Allegro con brio

I've had the dreams for as long as I can remember. This is the first time I've decided to pen them down.

Sorry, I lied. When I was young-between the ages of two and three-I drew my dreams often. My parents initially treated my drawings (and I use this word very lightly. Mishmashes of stick figures scribbled in tacky crayon can hardly be considered art) with indulgent looks and lighthearted praises on my creativity.

I stopped the drawings when I turned four. The responses they'd garnered by then had turned from "creative" to "concerning". I am not a genius, and I know I will never have the potential to become one, but even my childish mind recognized uneasiness when I saw it. My older brother had been wicked intelligent since the day he was born-he was tested with an IQ of somewhere in the 190s. The idea of even coming close to that left my mind reeling. I was, at best, adaptable, or perspicacious, but never prodigious. I'd been living two lives in the space of one, you see, so by the time I turned four I had been already gifted with the burden of an eight-year-old psyche.

The wisdom of a second grader certainly wasn't prodigious, but it was enough for me to recognize the melancholy that glinted in my mama's eyes when I presented her the pictures I'd drawn of my other family. Her smile was strained when she looked at the black hair of my other mother, which was a stark discordance against the sandy blonde of her own. Mama had pinned it on the refrigerator nonetheless. When I fell asleep, and the family with the dark hair and dark eyes woke into existence, I showed them the drawings of my beautiful light-haired mama. This family eventually gravitated towards less accepting.

"Perhaps we should call Inoichi-san," my brother, only nine but already so tragically brilliant, murmured to my father. I gave my drawing a betrayed look. It was a surprisingly well-done rendition of my mama working at her computer (she was a professor), and I wondered with great innocence what I had done wrong.

"We'll wait a couple more weeks, just to make sure it isn't a phase," was my father's response.

Itachi had then taken my hand and asked if I'd wanted to play tag with him and Shisui. I never drew another picture of my family ever again. When I went to sleep that night, and woke up in my other life, I took the drawing down from the refrigerator and burned it in the backyard. There were definitely better ways to get rid of it, but in my mind, I'd wanted it to be permanent. I will admit-however-that watching crayon mother go up in smoke was quite a traumatizing experience for my young, impressionable soul.

It was at that moment in my life I discovered-from an objective viewpoint-my dreams were abnormal.

I excelled in school. It was to be expected, of course-a derivative of my duplicitous lifestyle-but it was almost despicable how easy academia opened herself up to me. My teachers adored me: I was quiet, I was impeccably polite, my handwriting was neat, and my fingers were never sticky. My childlike politesse was where the similarities between my lives ended-from there on out the two diverged with ardor: In my childhood on Earth I drove with my mama to and from school, won piano competitions, and learned how to calculate the area of a circle pi 'arr' squared. Contrariwise, days in the Elemental Nations were spent in supervised sparring, learning how to kill a man without making noise, and washing dried bloodstains out of my older brother's military fatigues with my mother gently tsk-tsk-ing at my side.

My papa rarely was home. He was a touring violinist for the Berliner Philharmoniker, and when he did come home, it was with a carry-on full of trinkets from Shanghai, Tokyo, and New York. He practiced for hours on end in our living room, and I would sometimes play along, clacking out simple countermelodies on the baby grand, blushing when mama took a break from marking her student papers to applaud our antics.

"Try to sneak us tickets," I said into my papa's chest, letting the tears I'd been holding back soak into his Burberry scarf. We were at the airport.

Papa pulled away and wiped at my tears with the downy cashmere, "I'll only be gone two months, and you'll have front-row seats when I get back. Okay, Magda?" I saw him off at the gates, perched atop my mama's hip, waving and giggling as he made-pretend that his conductor was frog marching him onto the plane.

My other father was distant and aloof, but he was still a father figure. I made it a point to sleep early each night whenever papa was away for work. Father was mostly frustrated, the rest dismayed, at my periodic bouts of clinginess, but I suspected he was as delighted with the attention as I was. That did not loosen his resolve when I bugged him and mother to buy a professional upright piano for me-and oh boy, did I bug. But, in the end, I was a spoiled child whose parents had too much money, and my success saw a beautiful mahogany upright with glittering keys lounging against the east wall of our living room.

I suppose the addition of a second piano widely attributed to my victories in all my youth competitions. I was considered talented, and talented did I get fast. I played constantly during the day, and then when I went to sleep, I played again to rice paper walls and low-lying tea tables. And occasionally, to my brother.

Itachi would pull up cushions and sit beside me when I practiced, his eyes wide with curiosity. I never played anything amazing-mostly pieces that my piano teacher on earth gave to me-but sometimes I would fumble over melodies of my own creation. My original works were lightly considered dismal failures: the tempos were too drab, the time signatures virtually nonexistent, and I had a penchant for hammering away at accidentals while laughing in delight. I drifted towards jazz freestyles, and then torturous atonal, before cringing and flowing back into Chopin's easier pieces.

Itachi liked staring at my face with great intensity whenever I played. I found this slightly disconcerting-people generally enjoyed looking at the hands of a pianist-but he was family, so I let it slide.

"You're a good player," Itachi had said once, just back from a mission and still in his flak jacket. In response, I scooted over and patted the empty side of the piano bench. He sat down very gingerly.

"Thanks," I chirped, leaning my head against his upper arm. He smelled like oil and smoke. Gross.

He hesitated, and then continued, "Where do you get all the ideas for your music?"

With sudden guilt, I remembered that none of the pieces I played existed in the Elemental Nations. Sure, I played music native to that world sometimes, but they never sung to me as tantalizingly as the music on earth did. "The melodies come to me in my dreams," I replied, frowning, and added (mostly as a distraction), "I'll write one for you."

It worked, and Itachi beamed an immeasurably happy smile at me. His smiles had the effect of being slightly confounding. Without realizing it, I think, he placed a hand on the keys and attempted to mimic a glissando I'd played earlier. I made at face at the mission grime and redder things encrusted around his cuticles.

Itachi immediately noticed my discomfort, and shot to his feet, looking incredibly desolate. "I'm sorry," he muttered, and walked away. I heard the shower being turned on.

To assuage the uncomfortable feelings of self-reproach, I banged on the piano the tune of La Marseillaise, loudly and with one finger, until mother came down and yelled at me.

Back on earth, I decided, on a whim, to pick up viola. Papa was extremely supportive of this choice, despite the pained looks mama shot him during the first few months of my endeavour. I learned how to ride a bike without training wheels, chattered over the phone to my papa in Cantonese, and belted out German operas with my mama while she cooked. In school, I read books auf Englisch and the romantic languages; at home I watched Japanese war dramas.

"I don't understand why you enjoy those horrible films," papa complained to me. I could hear the sounds of cacophonous warm-ups over the tinny phone speaker. "The Japanese killed all of your grandmother's sisters when they invaded Hong Kong."

I made a noise of dissent. "I'm learning the language," I said stubbornly, scowling something fierce at the phone receiver. That was a lie-I was already fluent in it-but I needed a cover story on my knowledge for the future. I heard my papa heave a sigh, defeated.

"Magdalena," papa warned, and then his tone brightened, "have you tried the studies I emailed to your mother yet? They're pretty simple-I began with them when I first started playing as well. They're meant to build up resistance in your fingertips."

I glanced at my fingers, rubbed raw and bleeding from where I'd practiced with fervour, and, in retrospect, to the great chagrin of my mama. "Yes papa," I said, "I'll have them all mastered by the time you get back."

As seven years bled into eight, my brother started disappearing more and more frequently from the house, coming home sporadically and at odd hours in the night. Shisui committed suicide from stress. My room piled high with sheets of music I'd transcribed from earth. They lived taped to the windowsill and the sliding doors, their shy edges and corners poking out from under my bed. My hands were stained with black ink the day father brought me outside to the compound lake and coached me through the handsigns of the Grand Fireball jutsu.

I never managed to compose the piece I'd promised for my brother. He killed everyone and went rogue before I could finish it.

I'd come home very late that day. The Rice Country Orchestra had been playing in Konoha that night, and Itachi had gifted me tickets to go see them with a friend. When I finally returned to our clan compound, the new melodies buzzing in my mind crescendoed to a dissonant fin at the sight of bodies on the street. I threw up. I ran to my house. I saw mother and father felled by his blade.

In an explosion of blind anger, I threw myself at Itachi with the intent to kill. He backhanded me viciously across the face, and I landed with a whump next to the face of my mother. Her neck was open and dark blood was pouring out of the wound in two separate rivulets.

I couldn't help myself. I started crying-great, screaming sobs of fear and fury. I scrambled away from the dead bodies of my parents, dragging myself pitifully across the floor until I knocked my back into a wall. From there, I held my arms protectively in front of my chest. My fingers, usually shock-still and blessed with the control of that of a neurosurgeon, shook so hard I felt the vibrations in my stomach and behind my eyes.

Itachi gave me a moment to somewhat collect myself and then slammed me against the wall with a hand on my throat. The impact made stars appear in my vision, and my skull creaked ominously.

"Why," I managed to rasp out between tears and saliva. My hands scrabbled uselessly against his taut forearm.

"To test my ability, Sasuke," Itachi's eyes were demon-red, redder than the fresh blood on the floor, and the mutated pinwheels in them spun counterclockwise. I was mesmerized; I was terrified.

The world around me inverted and shed its colour, and I was left staring at a red moon, swollen in the prime of her lunar phase.

"Welcome to the world of Tsukuyomi," Itachi's voice whispered in my ears. Scenes of killing unfurled around me. "For the next seventy-two hours, your reality will be completely under my control."

Segno

I blinked and woke up screaming to the pink walls of my girlish bedroom back on earth. Mama rushed into the room and attempted to gather me in her arms, but I hit at her with my elbows and knees until she let go.

"It's just a nightmare, Magda! You had a nightmare," her hand reached out to tentatively stroke my hair, but I flinched away violently at the gesture. I never had nightmares-I didn't dream, period. Every moment in my life was a waking moment; sleep was a foreign concept to me.

Mama's voice was thick and lispy and there was more blood going drip-drip-drip from a split lip l'd caused. I didn't stop screaming, and eventually mama wrestled me into the car and drove me to the hospital, muttering nonsense about dreams and night terrors the whole way there.

The nurses at the ED tied down my thrashing limbs and slid a needle into the muscle of my left bicep. I fought valiantly against the oncoming unconsciousness-purposely breaking several of my own fingers in my frenzied effort to stay awake. Inevitably, I lost, and I woke up again in the black-and-red world of Tsukuyomi.

Open necks. Black blood and red eyes. Death. Bile.

I jerked awake to the fluorescent lighting of the ED. A pair of defibrillator pads ascended away from my chest. It took me all of three seconds to start desperately screaming again, and the familiar prick of a needle registered in my other arm.

Opennecksblackbloodandredeyesdeathbile.

Fluorescent lights.

"I'm sorry," a doctor was saying to mama. She looked at the doctor as if she considered him to be the devil himself. "Every time we induce unconsciousness she panics and goes into cardiac arrest."

My throat felt as if it was on fire, and I tasted iron every time I breathed in. I gurgled out another scream. It was much weaker, but it left my throat in a fiery agony for minutes afterwards.

Mama held her face close to mines. Her blonde hair was messy from sleep, and her sky-grey eyes were blinking too fast. I shuddered from head to toe, grounded by her familiarity-I barely even noticed the third needle that pierced my thigh.

Almost immediately I was hit with a sense of dulled joy. My previous fear had been scrunched into a miniscule singularity somewhere at the back of my brain. In this state of mind I stayed until a very nice lady pulled up a chair next to my hospital bed and introduced herself as my psychiatrist friend Lisa.

She asked what had happened. Tearfully and incoherently, I blubbered on and on about my second family, about my murderous brother Itachi, and about the scenes of death I saw every time I closed my eyes. Lisa smiled at me, patted my cheek, and then told me that everything was going to be okay. She then had a very long talk with my mother.

Mama drove me home with a forced smile on her face. I didn't go to school that day. She made bacon and sausages for breakfast, and then we ordered delivery for lunch and dinner in between watching silly Disney movies on the couch together.

Come night, I refused to go to sleep. I laid in bed, pulling at my freshly bandaged fingers, forcing myself to stay awake with periodic twinges of pain. I knew that the moment I closed my eyes I would be greeted with gore and death.

I didn't go back to school for the next day, either. The week that followed saw me passed through a flurry of psychiatrist's offices. By the time I reached fourteen days with no sleep, I hallucinated with each waking hour and my limbs felt as if they were constantly ploughing through molasses. My dark-haired mother with her slit neck ghosted around the edges of my vision, reaching out to me with bloody hands. Father sometimes appeared in the distance: stood at the end of a hallway or facing me as we drove past him on the sidewalk, his severed head cradled in his arms. Itachi's voice constantly whispered in my ears.

When I finally decided to tell my latest psychiatrist beau of my visions, I was immediately bundled up and shipped straight to a psychiatric hospital. Psychosis, the social workers there whispered. Schizophrenia was another popular buzzword. I was there for six unhappy months until I learned how to fake a recovery.

My new medication made the visual and auditory illusions disappear, so when I was discharged it was only with a harmless diagnosis of chronic insomnia. I slept once every couple of months, only when I could no longer hold it in, and each sleep saw me back in the hellish wastes of Tsukuyomi. When I returned home, I discovered-with a healthy dose of guilt and dismay-that papa had quit his job to take care of me and mama had developed stomach ulcers from stress.

As it turned out, chronic insomnia made a person extremely productive. Without the burden of sleep, I got my ARCM for piano, and then for viola, as well. I studied through the early hours of the morning without tire, ugly purple crescents carving themselves under my eyes. When I ran out of calculus problems to do and biology notes to make, I composed more atonal music that made my parents cringe and the neighbour's cat yowl.

Every time I blinked I saw the imprint of Tsukuyomi against the inside of my eyelids. I calmed myself down during panic attacks by quietly damning Itachi under my breath. My parents grew to believe I'd converted to religion-they misinterpreted my Japanese mumblings as praying.

It was to nobody's surprise when I graduated high school a whole two years early, and then moved to Manhattan to study music at Juilliard. It was also to nobody's surprise, when, at the age of nineteen, I quietly hanged myself in my New York apartment. Al coda.

I woke up with my back pressed against the wall and Itachi's hand around my throat. White stars sung across my vision and my skull creaked ominously.

Itachi let me drop to the floor. I sat there, in shock, staring at my hands-small, pale, and deathly still. My neck was already blooming into an opulent blue bruise and Itachi was saying something about vengeance and hatred and weakness; I registered none of it.

"Please kill me," I begged, not daring to meet his eyes. Partly out of shame, but mainly out of fear of another round of Tsukuyomi. "Please."

Itachi knelt down in front of me and snapped my radius into two pieces.

"Coward," he spat, as I instinctively curled around my broken arm. "Hate me! Detest me! Live a wretched, miserable existence-run, run, and cling on to life."

The irony of Itachi's last statement nearly sent me into hysterical laughter. I've been doing exactly that for the past eleven years, I wanted to yell at him, but I feared that if I opened my mouth I'd break into a maniacal smile. Instead, I bowed my head, and my shoulders shook with suppressed mirth. Let him think I was crying.

"May you burn in the ninth circle of Hell," I muttered, already feeling myself calm down, "Damn your soul and your existence. You deserve nothing better than the love of the Devil. Lord of the Flies, take this accurst man into your arms." My eyes were scrunched closed and my hands were poised readily over them. I was prepared to pluck my own eyes out if it promised I would never visit the World of Tsukuyomi ever again.

Itachi exhaled through his nose. It was a grotesquely angry sound: uneven, phlegmy, and it broke in the middle. I heard his sandals scuff against the wooden floor, and when I opened my eyes, he was gone.

I passed out. I awoke in a hospital room.

My throat felt as if I'd swallowed acid, and when I brought my hands up to rub at it I was met with frightful purple swelling. I cleared my throat, and wheezed in a laborious breath. Had my roommate come home early from work and found me? Did I not die? I stumbled my way toward the window, desperate for a view of the calming New York skyscrapers-I snapped open the blinds-squinted against the sudden harsh light-and I was met with a view of the Hokage Mountain.

God almighty. They kept me in the hospital for a couple days, or weeks. I wasn't sure. I was slept most of that time-real sleep, with nonsensical dreams and everything-and when the doctors finally decided I wasn't going to spontaneously up and off myself Inoichi-san walked me back to my house.

"Are you sure you're alright?" Inoichi looked nothing like my mother. His voice was foreign.

I gave a placid smile and nodded.