The practice rooms that filled Chance Hall felt like holding cells. They were tiny, perfectly square rooms just big enough to hold an upright piano and two music stands and smelled like one thousand years of body odor. I cast a scornful look at the music stands—pipers memorize everything—and set my pipe case down by the piano bench. I took out my practice chanter and sat down; the bench creaked like a fart.
My piano lesson wasn’t for days, but I hadn’t been to the practice rooms before, and I wanted to see what they were like before Friday.
It wasn’t exactly a room built for inspiration. A practice chanter doesn’t have a beautiful tone to start with—the words “dying goose” come to mind—and I didn’t expect that the crap acoustics of the room would improve it.
I looked at the door. It had one of those little twist locks on the doorknob so that you could lock yourself in—I suppose so you wouldn’t have people barging in all the time while you were practicing. It occurred to me, randomly, that the practice rooms would be a great place to commit suicide. Everyone would just assume you were inside practicing until you started to smell.
I locked the door.
I sat back down on the very end of the bench and held my chanter to my lips. I didn’t quite want to begin playing, because I could feel the song from my dream still lurking right at the edge of my consciousness and I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to stop it falling from my fingers if I started to play. And it would be amazing. The half-remembered song begged me to play it, to discover just how beautiful it would sound released into the air—but I was afraid that by giving in, I might be saying yes to something I didn’t want to say yes to.
I debated, my back to the door. I don’t know how long I’d sat there, unmoving, when I felt a tug in my head, a prickle of something, and watched goose bumps rise along the skin of my arms. And I knew that something was in the room with me, though the door had made no sound and I’d heard no footfalls.
I inhaled silently, wondering if it was worse to look or worse to not know. I looked.
The door was closed. Still locked. I was frigid, my sixth sense screaming at me something’s not right; you’re not alone. I fingered the iron band on my wrist, superstitious, and the action focused me. Close to me—very close—I smelled a weird smell, like ozone. Like just after a lightning bolt.
“Nuala?” I guessed.
There was no answer, but I felt a touch, like a weight, against my back and shoulder, from behind me. After a few seconds it was more than just weight: it was warmth, with shoulder blades against my shoulder blades, ribs against my ribs, hair against my neck. Nuala—if it was Nuala—said nothing, just sat silently behind me on the bench, her back leaning against my back. My skin prickled with goose bumps, cleared, and then prickled all over again, as if it couldn’t get used to her presence.
“I’m wearing iron,” I said—very quietly.
The body against mine didn’t shift. I imagined I could feel the thump of a heartbeat against my skin. “I spotted that.”
I let out the air in my lungs, very slowly through my teeth, relieved because it was Nuala’s voice. Yes, Nuala was bad—but an unidentified creature leaning against me, matching me breath for breath, would’ve been worse.
“It’s very uncomfortable,” I said, intensely aware of how speaking tightened my chest and created friction between her back and mine. The sensation was simultaneously terrifying and sensual. “The iron, I mean. It seems like such a waste of discomfort. I only put it on for you.”
“Should I be flattered?” Nuala’s voice was taunting. “There’s worse than me about.”
“Comforting thought. How bad are you, while we’re being friendly?”
Nuala made a little sound as if she were about to say something but thought better of it. Silence hung, fat and ugly, between us. Finally, she said, “I was only coming to listen to you.”
“You could’ve knocked. I had the door locked for a reason.”
“You weren’t to know I was here. What are you—a seer or something? A psychic?”
“Or something.”
Nuala shifted away from me, turning toward the piano. The loss of her touch was heartbreaking; my chest ached with abstract longing. “Play something.”
“Holy crap, creature.” I shifted toward the piano so that I could look at her, and shook my head to clear the agony. “You’re difficult.”
She leaned forward, across the keys, to see what my face looked like while I spoke. Her own hair fell in front of her face as she did so; she had to push the choppy pale bits back behind an ear. “That feeling only means you want to be more than you are. It only means you should’ve said yes instead of no.”
I was sure she meant her words to be convincing, but they had the opposite effect. “If I get somewhere in this life, it’s going to be because of me, bucko. No cheating.”
Nuala made a terrible face behind her freckles. “You’re being quite ungrateful. You haven’t even tried the song I helped you with. It’s not cheating. You would’ve written it eventually. Like, if you’d lived to be three thousand or something.”
“I’m not saying yes,” I told her.
“I wasn’t doing it in exchange for yes,” Nuala snapped. “I was doing it to show you what we could be together. Your damned thirty-day free trial period. Could you just take advantage of it? No, of course not! Have to question! Have to over-analyze. Sometimes I hate all of you stupid humans.”
My head hurt with her anger. “Nuala, seriously. Shut up for a second. You’re giving me a splitting headache.”
“Don’t tell me to shut up,” she said, but she did.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” I said, “But I don’t exactly trust you.”
I set my chanter down—it felt like a weapon that Nuala could use against me—and laid my fingers on the cool keys of the piano instead. Unlike my chanter, which was familiar and pregnant with possibilities under my fingers, the smooth piano keys were meaningless and innocent. I looked at Nuala, and unspeaking, she looked back at me. Her eyes were so wrong—so dazzlingly not human—when I really looked at them, but she was right. When I looked into her eyes, I saw myself looking back. A me that wanted more than what I was. A me that knew there was so much brilliance out there to find but that I would never begin to discover.
Nuala climbed off the bench, very carefully so that it didn’t make a fart-creak, and ducked between me and the piano, my arms forming a cage on either side of her. She pressed back against me, forcing me back on the bench so that she had an edge to sit on, and then she found my hands where they were spread artlessly on the piano keys.
She lay her fingers on top of my fingers. “I can’t play any instrument.”
It was weirdly intimate, her sitting in the framework of my arms, her body perfectly mimicking the shape of mine, long fingers fitting exactly on top of mine. I would’ve given one of my lungs to sit with Dee like this. “What do you mean?”
Nuala turned her head just enough for me to get a good whiff of her breath, all summer and promises. “I can’t play anything. I can only help others. It wouldn’t matter if I thought of the best song in the world—I couldn’t play it.”
“You physically can’t?”
She turned her face back away from me. “I just can’t. Music doesn’t happen for me.”
Something stuck in my throat, uncomfortable. “Show me.”
She slid one hand off mine, pressed a key down with her finger. I watched the key depress—one time, two times, five times, ten times—but nothing happened. Just the small, muffled sound of the piano key being depressed. She took my hand and dragged it to the same key. Pressed my finger down, once. The piano rang out, a sullen bell that stopped as soon as she lifted my finger back up again.
She didn’t say anything else. Did she have to? The memory of that single note was still singing in my head.
Nuala whispered, “Just give me one song. I won’t take anything from you.”
I should’ve said no. If I’d known how badly it would hurt, later, I would’ve said no.
Maybe.
Instead, I just said, “Promise. Your word.”
“My word. I’ll take nothing from you.”
I nodded. It occurred to me that she couldn’t see it, but she seemed to know, anyway, because she rested her fingers on mine and leaned her head back against me, her hair scented with clover. What was she waiting for? Me to play? I couldn’t play the damn piano.
Nuala pointed to a key. “Start there.”
Awkward, her body between me and the piano and her whatever the hell it was between me and my brain, I pressed the key and recognized it as the first note of the song that had been occupying my brain since I woke up. I stumbled, clumsy, to the next note, hitting several wrong ones on the way—the piano was a foreign language that felt wrong in my mouth. Then the next one, guessing a little faster. The next one, only getting one wrong. The next one, right on the first try. And then I was playing the melody, and I joined in with my other hand, hesitantly picking out the bass line that sang in my head.
It was clunky, amateurish, beautiful. And it was mine. It didn’t sound like a song I’d stolen from Nuala. I recognized a scrap of tune that I’d played with on and off over the years, an ascending bass line I’d admired on an Audioslave album, and a riff I’d toyed with on my guitar. It was mine, but intensified, focused, polished.
I stopped playing and stared at the piano. I couldn’t say anything because I wanted it so badly. I wanted what she had to offer and it stung because I had to say no. I squeezed my eyes shut.
“Say something,” Nuala said.
I opened my eyes. “Shit. I told Sullivan I didn’t know how to play the piano.”
Nuala
This golden song on my tongue, melting
This golden tongue giving song, longing
—from Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter