“I have come to claim my prize. He is there, inside the coffin. In truth, he is mine already. But a good musician holds respectfully until the final notes are played. This man’s melody is finished, but his mourners have come to add a few stanzas. A coda, of sorts. Let us listen. Heaven can wait. Do I frighten you? I shouldn’t. I am not death. A grim reaper in a hood, reeking of decay? Nor am I the Great Judge whom you all fear at the end.” 

These are the opening lines of the novel, where the narrator, Music, says that Frankie is his “prize.” He considers Frankie to be his because he lived his life with a great portion of Music inside of him. Music equates Frankie’s life to a melody, and he establishes that he is going to tell Frankie’s life story in much the same way that a person experiences a piece of music. Music also acknowledges the existence of heaven and the idea of a Great Judge, or God, at the end of life, themes that will come into play later in the novel.

“And yes, I infused the man in the coffin, my mysterious and misunderstood Frankie Presto, whose recent death during a festival concert was witnessed by a sold-out crowd, his body lifting to the rafters before dropping to the stage, a lifeless shell. It caused quite a stir. Even today, as they gather in this centuries-old basilica for his funeral, people are asking, ‘Who killed Frankie Presto?’ because no one, they say, dies that way on his own. That is true.” 

The novel opens with the premise that Frankie died under strange circumstances, and as Music tells Frankie’s story, pieces of the mystery come together. The main mystery is that Frankie’s body seemed to lift off the ground as he died before falling back to the stage. This is one of the first supernatural, or magical, elements in the novel, besides the fact that the embodiment of Music is telling Frankie’s story. 

“Did you ever notice how music sounds different played outdoors? A cello in a garden wedding? A calliope in a seaside amusement park? That’s because I was born in the open air, in the breaks of ocean waves and the whistling of sandstorms, the hoots of owls and the cackles of the birds. […] Only man shapes my edges to make me beautiful.” 

While this is Frankie’s story, Music reveals pieces of himself during his narration. Here, he reveals that he is timeless and originated in the sounds of nature, and that humans have refined him.