Yasushi Kazuo was, even at his worst, a formidably intricate and detailed writer. He left no things to chance. Every plotline needed to be accounted for. No character was ever to be robbed of closure. Everything and everyone possessed a purpose for the day his misanthropy might be understood by the world. It is all the more concerning, then, that within the disparate notes that he sent along with the manuscript for his final novel lies the immutable, haunting detail of Yasushi Kazuo’s most abominable character.
“Mephisto has been the real narrator behind all my work, but unlike me, his stories have yet to end.”
Erica Zen
2XXX
A Steinway piano stood at the center of a ruined concert hall. Gentle moonlight from above the shattered ceiling glanced off its black lacquer. Its ivory keys were suspiciously untouched by glass, dust, or rubble.
The pianist entered from the right side of the stage. He wore a bespoke tuxedo with his lengthy hair waxed and combed. A red rose with loose petals dangled from the pocket stitched onto his blazer. He stopped midway between the stage entrance and the piano and turned with an abrupt irritated click of his tongue to the darkened seats in the hall.
“When the pianist enters,” the gentleman sighed, “That’s when you clap. Hello? Anyone? Oh come on, do you really need a demonstration? Fine, fine.”
The pianist tapped his black oxfords against the creaking floorboards. In the next moment, he found himself seated at one of the chairs on the upper terrace. He began to clap, slowly at first, but with greater vigor and enthusiasm with each meeting of the palms.
“Now, some people like to whistle. How do you whistle? Really? Well, like this,” the pianist held a thumb and index finger to his lips, “But I just like clapping. It’s simple, it’s elegant. You whistle and you run the risk of sounding like one of those brutes who’s trying to catcall women, and you really shouldn’t do that. You’re supposed to be killing them instead.”
The gentleman tapped his shoes again and he appeared back on stage. He strode to the piano and rested one hand on the black resin rim. He smiled, turning his face to every corner of the concert hall, and took a deep bow. He raised his head and seated himself on the cushioned bench. He rolled his shoulders and stretched his fingers forth, holding them level over the keys. A moment later, he heaved another disappointed sigh.
“You can stop clapping now,” he murmured to the dark hall, “Stop. Stop! You’re all supposed to stop clapping when I get seated. How have you not learned a single thing about human decorum? Thank you.”
The pianist turned his attention back to his instrument. He shrugged his shoulders again and stationed his fingers upon the keys. Finally, he began to play, softly at first, a doleful chord progression dancing around the tonic, his body rolling back and forth, side to side alongside a rich, mesmerizing harmony. Eyes closed, the gentleman’s head rose to face the moon as if he believed the Earth’s gravity could force back the tears in his eyes.
“Such vivid emotions! Doesn’t this piece remind any of you of anything?” the pianist asked, “No? Has no one heard Beethoven’s Archduke Trio before? Opus 97? Both these pieces begin in moderato. Both are set in the same B-flat key. But Beethoven wrote his trio for young Rudolph, an Archduke of Austria, and the dialogue between pianos is meant to represent our dear Ludwig’s complex relationship with his friend, his student, his patron. On the other hand, our other departed maestro writes this dialogue with a single hammerklavier. Did you hear that tepid uncertainty in the harmony, that brief hesitation in the second measure when the major allows room for an augmented fourth, only to find its footing moments later? The piece wavers. Listen again, the maestro invites us to converse not with anyone but ourselves, we alone in this world who lack conviction as we near our end. Why? Because of death, of course! Listen! Listen for once in your foolish lives!”
The pianist leaned closer and raised his left hand with dramatic flair. The music rested in temporary suspense. Somewhere, a cough was heard and the pianist furrowed his brow. He would have to kill whoever did that later. When his fingers fell back to the ivory, they played a mysterious deep trill originating on G-flat.
“Scholars debate the meaning behind this trill,” the gentleman said, “On its face, Schubert presents us a tranquil, lyrical cantabile. It does inspire a sort of calm, but hear how the piano rumbles as it plays. It trembles from the depth of the keys. It’s not as tragic as the andante sostenuto, but there is something devilish about it, don’t you think? Something haunts the underbelly of the harmony. After all, silence begets and ends music, so why does the trill exist alone in between two rests? I’ll tell you why; it’s because death lurks in the intervals between music. Music is the last bastion that reminds us of our human condition. Death, on the other hand, stalks us from the shadows of our mind, watches as we take our last breath, and leads us into the darkness where the musical rest is not a half bar or full measure but eternal and we hear ourselves no more.”
As he finished speaking and transitioned into the sonata’s development, the piano began to buckle. Smoke emerged from beneath the lid of the piano and below the case. Dense clouds bundled around the pianist’s feet while a white trail snaked above the broken roof of the concert hall and into the night sky like a smoke signal. The hammers within the instrument cracked, the strings snapped, the black varnish melted from a mysterious heat, and a filthy muck oozed down the piano. The legs then split on all sides and the piano collapsed like an animal with ropes fastened around its legs. When it crashed onto the floorboards, the cracked wood below split open, and the piano fell through into a chasm, falling through a hollow cavernous abyss until it met its end at the bottom. The clangs of cacophonous broken keys echoed into the concert hall and died.
Only dust remained.
Mephisto lifted his fingers and rested them on his lap. He frowned.
“Looks like this Steinway’s no good either,” he murmured, “Only measure nineteen?”
A sound emerged from the seats in the audience. It wasn’t clapping, though the noise did at first mimic the cadence of applause. Mephisto could hear the clanging of blunt objects against metal and plastic and mutilated flesh and wished that his audience were less rambunctious. Joyful cheers and indistinguishable hollers joined the racket and Mephisto stood and bowed to his listeners.
“Bravo, bravo,” he sighed, “That’s what you’re supposed to say at the end of a concert, not your twisted demonic tongues. At least give me the courtesy of a standing ovation.”
And then it began with the first flame.
In the front row, the fallen angels hidden in fear of the moonlight brandished their swords. A great fire erupted upon their blades and revealed the mangled bodies of humans who had been seated at the most prestigious seats in the audience. The fire linked with the angels and demons, one by one, row after row, drawing their weapons until even the giants standing guard as ushers by the concert doors had been embraced by the flames. The fire trailed upwards and touched the scimitars and tridents and matchlock rifles of the angels on the upper terrace. The concert hall burned in this inferno, drowning in the chorus of fallen angels who now abandoned their horrid shrieks to sing a melancholic ballad.
The sound of that song assaulted the very foundations of the concert hall. The groans of a dense reverb unshackled the cement bedrock from its roots and blasted the doors and walls apart. The ornate tiled roof soared into the night sky while the rest of the support structures crumbled, brick by brick, until the edifice collapsed into dust and scattered steel.
Then, when the haze from fallen rubble had settled, the fires that had joined the angels in the concert hall continued to spread outwards, to the angels just outside the hall, to the narrow streets littered with bodies and smashed taxi cars, to the toppled tips of glass skyscrapers bludgeoned from their pedestal in the heavens, to burning Michelin star restaurants to dilapidated bodegas to the overpriced apartments built before the war along with their red bricks and lead pipes and closet spaced studios, to the heckling demons cheering from the subway trains uprooted from their underground nests, and even to the decrepit halls of the New York Stock Exchange, where angels with baited breath nailed stockbrokers and bankers to iron crucifixes; all of these places were linked by the licks of that devilish flame until the fires and screams of this pandemonium had traveled to all corners of a desolate ruined Manhattan, conquered by the millions of faithful angels and demons under the command of an aloof, wandering pianist.
“Right. That’s more like it,” Mephisto nodded, “That’s what I call a standing ovation.”
The pianist gazed into his heart and grinned.
“I guess it’s about time to get started.”
