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 bagel 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.
She wonders if she could tell, had she more time to scrutinize them, which have come to see her play and which have come to see her fail. Probably not. It’s always hard to tell a wolf. Havelin is out there. She can hear his haughty voice surfing the top of the hush. They wear tuxedos and gowns, armor against being interesting.
She pumps the pedals a few times, loosening her feet, and puts one atom of each fingertip against the flat plane of white keys, and listens to the silence become absolute. The last utterances of conversation carom from wall to wall until the curtains soak them up. There is always something dumb about an audience—dumb in the old sense: mute and staring. The opposite of deaf, not just by convention, but by design, by definition. Listening only. Seeing pictures of old gramophones, she always imagines the horn of the player to be a receiver, an ear, when that is the opposite of its purpose. Why is it so comforting, this idea that she could be wrong about everything?
The first étude is already playing. She is glad to be thinking of something else. The undistracted mind creates its own ripples. Still, she tries to listen for a moment, to see if she is keeping Schrödinger’s cat both properly alive and properly dead.
HOW HER FATHER TOOK IT
He cried and he didn’t at properly surprising times: at breakfast three days later, but not at the wake; at the viewing, but not at the funeral; not at the pool where he went to swim his laps, or anytime he walked down by the docks, but, for reasons no one understood, every time he went to the grocery store. It petered out: a slow curved line that never quite reached its asymptote.
Sometimes it could be years between little meltdowns. Sometimes they seemed to have gone away forever.
Charlie grew mythic, just a touch, in her father’s discussions of him. He would have gotten those swim scholarships to Michigan and Stanford. His height chart had never flattened out: Charlie might have spurted past both him and Marie and been the next Michael Phelps. You should have seen him after a meet. He’d put down four cheeseburgers and a bucket of fries. Did you know he wrote poetry? We didn’t, but we found it in his journal. Beautiful stuff, truly. It sounded like Yeats.
The next summer he was back in his chaise longue, though now he did read, and what he read was appropriately affirming and humanistic: Man’s Search for Meaning, The Long Goodbye, Tuesdays with Morrie. “Pablum,” Marie said when she was feeling generous. “Dreck,” she said when she was not. In this way he became golden again, while his wife turned to salt. He became better in conversation, more philosophical and circumspect. His laugh was less frequent, but it now had an anchor. Though she tries not to, she sometimes resents him for being improved by tragedy.