The Magic Hour

Chapter 25: Glass Harmonica

IT WAS MUSIC but like none he had heard before. Diaphanous tones mingled with a faint glissando that brought with it a distinct feeling of disorientation. At the same time the sounds seemed familiar and important, somehow. With difficulty Nathan roused himself and sat up. He was on his bed in his room at Sierra’s. He hadn’t dreamed the music. It was coming from downstairs.

    He got up and opened the door to his room and went over to the banister that overlooked the hall below. Pale purple light from early dusk filtered in through the sheer curtains on the front windows. Someone was playing the piano. He went down the stairs into the living room. To his surprise Sela was there, outlined in the dim light. She saw him and stopped.

    “Please, play that again,” Nathan said, before she could speak.

    “Hello! You’ve slept all day. I hope you’re feeling well. Sierra lets me come and use the piano whenever I want to—I didn’t mean to wake you.”

    “If I’ve slept all day, which is news to me, it’s about time I was awake,” Nathan said. “I would like to hear that again.”

    “Actually, I’m working along with a piece on the CD player. Trying to imitate the piano section so precisely that what I do sounds the same.”

    “Why?”

    “I have no idea. I just like the effort, I guess. Especially with this one. There are things hidden in it. Here goes.”

    Sela reached over and pressed a button on her CD player, at the same moment lifting her hands above the keyboard. In synchronization with the recording she began to play.

    It seemed to him that the music was not unlike his dream, the sliding notes a weaving of Naliv and Soran, of the world of the shaman, and of the labyrinth. They all flowed before him not in images but in sound, a crossing over of perceptions, the music a world between the dream and what was real in the moment as he sat in the darkening light with Sela and listened.

    When it was over, she sat back, her hands on her lap. “It’s a lovely piece, isn’t it?”

    “It’s strange, something unreal.”

    “Ethereal, yes. That’s because of an old instrument not often played anymore. It’s called a glass harmonica. This recording actually uses one, which is uncommon, as orchestras substitute the glockenspiel.”

    “I’m not much with music, but I didn’t want it to end.”

    “There’s something haunting in it, isn’t there? A different vibration,” Sela said softly. “As if we can’t quite place the source of it, that’s what it seems to me. I don’t entirely understand the process, but I’ve been told that the music from a glass harmonica is created in a range outside our normal perceptual range, though not beyond its possibility. Our brains can’t quite figure out where the vibrations are coming from, can’t locate what the frequency is. As if it’s in a different space.”

    Nathan had the sudden sense that where he was and what he felt was identical with his dreams, that there was nothing dividing the worlds he knew and had entered so recently from the one he was in at that moment with Sela.

    “Goodness, we’re in the dark here, aren’t we!” She got up from the piano and switched on a lamp near the window. The light was like a small shock to his system, breaking the mood and dissipating the dream.

    “So you’re a painter and a musician both,” he said to her.

    “Not really. I know very little about music, except of course where the notes are and how to read some things, but mostly I do it by ear, and this is one of the few pieces I’ve mastered.”