“I don’t know.  That’s up to you.  You’re the one with all the freedom, here.”

“You’re going to be playing that card a lot, aren’t you?” Peter said, grimacing.

“Hey, my deck only has one card.  But don’t worry about it.  I’m sure you can find people.  You seem resourceful.”

Peter shook his head.  “First I’m smart, now I’m resourceful . . . I don’t know what you’re basing all these claims on.”

“I’m basing them on the fact that if you’re not these things, then I’m going to stay stuck down here.”

“So . . . no pressure, then.”  Peter stared at the ceiling.  It wasn’t quite yellow, it wasn’t quite brown, and it wasn’t quite white, but it was certainly unpleasant-looking.  He wasn’t afraid of pressure—was he?

“You said you have a large repertoire of songs with mysterious powers,” he said.  “What are some of them?”

The woman suddenly felt tired.  It was a tiredness that had nothing to do with sleep or the lack thereof.  A week ago she would have thought that she’d be overjoyed to spend hours talking to someone who actually wanted to hear what she had to say, to explain in detail every aspect of her proposed escape plan and, really, her life in general.  But in actual practice, it was just tiring.  The kid was relentless with the questions, and she found there was actually a lot that she didn’t feel like explaining.  There was also a lot that she couldn’t explain.

“I don’t know.  There are hundreds, maybe millions of them.”  Out of those potential millions, the one she had thought of most over the preceding months inevitably came to mind.  “Like, suppose there’s a song that you associate so strongly with a particular place, it’s almost like they’re the same thing inside your head.  You hear the song, and all of a sudden it’s as though you’re actually in that place; you smell the smells and see the sights perfectly clearly in your mind.  Well, from there, it’s not much of a stretch for playing or singing that song to physically take you there, now is it?”

“You’re saying the song can teleport you?”

“I don’t know what the scientific term is, but one second you’re in one place, and then the next, you’re there.”

“It could be any sort of place?”

“Pretty much.  Any spot you have a particularly strong emotional connection to.”

“Could you teach me one of them?”

The woman’s irritation level was gradually rising.  “That’s . . . not the kind you can teach.  It’s kind of a personal thing.”

“Well, what’s one you can teach me?”

“Like I said yesterday, you need to break me out of here.  And, as I demonstrated yesterday, that’s not going to be so easy.”

“Sorry about that.”  Peter didn’t know if a muffin was an appropriate way to apologize for making someone run into an invisible wall.  It wasn’t a situation he found himself in often.

The woman chuckled.  “At least you only had me do it once.  You have no idea how many times I tried it before I believed.”

“And this jailbreak,” Peter said, gazing at the old flute as if it were something completely unfamiliar.  “It’s going to involve some sort of song with weird, inexplicable powers, isn’t it?”

She watched him closely for signs of sarcasm before proceeding.  “How did you know?”

“Otherwise you wouldn’t have bothered teaching me one yesterday.  It was a pretty ridiculous plan.  There were any number of simpler ways to get you out of those handcuffs, and you had hours to think of one.  But you decided to go with the preposterously complicated strategy because you knew that I would need to become familiar with this sort of thing anyway, and also as a test to see if I could handle it.”

She grimaced and decided not to tell him that she really hadn’t been able to come up with a better idea.  “You’re a lot smarter today than you were yesterday.”

“Anyone’s smarter when they’ve had time to think things over,” he replied drily.

“I wouldn’t be too sure about that.  I’ve had all the time in the world to think about my situation, and as you can see, I haven’t made a lot of progress.”

“And why is that?  You say that music is the way to escape, and music seems to be your field of expertise.  So why are you still here?”

His tone was casual, but his questions had a strong, demanding force to them.  He seemed so different from the helpless youth of the day before that the woman was put on guard.  The interrogation wasn’t outright unpleasant, but it was a little unnerving.

“There are two reasons, I think.”  The woman spoke very hesitantly, afraid of stretching the belief of her only potential helper to the snapping point.  She wasn’t quite sure why she believed these things herself.  “Keep in mind that I don’t know who put me down here or why, so I’m sort of guessing, here.  But the first reason’s obvious: I don’t know the right song.  There’s a lot of music out there that can . . . affect the world in ways beyond the ordinary, and I know . . . more of it than I can remember offhand.  But I sure don’t know any ‘Subway Station Escape Song.’”

“And you think that I do?”

“I think that someone does.  But you can work on that later.  Because the other problem, I think, is that we’re going to need more people.”

Peter frowned.  Part of the reason he had agreed to help was that he had naively believed that no one else would have to know about it.  “How many more?”

“I’m not sure.  But I do know that some songs are too potent to be performed by one person.  Whatever’s holding me in here is a doozy.  I don’t think a solo number’s going to cut it.”

“And where do you suggest I find these other band members?”

* * *

“Hey, Dizzy.  I was wondering . . . I mean, if you had the time . . . would you be interested in helping me out with something?  Playing your trumpet, that is.  It’s no big deal or anything, but I need some musicians for this project, and . . .”

Of course Peter didn’t actually ask his sister.  He didn’t learn that he would need to look for additional musicians until the following morning.  But even if he had known, he probably wouldn’t have asked her.  It may have been partly out of jealousy and a desire to not be overshadowed.  Deep down he understood that any halfway competent musician would be better than him, but . . . he just didn’t want it to be his sister.  On the other hand, even Peter had enough musical sense to realize that flute and trumpet would make a pretty poor duet combo.

“So, are you going to tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

“What you were really doing with Mom’s flute yesterday, of course.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be meeting your friends?”

“There’s no rush.  Most of them have older siblings, too.  They understand that it’s important to take some time out of every day for harassment.”

“How about I list all the things that I didn’t do with the flute, and you can figure it out from that?”

Peter had no intention of telling Dizzy what really happened to him that day.  It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her, or that he was afraid she wouldn’t believe him; on the contrary, he was a little worried that she would believe him.  They just weren’t that close.  They got along well, they teased and they bantered, but it’s hard to have an “I tell you everything and you tell me everything” sibling relationship when you’re six years apart in age, especially when there’s no domineering older sibling against whom it becomes necessary to join forces and bond.

“That sounds pointless and potentially disgusting,” she said, glancing at her watch.  “And ordinarily I would be all for it, but you’re right; I don’t have the time.”

“You’re just going to let me get away with it?  I could be using this flute to commit crimes or something.”

“They’re not crimes if you don’t get caught,” she answered coolly, leaving Peter to wonder what exactly his little sister was going out to do on a Friday night.  He was also briefly distracted by the image of the old woman in handcuffs, preventing him from getting in the last word.  The honor thus fell to Dizzy.  “But I don’t think you could be getting in too much trouble.  You are my brother after all.  Just remember: if you break that flute, Mom’s going to be really disappointed.”

He thought of Mr. Abrahamson and his inaudible fury.  For most people, disappointment was a tame, barely noticeable emotion.  In the hands of some, however, it was a devastating, soul-crushing force.

“Besides,” Peter added, “who could sleep when they had just learned that there are magic songs that can control people’s minds?”

“Is that sarcasm?”

“It’s . . . not entirely sarcasm.”

While he slept on the fold-out couch in his parents’ living room, Peter had had a dream.  He dreamt that he was in Paris.  The setting of the dream was quite clearly the alleyway behind his old dorm, but for some reason in the dream he thought—no, he knew that it was Paris.  He was talking to David, who had been his friend in the third grade and whom he had never seen since.  David left, and all of a sudden Peter realized that he had something very important to tell him, so he ran after him.  While he ran, someone said, “Look out!  There’s a fire!”  Peter turned, and saw smoke in the distance, and he immediately thought, That’s not Uncle Jim’s house.  (Naturally, there was no sensible reason for Peter to think that Uncle Jim’s house would be on fire.  Nor was there any reason for him to think that he had an uncle named Jim.)  Peter passed the Eiffel Tower, which had a large clock on it.  The clock read 3:57 AM.  Then Big Ben started ringing, and Peter thought, I bet I’m about to wake up.  Then he ran for a while longer.  Then he woke up.

When he had collected his thoughts, Peter decided that, after all the interesting things that had happened to him the day before, it was really stupid of him to have had a dream like that.

“So are you going to be carrying that around all the time now?” the woman asked, pointing to the flute—out of its case, already assembled—in his right hand.

Peter spun the flute absent-mindedly.  “You never know when you’re going to need to summon the squirrels of Simon Park to your aid.”

“Now that was sarcasm.”

“Yes.  One hundred percent.”

“So . . . what’s Simon Park like, anyway?”  The woman cast a reflexive glance toward the stairs.

Peter was temporarily torn.  Reassure her by telling the truth?  Or would the knowledge that the world above ground wasn’t so hot either break her mentally?

“It’s a park,” he said with a shrug.  Ever the strategic liar.

She nodded.  “It’s just a little odd that I’m called ‘The Old Woman of Simon Park Station’ and I’ve never even seen Simon Park.”

He chuckled.  “What’s so funny?” she asked.

“You’re sealed in a subway station by an invisible, inexplicable force, you assault and then teach strange musical hypnosis techniques to strangers, and that’s what you think is odd?”

The woman smiled.  It was good to talk to someone.  Not to pitch him on a quest or try to explain herself: just to talk.  But talk wasn’t going to get her out of there.  “Don’t forget: I eat mystery muffins.  Odd is in the eye of the beholder.  Now did you come here to offer me treats and make small talk or did you come to discuss business?”

“Both.”  Peter looked at the ground, hesitated, and then sat down anyway.  He was still wearing the grungy clothes he had changed into to go home for dinner: no great loss.  “When I start a new job, I like to find out what I’ll be doing as soon as possible.”

Peter’s mom had no objection to him spending the night, because it is the secret goal of every mother to get her children to spend as many of their hours as possible under her roof.  As soon as dinner was over, she set about fixing up the living room couch for him.  Peter’s old room had been converted into what his father called a “study,” which was basically code for “book storage.”  His father owned more books than some small libraries; storing them was a never-ending, Sisyphean battle.  His mother—who had nothing against books, per se—would always try to get rid of some at garage sales, but Dad would always snatch them up before anyone else could get their hands on them (really, it was a doomed strategy to begin with, because the average garage sale patron would have no interest in the kind of books he tended to collect).

“But you haven’t read that one in thirty years!” Mom would cry.  Dad would just give her a look to say that she had completely missed the point.

Peter’s sleeping in the living room immediately after dinner did not present a problem either.  Mr. and Mrs. Hamlin were both believers in the “Early to bed, early to rise” system, and it had ended up being a late meal anyway.  Dizzy’s schedule was considerably more irregular, but she was going out with her friends.  She did not go out directly, though.

“You lied to Mom.”

Peter was lying on the couch, scratching Cicero, who was making a rare appearance.  Earlier in the day he would have been in no mood for this kind of banter, but dinner had refreshed him.  “What do you think I lied about?”

“Any number of things.”  Dizzy was leaning on the back of the couch; her preposterous amount of hair was draped down onto it.  A casual flick of her head would easily have sent Cicero scampering back to the safety of the basement.  It might even have knocked Peter clean off the couch.  “Your saying that you were late to dinner because you were stuck at work didn’t have a lot of verisimilitude.  But I’m talking specifically about why you borrowed her flute.”

The flute had not been a subject of major inquiry at the dinner table.  Mom had started off by telling him that he looked like he wasn’t eating or sleeping enough (and, on this particular occasion, she was quite right).  Then she had demanded—politely, of course—an explanation for his lateness.  Much later on, and quite casually, she had inquired regarding the whereabouts of her flute.  Equally casually, Peter had responded that he felt the sudden urge to try playing again, and that he was considering taking lessons, and that he had borrowed the flute to practice a little, so as not to completely embarrass himself in front of a new teacher.

“Now, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with lying to your parents,” continued Inspector Dizzy.  “I certainly do it all the time.  It’s how the system works.  But I don’t think it’s fair to let you go around thinking that you’re actually getting away with it.”

“Mom seemed to take me at my word.”

“She’s your mother.  It’s her job.  She’s been pretending to take you seriously since before you knew how to talk.  I don’t think she believed you any more than I did.  She just was too polite to say anything about it.”

“Whereas you, clearly, are not.”

“No such thing as politeness between siblings.”

“Nor honor among thieves.”  The average person, when caught in a lie, thinks he has two options: cover it up with another lie, or give up and tell the truth.  A cleverer person knows about option three: cover up the lie with truth.  “I needed the flute to help a friend.”  Okay, so the “friend” part may have been a bit of a stretch, but the rest was true.

The mountain of hair shifted.  Cicero skedaddled.  “What kind of friend could you help by playing the flute for him?”

Peter decided not to comment on the “him.”  “So I’m really that awful, huh?”

“I never said that.”

This was true.  In all their years of good-natured (well, largely good-natured) sibling rivalry, Dizzy had never once insulted his musical talent.  Peter’s decision to give up on the flute was more about what people didn’t say than what they did.

Rather than thank his sister for her years of silent support—or at least, years of not actively trying to sabotage his confidence—he decided to go with another obscuring truth: “Did I say anything about playing it?”

“I didn’t expect you to come back so soon.”  The woman tried to act nonchalant and conceal her happiness, but she didn’t do a very good job of it.  She hadn’t had anything to be happy about in a long time.

“I was out and about anyway.”  Despite his strong desire to remain comatose, Peter had been unable to resist the summons to Friday Night Family Dinner.  For one thing, he had said he would be there, and Peter Hamlin did not go back on his word—unless he had a very good reason, or the word was ambiguous in the first place.  Also, after the phone call he realized that he had not eaten anything since the half a bowl of Caffeinated Cereal Catastrophe that morning.  So he dragged himself out of bed, lurched over to Carmine Street, and headed home for the second time that day.  He was greeted energetically by Sourdough, rather coolly by his human family members (who were impatient to eat), and not at all by Cicero.

After everything that had happened, however, he was unable to stomach the thought of yet another subway ride, so he decided to crash at his parents’ house for the night.

“I thought you could use something to eat,” he continued, reaching into a small paper bag and producing a muffin.  It was smaller than the last one she had been given, dotted with one of those berries with a name you think just has to be made up, like the nannyberry.  The top was a swirl of golden brown and a deeper, more granulated brown.  It was no longer warm, but even so the smell was at the same time both heavenly and devilish.

The woman couldn’t stop smiling.  She couldn’t remember the last time she had had to work her cheek muscles so much.  “Why do you people keep bringing me muffins?”

“What?”  Peter was still only really familiar with the woman’s bitter, aggressive side.  He wasn’t sure why anyone else would go out of his way to bring her breakfast.  He wasn’t sure why he was doing it either.  “Who else brought you a muffin?”

“Oh . . . I don’t know, actually.  It just sort of appeared one day.”

“. . . and you ate it?”

“Yeah.  Listen, when you’re trapped somewhere for a long time, you do a lot of stupid things.”  Then, either because she wanted to avoid going into a list of those things or because she didn’t want to admit that she had eaten the mystery muffin after only having been down there a week, she took a bite.  It had a kick, more of a kick than muffins should really be allowed to have.  But it was the exciting, invigorating kind of kick, not the “Ohymygodwhereismywater?” kind.

“Fanks,” she said, chewing.  “Buh I fough you be cahing up on yo seep?”

“I did.  I went to sleep right after dinner.”

Well, almost.

The doctor stared at her.  Or, to be more accurate, she stared at a spot a couple inches to the left of her forehead.  Or, to be even more accurate, she started at something that was not in Simon Park Station at all.

“I just got off the graveyard shift at St. Gregory’s,” she replied, with all the emotion of a cardboard tube.  “A twelve-year-old kid came in.  He and his friends were playing by the train tracks.  His foot got stuck.  A train came.  We—we had to take his leg.”

“Oh.”  The obnoxious smile vanished.  Nightmares crept back into the old woman’s waking mind.

“No, they didn’t run,” the doctor continued, answering a question that had not been asked, at least not since she had gotten off the subway.  “They tried to save him.  I was going to either compliment them on their bravery or berate them for their stupidity, but I never saw them.  They went straight to the morgue.”

The doctor stood there for a while longer, her face full of silent horror (inside her head, presumably, it was not silent at all).  Eventually some instinctual urge must have convinced her to keep moving.  She walked awkwardly out of the station, as if she was overly-conscious of her legs.

The old woman remained suitably dumbstruck for a while, but she was able to move on much more quickly than the doctor would.  She told herself that nothing was going to get her down on that day, that it was the first day of the rest of her life, and whatever other positive platitudes she could think of.  Without the task of constantly asking for help to keep her busy, she chose to spend her time simply taking in the organically woven tapestry that was Simon Park Station.

She watched her home for the past seven-and-a-half months go through a morning ritual not entirely unlike her own.  Dragged to reluctant wakefulness at 5:19 sharp, it gradually became more and more active over the hours that followed.  Small-time merchants came down the steps, unlocked their stands, and began to aggressively peddle their remarkably cheap (both in terms of price and quality) merchandise.  A few more dead-eyed overnight shift people fell off the early Outbound trains, but soon the station was taken over by families.  Parents representing the full spectrum of eagerness were dragged by children who had been driven to the peak of hyperactivity by breakfast cereal, early-morning cartoons, and the promise of a visit to the zoo or the aquarium.  Finally, a flow of people getting off of trains developed to complement that of the ones getting on, and the place was truly in full swing.

God, she thought, this is so boring.

Since the woman was no expert observer of the human condition, she eventually fell to brooding.  She believed that her search was over, but what proof did she really have?  The kid had agreed to help her, but those were just words.  She had heard a lot of words during her time down there, and she had seen very little action.  And, just in case that wasn’t a big enough concern, there was always the matter of effectiveness.  He could try to help all he wanted, but would he be able to do it?  The trick with the squirrel had been surprisingly effective, but it didn’t instill her with a whole lot of confidence.

Maybe the doctor was right.  Maybe doom and gloom was the only appropriate outlook for a day like that.  If she had even one tiny shred of evidence to make her think that—

“Good morning,” said Peter, standing above her.

No KYPC this week.  The Wordsman is otherwise occupied.  Try not to despair.

Day 234:

The thunder of chugging wheels, the rush of wind through the tunnel, the screech of over-used brakes.

5:19.  Time to get up.

The woman in Simon Park Station had no use for alarm clocks, with their revolutionary ideas and rebellious ways.  She got up at the same time every day, except Sundays.  At 5:19 the first train rolled in, its awful noise undampened by the sounds of human activity, for at that time—and for several hours before that—she was the only human there.  They say that people can get used to even the most horrendous racket, that soldiers in the trenches learn to sleep through artillery barrages.  The old woman could never sleep through the arrival of the first Downtown-bound Green Line train of the day.

She had a morning routine, like we all do.  When the angry noise forced her eyelids open, she would first make sure the train was not coming straight for her, as it often did in her dreams.  Then she would glance at the still-closed stands, in the hope that the mere memory of coffee might help to keep her awake.  Then she would lay her head against the cold concrete of the pillar and fall immediately back to sleep, because there was nothing to do in Simon Park Station at 5:19 in the morning.  On weekdays, the first Downtown-bound train was a sparsely attended affair.  On Saturdays it was completely pointless, deserted, a ghost train (yet another image that she did not need invading her fragile subconscious).

The real wake-up call came about forty minutes later, when the first Outbound train came in from downtown.  The 5:19 was just a train.  The woman did not care about trains.  She was only interested in passengers.  Unlike the crack-of-dawn Inbound train, the super-early Outbounds usually produced a couple.  Sure enough, here came a woman in her early 30’s wearing scrubs.

Here we go again, the old woman thought.

“Don’t you feel . . .”

With a shock nearly as strong as if that dream train had finally collided with her frontal lobe, the events of the previous day came back to her.  The new strategy.  The slap.  The handcuffs.  The boy and the Beherrschunglied.  The extremely mediocre flute.  Freedom.  And most importantly . . .

“. . . will you agree to help me?”

“Sure.”

The old woman experienced the joy of the worker who has just looked up and realized that her shift ended five minutes ago.  She didn’t have to do this anymore.  Her call had been answered.

“Don’t you feel,” she started again, smiling more brightly than any normal human should at just after six on a Saturday morning, “that it’s going to be a beautiful day?”

They walked over to what Peter considered the “entrance” but the woman could only think of as the “exit.”  The station was once again all but deserted—too late for most people coming home from work, too early for people to be heading back downtown for dinner.  While Peter scanned the area for anything unusual—trip wires, lasers, trick stones that trigger poison darts, ghosts—the woman retreated about twenty steps.  Then, with a “Here goes nothing,” she raced toward the staircase as fast as she could.  Peter was shocked by her speed.  And, for approximately four seconds, that was the only shocking thing about the run.

Most people think that Newton invented physics—or, if not him, the Greeks—but humans have always understood physics to a certain extent.  Nowhere is this fact more obvious than in our instinctual reactions when we see something violate the laws of nature.  One instant, Peter saw the old woman barreling forward with at least enough momentum to knock over a fruit cart.  The next instant, she was standing perfectly still.  In between, she had struck . . . nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  The whole thing lasted less than a second, but it still gave Peter a headache, and thirty seconds later he was still trying to figure out what had made her stop.

“You see?” she said, dizzier than when she had been doing her victory dance.  The woman appeared dazed but uninjured (another fact that made Peter’s brain wince).  “So,” she said loopily, “should we get started?”

“Not tonight.”  All good things must come to an end; Peter was hoping the same was true of bad things.  Though it seemed to be ending on a high note, he could not recall a worse day, at least not in the past five or six years.

“Okay.  Go home and get some sleep.  You don’t look so good,” she said, pointing about a foot to the right of where Peter was standing.

After he left, the woman returned to her pillar and sat down, adopting a position not that different from the one she had been trapped in for so many hours.  She let out a sigh of relief that had nothing to do with physical discomfort.  The search was over.  She wasn’t excited, exactly—seven-and-a-half months of waiting will do that to you—but she felt . . . something.  She felt like she was reading a series of books, and the first had been fascinating, but the second was a struggle to get through.  But she read the whole thing, driven on by the promise of wonder suggested by Book 1.  Now she sat there, staring at the cover of Book 3, unsure of what to expect when she turned the first page . . .

Peter walked up the stairs, crossed the street, opened the door to his apartment building, and realized that Rocky was still following him.  Since the woman had given him no helpful advice on how to end the effects of the song, he just shouted, “Be free!”  A fellow resident, on his way out, saw this curious communication and stared, but Peter didn’t notice.  He was too busy watching his former servant dash across the street and return to his unnatural habitat.

He took the elevator up, barely having enough energy to push the buttons.  He unlocked his door, pushed it open with the weight of his body, stumbled through the kitchen, and somehow managed to collapse on his bed before he simply collapsed.  He sank immediately into blissful, refreshing sleep.

Less than an hour later he was woken up by a telephone call from his mother, who demanded to know: 1. Why he wasn’t at dinner when he said he would be, and 2. Whether he knew anything about what had happened to her flute.