Several years into my youth I began playing the violin. I was first taught by an instructor and was then self-taught until I began enrollment in music school. The violin is a difficult instrument to play, you see, as it has no frets or markers the way an instrument such as the guitar does, and as I first began play with my plump child's fingers I did so with the grace of someone pressing uncooked sausages against twine. The instrument- whom I have come to call Frederic- screamed like a newborn as I first drew the bow down its strings, mewling and howling as if I had been shaving away at some secret nerve endings tucked away inside its four metal hairs. I remember wishing that I could coddle the violin- my violin- in the bent plumpness of my arms and soothe the pain and ache I had caused it with my youthful inexperience.
I grew and so did my violin. My bones extended through evenings of midnight practices in which I played lullabies to the waxing and waning moon. Frederic's feline mewl smoothed into musical notes resembling the sweetly calling robins, blue jays, and mourning doves of early spring and summer. The tips of my fingers hardened with the subtle off-white calluses of practice, and as my voice cracked and deepened with the onset of puberty, his highs and lows often took the place of my splintering voice. I recall once looking down at my feet as I slid the bow across Frederic's strings and saw that I was no longer toddling from side to side as I had done in my post-infant years, but I was standing with my heels pressed together, my toes angled outward so that, I imagined, if you drew a line between them the shape would form a perfectly acute triangle.
There is no one in the world who could understand the joys of playing the violin except, perhaps, the ballerina dancer who must move in musical pirouettes and lithe flexations of elastic joints and muscles. But even then, her pointed and bound feet could never tap against the polished wooden floor with the speed and agility that Frederic and I do when I press and quiver against his tightly wound strings. His voice is a sigh; a rise to an incredible peak and a delicate descend like the dancing collapse of snow down the decline of Mount Everest. The depths of his vibrato a mother's hum; a buzz like a thousand bees concealed beneath a cotton blanket. Mozart's silver haunting Lacrimosa; Schubert's elegant prayer Ave Maria; and even the modern whistle of Emilie Autumn's Revelry- we tip-toed around them, Frederic and I, spinning velvet ribbons of satisfaction around a hundred-thousand musical notes.
In the mornings of my current adulthood I stood in front of a gargantuan window and pulled the sun over the horizon with our songs as if the fiery orb was attached to my instrument by a tether. I played and lived on the top floor of a large open house that belonged to my roommate. Aaron, a cellist, contented himself on the main floor where the deep moaning notes of his instrument melted into the soft, wet wood, the green-smelling mold, the despondent vermin. Sometimes the sounds of our instruments reverberated off each other like echoes in a cavern, and although we played different songs they birthed a colorful harmony of pastel crescendos and sherbet staccatos. As time went on my friend spent more nights away, leaving spaces in our big Victorian house. I spent many nights alone playing my favorite nocturnes while his cello lay untouched, unnamed, in some corner of the house.
One evening the door opened behind me and with it came the deep and musky smell of Aaron, the leathery smell of his instrument case.
"Yeah?" I had asked, turning my neck to look at him.
He set the large instrument on the wall beside the doorway. "I'm having some people over tonight and I was wondering if you could, ya know." He made this sort of waving gesture with his hands before shoving them in his pockets. "Maybe take a break from rehearsing."
"Turn on some music, you won't even be able to hear me." I gently plucked a string and tuned it.
He said, "Well, it's kinda the spirit of the thing. I just didn't really want you to play tonight." Aaron added, "Maybe you could come join us for a little while, get out of this stuffy old room." Without looking at him I could tell that he was peering around, squinting his eyes at the silver spider webs in the deep brown rafters, smelling my bodily perfume that had sunk into the scrapes and crevices of the floorboards.
I shrugged and answered, "You know I gotta play tonight."
There was a sound that might have been him shifting his weight onto the opposite foot. "You play a lot," he said. "Pretty much all the time."
I moved the small lamp on the nightstand in order to make room for my bow. I set it down as I tightened one of the pegs on my instrument. "And you don't play enough." I added, "Anymore."
A few beats passed between us as I tuned Frederic's strings. Aaron was radiating something dense and unreadable and I pretended not to notice it. I glanced back at him for a moment, the violin pressing against my jaw and neck, and briefly saw Aaron's instrument resting behind him, sitting and shadowed like a disembodied limb. "If you're not going to say anything then leave," I said. "I don't know what kind of time you think I have, or why you would even think I have extra time in the first place."
I had picked up the bow and brought it to Frederic's strings when Aaron lunged forward and snatched my arm, pulling it away from my instrument, the bow scratching along the strings and making sharp sound like a frightened cat.
"Day and night," he cried, "that's all I hear! Play, play, play, that's all you do, you and that stupid violin!"
"Shut your mouth." My mouth was flat and pursed. I pointed my long, bony finger at him, crooked from almost two decades of pressing metal strings. "Get out. Get out of my room, get out of the house. Don't you ever come back here. You're not a musician, you're a squatter. And you're not welcome here anymore. "
He spat, "A squatter? In the house I own? You're out of your mind! I moved in with my friend and out because of a demon."
I was wiping Frederic down with a piece of cloth then, to clean off his wooden surfaces of dust, to check for scratches, wounds in the strings. "A demon?" I asked, and even to me it sounded maliciously and playfully amused. The cloth had almost nothing on it. "Cute. And you hardly own this house, you inherited it. It's practically charity."
He snarled and reached for my violin, his large, rough hands snatching the neck and tugging it- Frederic, my Frederic- out of my grasp. I jumped forward, stretching my arms outward and groping blindly for him as he was lifted into the air, falling forward and catching myself on the edge of the nightstand. I saw Aaron holding him in those hands, unclean and passionless, tactless and careless, his knuckles pale, pale white as he moved to snap the neck of my beloved, my child, my friend. I whipped my neck around, seeing the heavy metal lamp on the table and grabbing it. He was grimacing over him, baring his teeth and huffing like a monster, a troll. Frederic shrieked for me against his fingers and I cried out, "NO!" as I smashed the base of the lamp into the side of Aaron's head.
Red burst out of the wound and onto the lamp, my hand. He fell, slow and dense like a giant, onto his knees, tumbling sideways onto the floorboards. Blood began to pool not only where I'd hit him with the lamp, but on the opposite side of his head where his skull had collided with the wooden floor. It grew, creeping towards my hopelessly immobile Frederic, until I pulled Aaron's fleshy fingers away from his fragile frame. I turned him, looking for cracks and bruises, broken strings. I wiped down the face with my fingers as if to brush away the film of filth that was Aaron. At some point the bow had fallen to the floor and I picked it up and ran the taught bundle of hairs across the strings. I began to step towards the window as I climbed the scales. Only after I had gotten there did I notice that one of my feet had stepped in Aaron's blood.
We played the soft weeping sounds of Chopin's famous nocturne, and I imagined the notes mixing with the wispy stratospheric clouds and delving to the base of the ocean floor where it hooked onto the insides of fishes' mouths and kicked up grey sand as if it was a gust of wind beneath the sea. We descended, descended, descended, until the note was a desperate hum. The violin was sobbing, the notes fluttering like the startled wings of an insect. I did not know who we were crying for.
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