It came to him quite suddenly, the sum of all his experience as a composer juxtaposed just right against the rows of processed foods and piped in pop music, which is to say that at that precise moment, inside the fluorescent grocery store, Richard MacKinnon experienced profound inspiration. It stopped him dead, transmuting Aisle 5 into the Road to Damascus.
Richard stood at the end of the aisle, powerless to move, oblivious to everyone and everything around him. He closed his eyes against the brightness of the moment.
This was it. His Once-In-a-Lifetime.
That moment of pure inspiration was something akin to seeing a unicorn – something Richard had never expected because, quite simply, he didn’t believe it existed. Richard put his faith in the work. He didn’t have time to wait around for enlightenment. He worked hard to perfect his craft and often viewed composition as something closer to engineering than art. Focus, not hocus pocus. But here it was. A unicorn. And it was beautiful.
He followed the piece to its conclusion, unconsciously conducting certain passages with a flick of his wrist or, at one spot, a soaring gesture of both arms. The final notes rang out, echoed in the concert hall of Richard MacKinnon’s mind, and faded. He inhaled deeply and set about his original intention.
Balsamic. Where’s the balsamic glaze?
Suddenly, the search had taken on a new sense of urgency. He hummed the unicorn melody to himself while searching for bottles of black ink. A huge selection of vinegars and artisan olive oils clinked softly as Richard brushed past. None of those would suffice. He had the menu all planned out: caprese salad from their first date; pork chops and apple risotto from the night he proposed; creme brulee for dessert, because it was delicious.
Now, Richard worried that the store might be out of balsamic glaze, or worse, had never carried it at all. He shook his head and began to hum a little louder in agitation. Could he make his own from one of the balsamic vinegars on hand? Was this dinner thing even a good idea?
Kneeling, standing, pacing like a child in bad need of the restroom, when suddenly… there! On the top shelf where nobody ever looks. There were two bottles left. He grabbed them both and made off down the aisle, his footsteps carrying him in a prestissimo pitter-patter, scored by Richard’s fortissimo humming.
In his rush to check out, Richard rounded the corner without looking and crashed into a young man emerging from the neighboring aisle. People who bump into each other in stores generally bounce off, apologize, and carry on. But Richard was going a bit too fast and The Kid went down a bit too easily. Richard and The Kid fell hard, sending the future anniversary dinner skidding across an expanse of hard white tile flooring.
Richard’s first thought was for his food, but as he turned, his stomach leapt to his throat. The Kid’s left leg was folded sideways in an unnatural angle. When The Kid reached for it, the leg flopped around loosely as if his jeans were the only thing keeping the leg on at all. After a few seconds, Richard realized that was exactly the case. The Kid, who was probably in his early twenties, had a prosthetic leg – a leg that Richard had dislodged in his rush.
“I’m so sorry. Are you okay? Here, let me…” Richard quickly gathered The Kid’s things together in little pile. “So sorry,” he said again.
“Ah, it’s okay,” said The Kid. “Still getting used to this thing.” He grabbed his prosthesis, still loose in his pants leg, and waved it around.
“Do you need help with that or anything?”
“Nah, I should be good. Just need a minute to get situated.”
One of the store employees came over, carrying two tomatoes and a green apple that had tried to escape. She helped the two gather themselves and make their way to the checkout. The Kid paused after paying and turned back. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re… Richard MacKinnon, right? The composer?”
Richard felt the dynamic shift subtly, and his mind pivoted reflexively to prepared responses – an unfortunate consequence of a life that sometimes placed him in the public eye.
“I play a little myself,” said The Kid. “So, yeah, anyway… big fan.”
“Thanks.” Richard smiled modestly and nodded. “Keep playing and maybe one day I’ll be listening to your stuff.”
The Kid shrugged, “You never know, right?” He waved and quietly went on his way.
Richard paid and hustled home, driving quickly but carefully.
“Okay,” he said as he rushed into his office, a nice-sized room with a desk against one wall and prized Steinway upright against another. The piano, from Steinway’s Crown Jewel Collection, radiated in its flame mahogany case. Richard cleared away a few sheets of music that had been resting atop the flames. He wanted to play through the melody one time to make sure it was correct before committing it to paper. Until that was done, he wanted no distraction, no pollution.
A breath as his fingers settled lightly above the keys. Now… where was it? The tune, the melody, how did it begin? Richard looked aimlessly around the room as if searching for the missing notes. It had been right there. Even now he felt it suspended on the edge of his mind, just beyond the tips of his fingers.
Breathe, he told himself. It can’t be far. Stay calm. Be logical.
Richard looked absently around the room. Where was it? The tune wasn’t crouched in the corners. Maybe the ceiling? Ceylon? Maybe in the tea kettle. A good cup certainly couldn’t hurt. He emerged from his office, pulling at his unkempt composer-appropriate hair, stretching it towards the ceiling.
Misty MacKinnon was in the kitchen. She had seen this strange behavior more than once in their fourteen years of marriage. “So…” she prompted.
“Hmmm?” replied Richard without looking up.
“What’s got you stumped?”
Richard grunted a few incoherent sounds. He put the kettle on and continued stretching his hair.
“Richard,” Misty spoke slowly. “Richard, if you want me to help you, you’ve got to use words.” She smiled warmly as Richard turned.
“What? Oh, yes, sorry. I’m sorry. It’s just,” he paused, “I think I’ve lost something.”
“Would you like some help? What is it exactly?”
“A song. I’ve lost a song.” Richard finally let his hair drop and spoke with his hands. “How, I mean, I don’t know how to explain it. This was THE SONG. I had it right there. I was humming it and then, I don’t know, now it’s gone.”
“Was it the Hammerstein project?”
“What?” Richard’s eyes widened.
“Hammerstein. I thought…”
“No, what did you say the first time, exactly?”
“Was it the Hammerstein project?” Misty’s voice rose in a questioning question.
“No, no, like you did the first time. Like normal.”
“Was it the Hammerstein…”
Richard rushed to his office, leaving his wife alone in the kitchen. She stood for a minute, stunned, then followed.
“Say it again,” he said. He scribbled wildly as Misty repeated herself as patiently as possible. He went from desk to piano to desk and back, banging out notes then transcribing, scratching out, and repeating. Misty started to see the idea behind the insanity. Apparently, what she had said, and the way she had said it, had connected to some portion of the missing music. How many notes was that? “Was it the Hammerstein project?” she repeated. Eight syllables, eight notes.
The melody was taking shape, but Richard kept changing two or three notes in the middle. Then one at the end. The spacing of the notes started to change. He pulled on his hair and pounded his hands onto the keys in frustration.
“It’s not here,” he said. “It was so close, maybe six out of eight. But then … that’s just one phrase, one tiny piece. I thought…” A tension started to grow, crawling up and over his shoulders, reaching under his ribs, searching for his lungs.
Misty stepped forward. “What if we take the six notes you’ve got and use trial and error to figure out the other two? How many notes are there anyway? Eighty-eight? We’ll get that in no time.”
“Well, it would be eighty-eight multiplied by eighty-eight if you wanted all the possible combinations, but no, it’s really just twelve different notes that repeat over and over.”
“Twelve? That’s nothing. Even twelve times twelve is, what, one hundred forty-four?”
Richard nodded, she kissed him on the cheek and stepped into the other room, giving him the space he needed to work.
He jotted out the six notes he felt good about, with two blanks. He played the phrase, first with two C notes, one in each of the blank spaces. Then a C# in the first space, keeping C in the second. Then D and C, and so on. When he’d completed the first round and came up empty, he changed the second note to C# and started again.
Somewhere in the middle, Misty had tapped on the door to say she had put his food in the fridge and was headed to bed. Richard waved, head down, and kept working. Some combinations were obviously wrong, but Richard played through them all regardless. Some he played twice, some three times. He worked his way through every combination, but it still wasn’t right, which meant that one or of the good notes had to be wrong and it was impossible to know which one. Maybe they were all wrong. Everything was in question.
Richard did another calculation. If all eight notes of the phrase were in doubt, and there were twelve possibilities for each note, then the total number of possibilities would be equal to twelve multiplied by twelve, eight times. Twelve to the eighth power. He needed a calculator. He pulled out his phone, uncertain if it could perform that function. How often do you need to calculate exponents? There was a button that looked promising. Richard entered twelve, button, eight, enter.
429,981,696
What?! Over four hundred million? Was that right? He did it the long way: twelve times twelve times twelve times twelve times twelve times twelve times twelve times twelve. Same answer. How long had he just spent whittling down 144 possibilities? No way he could handle four hundred million.
Frustrated, Richard pushed back from the Steinway. He stared at the binary of black and white before him, awaiting their programmers instruction. A depressing thought took shape. All his efforts assumed the piano’s possession of the correct notes. What if the notes lay somewhere between the keys? Some sort of microtonal, gray scale. How many shades of gray were there? How many numbers between 0 and 1? A brief memory of college calculus flittered through Richard’s mind. As n approaches infinity, he thought. He slumped for a moment, then breathed deeply, and unable to deal with the infinite, set to work on the four hundred million.
When Misty woke the next morning, she found Richard sitting on the floor of his office, not really awake, not really asleep.
“Were you able to sleep at all?”
Richard shook his head. His eyes were red, clothes disheveled.
She left him there and came back in a few minutes with a bottle of NyQuil and a serving spoon. “Here,” she said, sitting on the floor next to her husband. “Drink up and get some sleep. Tonight you’re taking me out to dinner.” When he looked at her blankly she added, “Fourteen years is a long time. We should celebrate.”
“Dinner,” he grimaced. “I’ve got groceries in the car. I was going to cook.”
“And now you’re taking me out to eat. I have my doubts about anything baked in a car.”
“I’m so sorry. It’s just that…”
“Shush. You’re still working on yesterday. Get some sleep and catch up to me on our anniversary.”
#
Richard sat at his piano as he had every day for as long as he could remember. Only this time something felt different. His hands were cold and he noticed a slight tremor as his fingers hovered over the keys.
He was nervous. Richard looked over his shoulder and saw Ms. Bartel, his first piano teacher, sitting beside him, waiting for him to begin.
This was still his office. There was the old oak desk in the corner. This was his prized Steinway.
But it was also the room where he had first taken lessons. Signatures and scribbles from all of Ms. Bartel’s students covered the far wall. The wide variety of ages and personalities was on display, like a yearbook page turned graffiti. And there, about a third of the way up, Richard saw his own name neatly printed in solid black marker.
Ms. Bartel cleared her throat. She seemed so young now, as if Richard had gone on aging and she’d stayed the same.
“Whenever you’re ready,” she said. But the words she spoke were Mandarin Chinese. Richard only understood them because of the subtitles that appeared wherever he looked, as if burned onto his retinas. Unsure how to respond, he nodded and tried to focus on the piano keys.
That’s when he noticed the extra key on the piano. There were three white keys in a row. That wasn’t right. One of the notes had to be Middle C, to the left of that a B note. What was this strange new interloper?
“Richard…” came a gentle prod from the subtitled teacher.
Richard looked at the music in front of him. It was unfamiliar and Richard would have to navigate around the intrusion of the new key. Nevertheless, unprepared as he was, Richard set his fingers to the keys and began to play.
He paused frequently, looking from his hands to the music and back, always conscious of the additional key, so while most of the notes Richard played were technically correct, the timing, or lack thereof, resulted in a stilted and shambling mess. From over his shoulder, he felt that you-really-should-have-practiced-more-this-week look from Ms. Bartel.
After a particularly rough passage, Richard gave up all pretense. He broke off the piece and stared directly at the key to the right of the Middle C. To his amazement, the key changed color. A beautiful translucent blue stared back at him.
He had to know.
Richard raised his right hand and fell upon the key with a heavy middle finger. Richard had imagined several possible outcomes, but the sound that followed was wholly unexpected. The violent snapping of strings, the whine of joints unjointed, and the sound of mighty rushing waters. He wasn’t certain if the piano itself turned to water or perhaps a wave from some unknown depth had risen to swallow the instrument. It all happened so fast, like a film reel with frames missing.
There was no more piano, only water. It slipped through Richard’s fingers and slid off his clothes. It danced across the floor like mercury and escaped through the cracks.
“Well then. That’s as good a place to stop as any,” Ms. Bartel said, standing to leave.
Richard wasn’t listening or reading the subtitles. All his attention was on his left hand, where a final droplet of water was delicately balanced in the crook of his third finger. He moved to support the weight of his left hand with his right and peered into the unfathomable depths of that tiny droplet. Strange golden infinities gazed back.
“Xià cì jiàn,” Ms. Bartel called out as she left the room. The door slammed shut behind her and the water droplet slipped away. It was gone. Richard’s bewildered eyes popped open to the rays of the late afternoon sun and the sound of his wife’s voice.
#
James Hearst sat apart, the sounds of the restaurant accompanying him as the first guests began to enter. He hadn’t had the gig long, but it was a good one. Solid pay, steady tips, and one of the best meals in town when the night was done.
James’ fingers flowed across the keys. He eased into the night with a few light standards that he liked to think of as an appetizer course. Nothing too rich too soon or you’d risk blowing your palette.
The first set went well and the restaurant filled up nicely. At the break, he took stock of the crowd. They looked ready for something a little more substantial. Even if they weren’t, he didn’t think he could hold back much longer. He was eager to try out his latest piece.
Complex arpeggios rippled out, both hands working together to build a bed that the melody would soon lie upon. He still wasn’t sure it was the proper accompaniment. But as the first notes of the melody began to bloom, he realized that the best things shine regardless of their surroundings.
In the restaurant, the chatter of guests died out. No more servers hustling to and from the kitchen. A whisper of awe filled the room. James dove into the music, further and further down. He did not even notice the sound of a glass crashing to the floor.
But then there were voices. And a man, yelling… yelling in his direction, closer now.
“Thief! Thief!”
James was just beginning to turn when he was tackled from the piano bench. Fortunately, a couple of the nearby diners reacted quickly. They grabbed the man, who was still screaming, and wrestled him towards the door.
“Stole … everything … how did … how …” The shouts drifted out the door.
It was the strangest thing.
From the ground James was unable to see who had attacked him. But further back, he saw a woman standing alone in the middle of the crowded room. She was pale, transparent, as if all her opacity and mass had just evaporated. And the look on her face. James knew that look all too well. He’d had a similar look when he lost his leg – the shock of having such an integral part of himself ripped away.
“You okay?” asked a diner, pointing to the prosthetic leg.
“Oh, yeah. Never really get used to this thing though.” He looked back for the woman, but she was gone. Maybe she was never there at all.
The diner helped him up. “That’s some song you were playing. Never heard anything like it.”
“Thanks,” said James, dusting himself off.
“Mind playing it again now they got that loony out of here?”
James nodded and after reassurance from the restaurant manager, turned back to the piano. A perplexed look crossed his brow. What was it he’d been playing? Suddenly, he couldn’t remember.