Some people say they remember past lives. Not me. I remember my future.
I am ten, but I know what it is like to be 80. I also know that if I had not come back when I did I would be dead.
I remember the future like glimpses of a dream. I even remember the first time I was ten and how I hurt people. I hurt people a lot back then because I thought of people like I thought of my toys, which I was never very good to either. Just ask my mangled Aqua-man action figure, although if you ask me, he had it coming. What kind of lame superhero talks to fish? Anyway, I caused a lot of suffering. And maybe I would be the same way now, if not for the music.
The music follows me. And sometimes when I look at people hurting I can hear strains like music coming from a distant world telling me how other people feel.
On those days I wish I had never changed.
Before then, I liked my life well enough. Until my twenties life had been like an amusement park ride. Like I was looking at everything from one of those carts at Disneyland and everything was just an animatronic there just for me. None of it ever seemed real, which I guess is why I hurt people sometimes: to see if it really was.
I stole stuffed animals from toddlers, fried bugs with my magnifying glass, and I even killed a stray cat. There was also the time I stole a cane from an elderly man to see if he would fall, but I almost got caught that day by an Asian guy who was nearby. I was cornered into using my “talent” on him.
We were in a park blocks from my house when the elderly man, who had been feeding birds before he noticed his cane was missing, stood, fell and broke his eye glasses on the pavement, but the Asian man who had noticed what I had done rushed toward me and grabbed my arm. Crying out, I fought to get away, but he was bigger and stronger, and his grip was hurting me, so I stared into his eyes, and made myself feel as calm as I could. I thought of beaches and mountains and leaves drifting softly to the ground. After a moment, his eyes clouded. His grip relaxed. A dreamy expression crossed his face. He even smiled a little, and he let me go.
It was strange how, even though I was unable to feel for others, I could make other people feel for me. I had noticed since early childhood that people were like mirrors that reflected back how I was feeling. Some people seemed to be immune to the trick, but when I found someone susceptible to it, I used it.
I escaped, and that night as I was going to sleep I thought about how the elderly man had fallen and how I made it happen. Action and reaction. Stimulus and response. Cause and effect. A harmony of contrasts. Orchestrated by me.
I liked the idea of “orchestrating” anything and took pride in staying calm in situations where others freaked, but there was one area of my life where I lost control: my encounter with my piano teacher. As a teenager I liked playing piano. I studied all the great pianists from Beethoven to Liberace. I learned all the notes and practiced for many hours each day. Playing was my favorite thing in the whole world. But every time I played the teacher frowned. \”Where are YOU in this song?” she said one day. “You are doing everything right, the notes, the timing, everything, you do it better than any of my other students. Yet,” she threw up her hands and dropped them, “it sounds empty.\” I told her I was in it, I was doing my best, what did she expect? “It sounds cold, and mechanical,” she said, and pursed her lips. I could feel a pressure building in my chest, gathering into a spring-loaded impulse to hit her. Instead I swept the music sheet off the piano and stalked off and never went back. I did not play the piano again for many years.
Other than my frustration over music I was “happy” – happy in the way people are happy in soda pop commercials, happy without meaning or real feeling, happy like when you are hot and take a sip of something cold, temporary and boring, meaningless and frustrating. I had plenty of money and a lot of girlfriends, but nothing I bought gave me satisfaction and none of my girlfriends ever won my heart.
Maybe that is why I thought of the piano so much. Maybe I was no good at it, but it was all I had ever loved. I longed for it to love me back. I went into music stores a lot, imagining that just being near instruments might magically transform me into a real musician and not just a hack.
But my gift for manipulating people emotionally was some consolation, not to mention a way to pay the bills. By night, I went downtown and pick pocketed, numbing my victims the way a mosquito numbs its prey before taking what it needs.
I was amazed at how easily I got away with it, until one day I got caught, not by a policeman or my victim, but by a girl.
I had just slid a wallet out of a back pocket with a hand fell on my arm. “Nice trick,” a female voice said. “Especially impressed with how even people ten feet away from you seem not to see you. Congrats. But now you should give it back.”
I turned all the way around and faced her, and saw her pale skin and straight blond hair. Sixteen years old at most, she looked like a vagabond with a denim jumper covered with brightly colored patches, and her long hippy skirt. I tried my emotional trick on her but she only tilted her head at me with humor in her eyes. Before I could do anything else, she grabbed the money I had taken and said to my still-stunned victim, “Here, I think you might have lost this.”
I imagined myself throttling her as the victim, a plump thirty something lady wearing pastel stretch pants, absentmindedly took her money back.
“Who are you?” I said, supremely annoyed that she had interrupted my predations.
“My name is Chloe. I work in the music store, Instruments N Things. You go in there a lot. You always look so…wistful…but I think I know what you need.”
“What I need?” I stepped back. Mystery solved; she was a religious nut. My suspicions seemed to be confirmed when she pressed a pamphlet into my hand, but when I looked at the cover, I was surprised. It said “Hill-Bright Music Academy.”
She said, “Look through the pamphlet. The place where I teach music is different than most schools. Learning notes is not really our thing. We teach artistic sensitivity. Among other things. Our address and phone number are on the back. Look over it. If you are interested, the first visit will be free.” She gave me a final smile. “Toodles.” She swept a lock of hair behind her ears and vanished into the crowd, leaving me alone beneath a circle of lamplight, staring at the pamphlet. I was skeptical, but I had lost the heart for doing anymore pick pocketing that night. Getting caught had dulled the mood.
I took the pamphlet home and looked through it. The description of the school was vague, except it claimed to teach talent, not just skill. There were pages of testimonials of people who had always enjoyed music, yet lacked the “soul” for it. Each claimed that Hill-Bright Academy had “warmed up” their mechanical playing and turned them into brilliantly successful and spirited musicians.
I thought I sniffed a con. I was a con artist myself after all. The problem with cons is that, even when you know that what con artists offer is too good to be true, they tap into your deepest desires. Besides, how did the weird girl know my problem? It was like she had read my mind.
Against my better judgment, I decided to go. The first visit was free, so what did I have to lose? The next day, I called for an afternoon “work-in” appointment, got into my car, and rode into the country where the academy was supposed to be. After navigating a maze of dirt roads, I found it, not a stately building but a white clapboard two-story house with a long gravel driveway cutting across a big grassy yard. I got out of my car, made my way to the front porch, and knocked.
An elderly lady opened the door, but unlike my old piano teacher, she had a kind face, with laugh lines fanning from the outer corners of her eyes. She smiled. “Welcome. You must be Kevin. Chloe told me about you. I am Miss Martha. Do come in. Would you like some tea?”
Miss Martha? It sounded like something you would call a kindergarten teacher. I was having misgivings. “Um, no.”
“Oh, but I insist. Meanwhile, you can tell me about yourself and your musical aspirations.” She let me into the spacious living room with a hardwood floor, a glass coffee table, and a giant framed painting of a moon-bright piano glowing beneath a starry night sky. The piano tilted so steeply on a grassy hill, it looked like it would slide down.
Sprays of confetti-like flowers drooped from porcelain vases on the coffee table, along with a wooden bowl overflowing with ruby-colored apples. Bookshelves lined one of the walls. I scanned a few of the titles, which included everything from The Communist Manifest to Red Fish, Blue Fish by Dr. Seuss.
I sat in a padded chair and laid my arms on the curving wooden armrests. I scanned a few more of the titles, expecting to see at least one book about music. Instead I saw The Prince by Machiavelli, a book of quotes by Ben Franklin, and Falling Up by Shel Silverstein. What kind of musical academy was this? Before long, Miss Martha came back with tea. She smoothed her skirt and sat across from me on a love seat and asked me questions the way my grandmother sometimes used to when I was five.
I never give personal information to strangers, but after a few sips of herbal tea, I found myself confiding my adolescent trauma inflicted on me by my old piano teacher.
Miss Martha nodded. “I can imagine how terribly painful that must have been. Thank you for confiding. I know it is sometimes difficult for people like you to share your stories.” She put her hands on her knees. “Well, today was just a warm-up, an introduction to what will follow. However, much has been accomplished already.”
“What?” I said. “This is all? And what do you mean, people like me? I thought you would want to hear me play. Or give me a lesson. Or something.”
“Believe me,” Miss Martha said. “Your lesson is not going to end once you leave this house. Your real trial is ahead of you. You are going to have some very bad days before you see me again.”
I tensed, although I was starting to feel woozy. The tea. What had been in it? “What did you do to me?”
\”No worries, there was no cyanide or anthrax, although you are going to feel rather strange for a while,\” she said. \”Go home and take careful notes about what you observe. If the pain becomes too great, give me a call. A small percentage of our patients do not survive, but we are ethical here, at Hill bright Musical Academy. If symptoms become too severe, give us a call, and we will consider taking you back in time.”
I stared at her in stunned disbelief. “Back in-“
“Sorry, dear, I would explain everything now, but you are probably in no frame of mind to listen at the moment. “Oh.” She gathered a bowl of apples from the coffee table. “And take this bowl of apples, too, if you please, dear. They are at the pinnacle of ripeness, I am afraid they will go bad unless someone takes them off my hands.” I made no move to take the apples and only looked at her incredulously. With a frown, she sighed. “Oh, very well. I suppose I can make a pie with them. Come back later and I will cut you a slice.”
I stood, stumbling a little from the dizziness. I could not get as mad as I needed to be because I was too busy trying to remain upright as I cut a faltering path toward the door, fumbled for the knob, and made my way out into the sunlight. I was afraid to drive, yet I had to get away from the insane people who had drugged me and thought they could travel through time. The “academy” must have been a cult after all. What had I done?
I managed to keep the car in the correct lane as I drove, but the strange feelings increased as I went. I felt weak and my thigh muscles ached, like I was coming down with the flu. I parked in the lot in front of my apartment, flung open the door, and hurried to my door. I had just made it inside when the headache began.
It was the worst I had ever had. It came with a storm of memories of things I had done and been proud of, but now they came with agony as I became my victims. I was a cat and I was drowning. I was gasping for air, panic filling my being. I was a stooped old man pitching forward onto the hard pavement, my eye-glasses shattering as my chin scraped concrete. I was a minimum wage employee who looked into his back pocket and found his wallet missing.
Each memory seemed to stab me that night as my head throbbed. I felt like I was losing myself, carried away by a tide of painful confusion.
The headache continued all night and into the next morning. By the afternoon, the pounding had not subsided and I lay too exhausted to move, still swamped by the memories that crashed over me like relentless waves.
I felt like if I stayed in the bedroom, the walls would close in on me and the ceiling would collapse on my head. I got out of bed, threw on my beige trench coat, and left, bowing my head against the onslaught of winter wind, not knowing where I was going, only that I needed to escape. But the outdoors were no better, because of all the noise.
What did I hear? I heard music. A song seemed to be coming from each person I encountered, forming an emotional bridge between them and me. Not all of the songs were beautiful. Some were sad, some hopeful, others dark and terrifying.
The more music I heard, the more the gap between me and others closed. I did not know if I was hearing the thoughts of others, feeling what they felt, or just going mad. I was afraid for the woman who was worried her abusive husband would kill her toddler son; I was hopeful for the man who was about to propose to his girlfriend. I felt the smug avarice of a corporate executive who was embezzling money. The ecstasy, fear, sadness, and cruelty were all too much and I went back to the apartment and stayed there for days.
After the third day, my headache eased up, leaving behind a surreal and sunny euphoria. I left the apartment but this time, everything had changed once more. Colors were brighter, and shadows deeper. I went into a grocery store to buy some bread, and I could still “hear” the songs coming from each person I passed, although this time I had to try to listen.
I still had to keep my head down to keep from becoming lost in the clamor, and when I looked at an old person hunched over I could feel his ache the same spot on my body, the ceaseless rhythms of his song marching through my head. Everyone, I learned, had secrets, some dark and terrible, others just shameful.
Feeling the music of others was a terrible burden. I wanted to make the sad music of the homeless stop. I even bought one of them a roast beef sandwich and a bottled tea. Afterward, I wondered if I was really reading minds, or if Miss Martha had given me a hallucinogen like LSD. Maybe I was neither telepathic, nor insane.
One way or another, I retraced the chain of cause and effect that had gotten me into this situation. How stupid I had been. I had wanted to feel. I had wanted to play the piano with “soul,” not like a computer tapping keys. Now all the music I had taken in gathered in my head was building an uncomfortable pressure. The songs I had been hearing and the suffering that came with them was gathering into a unique song of my own, and it desperately needed an outlet.
Although I had given up playing piano, I had taken the one my parents had and put it in my apartment. I went to the instrument, dusted off its curved cover, and sat on the rectangular bench, a cloud of electricity gathering around me.
With trembling fingers, I tried to reproduce on the keyboard what was in my head. I tapped one key, and then another. Minutes later, I was playing as if I had never stopped, only it was better than before, the music and the experience of playing. I felt like I was channeling some hidden source of energy, playing the music of the universe itself. I remembered the painting at the academy, the one of the moon-bright piano glowing beneath an expanse of night sky, and I thought now I could grasp its surreal, transcendent mood.
I soared on waves of ecstasy and fell into currents of pain, only to be swept up once more into the raw energy of life, until someone broke my concentration by knocking on the door.
The magic suddenly fell flat, and I crash landed onto the cold hard floor of reality. I sighed, got up, and opened the door to find a middle aged lady staring starry-eyed at me. \”Just wanted to say how much I enjoyed your music. You play with so much feeling. I never heard anything like it. Do you play for a living? If not, you should.”
The compliment sent my mood soaring. I had to grant that the academy had done me a favor after all, even though I remained furious at the underhanded way Miss Martha had deceived me. I was still getting frequent, intolerable headaches, in which I suffered emotionally in the way my victims must have. No amount of Advil or alcohol would ease my suffering during those terrible moments.
I hated Chloe and her stupid denim jumper and her girlish smile, and the off-hand way she had said “Toodles.” I hated Miss Martha. But I needed answers. I had to go back to the academy.
The following afternoon, I stood on the front porch and knocked. I wondered if I had grounds for suing the “institution” for turning me from a dignified and independent predator into a wretch with a conscience.
This time it was Chloe who answered the door. She looked at me in surprise. “Oh, um, hi,” she said. You…returned.”
“Cut the crap. I came here for answers. What did you and your Miss Martha do to me?”
Chloe gave me a nervous smile. \”Hey, Miss Martha?” she said. “Guess what? We have a visitor.”
The pale face of Miss Martha bobbed into view; she was wiping her hands on a dish towel. Her gaze landed on me but, unlike Chloe, she appeared unruffled. “Great to see you, dear. Welcome back.”
I said to Miss Martha. “I am pretty sure there are grounds for a lawsuit here. You poisoned me. I only wanted to play the piano.”
She looked at me from the corners of her eyes. “Have you tried playing the piano lately?”
“Well, yes, but..”
“How did it go?”
I was at a loss for words.
Chloe broke in. \”You were always in the music store where I worked. I read your mind.”
“Read my mind? You are telepathic?”
\”We all are, here at the academy, which is why I chose you. You had the gift, but it only went one way. Before, you could only send your feelings. Now you can receive them. Despite, and even because of, your suffering, you are far more powerful than before. You should be thanking us.”
I huffed. “Do you even teach music here?”
“Here, we teach lots of things, history, philosophy, literature. But we do more than teach or learn the subjects. We feel them, and music helps us do that. Music is a language but few understand or speak it well. In normal schools, students learn all about war, the dates and the battles, but without ever feeling the real horror of it. A bloody and painful battle is only a dead fact to be filed away in a dusty compartment of the brain. If we could feel what our ancestors felt, maybe we would stop making the same mistakes they did. Our species would grow wiser. We would become more than ourselves.
“What if, instead of just reading about slavery, we could feel its lash on our skin? Know the pangs of starvation? We would stop making the same stupid mistakes over and over. Music is the language of emotion, but most musicians can barely stutter their truth. A telepath plays not just with notes or the strikes of a keyboard, but with all that he is, his life, his feelings, and his memory. And if he can play the songs he hears in others and share them, his audience will know worlds beyond themselves. Sad or hopeful, evil or good, your music is the language of empathy.”
Of all the excuses I had imagined hearing, I had never imagined this. They had poisoned me against my knowledge, and now they were being sanctimonious about it. I decided to play along. “So, were you like me? Before you changed?”
“I could imagine how others felt, but like you I had unrealized telepathic potential until Miss Martha found me. I had run away from home. I was sleeping in a shed near her barn. She caught me but when she sensed my ability, she took me in.”
I looked for Miss Martha to see her response, but she must have vanished into the kitchen.
Chloe went on. “She taught me that the reason there was evil in the world had less to do with cruelty than innocence. If people knew the whole truth of what they were destroying or the suffering they were causing, if they could really feel what others felt, many people would refrain from violence or inflicting suffering. Not everyone, maybe, but many would.”
I shook my head. “You have music all wrong,” I said finally. “You talk like music is propaganda meant to convert listeners to some pious system of morality, but music is about expressing, not proselytizing. Music can be dark and violent. It can be selfish and rude. Music has no purpose beyond itself.”
“You are right,” Chloe said. “Music is not morality and it never should be, but it tells a truth, an emotional truth, if done well. The truth music tells may be dark and it may be brutal, but even then, it communicates, and that is what we care about here: communicating and understanding, not converting. You can still do evil if you want to. You can use your enhanced telepathic abilities to destroy others. That is a risk we had to take when we brought you on.”
For a moment my deviant mind considered how well I could do in a game of poker now that I could read minds, though I would have to deal with the accursed pain of empathy, which would ruin my triumph. I huffed. “I was better off before. Alone. Apart. Above.”
Chloe laughed. “Might I suggest that you were never as above as you thought you were?’
I sighed. “Even if all you say is true, what do I do about the headaches?”
She frowned. “Oh, yeah. The headaches. Going back in time is the only thing that cures them, except for death of course. Problem is, when you go back in time, you forget who you are. You might even become the person you were before and lose all your new abilities. Never can tell. Depends on the person.”
“Hold on,” I said, “telepathy is one thing, but you talk so casually about time travel. Are you fucking crazy?”
Chloe shrugged. “People think time travel is something to be invented in the distant future when, in reality, it has happened quite a bit. Telepaths in particular seem to have a talent for it. Aside from the mechanics, the ability to bridge gaps between people goes a long way toward tapping into the power to travel into the past.
“When a telepath goes back in time, the music sometimes follows. When you awaken to the past, you have no memory of your future, not at first, but if you are lucky, the music will gradually come back to you. At first it is just a strain or two, and a feeling that you have seen a place before, lasting only seconds. But if you listen to the music long enough, you will start to remember everything else.”
I shook my head. “Telepathy. Time travel. Remembering the future. How am I supposed to buy all this?”
“That is your problem. I am telling you how to get rid of the headaches. But going back in time does more than just cure your suffering. Think reincarnation. If you go back enough times and your music follows, your essence becomes wiser, you become an irresistible musician, and you are better qualified to spread the truths, gathered from your multiple lives, through the language of music.” The gaze of her blue eyes settled on me.” I want to show you something. Stay here. I will be right back.”
My head was spinning as Chloe stepped away and I could see the back of her denim jumper and blond hair vanishing into a narrow hallway. Moments later she came back with a round object, and when I saw numbers on it, I realized I was looking at a clock. “Simple to use,” she said. “All you have to do is set the time you want and hit the lever on the back. But after you use it once, it loses its power. Whatever date you set, you had better be sure you want to go there because you are not coming back, except the hard way.”
“An alarm clock? You are more insane than I thought. And that is saying a lot.”
She shrugged and handed me the clock. “Whatever. They are your headaches. Oh, and even if you decide not to go back in time, the alarm feature works great. Has a handy-dandy snooze feature.” She held the clock out to me. “All yours now. Enjoy.”
With a long sigh, I took it, wryly thinking that at least I had gotten a free clock out of the deal. I told Chloe good-bye and left. I went home thinking. an alarm clock for time travel? It was too much of a stretch, even considering all that had happened. But even if it was for real, would I want to go back to the way I used to be? A mechanical piano player who had never known a moment of true joy?
I thought about the euphoria that had followed my last headache. Once the pain had vanished, every pain-free breath gave me the feeling I had won a lottery. I had experienced deep happiness only because I had known true pain, and I was willing to endure the headaches to know, even one more time, how that felt.
I gave up pickpocketing and conning people. I got a job playing piano in a local bar called “The Laugh Lounge.” Audience members were constantly telling me they thought they knew me because of the music. I wished my old piano teacher could have heard them.
Though I enjoyed the applause, I was happiest while I was playing alone in my apartment. As soon as I left my piano seat, my orientation shattered. I was annoyed that I could not pass a homeless person without hearing their song of woe and having the compulsion to buy them a sandwich. I did something even crazier: I adopted a starving stray cat. This one, I let live.
The headaches did sometimes tempt me to try time traveling. Instead, I began playing piano even during my headaches, to steal back some of the joy that pain had taken from me. I lived my life one day at a time, and somehow those days turned into weeks, months, and years.
I played until one day, very suddenly, at age 83, I began to sweat profusely. Warm salty rivulets went streaming down my face, back, and forehead. I felt a heavy pain in my chest. I felt like my rib cage was constricting my lungs and I fought for every breath. Moments later I vomited, again and again, which made it even harder to take in air. I did not think I would be alive by the time an ambulance came, so Instead of calling for one, I dug the clock out of my desk drawer and set it for my destination. What did I have to lose? I decided I wanted to be ten again. Being any younger seemed too vulnerable. As I moved the metal lever, I silently commanded my music to follow me.
That is how I ended up here, 73 years in the past. At first I did not know that I had lived in the future, but bit by bit, the music revealed it to me. Music, it turns out. is a language, and if you have the ability and will, you can decipher it.
Do you believe me? Whether you do or not, everything I have told you is true. But what matters is what the music says, and the music does not lie. I now teach a little at the Hill-Bright Music Academy, after school. I teach piano, but I also study history and read literature, which I seek to feel and not just learn.
I can feel history because, through those around me, I have felt the pain of the world, its hope, and its courage in the face of suffering and death. I cannot heal the world or erase its darkness, but maybe I can make it see, to feel the realities it only thinks it understands. Knowing is not enough. Facts alone will never change us. The music of reality is where our salvation lies.