Requiem for a Friend

by Math Spook

Chapter 2

Vinyl’s autopsy found an undiagnosed congenital heart defect. The doctor said it was “minor as such things go.” With proper care, she might have, perhaps should have, lived twice as long or even longer. But nopony had known, so nothing could have been done.

Her funeral was the week after she died. I didn’t feel like going. Even though we lived together, we weren’t friends. We had shared professional interests in music and mutual respect, nothing more. When we spent time together, it was never just for fun. It was for music, always and only music. So while I was sad that she had passed, I didn’t want to dwell on it. I had lost a close professional relationship, not a personal one.

I went to Vinyl’s funeral because I felt sorry for her parents. I hadn’t met them many times before, but they had seemed to love everything about her, from the way she shuffled to a beat to her melodious style of communication. Their relationship with her had been much deeper than mine, and they were, I was sure, grieving much more than I was. My presence at the funeral would be a sign of respect and condolence. I hoped it might provide them some comfort.

It was my first time attending a funeral for somepony my age. I arrived at the town hall a little before the service started. I wanted it to be still, to have row after row of statuary ponies in noiseless, grief-choked air. Instead it was filled with ponies greeting each other and chattering about their lives. I hated it, and I defied it by keeping my outrage silently within myself. I sat by myself in the second-to-last row and watched Pinkie Pie make last-minute adjustments to the black streamers that lined the room. Her mouth was a flat line, and her step had lost its bounce. It was strange to see her in a somber mood. When one of her events had needed a DJ, she had often turned to Vinyl.

Jasmine Leaf was seated on the other side of the hall. When she noticed me, she gave me a timid wave. I stared at her aghast and wondered how she could be so gauche. I had never before thought of her as obnoxious, but her liveliness and sociability, however restrained, were thoroughly offensive at an event like this. I kept staring, open mouthed, too shocked to know what to do, until she gave me a wry half-smile and dropped her hoof into her lap. She turned to face the front of the hall and hung her head.

Except for me, the only pony who seemed to be taking the funeral seriously was Rainbow Dash. Her face had the bleak expression of a pony who had violated her own creed. In her telling, she had not been fast enough or loyal enough to save Vinyl. No consolation from her friends and no future success could ever erase that failure. She looked as though she had erected an impenetrable shell of despondence around herself, and despite being flanked by Rarity, Applejack, Fluttershy, and Twilight Sparkle, she seemed entirely alone.

Pinkie Pie jogged to the front of the hall, where High Fidelity and Ivory Keys were sitting. They spoke softly, and she nodded and jogged away. As Ivory Keys watched her go, he saw me. He motioned to me with his hoof, so I walked to where he and High Fidelity sat.

“Sit up here,” he said.

On the stage, ringed with flowers, was a large portrait of Vinyl. In it, she was smiling, headphones around her neck, wearing her favorite reflective purple sunglasses. Next to the portrait was a casket of deep golden wood. The casket lid was up, and the lining inside was bone white crepe.

“I couldn’t,” I said. “I’m not family or anything.”

“Please. It would mean a lot to us.” He gestured to an empty seat in the second row of chairs. I couldn’t say no.

Mayor Mare presided over the ceremony, but I hardly heard anything she said. The last movement of the Beethoofen cello concerto kept sneaking into my head. There was always music in my head, but normally, when I wanted to focus on something else, I could keep it subdued. Now I couldn’t. When I realized I wasn’t listening, I felt guilty and tried to redirect my attention back to what Mayor Mare was saying. But whenever my eyes drifted to the casket and the crepe lining, I remembered that Vinyl was inside, and I stopped listening again, and the concerto returned.

Twilight Sparkle delivered the eulogy. She was too bookish and neurotic to understand Vinyl. Vinyl had always been mellow, and she had never been interested in coursework or studying for its own sake. In our first year at Filliard, we had been in the same music theory class. The professor’s droning lectures could have put even Twilight to sleep. When I wasn’t yawning, I dutifully tried to scribble notes. Vinyl spent the whole semester in the back of the classroom paying no attention. She gently bobbed in time to some beat in her head while she jotted in her notebook. I couldn’t figure out why she even showed up, and I was sure she would fail. At the midterm, she turned in her exam after only thirty minutes. I was sure she was giving up, and I felt like it served her right. I never asked her how she did in that class. Probably perfect.

Some of the other students, ponies who would have been the best at any other school but who were nevertheless incapable of her artistry, tried to hang around her. They wanted to be seen in her company so that her reputation would rub off on them. Maybe Vinyl had asked to be my roommate because I had never tried to wheedle my way into her good graces. And whatever Twilight Sparkle’s faults, she knew even better than Vinyl what it was like to endure unwanted attention. Twilight’s remarkable skill with magic had made her a celebrity. Ponies who didn’t know her expected things from her, or challenged her, or wanted to be acknowledged by her. Neither Vinyl nor Twilight relished the spotlight. Neither had time for flatterers and parasites. Neither could fully get rid of them. Vinyl, though, had been better at hiding.

At the end of the service, we viewed her body. The longer I had gone without seeing Vinyl, the more I had wanted to see her. Yet now, about to see her for the last time, I didn’t want to. Some part of me still hoped that the funeral was a mistake and that she was only missing, not dead. But I knew that seeing her body would extinguish that hope.

Her parents went first. They held each other silently for a while. Next came out-of-town relatives Vinyl had never once mentioned. Then it was my turn. As I approached the casket, I felt stoic. I knew I was supposed to cry. I considered pretending.

Vinyl had been primped by the funeral home to look as if she were asleep. Her sunglasses were off, and I wondered how many ponies in the hall besides me and her family had ever seen her without them. Every hair of her mane had been carefully placed, giving her a tidier hairdo than she had ever managed in life. But her cheeks and eyes were a little sunken, and her skin was a little gray, and her smile was missing. She looked like a life-sized doll, like a toy that could only pretend to make music, like a puppet that had never been alive and had never moved to a beat. I blinked, and then I couldn’t see her through my tears, and I was heaving with sobs.

As I reeled away from the casket, High Fidelity caught me in a hug. I squirmed out of her embrace, mumbled, “I’m sorry for your loss,” and stumbled back to my seat. I held my head in my hooves and looked at the floor. I breathed deeply, hoping to stop the tears, but a slow, undeniable trickle ran down my face. I just wanted the service to be over. I wanted to go back to the Beethoofen cello concerto and that sad note in the third movement that was vexing me. And I wanted Vinyl back so that I could ask her how to play it.

Rainbow Dash approached the casket with none of her usual swagger and braggadocio. She was reluctant, moving forward only when coaxed by gentle nudges from her friends. When she reached Vinyl, she saw not the body of a pony but the embodiment of her failure, and she wailed with responsibility and regret. Her friends held her steady, and they cried a chorus of sadness and grief that was at the same time terrible and harmonious, a chorus through which they shared their pain with each other and, in doing so, salved it.

As they left the casket, they passed High Fidelity and Ivory Keys. Rainbow Dash glanced at Vinyl’s parents and lowered her head in shame. High Fidelity sprang out of her chair and hugged Rainbow Dash. “Thank you,” said High Fidelity. “Thank you for what you did. Thank you so much.”

“I—” began Rainbow Dash. She sniffled, then grew quiet. She put a hoof around High Fidelity and wept silently. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” High Fidelity shushed and rocked her.

As High Fidelity hugged first Rainbow Dash, then Rarity, then all of their friends, I felt tears returning. I held my head in my hooves again, hoping that brushing the wetness away from my eyes would stop the tears before they were fully started. I sensed somepony sit down next to me, but I didn’t look up. An arm stretched over my shoulders. Automatically, without any conscious thought, I shoved it away. It was Jasmine Leaf, and I had pushed her so hard that she had rolled backward onto the next chair in the row. She looked at me with fear and horror. Then her face grew calm, adopting an expression of wisdom and maturity and patience. She righted herself, sitting erect in the chair I had pushed her onto. She leaned toward me and said softly, “I’ll be here when you need me.” For the rest of the funeral, she sat quietly, eyes fixed straight ahead, neither looking at nor talking to me. When the funeral was over, Jasmine Leaf stayed in her seat, still looking at the portrait of Vinyl and the casket. I knew she was waiting for me. I left without saying a word.

I spent the rest of the day wrestling the Beethoofen cello concerto. The quality of my performance with the Manehattan Philharmonic could determine the rest of my life, so I felt a desperate perfectionism born of cold-hearted rationality. I had never before struggled this much with any piece of music, let alone one I was so familiar with. I wanted to consult my teacher, but he was in Fillydelphia to play the Berlioatz cello sonata in a charity concert, and he wouldn’t be back until after I left for Manehattan. I wished I could consult Vinyl.

There weren’t many ponies I could turn to for musical advice, and I was afraid of what rumors might spread if ponies knew I wanted help. I knew Fluttershy would be discreet, so the day after Vinyl’s funeral, I asked her if she would be willing to critique my performance. “I need just a little bit of feedback, and I was hoping you might lend me a hoof. Rarity tells me you’re a good amateur,” I explained.

“Does she?” Fluttershy blushed. “Well, I don’t know how much help I can be, but I’ll try.”

I would have invited her to my home, but I thought Vinyl’s passing would make her feel awkward. Instead I hiked to her cottage near the woods. I didn’t know her well, so I didn’t know it was surrounded by birdhouses and animal dens. Once I was inside, Fluttershy told me that her animal friends wanted to listen, too, but she had warned them this was not a concert and made them promise not to disturb us. That was when I noticed the menagerie in her house. Crowded around the room were rabbits, mice, birds, squirrels, chickens, a spider, and even a bear. I panicked for a moment when I saw the bear, but Fluttershy assured me that he was very sweet.

I had brought a piano score for Fluttershy to follow. I started at the beginning of the andante section of the third movement. When I reached the long sad note, I wanted to scream in frustration. At the end of the andante section, I put down my bow and said, “You see? It’s not coming together.”

Fluttershy whispered, “That was breathtaking.”

“How can you say that?” I moaned. “It was terrible!”

“They didn’t think so,” she said, indicating the animals. They were sitting in rapt attention. Even the children were quiet.

I played again, halting in the middle of the long sad note. “Nothing I do makes it sound right to me,” I said. “I’m never happy with it.”

“I don’t think the music is the problem,” she said. “Could it maybe be—” She stopped. “How have you been feeling?”

I shook my head. “It’s not that. We were just roommates.”

I played more, and Fluttershy tried to help. She was, as Rarity had said, a good amateur. But she had never spent a whole day shaping a single phrase. She had never practiced for tens of thousands of hours. She had spent those hours on her calling, helping animals. She was serious about animals in the same way that I was serious about music. She dabbled in music in the same way that some ponies dabbled in pet ownership. She was modest and knew the width of the gulf between an amateur and a professional. I left her cottage grateful but unsatisfied.

That night, on the overnight train to Manehattan, the concerto kept me awake. Every time I began to doze, an ugly jumble of tone clusters drove me out of my slumber. The notes and chords wouldn’t leave me, and even though I knew how each one should sound, somehow they had all become dissonant. I imagined the concerto a hundred different ways, but a hundred different cacophonies shrieked back at me. The noises reverberated through my skull all night, accompanied by the rattle of the train car and the squeal of the wheels and the chugging of the engine. I got no sleep.

I spent the morning studying the concerto in the arid fashion of the worst music theorists, the kind who can read a score but can’t play a note worth hearing. It was tedious work that kept me gratefully and quietly occupied. When I got off the train in the late morning, I went straight to the concert hall, pausing only to buy a sandwich. I was supposed to meet with the conductor after lunch, but I needed to start warming up immediately.

One of the concert hall staff escorted me to the rehearsal room, which was actually a small concert space. It was used for chamber music concerts, preconcert lectures, and auditions. It was empty except for a grand piano on the stage and a chair and a music stand for me. A hundred plush, empty seats watched me tune my cello and warm up. I felt nervous and edgy, so I tried playing a few gentle passages from the adagio second movement to calm myself down. It didn’t work. The concert was going to be a fiasco. I hung my head.

“Brava!”

I jerked upright. At the other end of the hall, an elderly orange pegasus hovered in the door clopping his hooves. I cowered for a moment, ashamed that somepony had heard me. My failed attempt to relax wasn’t worth pitying, and nopony with an hour of musical education would actually cheer for it. He was surely a member of the hall’s staff, I thought, or maybe some donor with more money than musicality.

The pegasus flew onto the stage and offered me his hoof. “Pleased to meet you. I’m Joyful Noise.”

Joyful Noise! Joyful Noise was an institution in Equestrian music. He had led the Manehattan Philharmonic for over a quarter-century, ten years as principal conductor and the rest as music director. His enthusiasm was legendary. It hadn’t dimmed even as his mane turned white and his skin wrinkled. I trembled as we shook hooves.

“I’m sorry we had to meet here”—he swept a hoof at the hall—“instead of our usual rehearsal rooms. It’s too big for the two of us, but the opera’s using one room, the ballet’s in another, and the last is being repaired after a disastrous plumbing leak last week. Shall we get started?”

I could only nod. Joyful Noise! I had known he was going to conduct, but it was my first time meeting him, and I felt overwhelmed and terrified. It was said that he was only joyful as long as he liked your work. It was also said that he had exacting standards. Two weeks ago, I was sure I exceeded those standards. Now I was sure I didn’t. He would surely notice my problems with the concerto, in fact, had probably already noticed. His applause must have been a courtesy.

He set a score on the piano and flipped it open. We discussed tempi and dynamics. After a while we played, him on piano and me on cello. He wanted the first movement to be quicker, while I pushed for it to be more stately. I wanted the second movement to be soft, but he convinced me it needed more dynamic range.

We made steady progress until the third movement. The sad note that had been distressing me so much sounded almost as bad as the nightmarish noises that had chased me on the train last night. At the conclusion of the phrase, I stopped. “Can we try that again?” I asked. We played the phrase again, but it sounded no better. “I’ve been fighting that note for over a week now, and I can’t get it to sound right.”

Joyful Noise raised an eyebrow. “What’s wrong with it?”

“If I only knew.” I sat in dark silence and thought about Vinyl.

When I didn’t say anything more, he said, “I’m sorry to bring this up, but I heard that a friend of yours recently passed away.”

“My roommate. We met at Filliard.” I sighed. I was tired of explaining our relationship. “She would’ve known what to do about that note.”

Joyful Noise closed the keyboard cover and swung one leg over the piano bench, straddling it and facing me. “Three years after I started here, my father died unexpectedly. I heard on a Wednesday evening. We were scheduled to perform Coltzart’s Requiem on Friday. It was a favorite of his. Well, in the middle of Thursday’s rehearsal, I started crying and couldn’t stop. I had to halt the rehearsal and tell everypony to take a break. Somepony passed me a hoofkerchief; I never found out who. After the rehearsal, Forte Piano, who was music director then, came to me. He was a real serious type, always gruff, more forte than piano. But he said, ‘If you need to miss Friday, I’ll take care of everything.’”

I understood his true meaning immediately. He was trying to protect the Philharmonic. If I couldn’t perform adequately, then he wanted me to back out now. He would get somepony to replace me, likely the Philharmonic’s principal cellist. “A generous offer,” I said. Except it wasn’t, not for me. Canceling now would give me a reputation as unreliable. No orchestra, not even a minor one, would risk hiring me after that. “But I’m guessing you performed. I know I would have.”

Joyful Noise swung his leg back over the piano bench. “Forte hated when conductors spoke from the podium. He thought it made the symphony feel like a pops concert. So that Friday, before we started the Requiem, I turned to the audience and announced that the performance was dedicated to the memory of my father. Remembering Forte’s tail twitch still makes chuckle.” He lifted the keyboard cover. “The note sounds fine.”

Despite Joyful Noise’s approval, I wasn’t satisfied. The concerto’s sad note was supposed to be an emotional climax, and instead, it sounded empty. Normally I felt confident this close to a concert, but I spent the evening in my hotel room anxiously trying to fix the note. I tried to imagine what Vinyl would have done with it. During our musical games, she had sometimes taken pieces I had been working on, changed them in subtle ways, and thrown them at me. The first few times she did it, the notes the composer had written were etched too deeply into my mind, and I scrambled simply to play what I knew. Before long, however, I learned. When she changed chords or modified the rhythm, I could respond in kind. Soon after that, I could make modifications of my own, and it became great fun. I could make a song sound however I wanted.

Except now. I tried every trick I had ever heard Vinyl use, hoping to make the note sound like anything at all, but it was always an unfeeling void.

The next morning was the first rehearsal. Joyful Noise was a phenomenal conductor, and the orchestra was extraordinary. With the tiniest wave of his hoof he could completely change their timbre. We worked through the concerto methodically, familiarizing them with how I wanted it played. After the sad note, Joyful Noise stopped. “How was it?” he asked me.

From the way he stood and the tone of his voice, I knew he was satisfied. Yet I said, “Can we do it again?”

“What’s bothering you?”

I chewed my lip, unable to articulate my reasoning. I settled on, “It’s not sad enough.”

Joyful Noise raised his baton. “All right, everypony, you heard her. Sadder.”

I mentally cursed myself. I was playing with some of the greatest musicians in Equestria, and I had given them a useless instruction, one that couldn’t possibly help them make the music sound right. But there was nothing they could do, anyway, because I was the real problem. I was sure there was something wrong with how I was playing that note, but I had no idea what it was, much less how to fix it. After the rehearsal, I spent the rest of the day on tedious technical drudgery. Scales on every string. Scales crossing strings. Intervals. Bowing exercises. Hoofing exercises. Pizzicato exercises. When I had done every exercise I could think of, I did them all again. I felt like the kind of hack who plays with perfect pitch and rhythm but no more emotion than a waxed floor.

The following day was the concert. We held a dress rehearsal in the morning. The orchestra was spectacular, while I sounded dreadful. I was sure the concert would be a disaster. The audience would jeer at me and laugh me off the stage. It would be thoroughly and irredeemably humiliating.

Comments

[WubsAndCellos]

Omg this is so sad