Orpheus' lute was strung with poets' sinews,

Whose golden touch could soften steel and stones,

Make tigers tame and huge leviathans

Forsake unsounded deeps to dance on sands.

- The Two Gentlemen of Verona, William Shakespeare

The walls of the room looked as if someone had taken a vat of bleach and scrubbed them clean with the hem of the Pope's robe. As white as a woman's thighs. Purged of any dirt, any sin, it seemed. To Richard, the room resonated the same way a page in a new engineering manual did when he was reading it outside, with the sun whitewashing words in angelic glory – black words that trouped across paper like colonies of ants, all in a row. The walls were harsh. They stared down at him with holy indignation.

He stared back.

The voices behind him crooned. They whispered in church pew voices. Mourning voices.

Richard Lee had sinned after all.

He had partaken of a bitter cup.

And now he couldn't move his wrists or his ankles. His body was spread out – unraveled on the table like a penitent sinner, with his limbs stretched into Vitruvian Man positions and bolted down. He was naked. He felt like a beetle pinned on paper by a taxidermist. Richard felt exposed and helpless and he was pretty sure he could feel God's eyes performing surgery on his soul, picking out all of his sins like tumors and examining them, clicking his tongue, shaking his head.

Like a lion would shake his head.

But I can't help it, Richard wanted to scream. I can't change!

We are here to overcome our sinful appetites. Our base and carnal hungers.

A part of him realized he deserved what was coming. Another part was searching for the music in the room, sinning again and again and again. Listening to how the quiet voices hummed twitchy little choruses – flies darting around dead corpses – how his breathing kept time, how the walls seemed to exhale bass sighs. His fingers twitched. They conducted.

Such beauty.

Beauty in the way all things, living or not, twisted the air – manipulated sounds – into performing for them. Into giving birth to vibrating dreams and desires and thoughts. The music. The music was color. Prismatic splashes spattered across mildew spotted black-and-white photographs. Pictures of wilted looking citizens or empty hallways or skeletal tree groves.

I will die a sinner.

Three men approached the table, each dressed in blistering white, their faces stained with cold disapproval. They were wearing latex gloves and the largest man – his eyes as hollow as eggshells and as black as ink spills – was carrying a hose.

His name was Samuel.

He was smiling.

“I can't understand you, Richard,” he said. “Your condition doesn't make sense to me. You know it's wrong. You've always known it's wrong. And yet, for some reason, you keep doing it. Like a kid sneaking dirty pictures. You just can't get enough of it, can you?”

Richard remained silent.

His belly heaved like a dress in the wind and he squirmed at the cuffs rooting him to the table. He knew it was senseless to struggle, but something – instincts, evolution, whatever – tugged at his arms and his legs and controlled his muscles like puppet strings, tightened around his lungs like nooses. Samuel was laughing softly now. But the men at his side had empty faces. Faces that belonged staring up at the lid of a coffin. Carefully sculpted, carefully massaged into expressions of obedient submission.

Their movements were even mechanical.

It was as if Samuel and the Hierarchy had taken a scalpel and severed their souls from their chests like a doctor clipping a newborn from its umbilical cord.

Samuel was circling the table and running his gloved finger along Richard's thigh, chest, neck, face. The latex made mouse squeaks.

“Why are you broken, Richard? We've done everything possible to keep you in good working order. You've been taught by the Hierarchy's finest, you pray and commune every day, you work hard and diligently. On the outside, you look like a perfect citizen. Your skin looks just fine to me.”

Samuel's hand rested on Richard's forehead. His touch made Richard's intestines squirm like worms in the beak of a bird. But he kept silent. He wouldn't reward this bastard with his voice.

His voice.

What perfection it could produce!

Notes and sounds like apple tree blossoms. Twirling helicopter petals that could even kiss the feet of God or whisper pictures of flawlessness into even Samuel's ears. Richard wished that he could put words to those sounds, too. He wished that he had the time to string notes together to form wonderful monologues that spoke of revolution and human goodness. To string them together like pearls.

Music, he knew, was a Rosetta stone.

It translated the heart.

He tried to make his expression as blank as possible.

Samuel studied him for a moment, then sighed and shook his head. “But even now I can see in your eyes that you haven't repented. That you still believe that you are right and we are wrong. You think that something as insubstantial as music – as an instrument – is more important than peace of mind and food and shelter. Something went wrong along the way. You're rotting. Your insides are like oatmeal. Your brain is like oatmeal. Somebody corrupted you. They stole the virginity of your thought.”

He nodded to one of the men standing by Richard's side. The man – moving with glassy, department store mannequin grace – drew a remote from his pocket and pressed it. Deep, sonorous cello notes sludged their way through the room, dripping from unseen speakers like tired, worldly sighs. They echoed and twisted and bowed and pirouetted and danced like shadow stained men in sorrow-black overcoats who had the weight of the planet crushing their ribcages. Richard's heart felt swollen and carved-out. The music was sad. It sounded like a choir of whales. It sounded like the prayers of men and women alone, but surrounded cities of people.

He blinked.

Tears wedged their way out and slipped down his face.

All the music inside of him was leaking from his eyes.

Samuel was smiling. “Pretty isn't it? Do you like it? You know what it is? It's the old world speaking to us. It's kind of like a time capsule, except they wrote their message-in-a-bottle in a language not many people can understand. But you know what they're saying, don't you? You can understand. What are they saying to us, Richard? What are they telling you?”

Richard couldn't think straight anymore. His thoughts had evaporated and were stumbling around his brain like mustard gas. His throat felt sandpapery, as if someone had been busy scraping it with a paintbrush.

Richard closed his eyes.

Swearing, Samuel pounded the table and screamed, “What are they telling you, you bastard? You want to know? Are you too deaf? They're warning us! Warning us to stay away! To avoid the mistakes they made! You know what this music is? It's a nuclear bomb and it's a hungry child and it's a negro slave and it's a knife in someone's back. It's you, Richard! You've become one of them!”

Samuel's voice hung in the air along with the final cello notes like a body strung up on a tree limb. His chest was heaving. He was clutching the hose in his hand like the neck of a murder victim.

“Play it again!”

His voice was a spool of barbed wire and he yanked the hose up and over Richard's face.

The cello started weeping again.

And then water gushed into his nostrils and mouth and into his eyes – forcing them open, pushing on them, trying to worm them out of his skull. Richard tried to hold his breath as so many gallons of chilled-wine water forced their way into his lungs and punctured his face like a trillion thumbtacks. Suffocating him as if someone had taken a bible and was pressing against his nose with all of their weight. Richard tried to scream, he tried to move, to struggle, but the water from Samuel's hose continued to beat against his face like a baseball bat, like the butt of a gun crunching into his nose again and again and again.

And as he was drowning, all he could hear was a bow whittling at the strings of a cello.

Samuel laughed along with it.