Nightingale Songs (6 page)

Claire pulled the dusty bench out from beneath the piano and sat, hopeful she could make sense of the evening. Had she simply imagined the music, like some sort of echo in her memory? Why did the walls around the piano seem to lean inward as though being pulled by something unseen? The thoughts continued, amplified by her exhaustion, and with them followed an unplaceable rumbling. She stood from the bench and went to the window behind her. Something was out there in the dark.

At first, nothing appeared amiss. The view was nearly opaque save for what the moonlight edged, lending the world the appearance of being behind dark glass. The sound seemed to emanate from below the window, but when Claire looked down she was stricken with a vertiginous sensation; the ground crumbled away before her eyes, revealing the wreck of an old large automobile -- its driver’s side crushed, its hood crumpled like tissue paper. The creaking mass hissed with steam, and Claire experienced a wave of nausea that upended the flickering world and forced her eyelids closed before she fainted. When her breathing finally steadied she opened them and saw Eloise standing at the door, cane in one hand and an inscrutable look on her long face as she massaged her leg with the other. Claire looked out the window but the world had returned to normal.

"I'm sorry," Claire stammered. "I was... I thought I heard you playing the piano." Even in her dissipating stupor Claire knew she sounded like a fool. Eloise, to her surprise, did not comment upon it.

"How do you feel?"

"A little faint," Claire admitted. "But this is a lovely room. Very inviting."

Eloise's nod was curt.

"This was our father's study," she said, hobbling slowly into the room. "We used to spend quite an amount of time here, Doreen and I. As you can see, he was quite well read -- an artist's heart -- and after our mother died he was all we had." She reached the bookshelf and picked up the volume Claire had held earlier. "He read every book in here at least twice -- it was something he prided himself on. He used to encourage us to do the same. I didn't have the patience. Always too busy playing, running around..." She looked down at her leg and seemed shocked to see her fingers gripping it. "I don't do that much any longer. Do you see these paintings? Doreen did them. She did all of them. She's apparently quite gifted in her way. Our father did his best to encourage it. I never understood what the fuss was about myself. They're nice, I suppose, but hardly anything to get excited about. They look wrong to me. Out of shape. This one here --" She pointed a crooked finger at a painting of her and her father; the two of them looked beautiful side by side. "This is
me
? It looks nothing like me. No, I can't say I'm much for painting. Music, though, the way he played the piano, it used to set my heart free. I used to sit beside him as he played, right there on the bench where you are now, and listen. I could have stayed there for hours." She joined Claire on the piano bench, letting out a small huff when she finally shifted her weight off her limping foot. That close, Claire could feel the old woman's body emanating frailty, as though a wrong move or misspoken word might damage her. She smelled of naphthalene. "Our father always told us it was important to appreciate the arts. He always -- well, let's agree fathers are always right." She carefully lifted the lid of the piano, uncovering the ivory keys, darkened from a lifetime's worth of dirty hands. "He would tell me that if I loved music so much, I ought to do what Doreen had done with her paints. He imagined us a family of artists, and wanted little more than to teach me what he knew." She smiled and put her thin finger on a key. She pressed down, and the piano emitted a flat note that carried through the room. "But I never managed to learn more than a few chords no matter how hard I tried." She dropped the cover over the keys and the small slam echoed in the quiet. Eloise struggled to get her cane beneath her as she stood.

"Were you able to get hold of anybody?" she asked once she caught her breath. "Doreen says your car is ruined."

"I tried," Claire croaked, her throat dry. She coughed to clear it. "My phone is dead, though. I suppose I'll need to use yours again tomorrow."

Eloise sighed, and Claire realized her welcome had already been stretched to the limit. "I suggest you get some sleep then. Doreen has already arranged for a tow-truck to meet you in the morning."

"That's very kind of her."

Eloise may have laughed. Claire couldn't be sure.

"It was, wasn't it?"

She turned out the light and slowly limped out of the room, leaving Claire at the piano bench alone in the dark.

The morning sun woke Claire the next day, gradually filling her bedroom with light she could not hide from. When she descended the stairs, she heard Doreen's titter before seeing her humming along the hallway.

"Up so early?" she asked through her smile. "Come on, I'll make you breakfast."

"I should probably call my father."

"There'll be time for that after you eat. Why disturb his sleep if you don't have to?"

Doreen flitted around the kitchen as she cooked eggs and sausage and pancakes, all the while apologizing for her sister. "Eloise can be a handful sometimes, but I have to watch out for her, especially considering her state. Ever since the accident she's been moody. I guess it's hard to watch the person you love most in the world die while you're trapped helplessly beside him. Still, it's no excuse for refusing to see someone off! I suspect she's embarrassed by her behavior last night. What foolishness!"

Claire smiled and pretended she understood.

"What happened? If you don't mind my asking."

Doreen glanced at her. "What do you mean?"

"The accident."

"Oh," she said, returning to the stove. Claire worried her question had been impolite. "You know how these things are. One minute you're driving, the next you wake up in the hospital. The police said it was a hit and run but Eloise doesn't remember a thing. That's probably for the best, I'd imagine. Sometimes I think it would be better for her if she painted. It's amazing how therapeutic it is."

"I still can’t believe you've managed to paint so many."

"Well, only most of them. Father did a few."

"Regardless, they're really quite well done."

Doreen tittered and looked up at the wall. There, a farm landscape, a small car on the road in the foreground, looked back at her.

"Honestly, I wish I could take them all down. Sometimes I can't stand looking at them. They aren't good for anything but bad memories, but Father loved them so much Eloise insists we leave them up."

"Really? Eloise?" Claire could not contain her surprise.

"The funny thing is --" she started, and was interrupted by the sound of honking from outside. "Well, look at that," Doreen said, peering through the window above the sink, wiping her hands on her apron. "The tow truck is right on time. You should go before your father starts to worry."

Claire said good-bye to Doreen on the front porch. In the daylight the house took on normal proportions, no longer seeming to swell and encompass the entire landscape. The tow truck awaited her on the driveway with its engine running, the remains of her car already winched in place and dressed with lights. When Claire stepped inside the cab the driver asked her where she needed to go. She looked back and forth, trying to remember the direction she'd arrived from.

"You know," she said; "I'm not sure."

They pulled out of the driveway, and Claire turned to watch the house shrink away. She saw the window whose light she had followed the night before, and in it was Eloise, looking out like a prisoner in a castle. Beneath the window there was a large shadow, but before Claire could make sense of it the truck jarred and turned a corner. When Claire looked again the house was gone.

"Do you think I could borrow your phone?" Claire asked. "I'd like to call my father and tell him I'm on my way."

The driver handed it to her. "If he's anything like me, he's probably worried."

"Probably," she said with a shrug.

"People are no longer sleeping well,"
Doctor Wy
opined late one Thursday night during his regular telephone call to the sleep lab. Fisher yawned as he listened. "As a rule, they like things that are neither difficult nor bad and right now the state of the world couldn't be worse. The stock market, wars, crime; it all adds up to an existence that seems increasingly horrible and without end. What follows is worry, and with more worry comes less sleep. It's provable, and it's the basis for all my research."

But research was not Fisher's concern; he was just happy to be employed in such a downward economy.
Doctor Wy
spent little time at the lab, preferring to continue his work back at the university where he could see patients and evaluate their continuing candidacy for the program. Fisher had not seen the doctor in weeks -- which in some ways was a small relief. Though he found the end-goal fascinating, and was thrilled to play a small part in its hoped-for success, Fisher knew that without Doctor Wy's watchful presence he would be free to slip his headphones on and enjoy the sound of white noise rustling in his ears. It was the only sound he found soothing, and it helped block out those that he didn't.

Fisher had been lucky to find a lab located in a quiet part of the city, but he'd always been lucky at finding new jobs or places to stay. Even when far from home it was the case. He didn't know why it came so easily for him, but he imagined it was because he refused to worry about things he couldn't change. What was the point? Rather, he preferred to hope for the best, and more often than not the best found him ... though not always right away. The sleep lab, for instance, despite being far from the hubbub and the noise of the major thoroughfares, was in a rundown district full of boarded-over buildings. Across the street from it an urban renewal project promised changes in the near future, but until then it was merely another construction site from which the grating noise of work emanated -- noise that Fisher, due to his condition, could not tolerate. Why, he wondered, did the work have to be done so late in the day, every day, and why had it been going on for so long? At times, the progress seemed so slow as to be nonexistent. Perhaps it was a manpower issue. After all, he never saw more than two people on the site at any time, though they made enough noise for twenty. It did nothing but add to Fisher's anxieties. At least
Doctor Wy
's lab was soundproofed, and the din of the outside world did not carry through its brick walls. The promised quiet was the biggest motivation to accept
Doctor Wy
's offer. As the doctor said, "Though your level of auditory anxiety is low, what better place is there to work than with the sleeping, overnight when the world is at its quietest? The night shift requires someone with a positive attitude, and from what I've seen you should not have any problems adapting." There was no arguing with that logic, Fisher thought, and willingly signed on. A position that kept the noise he encountered to a minimum was ideal, though he found it strange that he was asked to keep the door locked at all times. "It's a private laboratory, after all,"
Doctor Wy
said. "And the patients at their most vulnerable."

Fisher was ostensibly in charge of the sleep lab, but recognized he was little more than another technician, hardly different from his partner Rose. She was the younger of the two by at least a decade, not to mention four stone heavier, yet she was also the parent of a daughter already in that netherworld between child and teenager. She showed him photographs one after the other the first time they'd met, all the while telling stories of her daughter's exploits. He did his best to listen and appreciate them if only because of the joy it obviously brought her.

The lab was devoted to research, more specifically
Doctor Wy
's research, and as such was smaller than most buildings of its kind.
Doctor Wy
's lab consisted of merely three rooms, and even then he wanted no more than one occupied at a time. His testing had entered a new phase and he feared the reactions patients might experience were they introduced to one another. "Once a patient is exposed to information, even erroneous information, about his or her treatment, it's inevitable that the patient will suddenly believe they too are experiencing similar results. Again, this behavior is well documented."
Doctor Wy
thus normally ran his tests with only three patients on a regular basis, and each was given a different day to come in. Great pains were taken to schedule them in such a way that no trace of one remained before the next arrived.

"I have to admit, it's a bit sad; we speak to them only long enough to put them to sleep, then stare at them all night long. At the end of it all, they wake up puffy-faced and then disappear without a word. I'm not even sure sometimes
Doctor Wy
's treatment is helping."

"Does it look like it's helping to you?" Rose asked. Fisher crossed his arms and leaned back from the console.

"I don't know. He assures me everything is normal and that the tests are producing the expected results, but I can't deny that no one
seems
any better. At least, not to me."

"If anything," Rose said; "I'd say they're
worse
. We've already lost one of the sleepers, and the rest don't look like they'll make it much longer. Especially Sanderson."

Eric Sanderson was the first patient included in
Doctor Wy
's trials. He suffered from a form of central apnoea that kept him from sleeping more than a few hours at a time. Since Fisher and Rose had met him, his appearance had deteriorated considerably. His once ruddy skin had turned grey, his complexion sallow. He was thinner, yet softer, so much so that Fisher had trouble keeping him in focus.

"What's Wy hoping to find?" Rose asked. "Sanderson is a walking corpse. Though, I suppose they
all
are, aren't they?"

"Apparently, the doctor is closer than ever to a breakthrough. He expects it at any time."

Rose snorted.

"Do you wonder sometimes if it's worth it? Look at everything that's going on. Recessions, Depressions... What's the point in dealing with people who can't sleep when all of
that
is happening?"

"You know what
Doctor Wy
would say: it's specifically
because
that's going on that they're being kept awake. He dreams of finding some way to ease people's minds about it."

Air hissed through Rose's teeth.

"Let me tell you a story about the way things are," she said. "My daughter is a good girl. Quiet, maybe a bit too shy, but she goes to school every day and works hard. There are two girls in her class who for no reason want to make her life hell. They push her around and taunt her and the teachers just turn a blind eye to it. It's like they don't care. So you tell me, Fish: how much sleep
does
everyone need before that sort of thing goes away? How much, because I'd like to know."

"Please, not so loud." Fisher could feel his heart racing, pounding to get out of his chest. "Can't we talk about something else?" Rose though didn't seem sympathetic to his plight.

"Sometimes I wonder if you
can't
hear this stuff or you
won't
," she said.

Fisher wasn't sure what she meant; he suspected it was the blood rushing to his head that made things so cloudy.

Before leaving for home the next morning, Fisher bid goodbye to the patient from Room Three. Martin Breem had been coming to the lab for a few weeks, but he already looked as though he'd been there longer. His thin beard had become patchy, and he complained about ulcers since taking his medication. The polysomnograph reported an increased level of brain activity, something that
Doctor Wy
was quite interested in. "The patient reports night terrors, yet I see no mention of them on your reports, Fisher."

"The polysomnograph is still a bit glitchy,
Doctor Wy
, and I wasn't sure about the results. I did a visual inspection at the time to confirm things but he looked fine. He was sleeping soundly and barely moved. Is that odd?"

"Nothing is odd in a trial, only statistically relevant or not. We'll know soon enough, I hope."

Yet Rose remained concerned.

"I don’t think he'll make it to the end of the experiment, Fish. Have you taken a look at him? Those bruises don't look like the result of Wy's testing."

"I'm sure it will be all right. He's still getting used to things. They can't all be like Sanderson, can they?"

"No, thankfully. Still, he looks like he's falling apart right in front of us. I've tried to ask him about it but he won't say a word, and I’m pretty sure he wasn't entirely sober when he came in last week. Seriously, I don't have a clue where Wy picked him up."

Fisher looked at his watch. If he didn’t go, he'd be stuck in the morning rush hour. The noisy morning rush hour.

"I wouldn’t worry about it," he said.

"No, you wouldn't, would you?"

Two evenings later, while Fisher was running a repair sequence on the polysomnograph, looking for the glitch he knew was there, he heard Rose unlock the front door. He looked up to see Eric Sanderson wander into the lab with a pained look on his face. His eyes were blank and wide, as though he was unfamiliar with the surroundings. Fisher stood, brushed off his hands, and approached the older man, but Sanderson shrank away. Rose shrugged her shoulders in bafflement.

"Mister Sanderson, are you all right?"

It was as though Fisher's voice had blown the cobwebs from Sanderson's mind; the older man turned around and Fisher could see recognition in those bloodshot eyes.

"I'm sorry. I don't know where my head was. I haven't been feeling myself."

"It's possible it's a reaction to the dose. Have you mentioned it yet to
Doctor Wy
?"

Sanderson smiled sheepishly. "I figured it would sort itself out."

"These are drug trials, Mister Sanderson. Things
don't
sort themselves out. I'm going to have Rose make a note on your report, but you should talk to
Doctor Wy
during your next session."

He smiled again and nodded and Rose's words started to replay in his mind: when would
Doctor Wy
's trials be over? His subjects were looking exponentially worse with each passing day. It was true Sanderson was sleeping longer, but the graphs were reporting more unusual activity than a simple glitch could account for, and Sanderson's appearance had taken an impossible turn for the worse. Fisher knew intellectually that the trials needed to be completed, and he had every faith
Doctor Wy
's research would prove beneficial, but Rose continued to question it. He wished there were some way to stop her, but the only thing he could think to do was put on his headphones and pipe more white noise into his skull. At least it quieted the repairs that had resumed across the street.

Rose led Sanderson away to Room One for prep while Fisher finished the maintenance on the polysomnograph. It had never functioned properly and he had yet to determine why. He'd reinstalled the software numerous times without effect, and at one point the system was crashing so often that an entire week's worth of data was lost. Yet
Doctor Wy
was strangely unconcerned when Fisher reported it. "There's nothing to worry about," the doctor said. "It's early enough that we can sacrifice some data. Still, let me send someone to have a look." A few days later, Fisher was surprised to find at the lab's door two thuggish men with shrill East European accents claiming
Doctor Wy
had sent them. The men remained in the office for hours while Fisher and Rose prepared Room Three for Martin Breem's next session. Fisher began to feel concerned as the time for Breem's session drew closer and he still had no access to the control room. It wasn't until the patient arrived that he and Rose discovered the men had already gone without saying a word. "I'm sure there was a good reason," Fisher found himself trying to explain to a disbelieving Rose, but he too had difficulty with it, especially once the polysonograph began to spit lines of black code across the console. A reboot of the entire network restored functionality, but only temporarily. Still, Fisher would rather have dealt with the code than the crashing. At least with the former they could continue to work in some fashion.