Warnings from the Future Page 5

  By the time Chelsea had disappeared back into the dark hallway, I could feel Rick shouting against my pajama shirt. When I put the phone back to my ear, I could hear it was just my name. “Sorry, sorry,” I said. I explained about Chelsea.

  “We’re here. We’re going in.”

  “How is she?”

  “The same.”

  “Rick,” I said. “Good luck.”

  “Hey. Thank you. Thanks for staying with me.”

  When the line went dead, I lost the picture. Once he was off the phone taking Shasta in, it was as though my knowledge of their lives, of everything that had happened in the last forty-five minutes, was contained within parentheses, and I couldn’t see anything before or after. Their lives were a fog to me, wholly in shadow. I sat there for a while wondering if I would get a call in the morning, connecting me to an image of Shasta recovering in a hospital bed, her gauze-wrapped legs under a medical gown and a linen blanket, sipping a boxed apple juice. Or perhaps, God forbid, I’d get a darker picture. But no, I thought: if I wanted an update, I would have to be the one to call him. Though I could get the same information from the website of the Tahoe Daily Tribune.

  It occurred to me that I could drive up to Barton Memorial in two hours, might even be there before she was out of surgery. This was what a brother would do. The idea was intoxicating—driving those dark curving roads in the night, guided by instincts so old they felt like genetic memory. I imagined myself there in the recovery room, explaining to him what happens as anesthesia wears off. I imagined him taking me up in a bear hug, her clasping my hand in thanks. After a while of imagining this, I walked back down the hallway in my pajamas.

  In bed, I nestled up to Denise. We hadn’t slept this close in years. All the usual complaints: my temperature, her loud breathing, my restlessness, her insomnia. If we aligned ourselves at opposite poles of the mattress, we could each get something akin to a decent night’s rest. I remembered how, in the early years, the nightly contact with her had been the deepest salve. The loneliness of solitary sleeping takes years to accrete to the point that another person’s sounds and movements are a comfort instead of a curse. But as I curled around Denise that night, she curled into me. I draped my arm across her ribs, and a deep, satisfied breath swelled in her chest.

  “Who was that?” she asked.

  “No one,” I said. “I’ll tell you in the morning.”

  THE UNPLAYABLE ÉTUDES

  THE FIRST OF THEM

  The first of the études always reminds her of a day when she was thirteen, though there’s no reason to remember this one day over so many others like it, while things were still good and summer meant beautiful blue skies with her parents lazing on chaise longues near the docks, her mother sipping Coca-Cola and her father a ginger ale whiskey. Her mother was reading Under the Sign of Saturn that month. Occasionally her father would use a copy of a magazine to block the sun from his face, but usually he just turned his head to the side, ambiguously dozing while he baked himself golden. She would have been in the ocher-yellow fiberglass kayak, and her brother, who had the lung capacity, would have been swimming out to the island. This was not the only perfect day, but like any piece of music, she thinks, you can only hear one moment of it at a time.

  The first of them does not sound impossible. It sounds, simply, like two distinct pieces of music being played simultaneously, perhaps in adjoining rooms. On the top is a lilting, Mozarty pastoral. She plays it and thinks of the gentle wind rolling on the water and the green coast in the distance, freckled with white cottages. Underneath is a gentle thumping march, someone rapping quietly on an old door. That’s the tune of her brother’s breaststrokes, powerful enough to cradle-rock the kayak when he passes close by. Here’s the difficulty: it’s not two pieces for two hands; it’s not two separate staves. Some notes for the upper melody come from the left hand, and some from the right. Sometimes it’s the right hand knocking, and sometimes it’s the left. Playing the pastoral and the march together requires a forced schizophrenia, and at the same time a unity. The impossibility of this first one isn’t in the hands. It’s in the mind.

  How can opposite things exist at once, even in memory? The perfection of that day, then everything after. It took her a long time to be able to play this piece without crying. She plays it and she sees the eleven o’clock sun hanging at a hawk’s angle of descent, and her brother’s arms crashing through the small swells the breeze made. He was such a strong swimmer.

  BAIRD ON LIGETI

  She had listened to an interview in which Baird said that the first time he heard Ligeti’s Invention, it gave him the image of the devil tumbling down an infinite staircase. It was perfectly chaotic, everything out of place just enough to be noticed. It was music that never went where the heart willed it. Calling it Kafka music, as some people did, was reductive. Baird was twenty-three when he heard it. He’d hated avant-garde until then, and he continued to disdain most of the ambitious composers. But he loved the Ligeti. He bought them all, the recordings and the sheet music, and sat at his piano banging away at them, particularly those études known for their difficulty. Étude no. 14a had been deemed impossible for a human player, but Baird threw himself at it nonetheless, over and over. He didn’t know if it was too difficult for any human, and he might not be the one to pull the sword from the stone, but he poured his hours into it anyway. It wasn’t practice, he said. It was play.

  He wanted to take it further. Any fool could write something well beyond the possible. The next art of the piano would be in creating work that teased you into believing it was within your reach, music that seemed to be right there in front of you. Tantalus, he called the collection of études. As he was composing, he thought often of that lonely demigod: the fruit always rising, the water always receding. All these remarks were on the record. Was she naïve to angle her neck upward? Clearly, that was what Baird wanted. He didn’t write the damn things for player piano. Still, was the music a grail or a mousetrap? Perhaps Baird was simply graying the space between the two. He never said much about the études—only his one declaration, so simple you’d think English was his second language: “Art should be more difficult.” More difficult than what?

  CANDELABRUM

  Someone has lit a candelabrum on the practice piano backstage. A candelabrum! Is she Liberace? It’s Darin who’s done it, of course. He’s the sweetest man. The sweetest men could also be dolts. Some might suggest a certain doltishness was required. She’s never counted the years it took her to realize the Sweetest Man was not what she wanted: it would have been too depressing. One couldn’t call oneself a good judge of her own character after that.

  How many of the people who dream of having a butler would, if granted one, be constantly mortified in front of him?

  Darin had seemed the perfect antidote, though that interpretation came only in retrospect. You cannot see the movement of a symphony from within it. She’s never told him about Layla. She knows the worries men get, and how quickly they sink the buoyant fantasies. Men cannot provide everything, nor can they be at peace with not providing everything. She won’t give him that dark corner of her mind. It is not his to plumb.

  All those beautiful brunches: the berries he bought, buckwheat waffles, hand-whipped cream, light-filled Sunday mornings with the most obvious Sunday morning music. It was a heaping half of the life she wanted. He had never made her lie naked, facedown, on the top of her piano. He had never pricked her skin with the long tines of a fondue fork. He did puppy-dumb things like drip wax on ten thousand dollars of piano. She blew out all the candles and touched a knuckle, not a fingertip, to a little gleam at the top of one of them, and she felt it turn into a thicker second skin inside the little folds. The antidote. The antidote to the antidote. What could she do but alternate? She did not want sweetness only. She did not want roughness only. She especially did not want anything in the middle.

  HOW HER MOTHER TOOK IT

  Like a shattered windshield. Her mother did
not fall apart, but she collapsed into a web of opaque pebbles. For the rest of her life she projected an imminent disintegration that never came. She wept for years, of course, at church services and TV commercials and offhand comments and at nothing, but those outbursts were only the surface of her mourning. Exhibit A: days after what would have been his twenty-third birthday, at a dinner in the city with the Patels and the Rosmunds, she improvised a speech about what an asshole Charlie had been sometimes.

  “Such an asshole,” she said. “I’d tell him to get his dirty shoes off the coffee table, and he’d say, ‘Get a life, Mom.’ When I told him once how high my expectations were for him, he said it was because I’d given up on myself. You can’t say something like that and not be an asshole.”

  “Marie,” her father had said, “he was fourteen.”

  “Do you mean to suggest, Ben,” she replied, “that being a teenager and being an asshole are mutually exclusive?”

  Exhibit B: at a church brunch, years after that, she was on her way to cut pound cake, and she froze, standing there with an eightinch kitchen knife held upright in her hand. At first she seemed to have zoned out, but after two-and-a-half minutes, it looked more like catalepsy. Failed interventions included a soft and then firm calling of her name, a hand on her elbow, snapping in front of her eyes (which did induce blinking), and gentle slaps on the top of her wrist. Only after her father delicately peeled back each finger from the handle and slipped the knife from his wife’s hand did she return to life. “Have you ever gotten lost in a train of thought?” she asked.

  Exhibit C: a longitudinal study of her conversations. Her mother had always made her and Charlie laugh with adult laughter, and the adults around her laugh with childish laughter. In the early years afterward, her mother’s humor was bitter and sometimes elicited smirks but never anything audible. But by the time she was an adult, her mother made no jokes, only smiled with a waspy politeness. As she progressed into her fifties, her mother failed to even recognize jokes.

  She remembers dubbing her father, dressed one day in a steelgray double-breasted suit and a matching vest, the USS Monitor, and her mother’s dry response: “Why, that’s a boat, dear.”

  She imagines that behind the grim, pale person who keeps the curtains closed and prefers only white flowers, her old mother is tumbling down an infinite staircase, that the notes of life all sound out of place just so. There’s the Ligeti again. Another metaphor. It’s not a good sign, she knows, when you think about someone you love primarily in metaphors.

  THE GENDER OF THE PIANO

  In the Spanish it is masculine. In the French it is masculine. In the Italian it is even more masculine: il pianoforte. Latin came and went too early. The Germans have come the closest: an upright piano is neuter. A grand, however, is still masculine. Bless the neutered language English: a grand piano can be what it wants—or, some would say, what one wants it to be.

  After she announced her program, that old wreck Havelin devoted his column in Pianist to a technical analysis of why a woman would never manage Baird’s études, let alone be the first. The average man’s hand, at 8.9 inches, could not manage the gaps that several of the pieces required, nor could that of a woman in the 99th percentile for hand width (here he made some facile joke about courting a gorilla). He cited a questionable study from the state university of Moldova about the relative speed of synapses in men and women. He cited lore about higher-order thinking.

  She let the crowds shout him down for her. She thought about sending him pictures of herself hanging weights from her fingers every day in the kitchen: stretching, stretching. She had taken the pictures. She decided she would send them after the fact.

  DIFFERENT IMPOSSIBILITIES

  Difficulties of the mind, like those in the first of the Tantalus études, some claim, cannot be classified as impossible. The mind is only about as well-mapped as the ocean, they say. Its depths are not known. Besides some apophatic arguments about God, its limits are not circumscribed. She thinks the lack of a map does not erase the territory.

  Impossibilities for the hand are the easiest to outline. Some spans are just too wide for a hand that tops out at five fingers. Baird has claimed, somewhat coyly, that his pieces contain no six-fingered chords: “Not if you’re clever.” But it’s not just about sprawling chords. Some call for clusters of four fingers near the top or bottom, with a pinky that has to reach for the ninth above the octave. She’s found that in Baird’s music there is a quantum uncertainty to the impossibility of reaching any particular note: On a given attempt, your finger might or might not make the stretch. Probability has to be on your side. But in all of the pieces, there are many such stretches. Probability must remain on your side more times than probability can possibly remain on your side.

  There is science, too, to back the limitations contained within the piano itself. The quick repetitions of notes in numbers 3, 4, and 7 push the responsiveness of the instrument. Each string vibrates on a wavelength. Strike the hammer too soon and it’s like a raw bounce on a trampoline. The string quiets or goes on a chaotic fritz.

  And then there is simple endurance. Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit was the famous test of will before Baird decided it was soft. When the quickly repeated notes are grouped into quickly repeated chords, there is no tag-teaming of fingers against a key to sound the note. The whole hand must rise and fall at a rate of blurred vibration that challenges all those minuscule, almost undiscovered muscles in the metacarpal network. No one wants to believe that endurance tests cannot be overcome. It’s a culture of sports movies, ultramarathoners, Jamaican bobsledders, and daredevil magicians. She can say this: Any time she’s played more than half of them in a stretch she’s had to soak her hands in ice baths, and they’ve still felt the next day as if they had been run over by a delivery truck.

  LAYLA

  The fondue fork. A kitschy Santa candle she’d inherited from an aunt. A magazine rolled so tightly it looked like a baton. Every time she saw what was coming, she flushed down to her bare hips. Every time it began happening, she felt the glue of gravity seal her seat to the ground or the bed or the piano or the counter. She felt her heart go tachycardic, a seizing hand banging crazed notes against the white keys of her ribs and the sharp black keys between them. She was always mute, stuck between the impulses of surprised laughter and a scream of terror. That was okay. As far as she could tell, Layla wanted her mute. The problem was the hours afterward. Layla left every time: for a walk, for coffee, for another girl in the registry of her phone—she didn’t know, and was left with an empty bed in a dark room with a view of the half-lit city, with the pungent pressured air of atomized old sweat. In those hours shame and regret became a literal black fog in her vision, and she’d lie curled up, immobile, blinking into it. She couldn’t see the door of her refrigerator or the bright Kandinsky print on the far wall. Her table and its three rough-finished chairs seemed to swim in a swamp. Though sometimes she considered throwing herself out the window, she wouldn’t brave stepping off the bed for the fear that, though she knew it was irrational, there were supernatural beasts in the fog. She believes now that she came close to psychosis. Another word for it is delirium. A nicer word. And the truth is she could have lived with the balance, the dark hours weighed against the most vivid in her canon. She was Layla’s passenger, and a part of her enjoyed that. Except that Layla was accelerating. The pain she wanted to inflict had to be pushed further. Layla began leaving scars. Not pinpricks but little stripes, and in semi-visible places like the insides of her upper arms. It was the look in Layla’s eyes as she did it: no longer cold coals, now more afraid than she was herself—terror, loss of control. Layla never let on much about the life of her mind, but she could see the being inside scrabbling, tumbling, the infinite staircase: there was the Ligeti again.

  Detaching required a plan of severance: a secret move to another borough, along with breaking from all mutual friends and places, and almost, she felt, of ideas. Walking alone to a drab new bag
el shop, she felt like a part of her brain had been excised. She worried for months about Layla showing up on her street holding a knife, posed just like her mother at that church brunch.

  THE COMPUTER SIMULATION

  It had not been long before a bored music writer had uploaded Baird’s sheet music to be played by a computer and then written three thousand words about it. It was good music, he argued, but when you took away the gimmick, it was second-rate good. It did not make itself immortal. When letters flowed in chastising the man, he made the audio of the computer simulation available on the website.

  Another music writer managed to sit with Baird while he listened to it for the first time. “Piss in my coffee while you’re at it,” Baird was quoted as saying as the opening notes began. He was described by turns as distraught, amused, scornful, and gleefully scornful. He called it a crippled attempt, and he was not referring to the aural limitations of the stereo system. It was the cold logic of the playing. The computer player made the pieces meaningless, Baird said. You could not hear the impossibility.

  THE AUDIENCE

  Darin is impossible to miss, of course, with a ridiculous bouquet the size of an overstuffed carnival bear. She scans the back for Layla—a ridiculous thought, but that is where she would be standing, improperly attired, if she were to resurface. In every crowd, there’s someone who looks like Charlie would have if he’d grown old enough to cultivate a proper beard. It buoys her, sometimes, to close her eyes and imagine that it is Charlie, and that she is playing to him. But that is not for tonight. This music is already crowded with ghosts.