Chapter Four: In which our heroine discovers that smoking is bad for your lungs

Question: What’s the difference between a violist and a terrorist?
Answer: Terrorists have sympathizers.

The next morning, we all woke up with varying degrees of hangovers. I'd eaten much and drunk less than most, so I was the most able to focus on the task at hand. Drew and the mayor had not only imbibed to excess, but had ended up having a little fun with a couple of the elf males. I didn't expect to see them for quite a while. That left Kit and me to talk things over and decide on a plan. Kit wanted a smoke, so we were out on the back porch of the elf king's palace, she with a coffee and her last remaining cigarette (and good riddance, once they were gone) and me with a plate of bacon, eggs, sausages, peameal bacon, and crispy home fries.

"So where to next?" I mused aloud. "The elf king said in order to get home, we had to all go together, and we had to take the rock with us, but he didn't say how!"

"Maybe you need a lift?"

The voice came from the woods to our left. As one, we turned to face it, and found ourselves looking at the hugest reptilian face I'd ever seen. Kit's mouth dropped open, and her cigarette nearly fell to the ground. She caught it just in time.

"What are you doing?" the dragon asked her.

"Smoking," she replied. "What's the matter? Never seen someone smoke before?"

The dragon stared (at least I think it did—I didn't really notice any difference in its expression, it just paused for a moment) and then started to laugh so hard it fell over. "You call that smoking?" he roared. "You pathetic imitator! This is smoking!" And the dragon proceeded to belch out a cloud of soot and ash so thick we were soon rendered helpless on the ground, coughing and choking.

"Ashes!" The elf king's voice, magnified a thousand times, roared from somewhere nearby. "What have I told you about smoking in the house?"

The dragon immediately stopped belching, but the damage was done, and it took nearly half an hour for the cloud to disperse.

When the air and my lungs were finally clear enough for me to speak, I said, "Ashes? Is that your name?"

The dragon nodded. "I am Ashes, son of Smaug the Mighty!" he said proudly.

Great! And he likely had a chip on his shoulder the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza because his Old Man got offed by a human. I chose to ignore his lineage, hoping it wouldn't come up again. "Did you say something about a lift? I don't know where we're going at the moment, but wherever we go, a lift would be mighty handy, if you were really offering."

"I was offering," the dragon told me, obviously somewhat piqued because I refused to say anything about his sire. "Old pointy ears here caught me trying to raid his herds, and as punishment he put out my fire and bonded me to serve him for a thousand years. He thought that if I gave you a lift, it would be the most expedient way of getting rid of you. By the way, is that a viola case you're carrying?"

"Yeah. Viola case, violin case—what does it matter?"

"Violin cases can carry either violins or sawed off shotguns. Viola cases, on the other hand, might carry violas, and if there's a viola in that case, I'd rather not hear it played, thank you very much!"

"Gees! Picky, picky. Remember this, lizard brain. You act up on our flight, and I'll start playing. You take us where we're going, no troubles, and the viola stays in the case. Deal?"

"Deal!" the dragon said, before I could add more demands. "Now where is it exactly that I'm going to take you?"

"That's the question, isn't it. I know we're in Mirkwood. I know we have to get back to Toronto. But there's no map connecting the two."

"Perhaps you should seek out the Lady of the Golden Wood?"

"You mean Galadriel's come back?" A wide grin split my face, and I wondered if the real Galadriel looked anything like Cate Blanchett.

"If you think Thranduil got bored back in the Blessed Realms, think of how bad it was for Galadriel. She's always been a go-getter, and meddles in things that aren't any of her concern. Thranduil came back of his own free will. Galadriel got kicked out, for trying to get the maiar to play violas in tune or something."

"She really sounds like my kind of woman!" I said. "And does she still have that nifty mirror? I wouldn't mind a peek of what's going on at home."

Chapter Three, The Rest...

Of course, it wasn’t very long before the King of the Wood Elves and his hunters found us. I knew he was the king because he had a crown of leaves and berries (it being autumn and all) on his head.

"Why are you in my forest, and why have you disturbed not only my people's feasting, but the repose of every creature in this forest with that awful racket?" he demanded.

I bowed as best I could. "Your Majesty," I said. "We were conveyed into your magnificent forest by means of a subway train from Union Station. We are only trying to return to our own world so that we might finish our practice for the charity concert we are playing in this evening."

"In how many years is that concert?" the king asked angrily.

"It's this evening, Your Majesty," I said, understanding neither the question nor his anger.

"You'd better hope that you're here for a while. Years, or maybe even decades. I estimate it'll take you that long to learn to play a C scale in tune," he said. "Now I suppose since you're lost, you're going to ask for help. And since you're from another world, you have no wealth with which to reward that help..."

"I have my rock," Drew said. "Isn't it shiny?"

The king noticed the rock for the first time. He peered at it closely. "There are moon letters written on this stone, though maybe your eyes cannot... Wait. That's Elrond's line, and it referred to the map those short hairy people were carrying a while back. The rock's interesting though. Come with me. I'll put you up for this evening, while I take a look at this rock and ponder what is so special about it."

I have to say that the elf king put on a good spread. We had roast venison and braised lamb chops and potatoes roasted with garlic and rosemary (who didn't much like being roasted, but that's another story.) Apple pie and ice cream and Black Forest Cake (still trying to figure that one out, as the Black Forest is in Germany, not Middle Earth) and the most delicious corn on the cob I've ever had. Round it all out with music, dancing under the stars, and decent conversation (Drew was occupied with telling her life story to a hapless elf warrior with mighty thews), and it turned out to be one heck of an evening.

"Where's Legolas?" I asked the king when he came over to ensure that I was well wined and dined.

"You do know your elves, don't you young..."

"Mary Sue," I supplied.

"Mary Sue. Isn’t that what writers derisively call a character who’s simply the author in disguise?“

I shrugged. “So what if it is?” I retorted. “So far this whole story is reminding me of a bad NaNo novel as it is. Now, we were talking about Legolas…”

“Yes, yes. Well, you know that my son pranced the length and breadth of Middle Earth with his short hairy friend. Well, eventually, they built a boat and sailed into the west."

"I thought you'd done that too," I said.

"I did. You know something? A place with no evil to conquer, a finished place with everything created that can ever be, a place where everyone plays in tune, a place where every desire of your heart is met..."

"That's most people's definition of Heaven," I said.

"I don't know about Heaven," the king said. "I do know it was boring as Hell after a while. I tried to pick a fight with Galadriel, but no dice. Which reminds me, no gambling, no drinking to excess, no viola playing..."

"You're right," I said. "It's Hell. So you came back?"

"With most of the elves who went with me in the first place. We'd rather live as a rustic, unknown people in a land ruled by humans than be bored beyond eternity in the Blessed Realm."

I nodded in sympathy. I understood, perhaps all to well, what he was trying to say to me. Middle Earth was my idea of Heaven. No nuclear weapons, environmental degradation was, if not extinct, surely more manageable than back home. No McDonald's to clog up the 'ole arteries, no rising with the alarm clock rather than the sun.

No Frank, no animal crackers that needed saving. No kids. No dirty diapers.

I closed my eyes and sighed. "All my life, I've dreamed of coming to Middle Earth. But now that I'm here, I know it's not for me. I don't belong, and I have too much to do back home. Too many people I love who need me. So how do I get back?"

"You should have said 'we'," the king said. "For you cannot go back without your companions. And you need the rock and the viola. The rock, as part of the physical being of your home world, is the link that will keep you from crossing over completely. If you use it properly, it will bring you home. With the viola, you must conquer the ultimate evil that seeks to keep you from going home."

Chapter Three: In which our heroine discovers that while music may soothe the savage breast, viola playing causes savage spiders to run away screaming

Question: If you were lost in the woods, who would you ask for directions—an out-of-tune violist, an in-tune violist, or Santa Claus?
Answer: The out-of-tune violist. The others are just figments of your imagination.

"Mary Sue, we don't want to go to Middle Earth!" Kit said.

I shrugged. "For one thing, this is the chance of a lifetime for me to be in the one place I've always wanted to visit. For another, I think this is the end of the line, and this train is out of service."

Right on cue, a pleasant female voice sputtered to life over the intercom. "This train is now out of service. All passengers please leave the train. This train is now out of service, all passengers please leave the train. Please remember to take all your belongings and violas with you."

The mayor looked out at the terrain doubtfully. Improbably, the doors had opened directly into a forest. A dark, tangled forest, with no light visible from above except that coming in from the clearing made by the subway tracks. "My shoe's broken. How am I supposed to walk with one broken shoe? For that matter, where are we supposed to walk to?"

I hadn't a clue, but I did know something about the woods of Middle Earth. Given the tangled, impenetrable growth on both sides of us, I'd say we were either in Mirkwood, or the Old Forest near the Shire. Either one of those woods was dangerous, and the same advice would get us through either one. Do not stray from the path.

And there was a path. It ran alongside the train, then bent so it continued on from where the tracks ended. I led the way. "Follow me," I said. "Don't leave the path—not for any reason! I've got a bad feeling about this!"

"Wrong movie," Kit commented.

"Huh?" I asked.

"'I've got a bad feeling about this' is something Han Solo would say in Star Wars. We're in The Lord of the Rings right now, remember?"

"Depends," I said. "We could be in The Hobbit, especially if this is Mirkwood."

As we travelled onward, I became increasingly convinced that we were indeed in Mirkwood. For one thing, though the undergrowth was tangled and impenetrable, the trees didn't seem to be on the verge of sentience. For another, there was animal life in the forest, something in which the Old Forest outside the Shire was conspicuously lacking. For a while, we traversed onwards and made decent time. The mayor eventually solved her shoe problem by wrenching the heel off her other shoe in some rabbit or snake hole, so even she could hobble forwards at a smart clip. We were fine, at least until we encountered the spider webs.

Drew was in the lead, as usual, and so was the first to feel the silken presence of the webs. She reacted in a predictably Drewish way—she screamed. The rest of us hobbled or ran forward as best we could, to find her brushing the webs out of her hair. "Sorry," she said. "Just cobwebs."

I looked closely. If they were cobwebs, they were pretty damn big. And strong. And, well, just a little to coherent and patterned to be cobwebs.

"They're spider webs," I told the others.

"Damn big spiders," the mayor remarked.

We didn't have time to react to that comment, because the spiders, alerted most probably by Drew's screaming, jumped down from above. One grabbed the mayor and tried to sting her, but she stabbed it with the broken heel of her shoe. The spider fell off her and ran away, dripping ichor. One rushed at Drew, and she beaned it with her rock.

But it was I who saved the day. "Music soothes the savage beast," I misquoted. "Music..." In a trice, I had pulled out my viola, and started to play.

I never knew spiders could hear. I didn't think they actually had ears or anything to hear with. I supposed, if I'd thought about it, that they might sense the vibrations of my music and that would calm them, rather like putting an infant in a car seat and taking him for a ride will cause him to stop screaming and fall asleep.

I was therefore rather surprised when the spiders started making music of their own, kind of a screeching sound. They stopped attacking, and slowly backed away. When they got past a certain distance from me, they actually turned around and ran. I stopped playing as soon as I was certain that the spiders were gone, and packed up my viola. It was then I realized that the mayor was lying on the ground, tucked as well as she could manage into a foetal position, with her fingers stuffed in her ears.

And she was off the path.

Chapter Two, continued...

So if I wasn't in the church basement, where was I? And how had I come to be here, in the middle of Strauss' masterpiece?

As I looked around me, I noticed that I wasn't alone. The whole viola section (all two of them, not counting me) was here with me, along with, of all people, the mayor. I walked over to her and extended my hand. "May I assist you, ma'am?"

"Is that a viola case you're carrying?" she asked.

I looked. Somehow, my viola case had made the transition from the church basement to wherever, along with Drew, Kit, the mayor, and Drew's rock.

"Of course it is," I told her. "I'm a violist, after all." She fainted again.

So where were we anyhow? At first, the place seemed to be a formless void, mist tendrils creeping around us. But the mist slowly cleared away, leaving us in a cavernous hall. There was a Harvey's over to the right, open, but with no customers or even cashiers that I could see. To the front, a stairway led down into who knows where. To our left, a row of double doors, then going forward, a row of what had once been ticket counters, but which now advertised a foreign currency exchange, a lottery outlet, and GO Transit tickets. The actual ticket counters, beside Harvey‘s had seven out of seven wickets sporting “Closed“ signs, which wasn‘t too far out of the ordinary. What was unusual was the huge neon sign over the untended information desk, which showed departing trains. Every single train was shown as being “on time.“ Something was definitely not right here. As for the rest of the station, I didn't need to look to know that behind me, there was an archway leading to another large, cavernous hallway leading to what had once been the Skydome, but which now was defaced by ugly red and white graffiti proclaiming it to be the Roger‘s Centre. I knew this place well, very well indeed.

An old man with a long, sweeping white beard and really far-out clothes approached us. I mean really, really far out, even for Toronto, and even seeing him with the eyes of a musician. He had a little cap of some sort, purple with gold embroidery. He had long purple robes that matched the hat, and his beard was contained at the half-way point by a gold, braided cord with tassels on the ends. He peered at us from behind half-moon spectacles with bright blue eyes.

"Dumbledore!" Drew exclaimed happily.

"Yes, I believe that is my name," the elderly eccentric said with a smile. "You seem to be in need of some assistance."

"Pardon me, Professor," I said politely, determined not to let Drew take the leadership in this situation. "Just a few minutes ago, we were in a church basement, practicing for our concert tomorrow, and now we're here. Have you any idea how that might have happened?"

"Well," he said, stroking his beard. "It would seem to me that something has happened that might have killed you all."

"What?" we exclaimed in unison. I might point out with some pride that this was perhaps the first time in the history of the world that any viola section anywhere has done something so completely together.

"I did say might have killed you all," he continued. "But it seems that Whoever It Is has failed in his or her designs. You're not alive, yet not really dead, either."

"But how do we get back to the church where we're rehearsing?" I asked. "We have a concert to play, dead or alive!"

"Where do you think we are?" Professor Dumbledore asked us.

"Um, it looks like Union Station," I said, "except there's nobody but us here. Kind of creepy, if you ask me."

"And how would you get to the church from here?" he asked, as if speaking to small children.

Well, duh! Maybe he was. "Come on, everyone! Down to the subway, and back to the church!"

"I can't use the subway!" the mayor wailed. "I just can't! What if I'm seen! I have an image to protect, you know, as a waster of taxpayer's hard earned money!"

We three ignored her. Kit, who sat behind Drew and I and generally ignored us, took the mayor's hand and pulled her towards the stairs.

It was weird. McDonald's, Country Time Donuts, Dairy Queen -- all the usual shops and services were present, but there was no-one running them, no passengers, no security guards, no one at all in the station. Drew was momentarily distracted by the smells wafting from Cinnabon to the left, and Kit pointed out that the LCBO shop was untended and open, but I pulled them away. We had to get out of this creepy place pronto. I admitted to myself that I was truly scared.

I mean, it was and it wasn’t the Union Station I’d come to know. No beggars sat at the doorway, looking for some spare change. No vendor ran the hot dog cart in the alley between the train station and the subway station. No ticket collector stopped us at the toll booth. We just waltzed right in. Well, we had to jump the stiles, and the mayor lost one spike off of her high heeled shoes, but no one stopped us.

Worse than the lack of people was the cleanliness of the station. It wasn't that there was a lack of litter on the ground. The whole place was clean, sparkly clean from top to bottom. No calcified remains of spilled soft drinks, no encrusted mustard and ketchup on the hot dog cart, no hardened gum on the hand rails—even the cracks in the pavement weren't there. The place looked...

New. It looked new, instead of decades old, decades that had seen more people pass through here than any other train station in Canada. I began to wonder if there would actually be any train for us to take. Not that it mattered—Yonge and Bloor was a fair hike, but under the circumstances, I'd say a half hour walk was a small price to pay in order to get back to where we needed to be.

I needn't have worried. We'd waited less than a minute before the inrush of air told me that a train was coming. The rumble of the approaching train followed, and soon enough, the silver rocket screeched to a halt in the station. The doors opened and we piled in. The doors closed and we were off!

"Middle Earth," a pleasant female voice said over the intercom. "Next stop, Middle Earth!"

My fellow violists and I stared at one another, and slowly a grin blossomed on my face. "Yippee!" I shouted, dancing around like Grandpa Jones in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Chapter Two: In which our heroine discovers that trumpet players should probably be licensed, and that mayors aren't particularly good conductors

One evening, just before the orchestra was to begin rehearsal, the maestro got an urgent call from home, saying his child was ill and needed to be taken to hospital right away. Not willing to cancel the rehearsal, the maestro asked the first player to walk in the door if he would take over the rehearsal while he drove his child to the hospital. That player, who happened to be the second trumpet player, readily agreed.

The rehearsal went as well as could be hoped, and everyone went home happy. Next week, the maestro was back on the podium, and the second trumpet player was back in his section, sitting beside the first trumpet player, who turned to him and said, "Where were you last week? I missed you."

I arrived at the church basement where we practice every Sunday afternoon only five minutes late. Not bad, considering I'd left ten minutes late because I was searching for my pants, which still had yet to be found. My stand partner, Drew, was just tuning her viola. A useless exercise, in my humble opinion, because it generally stayed in tune for five minutes, plus or minus four minutes and fifty five seconds. Usually minus.

I pulled my viola out of its case. Unlike Drew's, it was already in tune. It never got out of tune, at least as far as I could tell. Other people disagreed with me about this on occasion (actually, on many occasions, for example, just about every time I play a note), but to my ears it sounds fine. I sat down beside Drew and pulled out the music for the evening. We'd start with Richard Strauss' "Thus Spake Zarathustra," which ignorant plebes know only as the theme song to 2001: A Space Odyssey. The mayor was supposed to conduct the piece. Since the mayor had never in her life conducted anything more complicated than a city council meeting (and we know how well those go), our real conductor had got us to the point where we could play the piece without any conductor at all. I didn't have the heart to tell her that normally the only ones who paid any attention to her were the first desk violins and cellos, because a) they were the only ones (besides the first desk violas and second violins) who could see her (she being only five foot one in high heels, which she refused to wear) and b) the rest of us players were so engrossed in reading the individual notes on the page that the second we looked up to watch for her beat, we lost our place in the music.

"Mary Sue, can you play your g string? I think mine is out of tune," Drew asked as I sat down. Now that I think about it, that seems like an awfully risqué thing to say to someone, but at the moment, I took it literally and played my F#. She turned her peg to loosen the string.

"Wrong way," I told her. "Your string is flat, you need to raise it."

"It looks round to me," she said, eyeing the offending string carefully.

I sighed. "Not flat as in, flat as a board, but flat as in, too low in pitch. Just turn the peg the other way, Drew."

"What? What way?" she asked. "Just wait a minute. I think I forgot my pencil. I know I forgot my pencil."

She hung her viola by the scroll from the music stand and got up to get her pencil. That's another thing about Drew. She can't sit still for more than a minute, and three sentences is about the length of her conversation on any one topic.

Mary, the conductor (who we generally called Soccer Mom, because she had three kids in rep league soccer and boasted about it at length), stood on the podium and pointed to the first oboist. She obligingly produced something resembling an A. I say, resembling, because her pitch didn't match my A, and I've already told you my viola is always in tune. Drew returned with a shiny rock (I didn't really have time to look at it all that well, but it seemed to me that it was actually giving off light, rather than just reflecting it), picked up her instrument, and started to make the fake cat gut (all modern strings are steel) wail like a dead dog. Eventually, her g string approached the right pitch, but then there was a loud popping sound. I rolled my eyes and pulled my pencil out of my music bag.

"Oh, shit!" she said. "My d string popped." She turned to face Soccer Mom. "Sorry," she said. "I know I'm being a pain." She turned the peg that tuned her d string the wrong way, then the right way, then the wrong way again, plucking the string all the while to ascertain its pitch. "Sorry," she said again.

I really wish she'd just stop doing things that necessitated her saying, "Sorry," and be quiet and out of tune like all the rest of the violas. Really, with that need for the spotlight, she should have been a first violinist or a trumpet player. We viola players are quiet and demure and truly upstanding citizens, except for the fact that we play viola.

I mean, how do you get a viola section to play a passage "pianissimo?" Easy—you mark the passage "solo" and "fortissimo."

Anyhow, we finally got the orchestra tuned, and the right music in front of our faces. Always a trial, since Drew has to ask five times what we're playing, and I physically have to point out the place where we're starting, in this case, at the beginning. Not that hard really, since the whole piece is less than a page long, but I digress...

"Thus Spake Zarathustra" begins with five bars rest for the viola section, in which the bassoons and cellos play a very low tremelo which gradually gets louder. Then at some point, the brass section enters with their melody (why don't the violas ever get the melody, anyhow?), and finally, the entire orchestra comes in with a phrase that can only be explained as a "Ta Da!" And "Ta Da!" is at full volume.

The mayor got up on the podium, and started beating time. The cellos and bassoons began their low rumble.

And the mayor fainted dead away. She went down like a tree felled by a lumberjack. Boom! Her head hit the podium with a thunk.

Nobody noticed. The cellos and bassoons kept up their rumble. It was up to me to check and see if the mayor was all right, so I cautiously left my seat and poked her with my bow. She groaned, so I was certain she wasn't dead. I hastened back to my seat. It was almost time for...

Ta DA! The trumpets sitting just behind me blasted my eardrums, and in a nanosecond the orchestra, the church basement, and my lovely black pants were all gone. Oh wait. My pants had been missing since the beginning of this story, hadn't they?

Chapter One, Final Part

The subway ride was the usual for Toronto. I'm sitting on my seat, tunelessly humming the viola part for Pachelbel's Canon, and I'm accosted by the strangest characters. There are, of course, the obligatory religious salespeople. Always young, well dressed, and in pairs. Usually, they don't bother me because I'm as well dressed as they are, but today, I was in those darned sweat pants, and therefore fair game.

The male of the pair, soberly dressed in a grey pinstripe suit, looked at me with fear in his eyes. "Is that a viola case?" he asked. He started to back away, and I relaxed a little. I shouldn't have. His partner, a brightly dressed female who reminds me of nothing more than a male peacock with his tail feathers spread, complete with feathers, pulled at the man's jacket sleeve. "Paul, I'm more than a little scared by myself, but if that lady's carrying a viola, she really needs to hear what we have to say."

Oh, great. Not only is this pair afraid of violas, for some reason, but they're going to use that against me in the coming tirade. I brace myself to say as little as possible.

"Do you believe in God?" they ask. I nod. "Do you think you're going to Heaven?" I shrug. How should I know? Do I look like I can read God's mind? I don't have the answers to the daily crossword puzzle, let alone their stupid questions. "Here," the woman with the feathers said, thrusting a couple of pamphlets into my hand, "take this free literature. It will tell you the path to Heaven. See you there, if you follow the instructions." She smiled a little too brightly, and the pair wandered off in search of another victim. I shoved the pamphlet in my music bag and sipped at my cappuccino, now cold.

Another young man, obviously more than a little drunk, sat down next to me as soon as they left. "Do you believe in Heaven?" he asks.

Here we go again, I thought. At least he didn't ask me if I was carrying a viola case.

"Yes," I say. "If you don't, perhaps you should talk to the lady with the feathers up there. She'll tell you how to get there, too."

"I'm not going there," he says seriously.

"Of course not," I reply. "This train goes to Finch station, if you stay on it. Doesn't go anywhere near Heaven."

He sighed. "Not today," he said. "At least I think not today. But I'm dying. So I'm going to be going somewhere soon. Probably Hell."

"Is that further away than Kennedy station?" I asked. No, for the record, I'm not a complete idiot. I'm a violist. There is a difference, though cellists don't have enough words to articulate it properly. Besides, I like stringing people on, especially people who accost me randomly on the subway.

"I've got AIDS," the young man said.

I looked at him then—really looked at him. He wasn't bad looking—long, black hair pulled back into a pony tail, clear olive skin, dark eyes. Native Canadian, most likely. Young, not much more than twenty-five or so. And he was dying, of a terrible illness that had killed more than a few of my fellow musicians. "I'm sorry," I said.

I mean, what else can you say to someone who's just dumped shit like that on you, when you don't even know them? Serves you right, idiot! You shouldn't have got high with someone else's needle, had sex with another man, or whatever it is to get yourself infected? So I said I was sorry without really meaning it, and edged away from him as best I could without being too obvious about it.

His eyes narrowed. "Is that a viola case you're carrying?" he asked.

"Yeah," I admitted. Perhaps, given his revelation, I shouldn't have been so snarky, but I was tired of the question. So I hit back, verbally of course. "Why should you care? You've just told me you're going to Hell yourself, so why should it matter if I have a viola case?"

He smiled brightly. "See you there, then. It'll be good to have a friend."

Chapter One, continued...

I gave him a smack on the lips as I left the house. "Later," I promised him. "Thanks a bunch, but I'd still really appreciate it if you could find my pants while I'm out. I can get away with being eccentric once, but if I try it twice in a row, I'm going to get laughed at."

I slung my viola case over my shoulder, sipping from my cappuccino as I walked down the street to the bus stop. Tonight was the dress rehearsal before the big concert, and we'd meet the famous tenor soloist Ben Heppner for the very first time! It was amazing that our rag-tag community orchestra, made up of everyone from high school students to semi-professional musicians, should have garnered the attention of so prestigious a soloist, but it was for charity. A half-way house for recovering drug addict movie stars who had spent their last dime (and then some few million more) on booze and coke (not the bottled stuff, either) and plastic surgery. Truly miserable specimens of humanity, in other words. It felt good to help out with so magnificent a cause. Maybe we'd save Amy or Brittany, though I had my doubts. But the least we could do was try...

As I was thinking my noble thoughts, I passed an alleyway that was picturesquely named "Shady Lane." The reality wasn't nearly so picturesque, as it usually reeked of piss and rotting garbage. As I passed, I noticed something moving in the shadows. I investigated, and found an elderly lady, sprawled on the pavement. Now I'm not necessarily the most observant of people, and I do have somewhat eccentric habits myself, but I've never taken a sleep in an alley before, and I've never seen an old lady do it, either.

"Are you in need of some assistance, ma'am?" I asked.

She stared up at me. "Is that a viola case?" she replied. "Because if it is..." She started to scramble away from me.

"It's okay, ma'am. I won't hurt you. Yes, this is a viola case. You're quite perceptive."

She surprised me utterly at that moment by jumping to her feet, and running headlong down the alleyway, away from me. I noticed she'd dropped her cane, so I picked it up and ran after her. "Ma'am!" I shouted. "You forgot your cane!"

"I don't want it," she yelled back, panting. "Give it to your grandma for Christmas! Keep it for yourself when you get older! I don't care! Just stay away from me!"

I kept following her. She was clearly suffering from some debilitating mental disease, and I didn't want her to come to any harm. The alley emerged in another street a block away, and I could see the old lady as she ran, straight into a police car. I slowed down a bit. She was safe, and all I wanted to do now was give the woman back her cane and continue on to my dress rehearsal.

"Officer! Arrest that lady! She's brandishing a Vile Weapon of Destruction!"

The officer exited the cruiser. "All right, lady! Put down the cane and let's talk."

"Officer, the cane is hers, and I just want to give it back. I wasn't going to hit her with it, honest!"

"I wasn't talking about the cane, officer! Do you know what she's carrying?"

"Looks like a violin case to me," the officer said.

I sniffed. "Hmmph! Doesn't know his music, does he ma'am?"

"Officer, that's not a violin case! That's, that's a viola case!"

The officer gasped. "Oh, no! Ma'am, I can see that you're in dire need of protection. Get in the cruiser quick, before..."

"Before what?" I asked, perturbed. "I don't have a sawed off shotgun in there or anything. Just a viola!"

"That's what I mean," the officer retorted. "Ma'am, into the cruiser quick, before she pulls it out and starts playing!" The woman dove for the open door of the cruiser, and the officer stuck his fingers in his ears.

Me? I carefully laid the cane on the ground, gave them a scornful look, and wandered off towards the subway. If they didn't appreciate a real instrument, so be it! I had better things to do than chum around with a cop and a crazy lady who thought violins were the be-all and end all of the orchestra.