I’m backstage, box-breathing, trying to get my pulse down and my nerves under control. I need my hands steady. I’ve played concerts before, even solo ones, but never like this, never Carnegie Hall. This is a dream come true, a culmination, a knock on the door—
“Yes?” I say, surprised they’ve let someone in to see me.
My specific instructions—
Then:
I see his face.
I—
’m thirteen years old, seated in front of a piano. I keep playing the same passage. Beethoven. Always messing it up. My wrists aren’t loose enough. My mind is elsewhere. As I depress the keys, I am imagining myself: successful: famous. My parents and music teachers tell me I am phenomenal, a prodigy. But I know better. I’m good, but I’m not great. I’ll never be great.
He walks in holding a bundle of papers.
“Tonight is for me,” he says.
He drops the papers on my lap. “You’ll play this. To the very end.”
My regular teacher is sick. I have a substitute. I hate substitutes. This one is a young man, thin and handsome. After listening to me play, he says, “You lack talent—but I can grant it to you.” I ask him what he wants in return. “Someday, and that day may never come, I will call upon you to play a concert for me.”
I stare at the papers:
“Reckoning”
My playing is extraordinary. I am as if possessed.
I walk out to thunderous applause.
Carnegie Hall is full.
I take my seat behind the black Steinway, place the papers in front of me and begin to play. Immediately, I sense confusion. This is not Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit but something utterly different, atonal and demonic; fiendishly difficult, inexplicable. Inhumanly brilliant!
Gasps.
A few audience members have risen, heading for the exits—
Which are disappearing:
Further erased with each depression of the piano keys, until Carnegie Hall has no exits, and I see them in their formalwear touching hopelessly where the doors used to be. Confused, panicking.
I could not stop playing now even if I wanted to.
I don’t want to.
More is erased. Feature by feature, the walls—the entire interior—is being lost, replaced by nothingness. People are screaming. Nearly three thousand voices accompanying my pandemonium, a choir of the Damned. I no longer even flip the papers to see the notes. I know the notes, for they have always burned within.
Carnegie Hall is a smooth void.
Some rage. Others have collapsed, saliva seeping from their mouths.
He stands now, in the back, holding a drill, laughing; he raises the drill to his forehead and trepans himself.
I’ve a—
headache. I play—
They begin to vaporise, to wisp, and, wisped, become sucked into the hole in his head, one after the other, like bloody water down a drain.
Until:
They’re gone. / He’s gone.
And I am alone.
The piano: too disappears. Time itself:
disappears.
And I am I, forever alone,
in nothingness.