Everything had Changed

Everything had changed.

For once, he wasn’t lying in his bed under the bridge, wallowing with hunger and coldness. For once, he wasn’t wasting away from alcohol and weed. For once, his hair wasn’t oily and almost entirely knotted together like a muddied carpet.

He still couldn’t believe his good fortune. How had he gone from being a poor and penniless street violinist to the concertmaster of a professional orchestra, patronized by one of the most famous men in the nation?

He stared down at his new black and white suit and blinked. For the tenth time, he pinched himself. It hurt, and he believed everything was real for that second. After the pain passed, he was still unsure if the situation was imagined. He wished it was because he wouldn’t be as confused. He wished it wasn’t, because he didn’t want to go back to the life he had.

His palm was sweating, and he quickly took out a kerchief to wipe at it. He couldn’t have his hand wet the expensive violin – he was assured that it wasn’t a Stradivarius, but anything that could belong in this mansion was surely not below a hundred thousand.

He told himself to focus on the concert and worry later.

They were performing Mendelssohn tonight – his first performance in years (when was the last time he performed? He couldn’t quite remember.) At least he wasn’t the solo player. That would’ve been too much for his poor nerves.

The lights came on. It was performance time.

The soft notes of the violin section flowed as he watched the hands of his conductor. The solo musician – he couldn’t remember what the name of the woman was, nor what she looked like – that was strange. Perhaps because he was too shocked. She was an amazing player, her fingers sliding across the fingerboard, hitting the notes with the exact clarity and timbre needed. However, as he played and led his section with precision even though they had only practised a few times (he couldn’t remember when and where they had practised either – did he have amnesia?) he realised that her style was way too aggressive for him (how had he not noticed that before?)

He became engrossed in the music. The violin he held was superb. It didn’t dig into his shoulders or chin, the strings didn’t cut his fingers and roughed them as his cheap old violin had. Its sound was clear and warm, filling the accompaniment with a special twinge of orange and red in contrast to the solo player’s cold blue and greens.

Spots of colour danced in his eyes as the orchestra burst into a tutti section – he remembered only that he had synaesthesia, but what was it? Why was he seeing these colours? He felt overwhelmed. His hand trembled on the bow but he tried desperately to calm it. It was alright. He could deal with the colours. The greys, the greens, the anxious purples, the silent greys, the sharp blue – yes, it cut into him harshly, the blue of the solo violinist. Everything changed and kept changing in his eyes, and his body trembled at such wild stimulation.

Finally, it was the cadenza. He had managed through the whole accompaniment with the muscle memory of his sore arms, and now he could turn his head away, away from the sharp daggers of the solo violinist.

But as he rested in the music, as he turned around, as he looked at everyone in the orchestra as if only seeing them for the first time, his heart jumped wildly and his body was turning cold.

He – he knew them – he knew them all, every one of them. Every one of the orchestral players.

The first flute was the cashier who had chased him out of the bread shop, thinking he was a thief. The cello section was filled with a group of guards who had fended him outside a skyscraper as he tried to rest under the roof for shelter from the rain.

And the solo player, she forged on. Her arpeggios were the most beautiful things he had ever heard – ever seen. They were now a regal gold that shined and rotated in his eyes, with glitter and the sunlight penetrating from an invisible sky that was blocked by the concert hall——

His eyes hurt, but his body moved on to play his part. He realised – he realised he was supposed to be the solo all along, and then in a split second, he was standing where she had been, and he could feel his blood vessels popping and threatening to burst as he stood there in front of an audience as the solo player, and the concert was about to begin.

His mind was dizzy for a second, and his brain cleared. And suddenly, memory flooded into him. It was somehow foreign and alien, it was like a concerto being played from the start when it had already neared its end – but they had not even started, had they?

He wished he had volunteered for concertmaster instead of solo. Bianca would’ve been on if he hadn’t. Now, he had to go with all his pressure, and he didn’t remember the cadenza lines.

Everything went by in an exasperatingly puppet-like blur and the next thing he was trying to play the arpeggios in the cadenza section. Bianca was behind him, secretly trying to pass him the notes by glancing past them on her violin, but he remembered nothing. He dropped his bow. Everything went dark. Suddenly he could see the members of the orchestra.

He – he knew them – he knew them all, every one of them. Every one of the orchestral players.

The first flute was the cashier who had chased him out of the bread shop, thinking he was a thief. The cello section was filled with a group of guards who had fended him outside a skyscraper as he tried to rest under the roof for shelter from the rain.

His eyes popped, his breath sped up, and his mind was a whir, fighting with the memories that were his, that confused with each other, that confused him to the extent that he couldn’t tell which were real and which weren’t——

And he screamed.

The concert started to distort in a mirror of red and black and sticky something. His heart tore itself away from his body.

“At first, we tried to see how the subject would respond to moderate pressure, but as that didn’t seem to affect it, we took some more violent measures,” the man smiled with all his teeth. The auditors clapped.

“We edited his memory with the newest drugs, I believe RE-230 was it?” he turned for confirmation, “Yes. We gave him more pressure and even wove some of his actual memories into the scene. And you can see it broke down in a fit. We thought it would get him to speak, but unfortunately…”

The man’s voice echoed in the sterile, clinical room, where the walls were a stark white and the air smelled faintly of antiseptic. The auditors—men and women in crisp suits and lab coats—nodded approvingly, their faces impassive as they scribbled notes on clipboards. The protagonist, still trembling and disoriented, sat slumped in a chair, his hands cuffed to the armrests. His black and white concert suit was gone, replaced by a thin hospital gown. The violin, the orchestra, the concert hall—all of it had vanished, leaving only the cold, unyielding reality of the laboratory.

Some machine beeped in the background.

“Unfortunately,” there was a disinterested murmur from the auditors, “Specimen 2573 has died from cardiac arrest and will be discarded. The use of drug RE-230 will be discontinued as it is much too strong for extracting information.”