“Chakraborty?”

…

“Chakraborty…” the teacher repeated.

…

“Bashita, are you here?”

She wasn’t. Not for the first time in the last few weeks, Bash had skipped school at lunch and not bothered coming back.

The teacher sighed and marked her absent, noting it was probably time to contact Mr. Chakraborty again. Then the teacher went on to the next name on the list…

As for Bash, she was making her way down 33rd Avenue, basking in sunshine, crunching on fries as she went, backpack bobbing left and right and back again, imagining music in her head. Music, I tell you, was Bash’s great interest, her passion, her obsession. And piano was her instrument of choice, so the music she was imagining, which hopefully you’re now imagining too, was piano music.

33rd Avenue on a sunny day with fries, for solo piano.

Not that Bash played piano often. Not a real one anyway. The school had a beaten-up, out-of-tune relic from the (non-nostalgic) past, which Bash had played a few times, and once she’d played a beautiful one at a rich friend’s house, but the rich friend subsequently got bored of her, and after that it was the odd keyboard here and there. They [Ed: they being Bash and her father (author’s sub-note: you’ll meet him later)] couldn’t afford a real piano, and wouldn’t have had where to put one in their apartment even if they could have afforded it, or so Bash’s father said.

So that left Bash with her imagination and a low-tech aid that she now got out of her backpack after finding a park bench to sit on and wiping the grease off her hands: a folded up length of several pieces of printer paper “laminated” (and held together) with packing tape, on which Bash had drawn, in permanent black marker, the 88 keys of a piano. This aid Bash unfurled and placed on her knees. She took a breath, closed her eyes; and when her eyes were closed and her fingers touched the illustrated keys, the positions of which she had long ago memorised, she heard the notes as she touched them. And I do mean she heard them. Bash could imagine music as well as anyone I’ve ever narrated, but her paper piano she truly played, although only with her eyes closed. As soon as she opened them, allowing the sights of New Zork City back inside her, she may as well have been tapping cardboard.

Today, after repeatedly working through a melody she’d been composing since Monday, she opened her eyes: startled to see someone sitting on the bench beside her. It was a grey-haired man who was a little hard of hearing. “Hello,” the man said as Bash was still trying to work out if he was a creep or not.

“Hi.”

“I see you play,” said the man.

“Kinda,” said Bash.

“What do you mean by that?” the man asked.

Bash shrugged.

“It sounded good to me,” said the man as Bash stared at him, trying to work out how he could have known what it sounded like.

“How do you know what it sounded like?” Bash asked, tapping her paper piano.

“The same way you know what it sounds like,” said the man. “You close your eyes. I closed mine. We both listened.”

“That’s not possible,” said Bash.

“You’re still so young. You only know how to listen to yourself,” said the man.

“Just don’t get nostalgic.”

The man smiled. “Not today, I won’t. But I feel it coming. I’m afraid one of these days my self-control will slip my mind and—boom!” Bash recoiled. “Death’ll get us any which way, you know.”

That sounded to Bash a little too much like something a creeper would say. Not a sex creeper, mind; an existential one.

NZC has many types of creeps, perverts and prowlers. More than any other city in the world. One must be mindful not to let one’s self be followed and cornered by some sleazebag that wants to expose its ideology to you.

“So what was it I played?” Bash asked to bring the topic back to music.

The old man whistled Bash’s melody, first the exact way in which Bash had played it, then several variations. “Believe me now?” he said after finishing.

Despite herself, Bash did.

“And you’re saying I can hear stuff other than my own playing?”

“Mhm.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, many things. Tunes and harmonies. Thoughts.”

“Other people’s thoughts?”

“Other people’s and your own. Thoughts you have you don’t know you have, for instance. Let me say this. At this moment, you’re thinking some thoughts and not others. Of the thoughts you’re thinking, you’re only aware of some, while the rest flow through you, influencing you all the same. The more of the thought unknowns you know, the more you understand yourself.”

“Did someone teach you how to do this?”

“Long ago. Somebody dear to me. Somebody from the old city.”

“Old city?”

“Old New Zork.”

“Never even heard of it,” said Bash.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

“Most haven’t and that’s fine. But Old New Zork has heard of you, Bashita Chakraborty.”

At this, Bash stood. “How do you know my name?”

The old man stood too. “Follow me,” he said, then whistled a snippet of Bash’s melody. “I want to show you something I’m certain you will like.”

Bash knew she shouldn’t go. She knew she should turn and walk in the opposite direction, away from this creepy old man. But her melody: the old man must have heard it, and that intrigued her, intrigued her past the point of ignoring her otherwise good sense. “Where do you want me to go?” she asked.

“A hotel a few blocks from here. The Pelican.”

Bash had heard of The Pelican. It was a grimey sex hotel.

“Why there?”

“Because it overlooks a parking lot with the right number of spaces more-or-less.” When Bash didn’t move, he added, “You’ll understand when we get there. The hotel has seen better days, but it used to be quite the ritzy place, and there’s a power in what things used to be.

“How about this? I walk first. You walk behind me. I won’t look back. If you ever feel uncomfortable, walk away and I won’t know you’re gone until I get to the Pelican and turn around.” With that, whistling again, the old man started walking.

Bash followed. “OK. But you’re not, like, grooming me, are you?”

The old man didn’t answer, but it was because he was hard of hearing and not for any other, more nefarious, reason, and as they walked the few blocks from the park to the Pelican he didn’t look back once, just like he’d promised.

When they arrived, the old man was happy to see Bash behind him. “Most excellent,” he said and pointed at a large parking lot on the other side of the street. “That’s the lot I mentioned.”

It looked like any other parking lot to Bash. Flat and filled with cars, the majority of which were black or white.

The hotel itself looked like a lizard about to shed its skin.

They entered together. The old man walked up to the front desk and rang a bell. A woman emerged from somewhere, glanced at Bash, gave the old man a dirty look, sighed and asked how long he wanted a room for.

“One hour. But I would like to request a room above the tenth floor and with a view to the east.”

“Anything higher than the fifth floor is extra,” the woman said while checking her computer screen.

“Price is not an issue,” said the old man.

“1204,” said the woman.

The old man took the keycard the woman passed to him, and he and Bash took the elevator to the twelfth floor. The old man used the keycard to open 1204. He stepped inside. Bash remained in the hall. “OK, but seriously. We both know how this looks. Tell me it’s not what it looks like.”

“Better. I’ll show you.” He crossed to the windows, which were drawn, and pulled open the curtains, flooding the room with sunlight it probably hadn’t seen in years. “Look out the window and tell me what you see.”

Bash hesitatingly entered the room and walked across a series of stained, soft rugs that muted her footsteps, to where the old man was standing. He moved aside, and looking out she saw—

“Do you see it?” the old man asked.

—”crooked buildings, smog, the parking lot you mentioned outside,” said Bash.

“And what does the parking lot remind you of?”

“This feels suspiciously like a test,” said Bash, feeling the words as deeply as someone who’d skipped her afternoon classes should.

“It’s not a test,” said the old man. “It’s more like an initiation.”

Bash saw:

The parking lot, but viewed from above, its entire geography—its logic—its sacred geometry—revealing itself in a way it hadn’t from street level. And the parked cars, white and black, and white, white, black, white, black, white…

“Holy shit…” said Bash.

“I knew you’d see it,” said the old man.

“It’s… a piano…”

“Go ahead,” said the old man.

“Go ahead with what?”

“Go ahead and reach out your hands.”

“The window’s closed,” said Bash, but even saying it she knew it no longer mattered and she reached out her hands and they went through the closed window, through the expanse of smoggy air between her body and the surface of the parking lot, which was, needles to say, much larger than her arms should have reached, but there was some trick of perspective that—as she touched the tops of the cars with her fingertips, really touched them—was not a trick at all but reality…

“Now play,” said the old man.

And Bash did. Standing in 1204 of the Pelican Hotel, the decaying sex spot where creeps paid for rooms by the hour, she began playing the keycars…

on the parkinglotpiano…

And each note was like nothing she had ever heard before.

Unlike what she heard when she played her paper piano—unlike what she heard when she played the beaten-up piano at school—unlike, even, what she’d heard when she’d played her rich friend’s expensive piano. Unlike not just in quality or power; unlike, in the very nature of the experience.

This… this was bliss.

—interrupted finally by the passage of time:

“The hour’s up.”

And Bash was back in the room and her hands were at her sides and the parking lot outside was just a parking lot seen from the twelfth floor. The room was dim. Dust was floating in the air.

“Holy shit,” she said.

“I knew you’d like it,” said the old man.

“It was unreal.”

They took the elevator down to the lobby and returned the keycard. Outside, in the late afternoon, “You have the talent,” said the old man. “Goodbye.”

“Wait,” Bash called after him. “What do I do now?”

But the old man was hard of hearing, and even though Bash ran after him, he was also surprisingly quick for a man of his age, and somehow he disappeared into the crowd of New Zorkers before Bash could run him down.

She felt dizzy.

She had a thousand and one questions.

As for the old man. He went home to his little brick house constructed of right angles, satisfied that after all those years he had finally found one like himself. I cannot overestimate how at ease that put him, how fulfilled it made him. He had never given up hope, of course, but his hope had grown as threadbare as the sheets on the beds in the Pelican. Now, he knew his life had not been meaningless. Now, he could finally pass on without disappointment. He had a cup of tea, then somebody knocked on his door. He opened it to see a police officer.

When Bash got home to her apartment, her father was waiting for her with a grim expression on his face.

“The school called,” he said.

“Oh,” said Bash.

“Apparently you were a no-show for some of your classes.”

“Oh.”

“The lady on the phone said it wasn’t the first time. She said it was becoming ‘a habit.’ She sounded concerned,” her father said. “She also sounded like a bitch. Started lecturing me about the importance of attendance and blah blah blah…”

“Oh?” said Bash.

“She ‘suggested’ we have a ‘serious discussion’.”

“What did you tell her?” asked Bash.

“I hung up,” said her father. “Sometimes the best thing to say to school is…”

“Fuck you, school,” said Bash, both their expressions softening.

“That’s my girl.”

Bash hugged him.

“But you do have to graduate,” he said. “Even if you don’t show up all the time. OK?”

“Yes, dad.”

“So,” her father said, elongating the syllable until he started to beam, “there is one other very serious matter I want to discuss with you. You know how you always wanted a piano…”

“Oh my god. Dad!”

Smiling, he let her push past him into their tiny living room, where, somehow, an old-but-real piano stood against a wall that until this morning had been full of stuff. How her father had found the piano, managed to get it up there or found the space for it, Bash could not fathom. But it was there. It most definitely existed.

“Happy early fourteenth birthday, B.”

Excitedly Bash sat at the piano and pressed a key.

C

It was even in tune.

But as Bash played a few more keys, chords, a melody, her excitement waned. Her heretofore joy, which was genuine, transmogrified into a mere mask of joy, which then itself cracked and fell from her face.

Her father sensed this change but said nothing.

And much like her father knew, Bash knew he knew, and his silence, his stoic parental facade, broke her maturing young heart. She imagined the difficulties he must have suffered to get the piano for her. On any day before today her joy would have continued, and continued, and continued long into the night, but here there was—today, and now every day after today—one insurmountable problem: what joy could a mere piano bring when Bash had had a taste of what it was like to play the world…