"Have a seat, sir."
"I'd rather stand. Thank you."
"Sir, it's bad news."
"I know."
"You have a nervous system disease. It's terminal and spreads rapidly. The Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease."
"Oh."
"There is no cure, and no possibilities to slow it down."
"Oh. Well then, it's good that I decided to stand. I won't be doing much of that soon. Thank you doctor."
"Sir .. please may I propo-"
"Thank you, doctor."
----
Sitting at his piano, hitting the mellow notes of a lost cause, his fragile fingers played what would be one of their last etudes. They danced on the black and white keys with profound meaning, for he knew that every note he hit would strike a similar chord within him. The music occupied the empty spaces in the room, and his broken heart sang of loss and failure. Slowly and elegantly he played until he stopped. And as he did, a candle flickered in the corner of the room.
Waking up the next morning was hard. He felt the disease creeping up on him like an unfamiliar shadow. Afraid to get up just to fall again, he sat in his bed and did something he had not done in a very long time. He cupped is hands, placed them over his eyes and sobbed. He remembered all that he had done, all that he had written and played on his piano. He remembered his first note, how it was so terribly played, and thought of how he could now play it with such ease. And as thoughts like these rolled through his mind, he wondered what his last note would be like. He wondered if it would be perfect or as bad as his first. And he wondered if he would ever write another song. He wondered if there would be music where he was going. He would miss the twenty four years of his life. He had played music for eighteen of them. Realizing what he might lose, he struggled, got out of bed, fought his way to the studio, and sat down at the piano again. He drew a long breath, closed his eyes, and it was under the hanging lamp that he began to compose his final song.
He etched everything he knew into the song. As his notes grew subtle and mellow, he inscribed how he had lost almost everything in the accident that had caused this disease. A car had slammed into him, and he remembered screaming as the shards of glass entered the side of is head. His notes grew into the ways he had tried recovering, and how he found his only solace in music. They took him back to the days when he was a child, where he would spend autumn in his backyard watching the proud treetops, gazing at them until his father would call him in for dinner. He played for days, taking breaks only to eat, or if the pain got too unbearable. He would sleep on the piano, refusing to leave its side, too scared he might never touch it again. And when the night got too dark, he would bring the candle over to illuminate the keys, lending them an orange tint. He wrote the notes on the bark shed by the only tree in his garden. He smiled when the melody resonated in the half-empty room. It made him feel less alone.
On the fourteenth night after his visit to the doctor, he had nearly finished the song. On the fourteenth night after his visit to the doctor, the pain became unbearable. He clutched his head and screamed. He screamed because it was going to be his last scream and then he fell silent because he knew he needed to breathe. He kept his eyes open and played frantically. His notes turned into fury, into angst, into desperation. "Please ...," he whispered. "Please." He fought his tears. "Please." He wrote, and he wrote. The melody fell into place, the dissonancy would come but he did not erase it. There was one last segment until the song was complete. His legacy, the story of everything he knew, did not know, and wanted to know. His questions, his silence, his mistakes. The song lay like an unfinished biography. "Please," he said, and the pain came again. He flung his arms as if he was shooing it away. "GO !" he screamed, and as he did, he motioned with his arm. He knocked the candle over and it fell on the dead bark. It fell, and he watched as it burned.
He stared, and as the fire was reflected in his wet eyes, the pain came one more time.
But this time he surrendered. He fell off the chair onto the floor and surrendered. He looked as the fire grew before him, and then he closed his eyes and smiled. He could not feel anything anymore, and he could not move, but he was going somewhere. And he was taking the music with him.
