The Brass Instrument

“Let me play you a song from where I come from.”

The strange figure on the stage lifted the trombone to his lips. He was little more than a dark shape under the dull electric light of the sideshow tent. His right shoulder dipped low, and sound came from the instrument. Not music in any sense I knew, but a softer sound than I’d ever heard from brass. You could hear the crowd’s feet shuffling under it.

It seemed terribly far away, as if it came from the next mountain through a mist at dawn. Then the sound rose into a clear musical note: sharp, bracing, present. With a series of sudden, automaton-like jerks, he worked the slide so that the note fell again, passing on to the next mountain and the next and the next, far beyond where man could ever go.

The crowd--cruel enough to throw things at the one-legged dancer in the previous act--now stood motionless. Somehow I knew they were thinking of a mountain range too.

The strange musician lowered the trombone and stood straight, abandoning his stooped playing posture. “You must forgive me,” he said. “I never studied music when I lived there. Most of them could play it better.”

I looked around the room, and I knew that the crowd--dockworkers, old women from the factory, jaded city folk--did forgive him in their silence.

“Other songs came later,” he said. “There were the war trumpets of the Fallen Ones, when they found out where we lived.”

He played, and his body changed in impossible ways. Limbs shortened or extended, torso pivoting at spinal joints that didn’t exist. The blast of noise rumbled deep and heavy, almost geological in its violence. Unlike the first piece, this mad booming noise did contain a melody, but a wicked one, “Bald Mountain” performed with tectonic plates. Wooden beams rattled, dust fell from the rafters, but--strangely--it also rose from the ground, filling the tent with a thin haze of dirt.

The playing stopped. His body straightened, reforming itself into tall, gaunt, humanlike shape. In the silence, I heard the watchers--including myself--breathing heavily.

“When the Fallen Ones had finished, our mountain was a field of pebbles. Most of my people did not know they would die, any more than an insect knows of the boot coming down from overhead. They were not allowed fear or suffering.”

He lifted the trombone but stopped before it reached his lips. His voice had been loud and crisp, but his next words came out broken, poorly projected. Those in the back of the tent probably didn’t hear him.

“This is the sound of the rocks that lie where our mountain stood.”

The trombone glinted gold before his darkened face, and he played a sustained contralto note. As he held it, he grew. By inches at first, and then by feet, until he stood taller than the lights. The note warbled, pitched itself high and then higher, low and then inaudibly low. And the lower it dove, the more the tent swayed, not shaken as if by force but nodding under a spell. The tent flaps danced, but no wind blew. The air grew colder, impregnated with some terrible secret, and, as the sound of the trombone faded away, other sounds--an infinite number of them--came to take its place.

Feet stamping in anguish. Children murmuring and then crying out. Voices shrieking a single word in a language I didn’t know. Then a noise so alien and awful, I could never describe it in words, though I still hear it in my memory and in my nightmares.

Applause or whistles or jeering typically follow a concert, but everyone left the tent in silence. Only I remained as the musicians packed up. Many of the lightbulbs had quit working during the act, and the tent was darker than ever. The strange musician remained in shadow as I approached him. He placed the instrument in a wooden case, and I realized it wasn’t a trombone at all. Its brass tubes curved back on themselves, and the mouthpiece didn’t connect to them or to the bell in any way I could see.

“What did they want from you?” I asked. “The Fallen Ones.”

He straightened himself, like the performance.

“Perhaps nothing,” he said. I never could place that accent. “They had only answered our call.”

I shook my head, unsure of his meaning.

“My people were the greatest of all musicians. If you could have heard Death’s Bolero or the Cantata for Angel’s Wings, you would understand what I mean, and that was only the beginning of what they would have done. My people explored forms and instruments that no one else had even thought of. But the greatest of us went further than that and joined the countermelodies that the Elders had warned against. It was a beautiful piece. The whole mountain heard it and sighed. They did not understand what had been done. In musical form, a message had been sent to the Fallen Ones. That song brought them out of the air. And their answer destroyed an entire world.”

“But if music did that…”

“I’ve heard your question before. You want to know how I could play my brass tube after what such instruments did to my people. Everyone must play with fire. If it burns, it is also warm. The hand must discern how far to go.”

The circus packed up its tents and traveled on to the next county. I started piano lessons soon after.

The disaster happened in Canterling a year or two later. I read about it first, but later a local boy told me what he had heard about that night at the circus. He said the crowd in the music tent had gotten rowdy, that they wouldn’t quiet down for the show. He said the strange musician had tried to play above the din, that his playing became unfocused, angry, deafening. He said the tent went up like a mortar, and the police never found a cause.

I practice at the piano every day now, but I may never achieve what I'm searching for. He had been born into that world. I’m only a tourist, working with primitive tools. I try to remember the music I heard that night and perform it as best I can, but I can only move small objects with my playing, and the images come sporadically if they come at all.

 But I’m getting warmer.