And yet: You did what you did and made what you made. Here you are. And to tell the truth, this meadow had its moments. Oh pequeño infinito! O little infinity! We give it back. We give it back.
YOU STAND IN the evening rain, on the steps of her trim gingerbread. The Voice got you here, a last, best act of navigation. She opens, a woman in the foyer of middle age. Her face freezes in the happy irritation she’s prepared for someone else. She, your cells’ lone heir and executor, is busy with joys and fears you don’t even have the right to ask about. But now her whole task is you. She swallows her half scream back down her throat and pulls you inside.
There’s anger and there’s excitement. Hurried questions, distress and fuss thrust at you, along with a serving of noodles left over from a dinner for one. She towels dry your hair. The words pour out of her, unbearable. But they won’t need bearing for long. Are you feverish? What happened to your lip? What’s wrong with you? Jesus, Daddy, try to eat something.
She’s living in a two-page spread from a furniture catalog. The townhouse is as clean as a C major scale. The curtains have just been ironed. The throw pillows pile up on the sectional in chilling symmetry. Photos of her crossing finish lines in tech clothing and various stages of pain grace the walls. Four posture-correcting ladder-back chairs surround the dining room table as if they’ve been lined up with a ruler. An umbrella stand flanks the front door and, next to it, a shoe rack with several identical coral-colored running shoes. All a gift from you, this rage for rational management. It’s what happens when you teach an eight-year-old that nothing — nothing at all — is secure.
But there’s a piano, too. A six-foot baby grand, its keyboard open, Schumann’s Scenes from Childhood on the music rack, and the lid open on the short stick. It doesn’t seem possible.
You’re playing again? Why didn’t you say anything?
She doesn’t answer. She’s at the window, glancing up and down the street, then pulling shut the curtains.
On the near side of the music rack is a photo: A young man and woman amusing themselves together. The man crouches over a toy piano, arms above his head, fingers poised to pounce on the tiny keys. The woman holds up one hammy palm, eyes closed, her mouth a ringing O! You knew those kids, knew the photographer. How long did it last, that amateur duet? Not even ten years, from start to finish. Pero este amor, amor, no ha terminado. But this love, Love, has no finish line.
In the background of the photo grins a fearless girl. She’s in the kitchen now, making tea with an electric kettle and tea bags taken from an elegant roundel. Two vanilla wafers for each of you. She comes back into the dining room where you sit, her brows a single mound of worry in the middle of her forehead.
You think: My only decent composition.
Other photos on the sideboard tell the truer story: preteen and her fledgling half-sister, at the foot of a bumper Christmas tree. Mother, stepfather, and happy grad, her mortarboard caught in midair. Young woman and her feckless man in front of Half Dome, their walking sticks raised in a mock-joust. All the dense, long years of daily being, the real heft of it, not the mere soundtrack you imagine. You know nothing of her causes, the pulls on her compass, what she does all day to pay the mortgage on this trim place. In her life, you were mostly an itinerant sower of pain. And still she came and found you out in your self-made wilderness, kept you phone company every week when you had none, bought you a dog.
She sits and pours. First the tea, then a cookie go into her mouth like she’s blowing on a pitch pipe.
Please tell me you didn’t write those things.
The ones that proliferate like living things, all over the Net. You’d like to tell her that. You almost could. It’s almost true.
You shrug, and the shrug makes her curse you. The pent-up stress of forty years. More profanity, and she starts to cry. You take her hands, but she flicks yours away and pulls hers to her neck. She closes her eyes, bows her head, pinches the bridge of her nose. You see wild gray strands in her hair. You, who never see anything.
Her voice wavers like a student violin. I don’t get you. What are you trying to do?
But music doesn’t do. It is. Dust in the wheat, sand among the sands.
So many noises abroad tonight, it’s hard to add a thing. The air fills with trivial ecstasies. And here, at last, it’s enough to attend, to keep still and add nothing to the mix. The spring wind takes the metal blinds and scrapes them against the window casement. There are sirens, miles away. Fire or violence, someone’s life ending. A trickle of radio from a passing car. The chirping of gadgets. The chime of a glockenspiel broadcast from an ice-cream truck three blocks and sixty-six years away. The television of neighbors through the townhouse walls, tuned to the eternal national talent show. The hum of air conditioners, like frogs in the trees. A cheering crowd, an echoing PA. A cloud of buzzing insects and the silent pings of bats that hunt them in crazy knots across the sky. The coursing of blood in the capillaries of your ears. No place is greater than where you lived.
I wanted to make you proud.
She shakes her head, incredulous. Proud? I thought you were God.
Until I left.
She shakes her head, denying the denial.
The phone rings. She finds the offending device and kills it. But not before you hear the ringtone three times. It’s as familiar as breathing, but you can’t place it. Then you can.
What is that? Where did you. .?
She doesn’t answer you — you, the one person on Earth who doesn’t need that ringtone identified. Instead, she rises and whisks the tea service away before you can finish. No lingering, this one. There are problems to solve, systems to work, old nightmares to keep from reprising.
You can stay here. I’ll hide you. We’ll call that lawyer tomorrow, the one I told you about. He’ll figure out something.
You hear the first van pull up and a door open. She looks at you, thick with hope, ready to believe that even now, every misguided public confession might still be called back. Then her face clouds over again with pain. You really did that?
You squint: Did what? There’s much to plead guilty to. But you want to be sure.
She can’t stop looking, scrutinizing you for evidence. Her eyes say: You turned a living cell into a music box? A CD? Something in the look could almost pass for excitement.
Somebody says they’ve isolated it already. Somebody uploaded. .
No, you say. Not possible.
The rattle and thump of another van, on the other side of the house. Boots hitting pavement. You can’t make out how many. Then your daughter asks what she hasn’t asked since childhood.
What does it sound like?
Her eyes shoot toward the piano. A shy request: Play it for me, this thing that the world will only ever be able to guess at. Once, on another coast, you told a terrified eight-year-old, Nothing is going to change. We’ll still be like we always were. Now your frightened forty-two-year-old triathlete data miner needs another lie.