In an old section with dark, narrow streets and ancient buildings. But he’d saved himself by turning back and running for the exit and the elevator. Then the contrasting gasp as he leaped into space, and the wailing, sighing, screaming notes, as he hurled pavementward, the weird melody inspired by the whirling color scene of the street and sidewalk and people watching in horrified fascination, watching him, Dooley Hanks, and hearing The Sound, his sound, as it built into a superb fortissimo, the grand finale of his greatest solo-the harsh final note as his body slammed into the sidewalk and fused flesh, blood and splintered bone with concrete, forcing a final, glorious expulsion of breath through the clarinet just before it left his lifeless fingers. The magic view would be revealed in the first clear notes of the instrument and the heads of the other sightseers would turn in wonder. All he need do was take his clarinet from the case, assemble it. And suddenly he had been seized by the same mad exultation, certain that a flash of inspiration had ended his quest, placed the goal at his fingertips.

It had been a bright, clear day, and the magic of the view had enthralled him. The last time had been in New York, on top of the Empire State Building, over a hundred stories above the street. He’d had it before, but never quite so strongly. The narrowness of his escape from the suicidal impulse on the Weser’s bank still worried him.

A shudder of breathless anticipation coursed through Dooley Hanks’s body as his fingers trembled with the catch on the battered clarinet case.

What a frantic blending of the whole of his wild, sweetly sad, tortured existence, just as his straining lungs expelled their final gasp into a final note and inhaled the cold, dark water. What a mad montage that would be! What an inspiration for the final gurglings of the clarinet. He recalled the clichéd allegation, which he had previously viewed with iconoclastic contempt but now felt almost ready to accept, that a drowning person was treated to a swift viewing of his entire life as it flashed before his eyes in a grand finale to living.

And the sound, whatever sound there was, being made by the bubbling water closing over them. But was it really a sign? Dooley, shivering now at the thought of what he was thinking, stood at the Weser’s edge and imagined how it would be…wading out slowly from the bank, letting his emotions create the tune for the clarinet, tilting his head back as the water became deeper so that the instrument would stick out of the water after he, Dooley, was under it, the bell of the clarinet last to submerge.

The Star Mouse by Fredric Brown