The autolocks thud home behind me, sealing the performance space. It’s comforting. I’m inside, enfolded in the symphony as though its hands have cupped themselves around me and pulled me into a chamber of absolute focus. The lights dim. Conversational thrum falls away. I find my way to my seat more by feel than sight. Dirty looks from men in topaz hats and women in spectacle eyes as I squeeze across them. Gauche, I know. Absurdly late to an event that happens once in a decade. Plopping down just as Hua Chiang steps up to the podium.
His hands rise like crane wings. Bows and horns and flutes flash with movement and then the music comes, first a hint, like blowing mist, and then building, winding through a series of repeated stanzas that I have heard Alice play perhaps ten thousand times. Notes I heard first so long ago, stumbling and painful, that now spill like water and burst like ice flowers. The music settles, pianissimo again, the lovely delicate motifs that I know from Alice’s practice. An introduction only, she has told me, intended to file away the audience’s last thoughts of the world outside, repeated stanzas until Hua Chiang accepts that the audience is completely his and then Alice’s viola rises, and the other players move to support her, fifteen years of practice coming to fruition.
I look down at my hands, overwhelmed. It’s different in the concert hall. Different than all those days when she cursed and practiced and swore at Telogo and claimed his work couldn’t be performed. Different even from when she finished her practices early, smiling, hands calloused in new ways, face flushed, eager to drink a cool white wine with me on our balcony in the light of the setting sun and watch the sky as monsoon clouds parted and starlight shone down on our companionship. Tonight, her part joins the rest of the symphony and I can’t speak or think for the beauty of the whole.
Later, I’ll hear whether Telogo has surpassed Banini for sheer audacity. I’ll hear how critics compare living memories of ancient performances and see how critical opinion shifts to accommodate this new piece in a canon that stretches back more than a century, and that hangs like a ghost over everything that Alice and her director Hua Chiang hope for: a performance that will knock Banini off his throne and perhaps depress him enough to stop rejoo and stuff him in his grave. For me, competing against that much history would be a heavy weight. I’m glad I’ve got a job where forgetting is the most important part. Working on the pop squad means your brain takes a vacation and your hands do the work. And when you leave work, you’ve left it for good.
Except now, as I look down at my hands, I’m surprised to find pinpricks of blood all over them. A fine spray. The misty remains of the little kid with the dinosaur. My fingers smell of rust.
The tempo accelerates. Alice is playing again. Notes writhe together so fluidly that it seems impossible they aren’t generated electronically, and yet the warmth and phrasing is hers, achingly hers. I’ve heard it in the morning, when she practiced on the balcony, testing herself, working again and again against the limitations of herself. Disciplining her fingers and hands, forcing them to accept Telogo’s demands, the ones that years ago she had called impossible and which now run so cleanly through the audience.
The blood is all over my hands. I pick at it, scrape it away in flakes. It had to be the kid with the dinosaur. He was closest when he took the bullet. Some of his residue is stuck tight, bonded to my own skin. I shouldn’t have skipped mopdown.
I pick.
The man next to me, tan face and rouged lips, frowns. I’m ruining a moment of history for him, something he has waited years to hear.
I pick more carefully. Silently. The blood flakes off. Dumb kid with the dumb dinosaur that almost made me miss the performance.
The cleanup crew noticed the dinosaur toy too. Caught the irony. Joked and snorted nosecaps and started bagging the bodies for compost. Made me late. Stupid dinosaur.
The music cascades into silence. Hua Chiang’s hands fall. Applause. Alice stands at Chiang’s urging and the applause increases. Craning my neck, I can see her, nineteen-year-old face flushed, smile bright and triumphant, enveloped in our adulation.
We end up at a party thrown by Maria Illoni, one of the symphony’s high donors. She made her money on global warming mitigation for New York City, before it went under. Her penthouse is in Shoreline Curve, daringly arcing over the seawalls and the surf, a sort of flip of the finger to the ocean that beat her storm surge calculations. A spidery silver vine over dark water and the bob of the boat communities out in the deeps. New York obviously never got its money back: Illoni’s outdoor patio runs across the entire top floor of the Shoreline and platforms additional petals of spun hollowform carbon out into the air.
From the far side of the Curve, you can see beyond the incandescent cores of the superclusters to the old city sprawl, dark except along where maglines radiate. A strange mangle of wreckage and scavenge and disrepair. In the day, it looks like some kind of dry red fungal collapse, a weave of jungle canopy and old suburban understory but at night, all that’s visible is the skeleton of glowing infrastructure, radial blooms in the darkness, and I breathe deeply, enjoying all the freshness and openness that’s missing from those steaming hideouts I raid with the pop squad.
Alice sparkles in the heat, perfectly slim, well curved — an armful of beautiful girl. The fall air is under thirty-three degrees and pleasant, and I feel infinitely tender toward her. I pull her close. We slip into a forest of century-old bonsai sculptures created by Maria’s husband. Alice murmurs that he spends all his time here on the roof, staring at branches, studying their curves, and occasionally, perhaps every few years, wiring a branch and guiding it in a new direction. We kiss in the shadows they provide, and Alice is beautiful and everything is perfect.
But I’m distracted.
When I hit the kids with my Grange, the littlest one — the one with that stupid dinosaur — flipped over.
A Grange is built for nitheads, not little kids, so the bullet plowed through the kid and he flipped and his dinosaur went flying. It sailed, I mean really sailed, through the air. And now I can’t get it out of my mind: that dinosaur flying. And then hitting the wall and bouncing onto the black mirror floor. So fast and so slow. Bang bang bang down the line… and then the dinosaur in the air.
Alice pulls away, seeming to sense my inattention. I straighten up. Try to focus on her.
She says, “I thought you weren’t going to make it. When we were tuning, I looked out and your seat was empty.”
I force a grin. “But I did. I made it.”
Barely. I stood around too long with the cleanup guys while the dinosaur lay in a puddle and sopped up the kid’s blood. Double extinct. The kid and the dinosaur both. Dead one way, and then dead again.
There’s a weird symmetry there.
She cocks her head, studying me. “Was it bad?”
“What?” The Brontosaurus? “The call?” I shrug. “Just a couple crazy ladies. Not armed or anything. It was easy.”
“I can’t imagine it. Cutting rejoo like that.” She sighs and reaches out to touch a bonsai, perfectly guided over the decades by the map that only Michael Illoni can see or understand. “Why give all this up?”
I don’t have an answer. I rewind the crime scene in my mind. I have the same feeling that I did when I stood on spaghetti maggots and went through their fridge. There’s something there in the stink and noise and darkness, something hot and obsessive and ripe. But I don’t know what it is.