Magical realism hits the big city grind.
When a trumpet begins to play a single note late at night, strange things occur. Told through the perspective of Sarah, a supermarket cashier, we come to learn just how obsessive a single note can be.
Enjoy! If you don't like this story, I'll post one you'll like. Eventually. Don't give up on me just yet.
:)
Magical realism hits the big city grind.
When a trumpet begins to play a single note late at night, strange things occur. Told through the perspective of Sarah, a supermarket cashier, we come to learn just how obsessive a single note can be.
Enjoy! If you don't like this story, I'll post one you'll like. Eventually. Don't give up on me just yet.
:)
Coda: Crescendo
The sound came from all directions. A single trumpet or horn, its note brassy and warm, floated through Middle Bottom and refracted from every surface—buildings, cars, people. The horn played only one note, long and patient and unwavering, then a slight pause and the same note again, never different in volume or tone. Full, plain sound, without melody or any discernible rhythm, swelled into the night air from exactly 11:42 to midnight. Every night now.
At first, Sarah thought she was going insane—an entire week of the horn’s lonely and plaintive note felt in the womb, in the hypothalamus, beneath the molars. But when she heard some anonymous neighbors talking about a goddamn trumpet while she waited in line for coffee, she knew the sound wasn’t coming from inside her body and for this she was glad.
That’s what it felt like—as if the note emanated from Sarah’s belly as she leaned on the fire escape. Having never played an instrument herself, she poked around online until she discovered that it was an E-note. When the nightly sounding continued into a second week, she actually left her apartment to try and find it, wandering one direction then another in search of the source. A few nights of random searching, even noticing heavier foot traffic for such a late hour, people dressed in pajamas with confused or pinched expressions, turned into another week and then another. Finally, Sarah saw an article in the paper as she rattled home on the city bus.
“The Police Department has responded to over 20 noise complaints in the last 12 days, none of which located the source of the sound,” she read. The article went on to delineate all laws being broken; public ordinances on playing loud music past a certain time, disturbing the peace, etc. It was if the article was an open letter to the trumpeter—Sarah was certain now, after doing some vague research, that it was a trumpet, perhaps a coronet—a public effort to make him stop. And Sarah knew it was a male, could picture a hunched old man with a hooked nose, wearing an overcoat as he stood on some rooftop and surveyed the sleeping neighborhood below. But that very night, like all the others, was met with a steady E-note glowering into the darkness at 11:42 on the dot.
Sarah waited and worked, losing her thoughts as items beeped through her checkout line, the scanner beep also an E-note except short and terrible. She began to hear the trumpet during the day, or found herself humming a single note and noticing that ten minutes had passed, unknown customers with all their groceries, without an active thought in her mind. She stopped calling or texting friends, most in college with entirely different problems, and kept her phone off to prevent anyone from discovering she was going insane. She even heard the trumpet as her teeth clicked on the bus ride home.
Nights blended with one another as Sarah, hugging herself, began a methodical search to find the source, rather than just meandering after echoes. She made her way to the south end of the city where the sound never reached, alley by alley in a diagonal line down, down into the true Bottom neighborhood, the warehouses and curved, spontaneous railroad crossings, the slick black ribbon of the river, then blocks and blocks of homes and apartment buildings until the end, the freeway and more city beyond.
After a time, Sarah discovered she was going about her search all wrong. Instead of volume, how loud the trumpet sounded, she needed to go by direction—where it came from. The revelation explained nearly a week’s worth of directionless wandering in the warehouse district, and was confirmed in another newspaper article.
“Police ask that citizens stop calling 911 and stop filing complaints against the trumpeter. A police spokesperson confirmed that the department has done everything in its power to find the person or persons responsible.”
The article quoted a physics professor from the state university where most of her friends lived in a happy bubble. The professor said the sound, due to the properties of wave-form, is always in a state of diminishment. As soon as the note leaves the trumpet, it is dying, and dies further in each refraction, each increase in distance from the bell of the instrument. What we hear is the remnant of sound, a mere ghost of the actual sound itself.
Sarah thought about this. She knew if standing to the side of a loud trumpet, or anything for that matter, it wouldn’t be as loud as standing in front. And then the E-note. After more research, Sarah found that it’s used for tuning instruments and is the third note in a C-Major scale. Doe-Ray-Me-Fah-So-La-Ti-Doe… it was the “me” of the scale before the “fah,” and a moment of suspension in the scale, of tension. She listened to all kinds of recordings. She found a guitar tuner online and played the E-note on her computer, thinking. Or worse, she put it on repeat and went about her morning as she got ready for work—the note humming constant in the background.
One night, things worsened. Sarah left her apartment at exactly 11:30 so she would have enough time to start a new pattern, this time focusing on direction. Since her fire escape indicated the horn came from the south and toward the river, she would begin there. But on her way, when the lone E-note began to sound, she heard another horn, a different trumpet. Louder, this one played a different note in harmony and unison with the original trumpeter although harsher and somehow less melodic. What’s more, she easily spotted the imposter just before midnight on the balcony of a five-story apartment building three blocks from her home, streetlamps gleaming on the trumpet as the player pulled it from her face.
“Hey!” Sarah yelled up breathlessly, but the woman ducked into her darkened apartment when midnight, and the trumpeter’s call, ended the show. Sarah returned home shattered and more confused.
She woke up and called in sick to work. She went to the only music store in the Bottom.
“No, I don’t have any more trumpets,” the bearded man behind the counter said and scowled. “No coronets either. What… Do you think you’re the only one?”
“Only one what?” Sarah said, already turning to the door. Surrounding her on every inch of every wall were gleaming instruments of wood and brass and silver.
“Sold three horns in the last four days,” he said, as if the sales infuriated him. “Hadn’t sold one in almost a year. Now, I have a couple of trombones…”
Sarah stopped and turned.
“Maybe I should play them on the roof, sell the suckers. I’ve got a marching baritone in back,” he said and raised his head a few degrees. “That’s like a giant trumpet, though it plays in a lower register. But the valve positions are the same as—”
“I’ll take it,” Sarah said, reaching into her purse.
She made it home swiftly, but not without a thousand and one eyes watching her, feeling like a paranoid fool carrying a oddly-shaped, black plastic case the size of an endtable. Locking the apartment door behind her with shaky hands, she took out the enormous horn, surprised by the weight. When she put the cold mouthpiece to her lips and tried to make a sound, only embarrassing farting noises refracted off the walls. It took her nearly all day, with ice on her swollen lips between attempts, before she could belt out a passable E-note. After that, she rested and waited for the night.
By the time 11:42 rolled around, she was ready. Sarah stood on her fire escape, listening. Sure enough, the lonely note poured into the night like ink into water, curling around lampposts and seeping under doors. Sarah waited for a man in a suit to pass beneath her and then put the baritone to her lips. She drew in a lungful of air and waited for the next note… No, the next. But before she could ever play, there came another horn. This one from a different direction than the balcony-lady, with a warmer sound and in harmony. With each E-note sounded, the other trumpet would gently join in unison and—and then came another horn from a different direction. Three notes now, each in harmony at times, discordant at others. Sarah held the enormous instrument in her hands, trembling. Another horn joined in, probably the balcony lady. Then a flute of some kind, followed by the steady “ting” of a triangle being struck. By the time midnight came, there were bongo drums and guitars and pianos and violins and melodies of varying complexity all intertwined with the trumpeter, coming from everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. Sarah wiped at her eyes, surprised to find tears there. When the last note faded and all accompaniments dissipated, the world was silent and black and terrible.
Even though she was tired, always tired now, she put on her workshirt and apron and rode the bus to her store, her register, and rang up the banal purchases of a hundred people. She thought about the trumpeter with his hooked nose and overcoat, what he might think about all the people intruding upon his quiet creation. Sarah wondered if he was angry or joyful for the company or, even worse—what if he stopped playing altogether?
She read the latest article, now relegated to a one-inch column in the “neighborhood notes” section. She tried to concentrate on the words vibrating in her hands as the bus rumbled over potholes.
“Police have requested all citizens cease and desist playing any musical instrument at night. Over thirty citations for disturbing the peace have been issued in the past twenty-four hours and officers—”
She almost tumbled out of her seat as they crossed Percy, the newspaper falling to the floor, but she never read another word in the article. This night, tonight, she would add her own note to the din and cacophony. As soon as she got home, she played the baritone for an hour or so, eventually settling on a C-note as her best option—it was the clearest note she could play and, upon some research, found it was in harmony with the E. She wouldn’t try to be fancy like the others, nor would she do anything but play a single note at the same time and along with the trumpeter. She would join the song.
Instead of the fire escape, Sarah decided to go up to the apartment roof. She shivered in the dark, waiting, the baritone cold in her hands, the city winking embers of blue and orange and white below and away. At 11:40, she stood up. A minute later, the door to the roof opened and a parallelogram of light spilled across the blackened tarpaper. She squinted and hid behind her glinting horn, afraid it was the superintendant or the police, but when the door closed and her eyes adjusted, she saw a small boy—maybe nine or ten years old, she’d seen him once or twice at the mailboxes—standing there somberly. He held a trumpet against his belly. Sarah almost laughed in joy.
“Are you here to play along?” she eventually asked, once it was clear the boy wasn’t going to flee.
The boy smiled but said nothing. He walked to the edge of the building’s roof and put the trumpet to his lips. At precisely 11:42, he sounded a warm, clear E-note into the night.
But instead of playing along, Sarah put the baritone on the tarpapered roof, sat down and hugged her knees, letting the sound pour through her. In a matter of moments, all of Middle Bottom turned symphony, the night alive with music and rhythm. Voices both operatic and thin filled the air where there were no instruments. And Sarah, having found her trumpeter, would carry his song, which was no longer his own but for all of us and everything.