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Night Music
short story

Charlotte's Story

It is Halley who recovers first, and I am lucky that I am in a position to see him and the bar from where I curl under the table, protecting Maude. He is half bent, flat over the bar, long fingers still hooked in a wineglass, and as he straightens, there is something odd about the picture – and I realize that the huge mirror behind the bar is no more, reduced to a spiderweb mess of splinters radiating from a large hole at the center, fairly close to where Halley's head had been when I spoke to him.

He, incredibly but not unexpectedly, was unperturbed. "Eh bien," he said, and leaned his hands on the bar, checking briefly for broken glass before setting his palms down, "I assume you are the young woman we have been waiting for."

She froze in place, and her image is burned still in my mind, like the scene of an accident. Her dark hair was long and tangled, caught in a variety of braids and loops by several clips. It was her profile that I saw, and her features were pretty, although a bit heavy. Her nose was straight, her mouth very full, and her eyes luminous, maybe with the first onset of tears. Her clothes were unique, layers of black and shaggy dark shawls off her shoulder, showing bare skin and black spaghetti straps. In contrast to her clothes, her skin was pale, almost white, and she had a nervous quality, like a terrified bird. Her arms, in the moment Halley addressed her, were pulled in tight to her chest, and even from where I stood I could see her white knuckles clutched around the handle of her gun.

"Shh," I said, more to reassure myself than her. "No one will hurt you." I reached out my hand, and touched her. Gently, I pried the gun from her fingers and took her wrist lightly. I set the gun down, took her other hand, and led her toward Halley. He in turn, we as if in a well-rehearsed pas de deux, moved smoothly from behind the bar and pulled a chair out for her at one of the tables near the band, vacated by patrons who crouched now on the floor. "Well done," Halley said to me, taking the woman now by the shoulders and seating her with a valet's deference, then something odd: "Make sure she sees no reflecting surfaces."

This was nearly impossible, as you may imagine. Everything in a bar reflects, everything almost everywhere, I have since come to realize. But I nodded, and searched the room for offending mirrors or glass and found that this table at least minimized the likelihood of this strange woman seeing her image.

She stared at me with a hypnotist's intensity. Suddenly, without prompting, she began to speak.

It was magical the way the words came out of her, like a cascade, like the trumpet solo I had been so overwhelmed by earlier. At one point she stopped on the verge of tears, but Halley guided my hand to hers and for the rest of her strange monologue, my warm fingers were entwined in her cold ones.

This is the tale she told:

"My name is Charlotte. I'm not from here. I'm from Montreal, and before that from Toronto – but that's not important.

"About a year ago, I bought a gun. It was one of those little lady things, a twenty-two. It took so long to get a license. I kept wishing I lived in the States, because it would have been so much quicker.

"Oh – I'm getting this all in the wrong order. It's not the gun.

"When I went to Montreal two and a half years ago, it was because I thought I was going to die. Toronto was too crazy, too cold. Do you understand? I thought my mind was going.

"There was usually no work, and when there was, I couldn't pay the bills on what I made, and I would drop back off and start getting welfare again. It was – degrading, everything about it was depressing and degrading.

"If it had been up to me, I don't know if I would have ever moved or done anything to help myself. It was like I had been not-moving for so long that to get started doing anything would take more energy than I could call up. I didn't know what my dreams were anymore. I was dying, even though I was fed and had a place to sleep out of the cold. It wasn't anything, just existence. Survival. Not life.

"But I read about Montreal, and how cheap it was to live there, and how friendly everyone was, and I figured that I should go there.

"Then I got a letter telling me my mother had died. That was my last relative gone, and I hadn't even seen her in a year or more. But it was like she was helping me, because the letter said that she'd left me some money in her will, and that I would have to go to Montreal to claim it.

"I sold everything I owned and bought a one-way train ticket. I collected my check at the lawyer's office, and two days after the letter had arrived, I had money in the bank, a job in a café, and a little apartment, which was small but very bright.

"I thought everything had turned around, but it was still very difficult to meet people. I started hanging around not only where I worked but at the other cafés around the area. There were so many interesting things happening, and after a while, I started to forget that I wasn't really a part of them.

"I would listen, sitting near someone else's table, to the conversations, to the talk about the theatre, or art, or local musicians, and who they knew, and who was successful and who was frustrated – but it was all so vital. It was like watching a movie, except that the movie is so good that you don't think about where you're sitting, you just are there, in the film yourself, a silent watcher.

"Then, I found a café where the clientèle was even more exciting. A lot of them were famous people, but this was a place where they just hung out and talked, and a lot of people were just regular people too, and it was the best place yet. One of them I saw every day for a time."

And here, she named a famous songwriter who had disappeared not long before. This was the first break in her narrative, where I found myself shocked for a moment out of the transfixing rhythm of her speech. It was the name that did it. I didn't know what kind of tragedy her story would tell, but I knew then that this man would figure somehow in it.

The actual pause was just long enough for her to motion to Halley, who had brought her a glass of water. She took a swallow and handed it to me. I drank as well, aware that my throat felt very raw and dry – probably I was getting dehydrated from all that wine. This time, our eyes didn't meet. When she took up the thread of her story again, I slipped back into it like the surf on the beach becoming again part of the sea.

"It became him that I would come to see, and often if he wasn't there at the café, I would leave again and return later. I walked a lot when I couldn't see him, all over the city, in the parks. At home, I would dream about how to meet him, and what I could say, and the kind of jokes he would make, and the way I'd heard him turn something light again into something profound.

"What was drawing me to this one person more than the others? It was a degree, I think. Of all the people I had seen in the cafés, he was the most full of life and mischief, the one that seemed to embody all the things that I didn't have for myself. In time, I began to see myself as his shadow, a pale reflection dancing to the words and melodies he penned with the rise and fall of his voice, but initiating nothing.

"It was around this time as well that I bought the gun.

"At home, I would hold it and sit still on my bed for hours. It was cold and heavy and more and more it became the thing that held me in to reality. I was going like I had in Toronto, so silent all the time outside, but in my head, the words just kept tumbling and never stopped. The gun was like an icon. I don't think I ever really intended to use it.

"When I held the gun, I would say a prayer. It wasn't to God or anything, it was just inside my own head, just for me. To quiet the other voices.

"I would wish that I could see him, see this man, and not in the café where he was always surrounded. I wanted to see him as he was with himself. I wanted to know how someone who was that comfortable in the world acted when he was alone, without an audience.

"I thought of all the little routines that I did, day by day, and wondered what he did instead, because I couldn't imagine him washing dishes, or wandering around with a stubborn headache. I wanted to see what he was like when he was alone, when he was doing all the creative things that I only knew when they were finished, songs on the radio.

"This was my wish, then. Every day I worked, every free moment I had beyond that was spent in walking, or at home cradling the gun, or in that café watching him.

"It happened very suddenly, I guess, when I was asleep. One night, I went to bed as usual. It was summer, and it was late but it was just dusk. I was meant to work at five in the morning the next day, to prepare for the breakfast crowd.

"When I woke, it was in the dark, and for a moment I thought that it was still night. But I couldn't find my clock when I reached out, and then I realized that nothing was right, none of the same sounds or feelings as when I had gone to bed.

"I sat for hours, terrified, not knowing where I was. I thought sometimes that I was dead, or that I had been kidnapped.

"When some time had passed, I started to explore my surroundings. I had my pillow and blankets, but there was no bed. I crawled on my hands and knees, and finally my hands closed around the barrel of my gun.

"I was so comforted. Here at least was something to protect me in case I really was in danger. I put the gun into the waistband of my pyjamas and continued exploring, feeling more confident. Soon, going one direction from my blankets, I came to a wall. It was very cold and slick, and I thought it must be an outer wall from the temperature, or a window of some kind.

"Then, I saw a light come on beyond the wall. I could see my hands as they touched the smooth surface in front of me. Everything was black around me still when I looked behind me, just the one light beyond the wall. I could see my blankets and myself, but everything else sucked the light up without showing me anything.

"I focused on the light then, and realized I could see shapes. Everything was very clouded, like looking through tinted glass. The light grew stronger and stronger, and soon I realized I was watching dawn break through a window, and that window was in a room in an apartment. I could also see two doors and an arch that seemed to lead into a kitchen. One door was obviously the door to the hall. I guessed the other one led to the bathroom.

"I could also see a desk and several long black cases like coffins for ironing boards and a mattress under the window heaped with thick comforters. And everywhere, papers. They were stacked on every flat shelf and spilled over the desk onto the floor. I couldn't read anything on any of the pages, but I could tell there was a variety of shapes and sizes. It was like someone had emptied the contents of a stationary store into this one room with little attempt at organization.

"The sun rose higher, and the long shadows crept across the room until the first rays touched the pile of bedding on the mattress. And then, I heard a low groan, and a foot appeared near the head of the bed, then another, then a leg, then an arm from the bottom end closest to me, and finally a head with a profusion of tangled locks.

"It was my musician, I knew that at once. He struggled out of his bed slowly, with the obvious reluctance of someone who doesn't like mornings but has some outside influence forcing him to face them. He was dressed in worn flannel track pants, very different from the usual fashionable clothing I had seen him in before.

"He came toward my wall and I moved back into the shadows hoping not to be seen. But he gave no indication that he had noticed me, and instead stared straight through where I was. He yawned and ran a hand through his hair, and then began to pick the sleep out of the corner of one eye.

"And then, simply, I recognized the truth of my situation. Somehow, impossibly, I was trapped behind a mirror in the apartment belonging to this man I had admired and desired to learn more about.”

It was at this point that Charlotte began to cry and Halley guided me to take her hand. I felt her pulse under her fingers, the dryness of the skin. Even in the warmth of the bar, her flesh was icy as though no amount of heat would be able to thaw the chill that had entered her.

"What happened?" I prompted gently. It had occurred to me that this story had the feel of an elaborate fiction, told by someone that was using a fantasy to cover a deep guilt or horror.

"I stayed there," she said. "What else was I to do? I had no physical needs, it seemed. When he was there, I watched him. When he was gone, I watched the room. When he turned off the light at night, it was like I ceased to exist. I could see nothing. I didn't sleep. The time in the dark was meaningless.

"All those little things that I had thought would disgust me in another person I found fascinating. I watched him cook his dinner, moving in and out of sight through the arch. I saw him eat, watched him brush his teeth. When he left the door of the bathroom open, I could see him undressing to bathe.

"And there were other things too. He muttered to himself almost constantly, wandering around from room to room. Those black cases were for his instruments, a guitar, a keyboard, other things. He would unpack it all, play something, scribble it on a page. I watched him composing songs, singing quietly sometimes or louder when he had finished a piece, to try it out, I guess. I heard all his new songs, before they even got to the radio.

"When he went out, I imagined him at the café, talking and laughing. When he returned, my world began again.

"I started to feel very jealous of him. Whenever he left, I would guess where he was and how long it would take for him to get back. If he was late, I would be angry, feeling betrayed – although, how could he know anything about me?

"So much time went by – weeks. I wondered if anyone would look for me, if anyone would check my apartment. Who would miss me? Only the landlord, when my rent was overdue. My boss would probably just assume that I'd gotten tired of the job and decided not to come back. People did that all the time.

"No, my whole existence was caught up in watching him, through his mirror which was my window to his world. He came in with groceries, or a newspaper, or with an umbrella when it rained, and I greeted him silently. A few times, he brought a woman home with him, but I sat down on my blankets and closed my eyes until she was gone.

"My days were filled with this, his routine, his songs. I kept his hours. I witnessed his comings and goings with the attention of a priestess to her holy oracle.

"But in the end I had to realize that none of it was for me. Instead of passively observing, I was passionate to communicate. I felt like a sleeper waking only to find that she is paralyzed; although the mind is active, the body is dead.

"There was a change in me, slowly, and I began to wonder how I could escape. Somehow, my own desires had set me in this place behind the mirror, and somehow my own desires would be my release. Of this I was sure. I tried to rekindle that spirit of obsession that had put the fatal litany into my mind, and sat back on the blankets with the gun in my hands fervently wishing for deliverance. I believed at that time that the gun and my bedding had been preserved, alone of my worldly goods, merely to provide a route of escape.

"But nothing happened. Whether in the end I was too changed to repeat my previous actions, the method that had imprisoned me, I was trapped still.

"Every day after I began, the gun felt heavier and heavier. I was more and more eager to greet my composer face to face, not simply to watch him from behind a wall. I knew his every action, every idiosyncrasy of movement, but I only had the vaguest notion of the thoughts behind them. I wanted to talk to him, now that I felt vital. I wanted to learn how to grow, how to be a whole person and not the shadow, the reflection, I had always been, letting the images of my surroundings pass over me without anything remaining.

"It was in an act of final desperation that I finally pulled the trigger of the gun.

"The noise of the explosion broke my head, smashing into the mirror wall in front of me, and my world shattered.

"Suddenly, I was in my own apartment, standing before my bedroom mirror through which I had put the bullet."

"I believed then that I had been insane, that all the time I thought I had spent behind someone else's mirror had instead been a long moment of insanity. I had been in my room all the time and had shot the gun as if in a dream.

"I made a promise to myself that I would get rid of the gun, that day, and that I would have nothing to do with firearms again. Then I looked around my apartment.

"My plants were all wilted and brown. A plate sitting on the desk near where I stood was covered in mold. I couldn't remember what I'd eaten that night before going to bed. I had woken behind the songwriter's mirror, and had stayed there for weeks. And that was the only explanation.

"Then, I realized what it was my eyes had focused on. In a corner of the mirror, in a shard of glass that remained attached to the circular frame, I could see colour and movement, something that was not just a reflection.

"He was there, in that little shard, waving and shouting. And when I watched his lips, I realized that not only could I see him, but I could hear him as well.

"I ran out of the apartment, grabbing only my purse and my jacket. The summer was over and the weather had turned. I caught a glimpse of my mail box as I rushed past, stuffed with bills, but I didn't slow down until I reached a quiet park where I had walked once, waiting for him to arrive at the café. There was no one else around, which was just as well, because the gun was still clutched in my fingers. I put it in my purse and sat down to cry."

Charlotte stopped then, stopped dead.

"And then," said Halley gently. "Let me guess. In everything that reflected, he was there. And always you could hear his voice, asking who you were, and where he was, what had happened. You are tortured, for you know you have sentenced him to the existence you led behind the mirror, and this time there is no gun to provide a release."

She nodded, her head clutched in her hands. Her voice was a whisper. "I came to Quebec City. I thought I could escape. But here – too – he's here." The wetness of her tears made her fingers shine in the candlelight. I could hear patrons shifting in the their seats. Beside me, over the standing bar, I saw Jensen, the trumpet player, stretch his fingers on the keys of the trumpet he still held.

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