Chapter 1
“Hey, Mama,” Jessie greeted quietly into the flat phone. She hated how her tongue slowed of its own accord whenever she dialed that number. Just seeing a Georgia area code made her slide back into the lazy dialect.
“Why Jessie, darling, to what do I owe this dubious pleasure?” The woman was the southern queen mother of her trailer park. Jessie never quite puzzled out how Mama managed to maintain the inexplicable dignity of a southern belle despite her undeniably white trash surroundings. Jessie squeezed her eyes closed and tried to summon the fortitude of spirit to go on with her most harrowing tale.
“Well, Mama, I had an encounter this evening that I need to ask you about.” Two seconds on the phone with her and already her jaw began to slacken.
“Oh? What sort of encounter might press upon you to seek Mama’s council after all these years?”
Jessie jumped up from her place on the couch and set to pacing to and fro around her tiny house. “The song, Mama. The song and the story and all the nonsense you spun to me growing up, all the stories about my violin-?”
“Ah, Jessie, dear, you’re inquiring after your fiddle. Of course, child, everything I ever told you was the God’s honest truth. I’m not one to be taken by my imagination,” Mama Flora drawled. Her daughter was fiery, independent, and the overwhelming pride of her life. Dead air hung on the phone line like Spanish moss. “Jessie?”
Jessie was years away, back in that sweltering wet heat, the compression-like oppression of a southern summer spent outside an oven of a trailer. Her mother was playing that track again.
“Play ‘Fire on the Mountain’, Jessie,” she’d beckon. “Play ‘Granny Does Your Dog Bite?’.” Over and over Flora would sit in a fractured lawn chair above the white lattice pretending to be foundation, wilting, calling out song request while Jessie carved her bow across the strings of the ancient violin.
“Fuckin’ redneck trash music,” Jessie growled. If the instrument hadn’t been her only foreseeable ticket out of Hicksville, she would have happily set it on fire. Her mother gazed dreamily off, a fan beating lazily in her barely closed fingers to move the heat around.
“It was how your great-great-great uncle kept his soul and you best believe someday that devil’s a comin’ to get that fiddle back, Jessie. Jessie?”
“Yup, k,” Jessie sputtered back to life in her cold abode. Air conditioning she never really needed in this climate, nonexistent humidity, wisteria replaced by invasive ivy and possibly more invasive blackberry vines. “Th-that’s all I wanted, Mama. I’ll be in touch.” She hung up the phone before the woman could pull her back to that sweltering, Tennessee Williams-wannabe inspired childhood. But without the distraction of the grand dame Jessie with left with just herself, her empty violin case, and her encounter with the man who’d taken it several hours earlier.
It was a long rehearsal, the final one before performances began on Saturday. The piece was intended to harken the end of the world. Alexander Scriabin’s Mysterium, to be played at the foothills of the Himalayas and to quote the composer himself,
“There will not be a single spectator. All will be participants. The work requires special people, special artists and a completely new culture. The cast of performers includes an orchestra, a large mixed choir, an instrument with visual effects, dancers, a procession, incense, and rhythmic textural articulation. The cathedral in which it will take place will not be of one single type of stone but will continually change with the atmosphere and motion of the Mysterium. This will be done with the aid of mists and lights, which will modify the architectural contours.”
A walk in the apocalyptic park for a musician. Jessie, third chair at her peak, had been called out yet again for her lifeless performance. Her rhythmic textural articulation was way off.
“I am at a loss, Jess,” the conductor lamented. “I can’t put warmth in your fingers, I can’t put emotion in your bow. You have to bring something more than notes!” Sigh, hurumph, break another little conductor baton she’d like to shove up his ass if there wasn’t already a stick in residence.
“Yes, Maestro,” she recited as mechanically as she played. Fourth chair scowled at her, the up-and-comer salivating for that seat. If he had Jessie’s violin, he wouldn’t waste it like she did. First and Second settled more deeply into their smug, knowing Jessie was no threat. She didn’t have ‘it’. She would never have ‘it’. Jessie imagined all the places she would put ‘it’ if she ever found ‘it’ after all these decades of calluses, neck kinks, sleepless nights, horrifying auditions, and ceaseless exposure to criticism. Packing up as everyone drifted out of the music hall, Jessie was so caught up in her own disgust that she failed to notice the man’s approach until he placed his soft, spidery hand on hers as she started to close the case on her violin.
“I would love for you to indulge me a moment, my dear,” he crooned. The hand, the twanging accent, the satisfied cat smile, all of it startled Jessie out of her annoyance. He was ghostly pale, almost fishlike as his skin seemed to glimmer in the dusk of the concert house. From his veneers to his mirror-shined shoes, every line on his face, each slicked back darkly dyed hair, Jessie knew without knowing that the fibers stringing this man together were unnatural. Only his eyes shone with any honesty, the way a burglar’s eyes gleamed with true intentions through a stocking cap. Jessie recoiled her hand all the way back to her throat.
“What?”
“I wonder if I could trouble you to have a look at this violin you have here,” he kind of asked, hand sliding down the red velvet lining of the case. Jessie felt her heart contract involuntarily as he grazed the neck of the violin, sure she felt a chill beneath her shirt. She wanted to say no. She wanted to tell him to stop. Tell him that she didn’t like what he was doing.
