217 Babel Street | Apartment 17
At first all she could hear was the soft ticking of the clock on the bedside cabinet. Then the music started. It was always the same: every night she woke up just moments before it began. 3:17. The green illuminated numbers were the only light in the room. Natalie slipped out of bed and walked through into the living room, where she stood by the window looking out.
No sign of a moon. The twinkling lights of a ship far out, lost in the black expanse. The music louder now, notes tumbling from the saxophone and becoming lost themselves, lost in the maze of melodies. Sudden feelings, memories. There is a pleasure in the pathless woods. What was that? There is a something on the lonely shore. Rapture was it? Pleasure? Something like that. Byron, or was it Keats? Next line? There is a something something, la dee da da, where none intrudes, by the something sea, the blue sea, the deep sea. That was it. By the deep sea and music in its roar. And then the poem went on, beyond memory. It was the idea of the twists and turns of the music and the pathless way through the woods, through the dark, through life.
Natalie walked back to the bedroom and stopped in the doorway surprised, seeing that a woman was lying in the bed, the lonely bed where minutes before she herself had been sleeping. The music played on. Natalie looked down at herself, and smiled.