Outside the room, Auntie Phai reached for her ear without warning. Mook jerked her head away faster than she meant to. The two of them stayed frozen like that for a moment in the hallway, with forty other people lined up behind them. Auntie Phai pulled her hand back. She didn't curse or say a word. Then she pointed for Mook to go in when the staff member called her name.
The audition room was the theater's large rehearsal room on the third floor. The ceiling was high, the walls paneled in wood, and folding chairs were lined up against one wall. Three judges sat behind a long table, each with a bottle of water and a stack of papers. The applicants stood on the red strip of tape stuck to the middle of the floor, four steps away from the table.
"Number 411, Mookanda Wichianchai," the assistant read from the folder. "Two Separate Stars."
The middle judge looked up when he heard the last name. He was in his sixties, with a head of entirely white hair, and he had been judging this stage since the year Mook's mother won.
"You're Daoruang's daughter?" he asked.
"Yes."
He said nothing else, but set down his pen, which was worse than saying something.
The music began.
Mook knew from the first bar that it was over.
The piano reached her ears half a second after the fingers actually pressed the keys. She entered the section according to what she heard, and came in half a beat late for the entire room. Her own voice didn't come back to her the way it used to, either. It left her mouth and vanished into the air, as though she were singing in a room with sound-absorbing walls on every side. She didn't know whether she was too high or too low. She only knew she wasn't on pitch.
The short-haired female judge began writing something down. The assistant looked up at the clock.
One section ended in a way everyone in that room would probably forget within ten minutes.
Then someone spoke beside her left ear.
"Raise the second section by a half step. It won't reach otherwise."
A man's voice. Low and tired, speaking evenly, like someone who had spent thirty years talking to the members of his own band. He wasn't speaking to her. He wasn't speaking to anyone still in that room. He spoke that sentence beside the third chair from the wooden wall, on an afternoon in a year when Mook had not yet been born, and his heart stopped before he could say the next word.
He had been saying it every second for more than forty years.
Mook raised the second section by a half step.
She couldn't explain what happened afterward, not even to herself the following night.
The sound leaving her mouth no longer had to pass through her ears. It didn't have to return for her to check it, because someone else had already checked it for her. Raising the second section by a half step carried her breath exactly where the line needed it to go. The line her mother had once sung, the one an entire generation remembered, returned to that room once again—not because Mook was imitating her mother, but because someone who had died told her how to find its path.
The short-haired female judge stopped writing.
The white-haired judge raised a hand to cover his mouth.
When the song ended, no one in the room said anything for four full seconds.
"Child," the white-haired judge finally said, his voice raspier than it had been at the beginning. "When your mother won, she raised the second section by a half step too. Exactly the same. She was the only person on that entire stage brave enough to do it, and no one has done it again since that year."
He signed the paper and pushed it toward the assistant.
"Passed."
Mook bowed her thanks three times, walked out of the room, gently closed the door, and stood leaning against the hallway wall until her legs stopped shaking.
In that room, she hadn't sung her mother's song. She had sung her mother's song the way another dead person would have, and everyone in the room had heard her mother's voice.
She wasn't happy.
There was no word for passed in her head then. Only one cold conclusion rose on its own, like someone finishing a calculation in their mind: if the dead repeated their last words forever at the place where they died, and one musician's last words happened to be a command about a song, then there had to be countless rehearsal rooms, stages, clubs, theaters, and hospitals across this city where commands like that had been left behind for whoever could hear them to collect.
She only had to find out who had died where.
The hallway stretched all the way to the back stairs, sunlight from the window slits cutting bands across the concrete floor. At the end of the hall, Auntie Phai stood waiting with an iced coffee that had melted completely inside the cup.
Mook saw Auntie jump twice. She saw her pound her own chest. She saw Auntie's mouth open wide, shouting the same word over and over—the word Mook had been able to read from her lips from the very first time, the word Auntie Phai had used to call her for six years.
"Bitch!"
Everyone in the hallway turned to look. Some people laughed. Some recorded it. Auntie Phai shouted so loudly that a staff member came over to warn her.
Mook didn't hear a single word.
It wasn't that the sound was faint. It wasn't half a second late like it had been the week before. This time, where Auntie Phai's voice should have been, there was nothing at all, as if someone had erased it from the entire channel.
She could still hear other voices. She heard a woman on the sixth step of the stairs say not to turn off the lights yet. She heard someone dead in the second-floor bathroom complain about a key. She heard a long, thin, trembling whistling sound from a bay four thousand kilometers away and one hundred thirty years in the past. Every voice was as clear as if the speaker were standing in that same hallway.
Only the voice of the person still breathing right in front of her had disappeared.
Auntie Phai ran over, grabbed her by the shoulders, and shook her. Her mouth was still moving, her eyes wet.
Mook hugged her tightly so she wouldn't have to look at that mouth anymore, then spoke softly into the shoulder of the person who had shouted the loudest in her life.
"Can you say that again?"
"I couldn't hear you."