The End and Other Beginnings Read online

  It was a strange thing, but in the moments right before she fully woke, a memory of her mother had come to mind, from one of her sober streaks. Darya had come home from school for spring break, and her mother had been restored—one month sober, rosy-cheeked, smart, pleasant. She and Khali had been making cake batter in the kitchen as Darya’s neighbor nailed boards on all the windows, and her mother had been singing in a thin soprano.

  “Sing with me!” her mother had said. “You have a beautiful voice, Darya.”

  She had started on a song that Darya knew, and though Darya had felt that this woman was a stranger, she could not help but join in. She had made up a harmony on the spot, slipping her lower voice beneath her mother’s, and tears—happy ones—had come into her mother’s eyes.

  “Beautiful,” she had said.

  That was the week Darya chose violin as her third instrument, even though her fingertips were too soft for the strings, and she had trouble holding her fingers in tension for so long. She chose it not because she liked it, but because it was challenging, because she knew bearing through the pain would result in greater joy.

  The nurse checking the incision site noticed that Darya was awake, and she smiled. She said something Darya couldn’t hear, thanks to the glorified earmuffs she still wore. The nurse removed her rubber gloves and tossed them into a nearby trash can. Darya was finally awake enough to look around—she was in a large room full of beds, with curtains separating each one. She could only see the toes of the patient next to her.

  A stack of books stood on the bedside table—some of Khali’s favorites and some of her own. Darya slid one of Khali’s from the stack and started to read, propping herself up on the pillows.

  About an hour later, Khali walked into the room, dabbing at one of her eyes with a handkerchief. Her face was discolored—she had obviously been crying. My face looks like raw hamburger when I cry, Khali used to say. It’s so embarrassing. I can never hide it.

  Khali clutched a phone in her right hand, the one without the handkerchief. Her grip was so tight it looked like she was about to crack the battery in half with her fingernails.

  “What?” Darya said. She could feel the word vibrating in her throat, but she had no idea how loudly she had spoken. Khali didn’t shush her, so she assumed it hadn’t been that loud.

  Khali picked up the notebook and pencil resting next to the stack of books, and started to write.

  Mom’s request for a liver transplant was denied.

  Darya nodded. Obviously. They didn’t give new livers to alcoholics.

  I had her transferred here, so she’ll be close to us. She’s in room 3128.

  Darya wanted her mother to be as far away as possible.

  She looks awful.

  Khali glanced at her, wide-eyed, waiting. Waiting for what? Darya wondered, but it was a silly question. She knew what Khali was waiting for: an offer. I’ll go record her death song for you.

  But Darya didn’t offer. She took the pad of paper from her sister’s hands and scribbled, Okay. Thanks for telling me.

  It was midnight. Khali had left hours ago, right after Darya wrote back to her, but not in a huff—that was not Khali’s way. She always made sure to smile when she said good-bye.

  Darya put her feet over one side of the bed and let them dangle for a moment before touching them to the tile. It was cold, or her feet were warm from being buried under blankets for so long. She stretched her arms up and felt her back crack and pop, though she didn’t hear it. The ear covers were still on her head.

  She walked into the bathroom and looked at her reflection. What she saw shocked her. She had not expected the implant to transform her the way it had. The black veins sprawled across her temple, arching over her eyebrow and down to her cheekbone. She turned her head to see how far back the dye had traveled—it stretched over her scalp as far as the bandage that covered the incision site. Soon her hair would grow over it.

  She touched the layer of fuzz that was already growing in. It would grow back faster than normal hair, she knew—the nurse had told her, with a wink, that she had put some hair-regrowing salve on it, the kind they used for vain men and cancer patients. Looking at her reflection, Darya didn’t think she would have minded keeping the shaved portion for a while. It made her look tough, just like the implant dye.

  She made sure the back of her gown was tied tightly, slipped her shoes on, and walked down the hallway. At the end of it was a large waiting room that looked out over the city. The hospital was one of the taller buildings in this part of Minneapolis, so she would be able to see more than usual.

  She shuffled down the hallway, her head aching, but not enough to stop her. In one corner of the waiting room, by the television screen, were what looked like a brother and sister. The sister was rocking back and forth, her hands pressed between her knees. Both stared at the television, but were not really staring at the television.

  Standing near the window on the other end of the room was a young man with the same ear covers she wore, but his whole head was buzzed instead of just eight inches of it. When he looked to the side, she recognized him as Christopher Marshall.

  He smiled at her and beckoned for her to come closer. She did, scanning the tables for something she could write on. But then she saw that he was already holding a notebook, balancing it against the railing near the windows, and there was a pen behind his ear.

  She stood next to him and touched her fingertips to his chin, to turn his head. She wanted to see which implant he had chosen. The red dye sprawled across his forehead disappointed her. She had hoped that their paths would intersect in the future, but if he had chosen life songs, he would be in different classes for the next two years, and work in different places thereafter.

  He wrote something on the pad of paper:

  What made you choose it?

  She sighed, and took the pen from him. She paused with the tip of the pen over the paper for a few seconds before she began to write, then scribbled out what she had written and began again. It took her several tries to find a response she liked: Life’s something we already understand. Death is a mystery.

  He nodded, looking impressed, and wrote, I’ve heard dying people are ornery toward Hearkeners. Hornby got that scar above her eyebrow because one of her clients chucked an alarm clock at her head.

  Darya laughed, and reached across him to write back. So is that why you picked life? You can just wear a helmet, you know.

  He shook his head. No. I guess I just wanted to People don’t celebrate life as much as they used to. I think they should.

  She nodded and leaned her elbows on the railing. He did the same thing next to her. Their arms, side by side, were as different as the paths they had chosen—his were long and pale, dotted with freckles, hers were brown and short.

  The city lights were beautiful at night, glowing from distant offices and blinking atop buildings, like the Christmas lights her father had put up because he liked the way they looked, though he only turned them on for an hour a day to save on the electric bill. But there was no limit on these lights—they would be on all night, as long as it was dark enough to see them.

  Christopher was writing in the notebook again.

  Have you listened to anyone yet?

  She shook her head.

  He bit his lip and wrote, Do you mind if I listen to you?

  Darya hesitated. Hearkeners had listened to her life song before, but this was different. This was his first one, and he wanted it to be her? She doubted he was thinking of it that way, but it seemed that way to her.

  You can say no. I just want it to be someone I know, not whoever runs into me first when I walk out of the hospital, he wrote.

  He made a good point. She would be the first, but she would also be the first of many. She took the pen from him and said, Go ahead.

  He took off his ear covers, slowly, so they didn’t slip and hit the incision site. She turned to face him, though she knew it wouldn’t be any easier for him to he
ar her song if he was looking at her. He stood with the ear covers clutched in front of him for a few seconds, frowning and squinting as he made sense of the new sounds in his mind.

  Then, after a few seconds, he stopped squinting or frowning. His face relaxed, and his mouth drifted open, forming a loose O. Darya shifted, holding the railing with one hand, uncomfortable as he stared at her. And he stared. His eyes, normally so courteous, were wide and on her, pressing against her until she was forced to look back at him.

  When she did, she saw a tear in his eyelashes. He wiped it with the back of his hand and shoved the ear covers back on.

  Did he not want to hear her anymore? Had it hurt him?

  Far from staring now, he was looking at his shoes, at the railing, at anything but her. After she had let him listen to her, after she had exposed that part of herself to him, he had nothing to say, not even a glance to give?

  She handed him the notebook, and the pen, and walked away without another written word.

  Darya walked the hallways of the hospital for a long time after that, not sure where she was half the time. She walked through a cafeteria, and an atrium full of plants in large clay pots, and a hectic corridor with gurneys lining the walls. At 2:00 a.m., she realized that she was in a hallway in which all the rooms started with a 31. Sighing, she walked until she found room 3128 and peered through the window next to the door.

  Her mother, with her now-scraggly red hair and yellow-tinged skin, lay in the bed, hooked up to an IV and a few monitors. Khali sat beside her mother with her head on the edge of the mattress, fast asleep. Resting against the wall was a violin case. There in case Darya changed her mind, probably.

  Not for the first time, Darya wondered what it was that made Khali so attached to their mother. Their father had told her once that their mother hadn’t started drinking until two years after Darya was born, when Khali was seven. There wasn’t an inciting incident as far as Khali knew—no great losses, or deaths, or arguments—but the strain of the world had weighed on their mother always, more than it weighed on other people. And she had cracked under that weight.

  A sad story, maybe, but Darya did not feel particularly sympathetic. The world was terrible for everyone these days, and they still got up, got dressed, went to work, kept their families together.

  It didn’t really matter, though, did it? It didn’t matter whether she felt sympathy or not. Khali had asked her for something. Khali had always been there for her. And Darya would give it to her.

  She opened the door. The sound roused Khali from sleep, but not their mother. Khali stared at her sister like she was an apparition, and Darya supposed she did look like one, in a pale hospital gown, her hair half shaved, wandering in uncertainly. The door closed behind her.

  She walked to the violin case, and crouched over it to open it. Khali had probably brought the violin because it was so portable; she could not have known how perfect it was for this occasion. Darya had chosen it as her third instrument because it was so difficult for her. It seemed only fitting that she should play it on an occasion that would also be difficult for her.

  Usually Hearkeners listened to death songs with a computer in hand instead of an instrument, to transcribe the music so that it could be preserved and played later. Khali didn’t have a computer to bring, and neither did Darya, so the instrument would have to do.

  She sat down in a chair opposite Khali, with their mother between them. Khali opened her mouth to speak, her eyes full of tears, and Darya pressed her finger to her lips. She didn’t want to hear Khali’s gratitude—it might make her too stubborn, might make her want to take back what she had already done.

  Darya reached up and removed her ear covers. She put them on the floor and set her violin in her lap. She understood, then, why Christopher’s face had screwed up when he took his ear covers off. At first all she heard were sounds—clapping and clamping and stomping and banging. She scowled for a few seconds as the sounds transformed into notes . . . into instruments.

  And then the song of her mother’s dying came to life in her mind.

  The notes were low and consistent, at first, like a cello solo—but not like a solo, more like a bass line. And then, arching above it was something high and sweet—painfully sweet—faster than the cellos—but not too fast, not frantic. Then the low notes and the high notes melded together into one melody, twisting around each other, straightening out in harmonies. She thought of the song she and her mother had sung in the kitchen. Her mother had had cake batter on her fingers.

  Darya stared at her mother the way Christopher had stared at her, staring, trying to extract from her mother’s face the genius of this song. It took a few seconds before she realized her mother was awake—awake and staring back.

  The melody changed, turning darker. If it had had a flavor, it would have been unsweetened chocolate, bitter, smooth. Her mother’s eyes were on hers, clearer than they had been for the years that Darya lived with her, but bloodshot, ugly. She remembered the night she had awoken to her mother breaking plates in the kitchen, raging at their father for one reason or another. She felt a surge of anger.

  But still the music went on, lifting again, swelling, louder. It was so loud Darya moved to plug her ears, but she couldn’t plug her ears against this song, she couldn’t block out the sound of her mother’s death. The sound of her ending.

  Loud and pounding, a heartbeat contained in a song, low and high, vibrating in Darya’s head. Even if there had been a thousand symphonies playing alongside it, Darya still would have picked it out from the rest—it was insistent—she had to hear it—she picked up the violin and wedged it between her chin and her shoulder.

  Darya didn’t know what to play first. There were too many competing melodies at work in this complex death song, hard to pick just one. Finally she isolated what seemed to be the dominant notes and began to play them. She had not been in school long enough to be good at this, but she remembered what she had learned: Listen first, and trust your fingers to play what you’ve just heard. Don’t listen to yourself; listen to the song.

  Darya trusted her fingers. She played furiously, her eyes squeezed shut and her jaw clenched, as the song swelled again, the notes turning over and over each other. Her arms ached and her head throbbed but still she played, not for her mother and not for herself and not for Khali anymore, but because the song required her to play, to find its strongest moments and bring them to the surface so that someone else could hear them.

  Her fingers slowed, then, finding the melody she had heard first, the low, persistent notes. They moved into the high, sweet notes, the notes that hit each other so hard she thought they might crack each other in half. They were weak like her mother was weak, sprawled on the couch in her nightgown—but beautiful like her mother, too. They were the smiles that surfaced in the afternoon, when her mother was more lucid, and the happy tears she cried over her daughter’s voice, and the light fingers that went through Darya’s hair as she brushed it on her better mornings.

  And then the notes were low again, low and slow and barely changing, barely moving, a vague utterance in near solitude. They were the weight, the weight her mother bore, the world that defeated her.

  The song, moving in Darya’s brain—melodic—dissonant—fast—slow—low—beautiful . . .

  Then she felt tears on her face, and she threw the violin onto the bed and ran.

  She ran. She heard pieces of songs all around her and clapped her hands over her ears, but it did her no good. The world was loud, too loud to bear. Still, no matter how far she ran, she could hear her mother’s death song in her memory, the most powerful of all the music she encountered in her sprint back to the room.

  The nurse saw her on her way back in and grabbed her by the arm. “Where are your ear covers? Where have you been?”

  Darya just shook her head. The nurse ran down the hall and returned a few seconds later, new ear covers in her hands. She shoved them over Darya’s ears, and all the music stopped. Relief
flooded Darya’s body like cold water. The nurse steered her away.

  Darya crawled onto her bed, gathered her knees to her chest, and stared at the opposite wall.

  She slept past noon. Khali came in to speak to her, even touched her hand lightly, but she pretended she couldn’t feel it. She had done what her sister wanted, but she had not done it with a good heart; she had done it out of obligation, something she had always avoided. And she felt angry—angry with herself, for doing it, and angry with Khali, for making her feel like she had to, and angry at the death song itself, for refusing to leave her alone from the second she awoke.

  Darya sat in bed for the rest of the day, eating small spoonfuls of flavored gelatin and watching the news report on an attack that had happened in Kansas City that morning. She stared at the death tolls, numb. Sometimes it was weeks before a person showed signs of infection, and sometimes it was minutes—it depended on the potency of the bio-bomb. How long would it be before the world ran out of people?

  Darya winced as part of her mother’s death song played in her mind again. It ached inside her, feeble but intricate, and every few seconds she felt tears pinching behind her eyes like tweezers. She tried to suppress them, but they came anyway, blurring the news. She didn’t know what to do, so she just sat there.

  That evening she left her food uneaten on her tray and walked down the hallway again to the waiting room. There were more people in it now, most of them reading magazines or staring at the clock. And Christopher was there, too, sitting in one of the chairs with a stack of paper in his lap. His eyes moved straight to her when she walked in.

  He beckoned to her again. His ear covers were off now, and he looked slightly agitated, twitching at sounds she couldn’t hear. But the songs didn’t seem to pain him. Maybe he had learned to tune them out.

  She sat down next to him, and removed her own ear covers. This time she didn’t hear a series of random sounds when they were off—she heard music right away, everywhere, but not as loud here as it had been in the rest of the hospital. These people weren’t sick.