Subito Morendo No. 7

by m maldonado

Morning rose on the city with an affable air, a good strong wind sweeping in from the north to carry away the night’s clouds. The sun shone all the clearer for it, lacquering the town in soft gold and softer blue so that all the windows were aglow, and all the shadows gentle. A faint mist still lingered on the streets, each invisible dewdrop a miniscule prism, diffusing the light until it had snuck its way into just about every nook and cranny the city had to offer. The sun seemed intent to touch everything it could, from the tiniest townhomes that sat on the edge of the city limits to the quaintly average houses that infested suburbia—to the ever-ascending spiral of skyscrapers that made up the very core of downtown, the steel and glass so tightly groped by the light that the buildings looked like javelins of fire.

From the roof of a house on a hill a mile from the city’s outskirts, this vainglorious view of the entire effervescent city seemed like a gift, as if God had scooped the city up onto a platter and sat it on the opposite end of the cerulean bay so that the house’s occupant could forever partake in this solar splendor. The positioning of house and city could not have been more impeccable, nor the real estate more grossly expensive: it was the sort of house that rock stars squandered and trillionaires bought in spades. It sat on the edge of the bay atop its viridian hill, sprawling but stately, everything tight and rigid and grand, every aspect of it carefully composed.

He liked that.

The view was quite good from within the house, but no window or balcony could hope to match what was visible from the roof of the central wing, the tallest structure in the building. It had been designed to be some sort of open-air, laissez-faire observatory, but had, under previous owners, been reduced to a place to party under the stars, drunkards swaying to and fro in front of a view that was left wholly unappreciated by their inebriated eyes.

Now, though, he had cleared everything away—all the tables, all the chairs, all the couches and all the loveseats; they sat in awkward clusters in the basement with all the telescopes and other astronomical artifacts. Once upon a time, he had briefly considered restoring the roof to its former glory, but had instead opted for improving it, clearing away all the trappings of its past, good and bad, and replacing it with something new, something for which it would be remembered for always.

Near the very front of the roof, so that it was closest to the city, was a terraced dais laden with red velvet, luxurious and soft to the touch. Atop it was a music stand made of pale gold, matte in texture and shaped into an art deco spray of water, rising up and fanning out and ensconcing a thick leather booklet in its angular waves. Resting diagonally atop the black booklet was a simple baton crafted in grand fashion: carved from a single piece of rhodochrosite, it was a polished, tapering wand, richly scarlet and lavishly smooth. The sunshine reflected off its surface in languid lines, the pallid light dyed a sober orange by the crystal.

He stepped through the double doors that served as a gateway to the roof, letting them swing shut behind him with a perfunctory slam—and stopped dead, bouncing smartly on his feet as he took a moment to bask in the Godly glory that was Eight O’Clock On A Monday Morning. He was dressed far too sharply for the hour, swathed as he was in the livery of the host of some exuberant and exorbitant black tie ball. His black shoes gleamed as if slick with oil, and every piece of his tuxedo was neatly ironed and impeccable. Every inch was free of lint, from his coattails to the insides of his pockets, and each of the ebony buttons was brightly polished. His little black bowtie was tied perfectly straight, and his ruby cufflinks were without a single blemish. He wore a sash about his waist the color of maroon, bordering on crimson, that broke the monochrome monotony of his outfit.

Above his perfectly-pressed collar was a face that failed to live up to the luxury that lay below. It was rife with lines and slightly doughy, the skin stretched and kneaded and fattened by too many years and too much good food. The nose was pointy but bulbous, and so overlarge as to make the face appear hawkish. His mouth was perpetually crooked, slanting upward on one side, forcing it into an aged smirk; it was surrounded by stubble on all sides, the thick gray-black hairs densely populating the man’s face from ears to chin. The hair on his head was mostly a harsh black and very tightly curly, though there was a jut of frizzled, graying hair that stuck out near the front on one side, rendering his face all the more lopsided. The flesh around his eyes was a basset hound’s, mournful and sagging, but the eyes themselves were dangerously vivid, the gaze sharp and gleaming like a fang.

One eye was a brown so dark it was practically black, and the other was rhodochrosite red, with a pupil pinched so tightly closed that the iris looked like a cut jewel.

He smiled at the sun, his chapped lips stretching painfully around his bleached grin; his lips were split in places, and he idly ran his tongue over them, lapping at the blood that oozed from the fissures.

He smacked his lips in a satisfied way, still grinning, and strode forward, marching up the short series of steps between the recessed entryway and the rooftop proper. He arrived on deck with a sharp clicking of his shoes against the Corsican tile, and by this time, his smile had faded into the closest thing to sobriety he could manage. With his heterochromatic eyes locked on the music stand, he clicked his way to the dais, looking strangely out of place in the midst of the morning light; he seemed to deflect the dawn, his form retaining its stark sharpness in spite of the sun.

The velvet gave away just a bit as he settled his shoe onto the first step. He rose to the top of the dais slowly, with reverence, savoring every step upwards, and visibly relishing the moment when he finally had both feet planted firmly at the top: he stood there, ramrod straight, with his eyes closed and his smirk rising, for several minutes. The wind swept around his stillness, brushing him but leaving his pristine attire unscathed; the sun failed to warm his clothes, which stubbornly retained the chill they had obtained within the air-conditioned interior of the house; the birds chirped nervously into the silence he created, trying to break the tension between their beaks and on the back of their primal songs.

When his eyes opened, they were already resting on the baton, as if he had seen it through his aged and spotted eyelids—as if he had been watching it through them the entire time he’d had them closed, caging it in his ceaseless stare. He smiled softly at it, the corners of his eyes crinkling coldly as he plucked the baton off the stand in the same way that one would pluck a small and fidgety bird out of a cage. He clenched it possessively, the sallow, olive skin of his fingers going pale as he hefted the baton experimentally, checking the weight, and the balance. He turned it in the light, examining the way the crystal refracted the sunshine, checking for fractures, scratches, smudges, chips, and divots. The light twisted inside the gem, carried along the sinuous curves of the crystalline structure, squirming like trails of blood in water, twining amorphously.

Satisfied that his baton was still without defect, he held it at his side at a cant, and flipped open the leather booklet with his free hand, watching his every movement with his continuous intensity. He adjusted the book so that it sat perfectly center on the stand, and took a moment to contemplate the first page, upon which was printed

Subito Morendo No. 7

in the

Major of E#

and nothing else.

He turned the page, exposing the score to the air: to the untrained eye, it was a chaotic mess caught in a net of staffs, bars, and legers, forced into order only by the structure of the page. Some would say that a centipede dipped in ink and sent skittering across the paper could’ve done just as good a job, if not better, and looking at it now, he could not truly blame the uninitiated for such an assessment. It was, genuinely, a fervent cascade of dots and lines and little obscure notations, of clefs and longas and brevi and minims and crotchets and quavers, semiquavers, hemisemiquavers—all their ilk—notes with beams, notes with dots, some of them flats, some of them naturals, some of them sharps, some of them legato, some of them glissando.

All of them his.

He let his mismatched gaze wash over them with loving tenderness—and then his stare snapped up to the city, and he found himself standing even straighter than before, with his arms lazily akimbo, hands hovering on either side of him, suspended in this moment before the storm. He spent those paralyzed seconds studying the city, contemplating its contents, its workings, its composition: the hundreds of thousands of teeming masses that trickled through its veins, the vehicles that sputtered hither and yon, the bricks and mortar and wood and steel and concrete that were its body…all of it, hustling and bustling about as the workday began.

His fingers tensed.

It had been a mezzopiano morning, but now was the time for fortissimo.

He swept his hands up to their highest point, the sun catching in his baton, turning it into a bar of glowing magma as the top ten floors of the tallest building in the city exploded, every window shattering so that the sky was momentarily bright with glassy glitter. Fire was quick to follow, billowing out of the building in rolling spheres and twisting tongues, their edges black with smoke as the flames feasted on everything inside that was fit to burn.

His hand kept the beat, twitching in tune with the screams, as he stared across the bay at the torch that the skyscraper had become, burning high in the sky, illuminating the nearby buildings with the vicious vibrance of its own fiery decay. Smoke bled into the air in thick gouts, drawing a sharp black line in the sky, a punctuation mark to the sudden destruction, swallowing all the birds and all the sunshine in its carbon claws.

Suddenly his hands swan dived, sinking out of sight behind the music stand—but he kept staring forward, through and through, his gaze unshakeable, his eyelids never so much as twitching, even as his hands sunk to the lowest possible point they could manage while he was standing so upright.

A massive and brittle cracking sound rang out over the bay, and across the city as a whole, shaking all the nearby windows so that they quivered noisily in their frames. It was the sound of a gargantuan bone being snapped, or a vicious thunderbolt cracking through the clouds, or the death knell heart attack of an empire, aurally personified. It hung over the city like a corpse riddled with razor blades—but lingered in his ear like a sharp burst of brass and timpani, accented by shrill woodwinds. Very sforzando. Very beautiful.

His hand twitched slightly upward, and another, smaller crack cut through the air, accompanied by a glissando of concussive noise that arrived at his ears as a percussive rumble. His baton rose, and so did the sound, and suddenly the skyscraper was sinking, its base swathed with an ever-growing cloud of debris as it descended into its own foundation, the whole thing wobbling violently, the smoke spewing from its top drawing a sickly scribble on the sky. Every floor found itself flattened and obliterated by the weight above it, the support struts groaning and shrieking in the scant seconds before their brutal collapse, the entire structure compounding itself again and again and again in a rising crescendo of necrotic noise.

His hands reached their apex just as the inferno that was the top of the building sank into the ground, the atramentous smoke quickly mingling with the gray-white cloud of debris that had once been the proudest portion of the city’s skyline. They swelled together, rising and expanding, and, at the insistence of his baton, began to squirm through the city streets in dense tendrils, like the arms of some gaseous hydra. Their movement was relentless, and their hunger voracious, sweeping up light poles and stop signs and food carts and stoplights and newspaper stands and cars and trucks and taxis and people and animals alike, gobbling them up into the impenetrable ash-fog.

He let those sounds sing into the sky for at least a minute before flicking his baton to the west, summoning the first series of emergency vehicles, their sirens blaring in all directions, like shrill piccolos playing agitato. He did the same for the east, and the north, and the south, calling in a chorus of klaxons, letting them slowly build on one another as they got closer and closer to the center of the city, until all of them were singing in discordant harmony.

And then with a sweeping flick of his baton, he called forth a series of smaller cracks, like epic gunshots crying out into the shattered morning—and then a series of skyscrapers dropped like felled trees, tipping into the streets, twisting perilously as they slammed into nearby buildings, the frightened sounds of their occupants drowned in a sea of metallic groans and glass crashes, and the crepital cracks of brick and mortar.

They sank beneath the tentacular deluge of debris just as he gave a pronounced circular motion with both his hands, the movement sharp and violent, the strain self-evident in his face, his teeth ground taut against one another.

He was quick to regain his composure—just as every major skyscraper that had surrounded the central one cracked, and fell as one, in complete sync, toppling outwards like the blossoms of a rose. Each one struck the ground at a different time, in perfect sequence, creating a rising cascade of thunder, each one hitting harder than the last, each one pushing the ash-hydra further and further into the streets, choking the city with devastation, infecting it with all the more chaos for him to conduct.

And as he sank all the bridges in and out of the city into the bay, the water merrily snatching them into their depths, he smiled much too widely.

What a wonderful recording this will be.

And hopefully, he’d get it right this time around.