GARY A. BRAUNBECK

SMALL SONG

"Whoever is joyous while burning at the stake is not triumphant over pain, but
over the fact that there is no pain where he expected it. A parable."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche

MY COLLEGE ROOMMATE once asked, "Do you believe in voices?"

It was four-fifteen in the morning and we were both fractured on Jim Beam and
joints while cramming for finals. Like so many other bellbottomed, pot-smoking,
self-styled middle-class mystics of the 1970s, we'd read too much Gibran and Sri
Chinmoy Ghose and the Avatar Meher-Baba and enjoyed nothing more than espousing
our quasi-quantum rigmarole to prove how clever and enlightened we were.

"What was that again?"

"Do you believe in voices.; Then where are they located? Are they physical
things?"

"Wonderful. Three drinks and a couple of tokes and you go Zen on me."

He leaned back into a cloud of Hawaiian Seedless smoke and grinned. "C'mon, man,
you're the brainiac majoring in physics, you gotta have some idea where I'm
coming from. I mean, you ever think about this shit for too long? You ask
yourself questions, right? Like...okay, here you go: Does Beethoven's Fifth
Symphony cease to exist once the orchestra stops playing, or is it just some
fuckin' ink trails on sheets of parchment paper in a library somewhere? Like, if
you destroy the paper it's written on so no orchestra can ever play it again,
does it still continue to exist?" He shuddered and reached for the bottle.
"Questions, man. They'll mess with your head."

He OD'd a few years later and wound up part of the vegetable stew in some
laughing academy but I still think of him the way he used to be.

I think a lot about the way things used to be.

Do you believe in voices?

Listen to my life.

I did not recognize my daughter when she came back from the dead.

It was the end of spring, I was fighting a losing battle with the sinus/ear
infection that always came round this time of year, and since it was going to
rain soon I decided to take a shortcut through the ersatz-park behind the Altman
Museum in downtown Cedar Hill. I'd forgotten to bring my decongestants and
ear-drops that morning and by ten-thirty felt as if someone had drilled a hole
in my skull and filled it with rubber cement. I lived only twelve minutes' walk
from a crummy $5.25-an-hour job, which gave me just enough time to stagger home
during my lunch break, hit the drugs, scarf down a sandwich, and get back.

Though I often took this shortcut I made it a point never to linger; too many
memories waited there, ready to jump down my throat. Aside from the sixty or so
seconds it took to sprint through the park, I hadn't spent any significant
amount of time there in over five years, not since the death of my
three-year-old daughter from -- unbelievable as it sounds --mononucleosis.

I was nearing the south exit when I made the first of three mistakes --I noticed
the new sculpture that stood near the corner of the plat.

The second mistake immediately followed.

I stopped to look at it.

It stood about seven feet high, ten feet wide, and six feet deep. The figures
were made of synthetic stone and fiberglass covered with wire mesh, colored in
tones of terra-cotta and ash. There were fifty female figures in the piece. All
of them were naked. Some covered their faces with their hands, some knelt, some
stood, a few were lying prone as if draped over a sacrificial altar, while
others clutched their stomachs or were folded in a heap. Most of them were
screaming. Pain, anger, grief, confusion -- all of these were brutally etched on
their faces, raw and unspeakably ugly.

But none was more gut-wrenching than the face of the woman in the center. Hers
was a look of sadness so total that at first it seemed like disinterest; then I
saw the small crescent of tears brimming in one of her eyes and realized the
permanence of her heartbreak, that here was a genuinely good and caring woman,
full of passion, understanding, and tenderness who had dreamed in her youthful
loneliness of finding her soulmate and then, years later, just when she'd
started to believe she would never know the love that poets and singers
described, found her One Great True Love and gave her soul completely to him,
bore him a child, and in the instant when her husband stood with their daughter
cradled in his arms this woman believed with all her delicate heart that
everything was going to be just fine.

This had been Karen's favorite spot in the city, and we'd often brought Melissa
here; she loved to sit and watch the ducks and swans. Our favorite spot outside
the city had been the beach at Buckeye Lake. Karen and Melissa liked to go there
and look for sea shells. Of all the shells they had collected over the years,
Melissa's favorites were a pair of large, perfect, shiny conch shells. Whenever
we took a trip, those shells had to accompany us. Melissa bestowed more
affection on those shells than most children did their pets. They had been on
the table next to her hospital bed the night she died.

"It is something to see, isn't it?" came a voice.

She was sitting on a bench near the small pond where the ducks and swans lounged
in the water. Something about her reminded me of my ex-wife, no big surprise w
every woman reminded me of Karen in one way or another.

"Yes," I said, not wanting to look at it again but doing so anyway. "It's
very...powerful."

I don't know why I made this third mistake, striking up a conversation with this
young woman. I'd only wanted to get home. My head was a blister ready to burst
and the thought of my medication was a sweet siren's melody.

"Are you feeling all right?"

Startled, I looked away from the sculpture. When had she come up next to me? Why
was I down on one knee? Who'd lodged the icepick in my eardrum?

She helped me to my feet and guided me over to the bench. Sitting next to me,
she leaned in to take a closer look at my face. "Don't take this the wrong way,
but you look like hell."

"Good. I'd hate to feel this lousy and have it be just my little secret."

She laughed, patting my hand. "Great line. Lou Grant on The Mary Tyler Moore
Show. I'll bet you used to watch it all the time. You seem the type."

"Look, I appreciate your giving me a...a h-hand like this but I think I'd better
get home and --"

"Shhh," she whispered, placing a finger against my lips. "`You will say nothing.
I will answer not a word/And nothing will be able to shake our accord.'"

"Uh-huh. And that is...?"

"From a poem by Corbiere. `Rhapsody of the Deaf Man.' You suddenly reminded me
of it. A little bitter and angry, a little sad and distant, but also strong and
mysterious and sensual in a...I don't know, a smoldering, tipsy kind of way.
Does that make sense?" She shrugged. "It doesn't have to make sense to you, just
to me."

I did not, repeat not, want this. I'd spent a lot of time, effort, and liver
tissue in order to vanish from my old life and make myself as invisible to the
world as a person could be without actually disintegrating into thin air; the
last goddamn thing I needed was for someone to say, Hey, wanna be friends?

The pain and pressure came howling forward again. I winced, closing my eyes and
pulling inward.

She cupped my head in her hands. "Does it hurt that much?"

"...godyeah..." I didn't have the strength to pull away.

Her hands slipped upward, covering my ears and gently tilting back my head.
"Better?"

"A little." I opened my eyes. "What are you, a nurse or something?"

"Or something." She reached into the canvas bag next to her and pulled out a
small portable compact disc player, along with a set of headphones that she
plugged into the player, then tried to put over my ears.

"Whoa," I said. "What...what do you think you're doing?"

"You'll see."

"Look, I can't put those on, the pressure's bad enough as iris and if--"

In a series of movements so quick and smooth they might as well have been one
motion, she leaned forward, kissed me on the cheek in an intensely affectionate
way, and slipped the headphones over my ears.

Listen: I was ten years old when I got my first rock album, a 1971 release from
Dunhill Records, Steppenwolf Live. I played it to death but no track did I play
more than the six-minute version of "Born To Be Wild" that closed side four.
(Forget the anemic studio version that FM stations play during Friday rush hour;
the '71 live recording kicks ass in a way the studio version can only admire
from the cheap seats.) I played that song so much the grooves in the record
began to wear down and little scratches, pops, and hisses -- noises I came to
think of as "echofuzz" -- worked their way into the music. Still, I played it,
and after a while the echofuzz became part of the song for me. I'd put it there,
it came from me, and so, to my mind, that made me part of the song, slamming my
bad ass onto the seat of a chrome-roaring hog under heavy metal thunder.

And now I was listening to it again. This was not the clean, remastered CD
version, this was from the record, my record, the one I'd lost fifteen, twenty
years ago: there was the hiss that almost drowned out John Kay's growling vocals
at one point, followed by a series of pops in the middle of an instrumental
passage, then, near the end of the song, the scratches that underscored a
wailing guitar run, the kind of high-pitched, squealing, uncoiling-barbed-wire
run that has to be surgically removed from your brain. I was so amazed to be
hearing it again after all these years that it took a few moments to realize the
pressure in my ears was gone and my sinuses were clear and open, enabling me to
breathe freely.

The song came to its snarling-hurricane conclusion and I removed the headphones.
"Where in God's name did you find this?"

"So it did help? You really feel better?"

"Yeah."

Most men could have swum a hundred raging rivers on the memory of the smile she
offered to me, which was suddenly so much like Karen's I couldn't look.

"Why did you kiss me?"

She blushed. "I wanted to. I've wanted to for a long time, ever since..."

"Since what?"

She handed a small photograph to me. "Since this night."

I looked at the photo. Something pulled tight in my chest, frayed apart, and
snaked like tendrils of black, searing smoke into my eyes. I pressed my hand
against my mouth as if I could stop the tears through sheer force of will; if I
did not allow air to pass into my lungs, I would not cry. I'd rather have had a
fatal aneurysm at that moment than allow this particular memory to resurface.

"Who the fuck are you?" I said through clenched teeth.

Her face became a placid mask...except for a small crescent of tears brimming in
one of her eyes. "Don't you recognize me?" She reached over and brushed the back
of my hand with her fingertips.

Something like an electric shock snarled up my arm and --

-- and there I was on that last night with Karen. She was crying and shaking
beside me in bed, just like every night since we'd buried Melissa five weeks
ago. I stared at the ceiling, feeling nothing; not for her, myself, not even, it
seemed, for the loss of our little girl because all children would eventually be
crushed under the weight of a future that was merciless and uncaring if not
actively malignant, and when at last I looked at Karen I felt embarrassed at
being human because we truly believed we could heal most forms of hurt by
telling someone that we loved them, and then Karen was facing me, her eyes empty
and furious at the same time: "I dreamed that when we buried Melissa, one of her
arms came up out of the dirt holding a rose in its hand. You gave me a shovel
and I threw down more dirt but her arm just kept coming up, and every time the
rose bloomed a little more. You said, 'We can't let that happen, we can't let it
bloom,' and the next time her arm came up you beat it with the shovel, then you
made me beat it until it slunk down into the dirt and never came up again. We
both felt so happy then, and I hated you for that! I don't want her to be dead,
I want her alive so maybe we can pull ourselves out of the open grave our life
has been since then -- don't look at me like that, you know it's true, but
you've done nothing, said nothing, you probably don't even feel anything and I
can't stand it, I don't want to hate you so please, please just...touch me, even
if you don't mean it..."

I yanked back my hand, then shoved myself off the bench and started backing away
from her, still clutching the photo.

"...I don't know how you got this," I croaked, "but you have no right, damn
you...you have no right to...to...ohgod I don't want to think about this..."

"You have to," she whispered, slowly rising to her feet and coming toward me.

"...no..."

She stopped moving and held up her hands, palms out. "I won't come any closer, I
promise. I didn't mean to throw that at you so soon but I...I don't have a lot
of time -- and neither do you."

"Is that some kind of threat?"

She shook her head. "No. It's just that you've been trying so hard to forget and
it's killing you. It will kill you. If you keep going like you have been you
won't last another year." She lowered her head, folded her hands, and began
tapping the tops of her thumbs together. Karen used to do the same thing
whenever she felt anxious. "How many times in the last six months have you
thought about suicide? How many times have you looked at your prescriptions and
thought about quadrupling the doses? Christ, you have to take three different
anti-depressants just to get yourself started in the morning!

"Please don't look at me like that."

"Then get to the punch line."

"Fine. If you go on living-- scratch that -- if you go on existing as you have
been, you're going to do it. You'll miss a couple of doses and sink into one of
your moods, and then you'll open the door to the cabinet underneath your sink,
you'll take out that bottle of Chivas Regal you've got hidden back there-- you
remember that bottle, the one your AA sponsor doesn't know about? -- and you'll
wash down the rest of your pills with it."

I couldn't think of anything to say.

How in hell did she know about the scotch? I hadn't even broken the seal around
the cap yet.

The doctors had made it clear enough -- if I started drinking again, I would
die. It was that simple. I had no intention of ever starting again; it was just
that, for some reason, knowing there was liquor nearby made it easier not to
drink.

She wiped her eyes, then stood hugging herself. "I was allowed one day, one day
from the future I never had, to see you again. I used half of that day three
years ago -- if you think hard enough, you'll remember seeing me. I spent hours
looking for you that day. I--" She shook her head angrily, took a deep breath,
and looked at her watch. "I've been waiting here since eight this morning,
hoping you'd come by. Four hours and fifteen minutes gone."

She was crazy, that had to be it, and I said as much.

"Then explain the picture."

Not daring to look at it again, I held the photograph up to her face and
crumpled it into a ball.

"You go to hell, lady." Then I turned and walked quickly away from her.

"I can't follow you!" she cried out." I can only -- please stop! Please!" Her
cheeks shone with tears. There was not one part of her that wasn't shaking. "I'm
sorry, but I can't...I've got less than eight hours left."

I decided to play along with her. "Why can't you follow me?"

She held out one of her hands. In it was a small rosebud. "It's going to bloom
very soon, you see, probably before the day's over, and when it blooms I'll have
to...please don't go. I can't follow you because you're going to places I never
went. This park is the only place left from your past that you ever go to.
Please don't leave. Please. There's so little time left and I want it to count
for something. I've mi--"

"Then stay here. Look at the statue, get soaked in the rain and wait for your
rose to bloom, I don't care, just leave me alone--which shouldn't De too
difficult because I won't be coming back here again."

Something behind her eyes crumbled.

And that's how I left her.

I GOT BACK to my apartment, took my decongestants, and ate a little something. I
would not think about her or the photograph or anything she said. I would not.
Would. Not.

Because of being delayed in the park I didn't have time to make it back to work
on foot -- but there was just enough time to catch the #19 bus at the corner.

I arrived with a minute or so to spare, just in time to see the Operation
Mainstream van drop off one of its handicapped passengers, a young man in an
electronic wheelchair who was balancing a small briefcase in his lap.

I watched as he moved his chair onto the hydraulic platform. The van's driver
pressed a button on the control board and the platform hissed, then buzzed as it
slowly lowered the young man toward the ground. It sounded exactly like the
mechanism that had lowered Melissa's coffin into its grave.

Even after the man disembarked and the platform had folded back into place, I
could still hear its buzzing. The van pulled away, the young man moved a small
lever on the arm of his chair and began rolling in the opposite direction...and
the buzzing persisted like the white static noise of a snowy television screen.
Thinking it was just the infection kicking into a higher gear, I pulled my nose
spray from my pocket and pumped a shot up each nostril.

No good.

The static was still in my ears. It quickly rose in pitch and volume to become a
physical weight on my skull, and as the #19 arrived I stumbled around, pressing
a finger into each ear, trying to create a vacuum to relieve the pressure, but
nothing seemed to help. I must have looked absurd or, worse, stoned, because the
bus driver took one look at me, closed the doors, and drove away.

I shook my head a few times, violently, then pulled my fingers from my ears --
the static was not gone, but the weight of it was.

There were so many sounds -- scratch that -- there were so many impressions of
sound. That's the only way I can describe it. And though none of the impressions
were those of voices, they were nonetheless talking.

Some of these communicating impressions were so quiet they seemed barely to
exist at all. I almost smiled then, thinking of Dr. Seuss's Horton Hears a Who
-- Melissa's favorite story. I'd read it to her every night, even on her last.

One of the impressions called for my attention, even though no actual words were
spoken.

I looked toward the man in the wheelchair.

It couldn't have been him because his only means of communicating with the world
was through the small personal computer -- what I had thought to be a briefcase
-- fitted to his chair. The computer employed a program that allowed him to
select words from a series of menus on the screen by pressing a switch near his
left thumb. This program could also be controlled by head or eye movement,
enabling him to select up to fifteen words a minute, then "speak" by sending
those words to a speech synthesizer that had been added to the computer only
this morning.

I had never seen this man before.

I knew all of this because the cells in his dying body and the integrated
circuitry of the computer were talking to the synthesizer in the same clinical,
matter-of-fact tone that a physician might use when dictating notes for a
patient's medical records.

I clearly heard them.

But I was hearing the impossible; a conversation between mathematical equations,
electronic impulses, and myriad physiological mechanisms, all of whom had agreed
to conduct their little mixer at the same specific neuron receptor site.

As the man maneuvered his chair around the corner and the conversation grew
fainter, a single thought, irrational though it was, came to me: Her.

She did this.

Somehow that girl in the park was responsible.

Sound, I thought. This is all connected to sound.

Or the impressions caused by its absence.

The Vedic religious traditions believe in the "vibration metaphor": throw a
pebble in a pond, and the vibrations ripple outward in concentric circles;
strike a bell, and it vibrates in waves of sound; meditate on a thought, and it
will echo through the realm of the collective unconscious.

But what pebble, what bell, what thought, was now sending ripples through the
world I knew?

The first few spattering drops of rain started coming down. I buttoned my coat
and turned up the collar, my hands shaking --

My hand.

I remembered the electric shock I'd felt when she touched me earlier.

That was when she had done it.

I held my hand in front of my face and looked at it.

Something about standing like this, bundled up and shuddering with my hand in
front of my face, triggered a memory of another time, two, maybe three years
ago...

... I was sickeningly drunk, wandering near the Cedar Street bridge. It was
snowing heavily, high winds, blowing and drifting, blizzard conditions. I was
trying to remember why I had come this way when I suddenly found myself
calf-deep in snow. It grew very dark; the darkness the blind know. The cold
penetrated to the marrow of my bones. I pulled myself out of the snow and
stumbled forward, though I couldn't see a thing. My feet were heavy lumps of ice
in my cheap canvas shoes. My body turned numb with cold, making me aware not
only of the embodied side of life where everything was black darkness, bitter
cold, and churning snow but -- so close it seemed I could step right into it --
also of the unembodied side of life. Colors that transcended color. Sensations
that transcended sentience. Sounds that transcended sound. I was freezing to
death.

I saw beings emerge from the swirling snow and pelting ice. One of them moved
toward me. She smiled. She held a cold rose. I thought she was Death and asked
her to take me. She gestured to me follow. I groped my way down the snowy
embankment and followed her under the bridge. She was gone, but in her place was
a large cardboard packing box with wrapping paper inside. Slowly, clumsily, I
got into the box and pulled the wrapping paper around me. Then I wept, for
something about her had moved me in a way I hadn't known since the days when I'd
had a family ....

Now, standing in the rain near the bus stop, I thought of what the young woman
had said.

...If you think hard enough, you'll remember seeing me ....

I shoved my hands into my pockets and started back toward the park.

Along the way I passed several people; some were on foot, others were in cars,
but I was aware of the depths of their existence as strongly as I was aware of
my own breathing.

And I heard things.

I saw an old woman and heard the first time she had made love to her husband.

I heard a child's fear of its first day at pre-school.

A bird's irritation at the rain.

The quenching of a garden's thirst.

I broke into a run. The spattering of rain became a heavy sprinkling. I heard
the empty spaces between the raindrops.

She was still there when I arrived. I went up to her and grabbed her by the
shoulders. "What did you do to me?"

"I had to make you come back."

"Why? What do you want?"

Her lower lip quivered. "I want you to remember." She handed the photograph to
me once again. It was smooth and perfect, as if I'd never crumpled it.

"You're dying inside," she said. "I don't want you to hurt anymore. You're not
the monster you think you are. People make mistakes. It's time you understood
that it's okay to just pay the fine and go home."

"I don't want to think about it," I said, dropping onto the bench. "I don't ....
"

But I couldn't stop the memory coming back, nor could I stop myself from looking
down at the face of the man I used to be and thinking: You stupid fucker.

There was a time when you had the world by the balls, didn't your Acing your
finals and graduating in the top five percent of your class, snagging a great
teaching position at an oh-so-private Ivy League school, then marrying a
beautiful woman who loved you and gave you a perfect daughter who thought you
were the bestest thing in the whole great big wide world I love Daddy
thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis much! You were so safe and smug within the myopic borders
of your world, and you never once gave a thought to being undone by an
absurdity, did you? Because that's what it was, an absolute, certified,
in-goddamn-comprehensible absurdity that in this country, in this age, with so
much wondrous medical technology there for the paying, that a happy, radiant,
inquisitive little girl with a giggle that brought tears to your eyes could die
from a disease you're supposed to get from kissing or burning your candle at
both ends. Well, I got a Muppet News Flash for you, pal; it is possible for a
three-year-old girl who loves to watch ducks and collect sea shells to feel bad,
and then a bit worse, and then a whole helluva lot worse, and finally lousy in a
way that requires machines and tubes and pills and catheters and before you know
it you're sitting in the front pew at good ol' St. Francis de Sales Church on
Granville Street along with your wife and parents and in-laws and Xamount of
your balding schoolboy chums listening to some second-rate organist eviscerate
Bach's "Sheep May Safely Graze" and dreading the moment when two dozen children
from your daughter's pre-school are going to stand up and sing "Let There Be
Peace on Earth" because that's when you're going to lose it and lose it bad and
wonder how but mostly why something like this could happen. Just forget it, pal,
just scratch that "why" business right off the list because there's no making
sense of some shit, and your nice manners and fine credit record and good
insurance notwithstanding, it is possible -- and you have a crisp, clean copy of
Autopsy #A72-196 to remind you in case you forget-- for a three-year-old girl to
contract Epstein-Barr virus and have her immune system degrade so quickly that
she acquires, in spite of your fine house and dazzling grin and that
award-winning thesis on Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, a thing called acute
interstitial pneumonia, then another thing called purulent exudate, which gets
lonely in a hurry and so invites pelvic venous plexis to come join the party and
presto-change-o! -- you're looking at a little girl who in less than four weeks
curls up into a wheezing skeleton and turns yellow and finally dies in a
torturous series of sputtering little agonies, and you can't even get to her
bedside to hold her hand because of the tubes and wires and bandages and all the
rest of the Close Encounters of the Third-fucking-Kind hardware dwarfing this
room where all the numbers are zero and all the lines are fiat, so when she dies
it is without the final benefit of a warm, loving human touch tingling on her
skin to let her know that you will always love her and will miss her every
second of every hour of every day for the rest of your life.

It is also possible for that little girl's daddy to collapse in on himself and
ignore his wife's grief until she can't take the loneliness anymore and leaves
him to wallow in the wreckage that was once their marriage, and when he finally
lifts his head he finds himself alone, alcoholic, and unemployed. He also
discovers that his insurance has been bled dry, so he has to sell his car, then
his stocks, and then his house in order to pay off medical and funeral expenses.

It is likewise possible that, having nowhere to go, he will hock his wedding
ring, spend the money on liquor, and try to drink himself to death.

He will come very close to succeeding.

Then one morning he awakens in the psych ward of the county hospital where he's
been drying out since a couple of cops found him unconscious in a large
cardboard box beneath a bridge, lying in a puddle of his own puke and just half
a mile from the gates to the graveyard where his little girl is buried. A social
worker helps him to find a job and a place to stay so that, if anyone cares to
ask, he can say that he's a janitor -- give him a mop and a bucket and a bottle
of Windex, he's hell on wheels -- and that he lives in a two-room apartment just
twelve minutes' walk from the office building where he sweeps floors and scrubs
toilets for nine hours a day, five days a week.

Lastly, though, and here's the real kicker, it is quite possible that on his way
home from his crummy job one day he will meet a young woman who looks too much
like his ex-wife, and this woman will show him a picture that in no way, by no
stretch of his alcohol-damaged imagination, could possibly exist.

"Do you remember it now, that moment in the picture?"

I nodded my head; a stray tear flung itself down onto the photograph like a
suicide plummeting toward the pavement.

"Good," she whispered. "Because that moment is when your small song revealed
itself to you."

"...my what..?"

"The voice of your soul. You do believe in voices, don't you? The voice of your
soul holds your history, all your memories and hopes and dreams, your baser
impulses and higher aspirations; it's what truly defines you. And when it
reveals itself to you, as yours did, it will tell you the purpose of your life,
the reason why you exist.

"It's different with every person. A dancer's small song might reveal itself to
them at the moment a strenuous, complicated piece of choreography they've been
struggling with suddenly becomes as effortlessly liquid as cascading water. The
man in the wheelchair, his small song is still looking for its voice -- that's
what you heard; a child trying to learn a new language."

I started to speak but she placed her finger against my lips and shook her head.
"Shhh. `You will say nothing...nothing will be able to shake our accord.'" She
tilted back her head, caught a few raindrops on her tongue, then said, "Years
ago there was a concert on PBS commemorating Aaron Copland's seventy-fifth
birthday. Leonard Bernstein conducted and he was really on that night. The
concert closed with A Lincoln Portrait and the second the piece was over, that
phenomenal crescendo still ringing in the air, Bernstein dropped his head and
wept like a baby. That was when his small song revealed itself to him. He'd hit
his pinnacle and everything had fallen into place in a wondrous way that only he
and no one else could have brought about -- he knew it, you could see it in his
face. Later, someone asked him why he'd wept and he said, `This piece will never
again be played as gloriously as it was tonight. I thank God I was the one to
conduct.'

"It's that way with all small songs; only one time in a life will conditions be
right for it to reveal itself and once that's happened, it never speaks again.
Think of the song a swan can sing only at the moment of its death." She touched
my cheek, then faced the pond. "I always liked watching the swans more than the
ducks."

And I knew. I think it's possible I had known all along.

I looked at the picture in my hand.

An overhead view. A man kneels on a hospital bed amidst the debris of tubes and
hoses and electronic monitoring wires. He clutches what looks like an empty
white laundry sack to his chest, only the sack has strawberry-blonde hair. On
the floor next to the bed is an expensive piece of medical equipment that is
sparking and smoldering because he knocked it out of his way in order to climb
onto the bed and get to the sack before it was too late.

You know from the look on his face that he didn't make it.

It's hard to tell if he's crying or snarling...until you see the shadow of
something like love buried deep in the dark wreckage of his face. He has no
thought for his wife, who even now lies sleeping on a couch in the nurse's
lounge, having been forced by him to rest for a bit.

The photo captures a phenomenon you've heard about many times before from people
who claim to have had an out-of-body experience.

This was the last earthly image seen by my three-year-old daughter as her soul
left her body at the moment of her death.

"Where are the conch shells?" I said. "They were right here, on the table beside
the bed. I remember that they were there but...they're not in the picture."

She reached into her canvas bag and pulled them out, setting them between us.
They were smooth and shiny and perfect. "I was careful not to break them, just
like you used to tell me."

I marveled at her beauty; she had her mother's rose-petal smile and blue
sapphire eyes, but also my slightly crooked nose and somewhat weak chin -- to
keep her humble, I assume. Still, she was even more stunning as an adult than
Karen and I had imagined she'd be.

Her eyes regarded me as if I were the bestest thing in the whole great big wide
world. "Hi, Daddy," she whispered, then reached over and took hold of my hands.
Her touch was a drink of cool, clean water after a lifetime under the scorching
desert sun.

"H-hi," I managed to get out. "God, hon, I've missed you so...so much .... "I
fumbled for something else to say but there were no words. How could there be?

"I've missed you, too," she said. "Please say you'll stay here with me. We'll
have almost seven hours together. You can...you can say good-bye this time."

My heart sank. "Why is there so little time? Why were you given only one day?"

"Because that's what you asked for, remember? When you talked to Father Ehwald
after the funeral. You said you'd give anything to have me back for just one
more day."

Something clogged in my throat. "I didn't think anyone was listening."

She put her hand through my arm and kissed my cheek, then looked out at the
pond. "Not to ruin the warm fuzziness of this moment, but did you know they
won't let you feed the ducks anymore? Isn't that a bitch? I wanted to give them
some popcorn but that vendor doesn't come around here these days."

"He hasn't been around for a long time."

She huffed. "Well, I think that sucks. How're you supposed to have any fun if
you can't feed the ducks? I'll bet if enough people complained, they'd change it
back to how it used to be."

"You're pouting."

"I am? Sorry."

"No. I used to love it when you were a kid, the way you'd pout like the whole
world had conspired to ruin your day."

"Well, that's what it felt like. I was trying to learn about the world. How're
you supposed to discover anything when all the crabby old adults are breathing
their rules down your neck all the time? And you were the worst, don't deny it.
Especially that business about your computer."

"You wanted to pour Kool-Aid on the keyboard! I used to think I'd have to hire
armed guards to keep you away from it."

"You could have locked your office door."

"And miss catching you in the act? No way."

"That's wicked."

"You were a wicked child sometimes. Kool-Aid, for chrissakes!"

"I was three. Sue me." She looked at me and we both burst out laughing. It felt
odd. I hadn't laughed in a long long time.

She hugged me again. "God, Daddy, I really have missed you. And so does Mom. She
thinks about us all the time -- but mostly she thinks about you."

"Do you...do you know where she is? My God, I tried to find her right after I
got out of the hospital, but she'd moved away and --"

"Shhh, Dad, please. Just listen, okay? This has to do with Mom, too.

"Every living thing has its small song, but there have been countless things and
people who, for whatever reason -- a moment of fear or hesitation, weariness or
grief, anger or confusion -- didn't hear the voice of their soul when it spoke
to them. But what it said didn't cease to exist simply because it wasn't heard;
a tree that falls in the forest still makes a sound even if there's no one
there, radio and television transmissions that'll never be picked up by a
receiver still bounce through space; and, just so you know, Beethoven's Fifth
Symphony doesn't cease to exist just because the orchestra stops playing." She
held out the conch shells. "Take them."

"Why?"

"Because you need to hear some of the others."

"How, when I didn't even hear my own? You said that once it reveals itself it
never speaks again."

"Yes, I did. But I never said that it doesn't leave an echo.

"And all things left behind can be found if you look hard enough. How do you
think I was able to dig up that dumb Steppenwolf song of yours, Mr. Echofuzz?"
She shook her head and laughed softly. "Oh boy, if you knew how much mnemonic
resonance I had to sift through ...."

She placed the shells in my hands. "That's why so many people feel empty and
spend their lives looking for something they can't quite define. That's why the
world is so miserable -- all of those lonely, unheard small songs."

I looked at the shells in my hands. "Are these...?"

She shrugged. "They have to go somewhere, don't they? What do you think you hear
when you hold a sea shell to your ear? `It sounds like the ocean.'"

"You mean that ocean-sound is --?"

"Well, duh. But people never listen well enough, they never get past the
first...layer of sound. Go on, Dad, listen. Hear it for yourself so you'll know
that all of that mystical bullshit you talked about in college, that you thought
it would be nice to believe in, is true."

Not feeling at all foolish or self-conscious, I held the shells against my ears,
listening.

And was aware of every exquisite moment as the sound waves registered as a
massive but muted ocean roar --

-- becoming the crash of waves scattering on a beach --

-- then one wave breaking apart --

-- becoming a small pool into which a pebble was dropped -- and the ripples
expanded outward in concentric circles, becoming a rhythm --

-- then rhythms.

Rhythms and pulsings.

Rhythms and pulsings and tones.

The rhythms and the pulsings and the tones of the universe.

The rhythm of insects and heartbeats, of whisperings and thunder and bodies
locked in sex; the pulsing runs of birdsong and tolling bells and whistling
breaths; tones of infant birth-cries, canticle moans of graveside mourners;
cicada arpeggios, descants from whales breaking the surface and trillings of
single cells in division and in death; the thunderous tympani of gorillas in
Africa beating their chests; the chirpings of crickets; the growl of cancer
cells devouring delicate tissues; modulated vibrations of a million locusts in
migration; the primeval groans from shifting tectonic plates; the gloriae of
melting polar ice-caps; madrigal dawn; andante night; and the brassy, sassy
blues from the light of a long-dead star as it staggered like a drunkard toward
the Earth: a polythematic assault.

I heard thoughts and sensed dreams and absorbed impressions as they were passed
from psyche to psyche with compulsive speed and more sensory layers than my
brain, anyone's brain, anything's brain could possibly absorb. The atmosphere
was packed with millions upon millions-squared of swirling, drifting, reeling
bits of consciousness.

Attuned to the majestic cacophony I heard the murmur of every cell; the
synchronic rustling of blood brushing against arterial walls; the clicking of
countless synapses; and I realized that somewhere, underlying all life, there
was a continual music that had been playing since life began, and that its
sounds, its rhythms and pulsings and tones, were the refrain of something more,
the distant memory of the chorus from an earlier song, a sub-organic score for
transposing the inanimate, random matter of chaos into the enigmatic, lavish,
magnificent, improbable, ordered dance of living forms, rearranging matter and
consciousness into miraculous symmetry, away from probability, against entropy,
lifting everything toward a sublime awareness so acute, so incandescent and
encompassing I thought everything within me would burst into flames from the
overpowering wholeness.

I was hearing the voice of the soul, maybe of all souls.

I felt divided from my body, standing outside my flesh observing all of it, my
only companion the delicate echo of a single voice-note, pure and easy and
somehow incomplete, that rose above the cacophony and whistled through me like a
breeze through an open window. I tried to grasp the echo, to make sure I had
understood its meaning, but it was gone too quickly.

I turned toward Melissa. My daughter said nothing, only gestured toward the
sculpture.

I rose to my feet as the rain grew more dense and moved toward it.

I couldn't speak. I couldn't breathe.

All fifty figures were still there, and all of them still suffered unimaginable
pain --

-- but now all of them, their hands grasping synthetic stone roses, had Karen's
face.

God pity women who love unselfishly, true souls who offer their hearts and
dreams to men who don't deserve them, whose grief must be borne privately so
they might be strong for the weaker ones they love, who grow used to being
lonely in the company of a husband too self-absorbed to notice their pain, who
must sustain themselves on memories of tenderness rather than the promise of it,
and who continue to love faithfully even if that love is never returned in equal
measure. May whatever joy there is in your life be safe from harm. God pity your
selflessness. I once knew such a woman and, for a time, loved her as best I
could. But it wasn't enough to protect her from the night. Forgive me.

I climbed onto the base of the sculpture and pulled myself close enough to kiss
her wonderful lips if they had been real, to hear her laugh that so often had
given me the strength to go on, to remember how she had, for a while, opened me
up to feelings and tiny kindnesses that most men never experience; and close
enough for all of that, I knew her outrage, her loss, her terrible loneliness
and sorrow, this splendid woman who'd needed so much from me but asked for so
little and didn't get even that much --

-- here, before me, was Karen's hurt made physical, and I could see now in all
of the figures' expressions the terrible evolution of what she'd gone through;
from the look on her face when I'd told her that Melissa had died to the way
she'd forced herself not to cry the day she walked out of my life, I had now
before my eyes all the feelings I never heard with my heart.

I fell backward onto the spongy ground. Melissa knelt beside me and took my
hands. "I love you, Dad."

She held me in her arms, rocking me like a baby, there under the pounding rain
and the perpetually grief-stricken gazes of her mother.

Melissa touched my cheek, then kissed my forehead. "Did you hear it?"

"...yes..."

"So you know?"

"...godyeah.."

She kissed me again, then held me closer. "I wish you hadn't loved me so much."

I grasped one of her hands in mine, brought it to my lips. "Me too, hon. I'm
s-sorry, but me too."

And almost added: Because.

Because if I hadn't loved her so much, I would have seen that my wife's pain was
so much greater than my own, and I would have helped her through it, and we
would have gone on together.

It was as simple as that: The purpose of my life had been to share it with her.
For better or for worse, as the saying goes.

"You have to find her, Daddy," whispered Melissa. "It's going to be hard, and it
might take a long time, but you have to find her. She still hurts so much. She
never stopped needing you. Or loving you."

"Oh Christ, honey...how?"

"Shhh." She placed her finger against my lips and pressed her rose into my palm.
"You just have to...listen..."

For a while we listened together, holding each other on that bench in the rain,
until the afternoon faded into twilight and the twilight into night.

I tried to say all of the things I had dreamed of saying to her for so many
years but there wasn't enough time. How could there have been?

In her last moments Melissa took my hands in hers and kissed my cheek once
again.

"I've wasted so much time," I whispered to her. "We could have had an entire day
but I --"

"I love you. And when love is present, no time is ever wasted. I've had my
lifetime with you today, and that's enough. It has to be." She wrapped her arms
around me. "Good-bye, Daddy. You'll be happy again someday."

I looked down at the rose she had given to me. It was in full bloom. "Good-bye,
hon. I wish --"

"Shhh, you mustn't-"

And then she was gone.

I moved back into the cacophony layer by lonely layer. I listened to the old
songs, the sad songs, the bitter, misused, and jubilant songs, all so ephemeral,
all so small. I listen still. Every moment of every day, wherever I go, they are
with me.

The echo of Karen's small song is here, somewhere. If I can find it, it will
lead me back to her. So I listen for it. Truly listen. And I prepare for the day
when life shall continue by her side.

In the night I hear the poetry of this world; the patience of the darkness, the
sighing of the moon, the laughter of dreams.

A pressed rose rests in my breast pocket.

My daughter's kiss still lingers on my cheek.

In my hands are two perfect shells.

I will find my wife, no matter how long it takes.

And I warn the universe: I will not lose her a second time.

Do you believe in voices?

Then listen.

Listen.

Listen ....