"Syrinx" by Debussy
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The flute is made of air.
That is what Sofia Chen tells him on the first day, in December, when the world outside has gone gray and cold and the heating in the Practice Room makes small clicking sounds that Yaz no longer notices. She holds the silver instrument horizontally, her fingers positioned over the keys, her mouth curved into a shape that is not quite a smile.
"The other instruments make sound from wood or string or brass," she says. "The flute makes sound from nothing. From breath. From the air that passes through you and becomes something else."
Her voice is strange. Soft and distant, like someone speaking from another room. Her eyes are dark and calm, the eyes of someone who has learned to want very little and expect even less. She is thin, angular, her black hair cut short and precise. Everything about her is controlled. Measured. Empty of excess.
"The flute plays what you exhale," she continues. "What you breathe out. What you release. To play well, you must empty yourself first. Let the feeling go."
Yaz takes the flute she offers. The metal is cold against his fingers. The weight is almost nothing. He raises it to his lips the way she shows him, positions his mouth over the embouchure, and blows.
No sound comes out. Just air. Just breath, escaping into the room and disappearing.
"Good," Sofia says. "That is the beginning. Emptiness."
The piece is called "Syrinx."
Sofia plays it first. The melody is hollow. Floating. It drifts through the Practice Room like smoke, like the memory of something that was never quite real. There are no chords, no harmonies, no accompaniment. Just one voice, wandering through spaces that feel ancient and lonely.
"Debussy wrote this for a play about a nymph who turns into reeds to escape a god," Sofia says when she finishes. "The god cuts the reeds and makes them into a flute. So when he plays, he is playing her. What remains of her."
Yaz does not know what a nymph is. He does not ask. The explanation feels too heavy for the room, too full of meaning for someone who is learning to feel nothing.
"The flute is not about expressing," Sofia continues. "It is about releasing. You breathe in what is around you. You breathe out what is inside you. The music is what happens in between."
She hands him the instrument again. Adjusts his grip. Positions his lips.
"Empty yourself. Then play."
December passes. Then January. The days blur.
Yaz wakes at the same time every morning. The bell rings at 6:30. He counts to ten before opening his eyes. No. He used to count to ten. Now he just opens his eyes, and the ceiling is there, and the forty-seven tiles are there, but he does not count them anymore. The numbers do not comfort him. The numbers are just more routine.
Breakfast is porridge. It skins over before he can eat it, the gray film forming on top like ice on a puddle no one would skate on. He eats it anyway. The taste is nothing. The texture is nothing. The eating is just something that happens between waking and lessons.
Lessons fill the middle of the day. Flute with Sofia on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The other instruments on other days. Guitar with Javier, who still laughs but whose laughter sounds farther away now. Piano with Lydia, who still demands precision but whose demands feel like echoes of demands. Drums with Kwame, trumpet with Marcus, cello with Elena. Seven teachers. Seven instruments. Seven ways of making sound that all blur together into one continuous note that never ends.
Practice fills the afternoon. The Practice Room is always there. The instruments are always there. The red light blinks in the corner, always recording, always watching. Yaz plays what he is supposed to play. He improves. The teachers say so. The recordings prove it. His fingers are faster. His breath is steadier. His technique is approaching something called mastery.
But the music means nothing. It is just sound. It is just routine. It is just the thing that happens between practice and dinner.
Dinner is whatever the orphanage serves. He does not notice. He eats. He returns to the Practice Room. He practices more. The bell rings for bed. He returns to the dormitory. He lies down. The new boy in Suki's bed cries sometimes, but less often now. The crying is becoming routine too.
Everything is routine.
The routine is everything.
Mrs. Okonkwo finds him in February.
He is sitting in the Practice Room, the flute across his lap, staring at the wall. Not practicing. Not thinking. Just sitting. The wall is gray. The acoustic panels are gray. The light is gray. Everything is gray, and gray is fine, because gray asks nothing of you and expects nothing in return.
"Yassine."
Her voice comes from the doorway. He turns his head. She is standing there with her orange headwrap and her worried eyes and her hands clasped in front of her the way they clasp when she is about to say something she does not want to say.
"Yes."
"Are you all right?"
The question is simple. The answer should be simple. Yes or no. Fine or not fine. But Yaz does not know how to answer it anymore. The words all and right do not fit together in a way that makes sense.
"I'm practicing," he says.
"You're sitting."
"I'm resting between practice."
She walks into the room. Sits down in the chair across from him. Her eyes search his face, looking for something. He does not know what she expects to find.
"You've changed," she says quietly. "In the past few months. You're... different."
"Different how?"
"Quieter. More closed. You don't count things anymore."
"I still count."
"Do you?"
He thinks about it. The tiles above his bed. The steps from the dormitory to the Practice Room. The days since Suki left. He used to know these numbers the way he knew his own name. Now they are just numbers. Now they are just more gray things in a world that has become entirely gray.
"I guess I stopped," he says.
Mrs. Okonkwo's face does something complicated. Her mouth trembles. Her eyes grow wet. The face of someone watching something disappear and knowing they cannot stop it.
"I talked to Mr. Thorne," she says. "About you. About how you've been."
"What did he say?"
"He said you're focusing. That artists do this. Go inside themselves. Become... absorbed in their work."
"Is that what I'm doing?"
"I don't know, Yassine. Is it?"
The question hangs in the air. Yaz looks at the flute in his lap. At the silver metal that makes sound from nothing. At the instrument that teaches emptiness.
"I don't know either," he says.
The rain comes in mid-February.
It starts on a Tuesday and does not stop. Day after day, the water falls from a sky that has forgotten any other color. The yard floods. Brown water covers the grass, creeps up the sides of the buildings, turns the fence into a thing rising from a shallow lake. Outdoor hour is cancelled. The children are trapped inside.
Tensions rise. The dormitory becomes too full, too loud, too close. Children fight over nothing. Over toys. Over space. Over the particular spot by the window where you can watch the rain and pretend you are somewhere else. The staff move through the hallways with tight faces, breaking up arguments, enforcing rules that seem more arbitrary than usual.
Yaz watches.
That is what he does now. He watches. He sits in corners and doorways and the spaces between things, and he watches the other children and the staff and the world moving around him. He is not part of it. He is outside it. A spectator at a play he does not remember buying tickets for.
The new boy in Suki's bed is crying again. His name is something Yaz has never learned. He is four years old. He wants his mother, who is not coming, who has never been coming, who left him here the way Yaz's parents left him here and Suki's parents left her here and all the parents leave all the children here because that is what parents do.
The crying does not bother Yaz. Nothing bothers him. The sound is just sound. The tears are just water. The pain is just pain, and pain is something that happens to other people now, people who still feel things, people who have not learned to empty themselves before playing.
Yaz.
The Maestro's voice is very far away. Barely audible. Like someone calling from the other end of a long hallway.
Yaz, can you hear me?
He can hear. But hearing is not the same as responding. Hearing is just more input. More routine. More gray.
Don't disappear completely. Someone still needs to see.
See what? The question forms in his mind but does not go anywhere. There is nothing to see. There is only routine. There is only the rain falling and the children crying and the days passing one after another, each one exactly like the last.
He finds the puddle on the third day of the lockdown.
It is in the hallway outside the common room. A leak in the ceiling has dripped water onto the floor, creating a small pool that no one has cleaned up yet. The water is still. Dark. It reflects the ceiling lights in small, wobbling circles.
Yaz stops walking. He does not know why. Something makes him stop. Something makes him look down.
His reflection stares back at him.
The face in the water is strange. Distorted. The features are his but stretched, pulled apart by the ripples, rearranged into something that looks like a boy but does not feel like one. The eyes are dark. The mouth is a line. The expression is nothing. Not sad. Not angry. Not hopeful. Just nothing.
He does not recognize himself.
The thought arrives without emotion. It is just a fact. The way the tiles are forty-seven is a fact. The way the porridge skins over is a fact. He is looking at his own face and he does not know who it belongs to.
That's you, the Maestro says. The voice is closer now. Urgent. That's still you. Don't let it stop being you.
But what is me? Yaz thinks. What was I before all of this? A boy who counted things. A boy who wrote a song. A boy who stood at a fence and wanted something he could not name.
That boy feels very far away now. That boy feels like someone he read about in a story. Someone who existed once and then stopped existing, the way children at the orphanage stop existing when they get adopted, the way Suki stopped existing when her bed was given to someone new.
The puddle ripples. His reflection breaks apart. Reforms. Still unrecognizable.
He keeps walking.
Sofia is pleased with his progress.
"You've learned to empty yourself," she says during their lesson in late February. The rain has finally stopped. The yard is draining. The world is returning to something like normal. "The breath is pure now. No interference. No emotion cluttering the tone."
Yaz plays "Syrinx." Every note is correct. Every breath is placed exactly where it should be. The melody floats through the Practice Room, hollow and wandering, the sound of a nymph who became reeds, who became music, who became nothing.
Sofia nods approval. "Excellent. Debussy would be impressed."
Yaz lowers the flute. The metal is warm now from his breath. The weight is still almost nothing. The instrument of emptiness, teaching emptiness, played by someone who has learned the lesson too well.
"What do I feel when I play?" he asks.
The question surprises Sofia. Her calm face shifts slightly. A flicker of something. Confusion, maybe. Or the ghost of an emotion she has trained herself not to feel.
"Feeling is inefficient," she says. "The breath is enough. You let the feeling go."
"But what if there's nothing to let go?"
Sofia looks at him. Her dark eyes are still and deep, the eyes of someone who has traveled a long way into emptiness and found it comfortable there.
"Then you have achieved what most musicians never achieve," she says. "Pure technique. Pure sound. Uncontaminated by self."
She picks up her own flute. Begins to play a scale. The lesson continues.
But Yaz sits with the flute across his lap, thinking about contamination. About self. About the boy in the puddle who did not look like anyone he knew.
That night, he takes out the broken string.
It is still in his locker, where he put it after it snapped during his first guitar lesson. The first memento. The first piece of himself that he kept. The metal is coiled into a small spiral, tarnished now, darker than it was when it was new.
He holds it in his palm. Looks at it.
He remembers when he kept it. He remembers the feeling of that day. The joy of learning something new. The warmth of Javier's teaching. The sense that the world was opening, that possibilities were multiplying, that he was becoming something more than he had been.
He waits to feel something.
Nothing comes.
The string is just a string. The memory is just a memory. The boy who kept this because it meant something is the same boy who stared out of the puddle without recognizing himself.
He puts the string back in the locker. Beside the smooth stone. Beside Suki's note, which he has not read in weeks, which says words that used to mean something. Keep counting. Keep making. I'll listen.
He is not counting anymore. He is not making anything except the sounds they tell him to make. He does not know if anyone is listening.
I'm listening, the Maestro says. The voice is barely there. A whisper of a whisper. I'm still here. Even if you can't feel me. Even if you've forgotten how to listen back.
Yaz closes the locker. The click of the latch is small and final. The sound of something being put away. The sound of routine.
The flute waits in the Practice Room. He goes to it. He plays.
"Syrinx." Every breath in the right place. Every note exactly where it should be. The hollow melody fills the room, empties into the air, becomes nothing the way breath becomes nothing when you release it.
Sofia is not there. No one is there. Just Yaz and the flute and the red light blinking in the corner, recording perfection, documenting the absence of feeling.
He finishes the piece. The last note fades. The silence that follows is the same as the sound. Empty. Hollow. A space where feeling used to live.
He has learned to disappear. And no one seems to notice. Or maybe they notice and do not care. It is getting harder to tell the difference.
He plays "Syrinx" perfectly. Every breath in the right place. Every note exactly where it should be.
Sofia would nod approval. "You've learned to empty yourself."
But Yaz knows the truth. He has not learned anything.
He has simply stopped being full.