But I did pity her. I looked for ways to make her life more bearable, for things to interest and distract her. I observed Lavondaville closely as I walked to and from my music lesson, the limit of my circumscribed existence. At night I described things I’d seen, to her great delight. I left gifts in her garden—a puzzle, a tortoise, roses—and she exclaimed happily over every one. It took so little to please her.
One evening, as we sat sipping tea and watching a glorious sunset I’d dreamed up, she said, “Please don’t be angry, but I heard you thinking today.”
I froze, tea halfway to my lips. I’d grown so used to her that I’d forgotten she wasn’t separate from me as other people were. Her consciousness was inside my head. How entangled with mine could it become? How entangled was it already?
“I don’t hear your every thought,” she said hastily. “Or else you think very little. But you seemed to have spoken to me intentionally when you looked at barges on the river.”
In fact, I had been imagining how I would describe them to her. The green water between red and blue barges made a striking image.
“I only mean to ask,” she said, blushing charmingly, “if you would describe the city again while you’re walking. I would love to hear it.”
I relaxed a little. As spooky as it was to be reminded of our uncanny link, she didn’t mean me any harm. “Of course,” I said. “I’d be happy to.”
As I walked to my music lesson the next day, I thought at Jannoula, describing everything I passed: the stone curlicues in the balustrade of Cathedral Bridge; the lizard-like quigutl climbing upside down along a clothesline between houses; the shouting pie vendors and their savory-smelling wares.
I wasn’t completely sure she was hearing my descriptions until she replied: You should eat a pie for me, since I can’t taste one myself.
It is generally inadvisable to obey voices in your head, and indeed I froze when I heard her, downright spooked that she could talk to me when I wasn’t visiting my garden. Still, it wasn’t much stranger than the fact that she’d heard me, and what a sweet request. I smiled in spite of myself and said, Well, if you really insist …
I had hoped she could taste the pie while I did, but she couldn’t. I described the sweet apples and flaky pastry until she laughingly cried, Enough! I’m envious now.
We started conversing during the day as I walked around, and for the first time I began to feel I truly had a friend. She wasn’t always there; her own life—her captors? I could only imagine—sometimes demanded her attention and, she explained, she couldn’t be in two places at once. When she was gone, I saved up details for her: the legless beggar singing in St. Loola’s Square; the way falling red maple leaves gavotted in the autumn breeze.
What does gavotted mean? she asked when I shared these things later. Or singing, for that matter?
“Have you never heard music before?” I exclaimed aloud, forgetting in my astonishment that I was eating dinner with my family. My father and stepmother stared; my little half sisters giggled. I stuffed a forkful of jellied eel into my mouth.
Poor Jannoula, though. If she was truly deprived of music, I had to correct this.
It wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Jannoula could hear thoughts directed at her, but she could not sense through my senses. My daily music lessons with Orma could not enlighten her; she didn’t hear me playing my instruments. I tried thinking at her while I played, but that just made my playing suffer. I sang to her in the garden after I’d settled the other grotesques for the night, but I was a self-conscious and indifferent singer even in my own head. I imagined an oud and played that, but it was only a pale shadow of the real thing. She remained unfailingly polite, but I could tell she didn’t see the point.
Then one day I was practicing flute, thinking not about Jannoula but about some beastly arpeggios that kept tripping me up. I tensed every time they approached, overthought and overshot them. Orma’s suggestion—that I play them extremely slowly until I had the technique down—was good as far as it went, but it didn’t solve the way I cringed, or how the cringe itself tightened my timbre into an excruciating shrill.
Solving the notes was the easy part; I had to solve the dread, and I couldn’t.
I took a break, stretched, tried again, failed, kicked over the music stand (I am not proud of that), and wondered whether I had reached the limits of my musical ability. Maybe I’d never had any. Surely someone with a modicum of talent wouldn’t have to work this hard.
The music stand had hit my table and knocked a cascade of books and parchments onto the floor; I had my uncle’s proclivity for filing by piling, alas. I picked everything up, leafing through to see whether I couldn’t relocate this mountain to the bottom of my wardrobe and forget it. The avalanche consisted mostly of scores that I needed to study, but then my eyes lit upon Orma’s scrawled handwriting: On Emptiness. It was a short treatise he’d written for me, back when we’d hoped to quell the visions through meditation. I drifted over to my bed and read the whole thing again.
And had an idea.
I needed to get out of my own way, release this anxiety and relax into the arpeggios. I had gotten good at vacating my mind; the obvious jokes aside, meditation practice had enabled me to create my garden, and to visit it. I lay back on my bed and imagined myself empty, pictured doors in my heart and how I would fling them open. I was a hollow channel; I would be my own instrument, reverberating.
I didn’t sit up or open my eyes, just put my flute to my lips and began to play.
Oh! cried Jannoula in my mind. There was such anguish in her voice that I broke off in alarm. No, don’t stop!
It took me a moment to understand that she had finally heard me—through my ears, or some other method? I wasn’t sure. I only knew that I had found a way to open myself to her. I laughed, long and loud, while she continued to grouse. “Yes, Your Majesty,” I said, grinning. I took a deep breath, filling and emptying myself together, and let my whole being ring with music once again.