The Starlight Sonata

[note: this trilogy, first posted in 2008, remained unfinished until now. This is 300 pages, 100k+ words, unedited. Story elements from Passegiatta interwoven. AL]

THE STARLIGHT SONATA

Part I: Woman in Chains

Tracy Tomlinson walked down the stairs as quietly as she could. She slipped into the kitchen like a shadow and put on coffee, then walked outside and down the driveway; she groped around in the dark for the newspaper, nearly tripped over a football when she bent over to pick it. It was still too dark out to see the headlines, but she hardly cared about them anymore. Mark kept up with all that stuff. The world would get along just fine without her knowing who had been fighting in what war over this or that reason last night, and she knew she'd greet tomorrow's wars with about as much interest.

Yet she could remember a time when she'd cared about the world -- and she knew she had. Like she had once cared about how she looked, about what she ate, or even what Mark thought of the way she looked. There'd been times when she worried what her friends thought of her, even what her children thought of her -- but not any more. She had grown tired -- tired of life, tired of living, tired of eating and tired of even breathing. Fucking Mark, she remembered bitterly, had been the last to go. She'd always loved a good rough fuck, but Mark had lost interest after she put on a hundred pounds, so now not even that simple pleasure remained. She was numb now, and it was like all those things resided somewhere in the back stacks, lost somewhere on a forgotten list with all her other useless memories.

She climbed the steps back into the kitchen and pulled down two little packets of flavored oatmeal and put water in the microwave to boil, then walked upstairs to her boy's room. Brian was on his back, his morgen-bone rising under the sheet from the center of his bed; the first time she'd seen that she had almost laughed -- because the spectacle looked like the troops were raising the flag on Iwo Jima once again. She shook her head at the memory and turned on his light, called out his name, then walked down to Stacy's room -- but heard the shower going in the hall bathroom and knew her daughter was already up. When she poked her head in their bedroom she heard Mark in their bathroom, his electric razor grinding away through day old stubble. Already the room smelled like his Old Spice deodorant and the scent brought back another bundle of useless, if unwelcome, memories -- like the last time she'd touched herself down there and everything had felt cold and dead -- or was lifeless the correct word, she wondered.

'Like this waste of time I call my life,' she told herself as she returned to the kitchen.

Once there she pulled out the big skillet and put it on the range, took eggs from the refrigerator and sausage patties from the freezer and set out everything she needed to cook her family's breakfast, and then she poured coffee for Mark and Stacy. Brian was still, she thought with the last vestiges of a smile, a little too young for caffeine. Too young to do much this early in the morning besides hump his pillow or brag about how well he was doing at football practice.

She scrambled two eggs for Stacy and three over-medium for Mark, poured water over Brian's instant oatmeal, then set out a platter of sausage patties on the table and poured orange juice for the three of them. As they flooded into the kitchen she walked by them silently and walked back up the stairs to her bedroom. She locked the door and sat down on the edge of her bed; she felt like crying for a few minutes, then walked into the bathroom. She looked at the bottles of Prozac and Xanax in the medicine cabinet and wondered if these were all she had to look forward to now, like would there ever be anything more than chemically induced oblivion to look forward to? Pills and a nap, again and again, then wake up and start it all over again, wearing a beaten path in the house's old brown carpet on her way to an early grave.

She took her prescribed dose and lay down on the bed, listened as the kids got into the car with Mark and headed off to school. She hoped sleep would come soon for her, and take her far, far away.

+++++

She knew she was far, far away because the ringing in her ears was so out of place.

Nothing here seemed right.

She was on a beach, she was sitting on a sandy beach; she knew she was sitting because she could feel wet sand under her legs and feet. The sun was hot; a soft breeze was blowing, lifting her hair and filling the air with smells of a salt-laden sea. Mark was standing beside her, his back turned toward her, and he was holding a huge mass of heavy chain. She looked down and saw twisted and rusted links wrapped tightly around her thighs, forcing them tightly together.

Why... Mark, why? Why have you done this to me?

The ringing was insistent now and she turned, looked over her shoulder at rows of palm trees swaying in the wind. She wanted to walk into the trees, look for the ringing lost in the darkness because the sound seemed to be coming from inside the forest. Suddenly she turned back to the sea, remembered something. A sailboat sat offshore a few hundred yards away. A man was on deck, looking at her from time to time, and she saw a gray dorsal fin circling the boat. She could see the man quite clearly, yet his face was invisible, like he was not quite a part of this dream. The man was playing a grand piano on the boat's foredeck, and she looked harder at him now -- because something was wrong with the dream today. She could just see strings attached to his arms and hands; some strings were stretched tautly, others dangled loosely, and all vanished in low, gray clouds that had just swept just overhead. She could see that the man's movements were being controlled by these strings, and she gasped when she saw the man's helplessness.

The ringing grew louder still. Then she heard someone knocking at the door.

The door? On a beach?

She opened her eyes; she saw her bathroom door was open and felt herself adrift in the hazy, shaded ambivalence of her meds. She looked at the old clock on the table by her side just as the knocking started again. It was nine thirty. Daylight, she saw. She swung her feet to the brown carpet and stood uncertainly, fell back to the bed with practiced ease and let her head spin slowly, let the pressure in her chest subside, then she stood once again and walked down the stairs.

She could see two police officers on the front porch; one was looking in the window by the door and he saw her, stood back and waited. She reached for the door, still not sure if she was awake yet, or if this was a new, very different part of her dream.

She opened the door, then squinted into the harsh light of day.

"Mrs Tomlinson?" One of the officers said.

"Yes. Is something wrong?"

"Ma'am, could we come inside," the other officer said.

She was waking up now; she could feel something dark circling overhead. Something wrong. She could feel it all around her now. Something was terribly wrong with this place.

She opened the door and let the men in and closed it behind them. She had the impression neighbors were standing across the street looking at her, and for some reason this scared her. She led the officers into the living room, asked if they wanted coffee and what this was all about.

"Ma'am, there's been an accident. Is there someone we could call to be here with you?"

"An accident?" Tracy Tomlinson said, her eyes going wide as the pressure in her chest returned, and she was now fully awake. "What? Who?"

"Perhaps you'd like to sit down, Ma'am..."

"No, I want to know what's wrong," Her voice bit into the rising tide of fear welling up deep inside, while hysteria rippled through the air around the empty house. "Why are you here?" she asked the closest officer. "Why? Tell me why?"

"Ma'am, does your husband drive a white 2023 Volvo SUV?"

"Yes! What? What...are you saying?"

"Ma'am, that car was struck by a train this morning at the grade crossing on Paterson Parkway. There were three bodies in the car, but, well, there was a fire, and I hate to inform you that..."

"What? Where are my children?"

"Ma'am, we've identified the bodies in the Volvo, and, uh, I'm afraid they're, uh, well, they are your children, well, they're gone, Ma'am..."

She was aware of time slowing, of the room spinning, then growing dark, darker, darker with each slowing heartbeat -- the pressure in her chest suddenly crushing the life out of her, then just as suddenly everything grew quiet, and the purest white she had ever known filled her sight. She was surrounded by clouds speeding by and suddenly felt like she was flying, flying into this light, and yet everything was cold in this new dream, and suddenly everything was so very quiet.

Then she felt like she was flying at great speed -- but straight down. The sensation of speed was vertiginous, the nausea overwhelming, and then pain the pressure in her chest returned.

'Why does my chest hurt so much?' she said to herself. 'What a strange dream this is.'

+++++

She opened her eyes, and still all she saw was fog.

But there were people in the fog now, and they were all around her, their eyes full of concern. There was a bright light overhead, a sharp pain in her left arm, disjointed faces in funny paper hats with masks over their mouthes and noses. A bald man with kind eyes behind small round glasses was leaning close, looking into her eyes -- and she wanted to fall inside his kindness.

"It's alright Tracy. You're going to feel a little sleepy now. Don't fight it, okay? You'll feel better when you wake up."

Falling again, further this time. Darker now, darker than before, but she felt warmth all around her, the welcoming warmth flooding through her like a wave.

'How much longer is this going to last?' she said to the reflection of herself down below. As she fell, lost inside all these sudden unfamiliar motions, she became aware of a sound very much like the clatter of heavy chains being hauled across the floor of her dream...then she saw the man on the sailboat, and the brown eye of a whale staring at her. Why did she feel like the whale understood what was happening to her?

+++++

She knew she'd been asleep for a long time, yet she knew she was still in her dream. Mark was here beside her. She felt him, and him alone for a while, and she knew he was near because she heard the chains that had shackled her to him for so long. The chains made a horrible music, a forlorn note much like a single oboe -- and the monotonous music pierced the fog around her; the melody was painful, discordant, and she longed to find the oboist and correct him. She'd never held an oboe before, let alone played one, but an oboe was hovering in the air before her eyes and suddenly she realized she knew how to play it. She saw chains materializing in the air all around her, hundreds of them, and each one was carried by Mark. Only there were hundreds of Marks now, all looking at her with pale, lifeless eyes, all holding their chains up for her to see, before pitilessly walking away from her.

The chains seemed to rattle but she heard their music, too. Music everywhere, all around her, yet it was the music of her chains. She looked at a link in one of the chains and saw that it was a horn of some sort. She didn't even know the name of the instrument, yet when she looked at another link and another and another -- one by one all the links within all these chains turned into a vast ocean of musical instruments. They advanced on her and held her firmly in the dream just as surely as Mark's chains had. She was suffocating again, trying to pull free but her hands were weighted down by chains that writhed about like coiling snakes, then as suddenly changed before her eyes into clarinets and piccolos and violins. And yet in this dream she blinked and tried to turn away, but everywhere she turned it was always the same. Chains rose, coiled in the air, readied to strike at her and as suddenly shimmered and mutated before her eyes. Before long she was surrounded by hundreds of instruments, each one being played by reflections of herself, and as suddenly the sky filled with stars. millions and millions of hot, white stars.

+++++

Todd Wakeman flipped through the chart and looked over the patient's entries for the last 24 hours. Nothing made sense. Chemistries were all in range, surgery to repair the small clot in the base of the woman's brain had gone off without a hitch, yet for some reason the woman had never regained consciousness. She had been in a coma for two months now, yet on more than one occasion nurses had heard the woman singing. Well, not exactly singing, at least not at first. The first nurse to observe this phenomenon had, in the middle of the night, heard what she thought was a co-worker's innocuous humming, and this she did not report. Later that morning an orderly heard what sounded like simple singing, as in notes from a classical piece; when the woman in the coma launched off into an impromptu solo session, the orderly screamed and staff neurologists were duly summoned. One of the physicians, a classically trained pianist, noted that the woman's vocalizations were totally original compositions and that they resembled something akin to Gregorian chant; nurses began to hear a pattern in these episodic outbursts and noted the time and duration of each. These outbursts happened almost every morning around eight, and lasted anywhere from a few minutes to a half hour.

Todd Wakeman was in the fourth year of his neurology residency, and he'd neither seen nor heard of anything like this happening before. The patient was presenting 'Something New,' and usually when anything in the 'Something New' category happened, it tended to be a 'Very Big Deal.' So the attending professors had looked her case over, ordered more tests and scans, but when nothing new showed up in their tests they soon lost interest in her case -- again. Though Wakeman had no idea what was going on, his way of looking at medicine was grounded in curiosity; he soon noted that these singing episodes seemed to presage an electrical swarm, in as much as her EEG recordings went from almost brain-dead to near total brainstorm in the seconds just before her vocalizations began, and they as quickly subsided when she grew still again.

Wakeman had a new group of medical students that had recently begun their clinical neurology rotation and he was going to present her case that morning, perhaps to see if he could get some original ideas out of them -- because it couldn't hurt. He looked at his watch: 7:30. They would be here soon, and if the timing of the woman's recent swarms was a solid indicator, the group would be in for quite a shock.

He closed her chart and walked out to the nurse's station, a peculiarly impish little twinkle taking flight across his empath's face.

+++++

"Next patient is a Mrs Tomlinson. Tracy, I think. Forty nine year old female suffered a moderate CVA after being told her husband and children were killed in an MVA. Surgery to correct two months ago was non-eventful, but she has never regained consciousness. Mother and a sister visit about once a week now, but no response from the patient. Vitals are good..."

Wakeman rattled off the recorded stats and other recent observations...all but the noted episodes of musical activity. And as luck would have it, he was just about to go over how to assess a comatose patient's neurological status when the swarm began on her EEG. And as the med students looked on, the singing began.

Gently at first, but insistently, she began to sing the prominent parts of a piece of music that seemed hauntingly familiar to Wakeman; it was just the second time he'd been around at the onset of one of these episodes, and he still found it shocking, literally quite unnerving. Now he turned to look at his students, then the woman.

Her eyes remained closed, her body motionless, but her mouth moved precisely, methodically, while the notes that came from inside her mind were as precise, and as methodical; they were, in fact, tonally pure and structurally correct. Wakeman looked at the shocked expressions on his students' faces and grinned, if only because he understood completely what they were feeling.

One of the third years, a girl named Judith Somerfield, stepped forward with a penlight and opened an eyelid, waved the light in front of one pupil, then the other.

"Equal and non-reactive," she said. "But, isn't that impossible?"

The girl took a ball point pen and went the end of the bed; she pulled up the sheet and ran the cap of the pen up the bottom of Tomlinson's foot.

There was no reaction. None at all.

"I don't get it," Judy said. "Is this a gag, maybe like some kind of a twisted joke?"

One of the other students, a teenaged boy with "MacIntyre" embroidered on his pristine lab coat, leaned forward, lifted the sheet covering her arms.

"The fingers," Ben MacIntyre said quietly. "They're moving. See! She's playing notes."

"What IS that song?" one of the other students asked.

Judy Somerfield looked annoyed, because any dolt really should've known this music. "Romeo and Juliet. Prokofiev. The Death of Juliet! Geesh!"

Wakeman smiled; like always, this latest batch of med students was still ultra-competitive, they were always standing by with a ready put-down, looking for one way to get ahead. At least some things never changed.

"Has anyone done EEGs when this happens?" Somerfield asked.

"Oh, yes, we managed to figure that one out for ourselves," Todd quipped. "Nominal coma until a sudden swarm, then total overwhelming cascades."

"Interictal discharges?"

"No."

"Transmissible spongiform encephalopathy!" MacIntyre chimed in.

"MRI and PT are both clear. No spongy tissue observed," Wakeman said, and the boy looked crestfallen.

"Hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy?" Somerfield asked hesitantly.

"Good guess, but nothing in the surgical record supports that, and neither the paramedics or the cops reported doing CPR, because no breathing anomalies were noted."

"Cardiac enzymes?" Judy asked.

Wakeman was brought up short by that one.

"Where are you going with this?" he asked. "An undiagnosed cardiac episode?"

"Possible, isn't it? If everyone was focused on the CVA, maybe they overlooked an infarct. A small, transient..."

Wakeman rubbed his chin. "Possible. Where would you look?"

"Are the ER records up here?"

"No."

"First I'd get those, see if anyone did gases and enzymes, see if anyone suspected cardiac involvement and ruled it out."

"Okay, y'all stay put. I'll go send for them."

'Could it be so simple?' Wakeman said to himself. 'These kids were just coming off a rotation in Cardiology, so of course that's where their heads were at, but...could it really be so simple?'

It wasn't.

+++++

MacIntyre and Somerfield stood outside Wakeman's office two days later; they hesitated, second-guessed themselves, wondered aloud for the hundredth if they really should tell the head resident about the idea they'd had. Judy had been the first to figure out the key element, and she had talked to Ben MacIntyre after rounds the next morning.

"Didn't you notice? She gets about half way through the piece then stops, retraces her steps and tries again. She gets to that same chord sequence and tries a few times to work through it, then falls back into unresponsive coma."

"It's a difficult passage," Ben said knowingly.

"You know it?"

"Of course! What kind of moron do you think I am?!"

"A young moron, Bennie. I still can't get used to an fifteen-year-old third year medical student..."

"Screw you," MacIntyre said defensively.

"Look, I..."

The door opened; Wakeman stood there sleepily, rubbing his eyes. "You two gonna duke it out, or what?" he growled.