Free Infinite Days by Rebecca Maizel Page B

looked back at me and motioned for me to hurry up. I decided to stop thinking about her slow gait and my deft ability to lure my prey.
    I peeked into the crate. The slim cases held names, some of which I recognized. I slid one of them out; on it, I read the name George Frideric Handel. What was this? Handel was a musician, a composer—what on earth could those cases have to do with him? I flipped the case over. The artwork depicted a man wearing a white wig, a wig I had seen on countless men during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The wig curled on both sides of the man’s face and was held back into a ponytail. He held a small composing baton above a full orchestra.
    Only when the librarian’s clip-clopping heels came to a stop did I realize that we had come to the listening room. Justin and his friends were at the long end of the hall. The librarian opened a black door with a paned window in the middle. She pointed inside the room; running over the walls was a thick, gray fabric that was very dense but soft to the touch. I let my fingers graze the plush material that crawled on the walls. Facing me was a towering, black machine that took over the entire wall. The librarian pointed at a wall of shelves. “Just place them on the racks and organize them by the last name.”
    The wall was filled with cases just like the ones in the crate.
    “Would you mind showing me how the machine works?” I asked, referring to the monstrous, black tower to the right of the cases. On a desk in front of it were three computers.
    “Which CD do you want to listen to?” she asked.
    I picked up the CD that said handel opera in swirling white cursive across the front of the case. But the last opera I had seen was in the 1740s, in Paris. I shook my head—I remembered that night too well. And that was not a night I wanted to recall while I stood in a room with a stranger.
    She pressed a button, and a small tray slid forward all on its own. I felt my eyes widen. Everything that involved machinery in this age was so easy—one simple push, and magic happened.
    She opened the case and took out a silver disc.
    “You place the CD in the slot, press the button on the stereo, and there you go. You can turn it up to volume ten; no one can hear. This room is soundproof. The musicians listen to their CDs at an unreasonable volume.”
    She turned the knob up to the ten setting and closed the door behind her, leaving me in the silence…for a moment.
    I stuck my hand into the box of CDs, waiting to line them up accordingly when music came out of the speakers. I stood up and backed away from the stereo.
    The aria was Handel’s “Se pietà” and it moved throughout the room, wafting over the foam walls and carpeted floor. Finally, it settled into me. The feeling of the drawn-out strings, the vibrations of the cellos, flowed through my body like blood. Violins —many of them—how many, I could not decipher. I could almost feel the bow moving across the strings. My lips parted, and my breath escaped in a slow exhale. The cellos came next—the low melancholy strings made goose bumps roll over my arms. I reached forward and touched the tiny holes of the place where the music came out. I could feel the machine vibrating from the sound.
    How on earth was this possible? Had so much time passed that humans were able to contain any music they wanted? Keep it somewhere so they could listen to it over and over again?
    I brought my hand to my chest when a woman began to sing an aria. Her voice cascaded through the notes, soared with the violins and matched the cellos’ harmonies. I couldn’t help it—I slowly knelt down to the floor and closed my eyes. It was a kind of beauty I could not have fathomed before that moment—music that I could finally feel with my body and my soul.
    In 1740, opera was popular, but you had to travel to attend performances. Now it was in the listening room at Wickham Boarding School. I closed my eyes even tighter and let