source of the music. In that instant, a white sheet billowed out of the way, exposing a window that opened into a dark, dank apartment.
Through the gloom, Jasper could see the same gray shirt and the same disheveled hair that he'd followed through the city streets.
Impossibly, it was Edward.
Impossibly, Edward was playing this music. Edward's fingers were (smoothly!) masterminding the keys. Edward's head was bobbing along (on beat!) to the movements of his arms.
Jasper's seasoned ear could discern that Edward's fingers still lacked the muscle-memory required to flawlessly execute the more difficult chord reaches and scales that the song contained. However, he course-corrected beautifully and never made the same mistake twice. As Edward became more comfortable with the song's eddies and flows, he began to improvise, adding more intricate harmonies and melodies as an additional, rich layer to the base song that Jasper had taught him.
Jasper couldn't have uprooted himself from this spot even if he'd been faced with a herd of stampeding elephants. He'd stare them down, listen to the music, and die a happy, flat man.
He was obviously the best piano teacher on the planet.
When the echoes of the final harmonica note died away, the little courtyard erupted in applause. Even the laundry flapping in the breeze seemed to be paying homage to the creator of such music. He looked down and was surprised to see himself clapping right along with them, as hard as hands could go.
And then it began to snow.
Jasper watched a veritable blizzard of white—was it paper?—drift from all facets of the building toward Edward's window. Many of the paper wads and airplanes made it to their intended target. But one of the balls ricocheted off the peeling window frame and rolled until it collided with the toe of Jasper's boot. Although it felt sacrilegious to touch something that had clearly been intended as offering or payment for whatever it was that he had just experienced, Jasper bent to retrieve it.
In the center of the crumpled paper were two words: Ave Maria.
A song request.
Jasper thought the words particularly appropriate; if he were a praying man, now might be a praying moment. Although it would be more like Hail Edward.
When Edward started to play another song, plucking a request from the floor of his apartment like manna from heaven, Jasper realized that Edward's newfound ability had absolutely nothing to do with his instruction.
Jasper hadn't taught him that song.
Edward clearly had some sort of internal talent that had taken a while to well up from inside him but was now gushing out with such force that Jasper was surprised he wasn't crushed beneath his own tidal wave.
Edward needed an outlet, and fast.
And Jasper had just the thing.
Note: The concept of what is happening to Edward in the abyss was inspired by the lyrics of Only Hope, after which this story was named. And the idea of Edward "hearing the music" and playing it so that Miss Bella would hear was inspired by the movie August Rush, a movie that I watched recently and found particularly applicable to this story as well. In other words, I'm pretty much wholly unoriginal, but I can only hope (pun intended) that I have taken all these threads from different places and have woven them into something new for your reading pleasure. Thus is the joy of fanfiction.