Timothy Zahn: For Love of Amanda

"Music hath charms..." and, like any powerful tool, it must be handled with care.

The bar was a small local job, a bit shabby but clean enough, tucked away in an out-of-the-way corner of an equally worn working- class neighborhood.

I looked around as I sipped the beer I'd ordered. The clientele was pretty much the same mix I'd seen here every other evening for the past week: burly working-class men from the steel mills gathering for a little hearty Saturday-night conversation, a few lower-level professionals and their wives or girlfriends, plus a scattering of hopeful or hopeless singles, most of them looking a little on the burned-out side. There was also a sprinkling of travelers from the small and undistinguished hotels around the corner on the highway, most of them probably salesmen who spent far too much of their time in places like this.

But then, so had I, at least lately. And I was hardly in the sales business.

I took another sip, wincing at the taste. The place smelled heavily of this particularly bad brand of beer, heavily overlaid with the scent of the harder drinks being downed by those who hadn't come here to socialize. The air was thick with cigarette smoke, the clink of glasses, and a general conversational buzz punctuated at irregular intervals by a call for service or a bark of laughter.

It was just so typically mid-twentieth-century-America that sometimes I felt I had to be on a vid set; that at some unexpected moment a Mohawk-haired director would step into view from among the potted ferns lining the wall by the door and yell, "Cut."

But that wasn't going to happen. This was the real 1953, and the real Pittsburgh. And I was really here.

I sipped my beer again and glanced at the clock above the bar. One minute till nine. The piano across from the far end of the bar was still unoccupied; but if there was one thing I'd learned in the past six weeks, it was that the pianist was one of those time-obsessive people you could set your watch by. I took another sip --

And there he was, stepping out of the door behind the bar and making his unobtrusive way through the tables toward the piano. He was thin to the point of scrawniness, twenty-three years old though he looked younger, with the vacant-edged expression of a man who's collected enough kicks to the head that he's basically given up on life.

The great jazz pianist Weldon Sommers. Or rather, the soon-to- be-great jazz pianist Weldon Sommers.

He sat down at the piano, and for a moment his fingers caressed the keys in silence as if he was waiting for the muse to join him on the bench. Then, very softly, he began to play.

It was nothing special at first, just the typical background filler that a thousand other third-rate barroom pianists were pounding out this evening all across the United States. His eyes lifted from the keys as he gradually brought up the volume on the half-melodies and began looking around the room. Here and there his gaze paused momentarily on this table or that, as if sifting through the essence of the person or persons seated there, before moving on.

And then, after a few false starts, I saw his eyes come to rest on a hard-faced brunette seated alone at the bar, her lacquered nails rubbing with silent hopelessness at the smooth curve of her glass. As Weldon stared at her, I heard the meaningless filler he was playing start to change as the tone began to mirror the mix of emotions in her face. The melodies became longer and more elaborate, the harmonies sweeping the minor end of the musical spectrum. It was as if he was capturing the essence of the woman in his music, creating her pain and despair and feeding it back again to her.

And the change wasn't only in the music. As I watched Weldon, I could see a hint of shared pain and pity in his face as he created the music of her soul.

I looked back at the woman. She was responding to the music, slumping ever farther onto her bar stool, staring into her drink as if wishing it was a deep pool she could throw herself into. Her fingers dabbed at her eyes, her back twitching with silent sobs. She had connected with the music; and as the music had darkened and deepened, the hopelessness she'd brought in with her had turned to black thoughts of death.

And then, with a subtlety that I doubted a single person in the bar even noticed, the music again began to change.

It began with whispers of hope, bits of brighter melodies unexpectedly appearing among the minor keys like small patches of blue sky peeking out between storm clouds. Slowly, the cheerful melodies began to grow in length and complexity and energy, the blue sky steadily pushing back the clouds.

And again, the brunette was responding. The thoughts of death on her face began to soften, the hopelessly tight grip on her glass began to loosen, and her slumped posture began to straighten. When the music had mirrored her mood she had connected with it, grabbing on like a fish with a piece of bait. And now, with her psyche firmly hooked, Weldon and his music were pulling her upwards toward the light.

The blue sky dominated the music now, the darkness shrinking into mere echoes of distant pain and sorrow. The brunette was looking around the room, actually focusing some attention on the rest of humanity instead of solely on herself. There was no real animation in her face yet, but her eyes seemed brighter and more cheerful. Though maybe that was just the aftereffect of the tears in her eyes.

And then, with a suddenness that caught me by surprise even though I'd been expecting it, from out of the mix of clouds and blue sky came a blaze of musical sunlight.

The effect was striking. The brunette straightened up, her chin lifting as she took a deep breath. This time as she looked around the room, her face was relaxed and at peace, a small smile playing around the corners of her lips. The music came to a crescendo, then faded away into a quiet calmness. The woman took another deep breath, then picked up her drink as if to down the remains in a single, radiantly defiant swallow.

She paused, looked into the glass, and set it down untouched. Pulling a couple of well-worn bills out of her purse, she laid them on the counter beside the glass. Then, with her head held high, she walked straight across the room to the door.

And as she lifted her hand to open it, I saw for the first time the glint of the wedding ring on her left hand.

I looked over at Weldon. His eyes were still on the door through which she had disappeared, and as I peered through the smoke it seemed to me that his face was more alive than it had been when he'd first entered the room.

Small wonder. In a few short minutes, with nothing but his music and his genius, he had lifted another human being from despair to hope to confidence.

And as far as I could tell, not a single person in the bar besides me had even a glimmer of what had happened. Probably the woman herself had no idea how her miraculous transformation had been engineered.

For a minute Weldon seemed to savor his victory. Then the satisfaction faded, the protective mask slipped back into place across his features, and his gaze resumed its probing wanderings around the room. All in a night's work, apparently. His eyes touched my face....

And paused.

I held that gaze, trying to look casual and unconcerned and as oblivious as everyone else in the bar, waiting for his eyes to move along. But they didn't. The barroom filler he had resumed playing turned into a questioning lilt, and his eyebrows lifted toward me in invitation.

I hesitated, all the dire official warnings fast-forwarding through my brain. Even professional time observers shied away from personal contact with the locals, and I was anything but a professional. Add that to Weldon's already demonstrated ability to read the human psyche, and staying where I was definitely seemed like the smart thing to do.