“Can you talk? What’s your name? Oh God. Is your neck broken? Can you hear me?”
I realize this woman is alarmed because she does not understand the situation. The situation is that I have been transformed into an invincible angel who feels no pain. I realize I must elucidate the situation before she calls an ambulance. I leap up from the ground. The woman’s alarmed look is nothing compared to the way the branches of the magnolia tree begin to riot in the wind. I scuttle across the street and snatch up my bike. Straddling it, I flash her the devil horns.
“Hail Satan.”
I ride away, wobbling, as fast as I can.
chapter twenty-seven
I’m fine and my bike’s fine and the situation is 100 percent under control.
I would be exaggerating if I said that my skin is in shreds or my bike looks like it’s been beaten by thugs or if I claimed there was any kind of problem at all.
In fact, I have made it home safely and stowed my bike safely in the garage and all the doors are locked and the lights are on.
There is only one bloody handprint on the garage door to suggest—incorrectly—that matters have exceeded my ability to deal with them. There is only one wrecked pair of gold tights in the kitchen garbage can to indicate that anything has veered even slightly off course.
My thoughts dart from one bright thing to another. I sit on the kitchen counter smoking a joint and drinking electric lemonade while drops of purple-black blood run down my shins and make fascinating splatter patterns on the kitchen floor. I make seven bowls of oatmeal, one for each day of the upcoming week, stud each one with razors, no, raisins, swaddle them in Saran Wrap, and line them up in the fridge. This is what I will eat this week. These are my monk’s rations. I draw up a new and improved practice schedule and tape it to the wall; it’s as big as a map of the world and contains all my plans.
What I need to do is get Serious. It’s time. I’ve had my fun. It’s okay to be free but not so free you lose track of what’s Serious. If you ever get that free, you need to reel yourself in, because the edges of the world are as sharp as glass, and if you ride over them you’re going to get torn up. I wanted to hear that secret music, so I let it play and now that I’ve played it, it’s time to turn it off and be Serious again.
I rearrange the living room furniture, pushing the couch and coffee table against the wall and dragging all the lamps into a circle around the piano. It is time, I decide, to learn some new music. Something daring. Something bold. Something the judges at the Showcase have never heard before. I rifle through my collection of sheet music until I find the tattered folder marked Sesquipaedia. It’s a piece I’ve wanted to play for years but never had time for: thirty-five pages long, devilish timing, written by a little-known composer called Stanley Otter Fish, who was run over by a bread truck at the age of twenty-three.
Sensational, sniffed Dr. Scaliteri when I showed it to her last year.
But if I’m going to make an impression on Tzlatina Tzoriskaya, that’s exactly what I want my performance to be.
I take out the sheet music and lay it out neatly on the floor, pages and pages of notes like tiny black beetle eggs. I walk through the rows of music like a maze. Someone once told me that it’s possible to play any piece of music after hearing it a single time, without ever looking at the notes. Everything we see and hear gets stored in our memory, whether we realize it or not, and it’s only a matter of coaxing it back to the surface. I circle the room in my bare feet, listening to the music in my head and trying not to peek at the pages on the floor. As I circle, I can feel the Prokofiev concerto being ripped up like weeds and tossed into a gnarled heap. If I can learn music, I can unlearn it too. I can unteach my fingers to play the notes I spent so long mastering. I could make the whole keyboard foreign again if I wanted to. I could rewind and rewind and rewind until the whole thing