Where's My Heart? Finale: The Coda

Finale: The Coda

Alfred Tishman as he was then was not seen alive by anyone ever again. The “Right Here,” was discovered after the storm, tossed onto a rock outcropping, with no trace of its owner anywhere. All around Mr. Tishman’s piano were the twelve songs that he had managed to write before his unfortunate passing.

A month after his passing, a memorial service was held in Madison Square Gardens, the site of his last great performance. There the twelve songs that he had last composed were played before an audience of thousands. Millions more watched the ceremony on television. Not a single one of them had a dry eye. His closest friends spoke highly of him, saying that had he not met with this turn of fate he would have returned greater than when he had gone out.

Then in the conclusion another song was played. The master of ceremonies, Todd Dudson, the man at Captain Records who had discovered Alfred, said this about it. “I believe that there’s an answer to the question this song asks. In Heaven.”

The song was “Where’s My Heart?” But Todd Dudson, who had been right about Alfred Tishman, had been right about a dozen other musical talents, was, for once in his life, wrong.

He floated in what seemed to be a timeless suspension of both himself and reality. It was a cold aquatic expanse, a veritable ice-water mansion, that surrounded him. He knew what had happened before, he remembered it with clarity. But he was not what he had been when all that had happened. No, he was something far different now, something far greater than what he was formerly. Questions formed in his mind as his consciousness slowly began to return.

Then a soft voice, one he recognized as belonging to someone he had known very recently and even more briefly, spoke out through the animated eternity.

“You have come here after learning the greatest lesson of your life,” it said to him, reaching deep down into his very being, down into his soul. “You have a chance again to live. And to live a life far superior to anything that your old one even could have been. It is yours and yours alone. There are others here who shall join you in this and add their voices to yours to create a chorus that even the greatest choirs of your former kind cannot hope to imitate. All you have to do is sing forth with all that you have become.”

He felt the truth in those words; he felt the others coming around him, surrounding him with a feeling of family that he had never before experienced. All this was for him to be a part of, to enjoy simply living and nothing more. So Alfred Tishman stretched forth his flukes and with all that he had become he sang songs that have never been equaled in any circle on any plain of existence