Six Months
I was a fussy baby. The only thing that quieted me was my great-grandfather’s piano. They placed my bassinet directly on the piano, with noise-canceling headphones to keep from damaging my ears. His chords came up through the instrument, up through my bones. “That child is full of music, I’m telling you,” he told anyone who listened.
Five Years
If my family couldn’t find me, they looked under the piano. I’d curl up there and listen to the space.
My great-grandfather held me over the piano’s edge, let me lift the hammers and strum the strings. “The piano is a percussion instrument, Katja. Percussion and strings at once. It can be the whole band.”
“Again,” I’d say, and he’d pick me up again. “I want to be the piano.”
“You want to be in the piano?”
He understood me better than anyone, but even he never understood.
Eight Years
I’d go with him to synagogue on Saturday mornings and holidays. On the walk to and from, he told stories. My favorite was about a child in the old country who had never been taught to read. “In order to have a good year, you have to go to synagogue and pray on Yom Kippur,” people told the child. The child followed them to synagogue. She didn’t know the prayers they sang, but she wanted a good year, so she lifted her flute to her lips.
The congregants grew outraged. “Quiet! It’s forbidden to play an instrument on Yom Kippur!”
“No, it’s you all who should be quiet,” said the rabbi. “Her heartfelt notes are more pleasing to God than prayers spoken without any feeling behind them. God turns her song into prayer.”
“I’m like her,” I told Pop.
He raised his eyebrows. “You know how to read.”
I didn’t know how to explain what I meant: that all my thoughts came out as music, that music said more than words.
Fifteen Years
“Play it for me again.” Pop put his hands up to the monitor headphones, cupping them closer.
I started the piece over, and he closed his eyes, his head nodding with the beat. It wasn’t the first thing I’d written, but it was the first I’d been confident enough to play for him. I sat across from him chewing my thumb.
“The drums,” he said when it ended. “They aren’t real drums?”
“I programmed them myself. Built the synthesizer, too.”
“Ach, that’s my girl. Computers and music and skill and talent and hard work. That’s my girl. What about the piano?”
“I designed that patch, too.” I let the pride seep out, just a bit.
“Amazing. It sounds almost real.”
“Almost?”
“The keys need a little more weight. The notes need weight. But the piece itself is magnificent. Good composition, good arrangement. Have you ever thought about playing your songs with other musicians instead of doing all the parts yourself on a computer?”
“Where do you find other musicians?”
He put his head in his hands. “What a time we live in. You go to school in a cloud, and you meet your friends in a cloud; and you make such beautiful music but you’ve never met another musician.”
I didn’t know what he meant. “It’s okay, Pop. You don’t have to meet people in person to be friends with them. And I know you, so I’ve met another musician.”
He shook his head. “Come with me.”
We put down our headphones, and I followed him down the hall. He sat down at his piano, motioned for me to sit down next to him. We hadn’t sat together that way for a few years; the bench felt smaller than I remembered.
He started playing a simple bass line with his left hand. I tried to stop the part of my brain that kept analyzing the rates of attack and decay, translating piano into programming.
“Play over it,” he said.
I listened for a moment, then started to pick out a melody, adding chords for color, arpeggiating and inverting them as I grew more confident. We were playing in D. I liked D; D always resonated in my bones.
“That’s music,” he said without stopping. “That’s friendship and music and love and sex. Don’t giggle, I can say the word. I’m old, not dead. One person can make music, too, but it’s better when it’s a conversation. Between you and another musician or between you and an audience.”
I hit a wrong note then. He gave me a funny look, then incorporated my wrong note into his bass line, sliding past it and making it part of the song.
Sixteen Years
Pop was always right. I met Corrina when we were paired together in bio lab. The only other person in class from the same city, and we wound up being paired together. I don’t remember how we realized we both played music. Once we figured it out, it didn’t take too much convincing to get her over to my house with her violin. My house because she hadn’t even seen a real piano before.
We didn’t have any songs in common, or even a genre, so we invented our own. I’m not sure they were any good, but they were us; and us had never happened before. I liked the way the sound filled the room, the way it became something more than both of us. Bodies and music, fingers and hands, we drew each other out.
Eighteen Years
At the age of ninety, my great-grandfather got his second tattoo. A piano keyboard, a single octave, the black keys obscuring the numbers that had been inked into his arm when he was a little boy. I took him to the tattoo parlor.
“I thought Jews weren’t supposed to get tattoos,” I said to him.
He said, “If I didn’t have any choice the first time, I don’t see why I shouldn’t get to replace it with something I won’t mind looking at.”
Whenever I caught him looking at it, I thought of his stories, of the little girl with the flute and the way her offering transformed.
Twenty Years
Pop died playing piano.
“It’s a shame he died alone,” a great-aunt said to me at the house after the funeral.
“He didn’t.” I knew it was true. “If he was in the middle of a song, he wouldn’t have said he was alone.”
I walked over to the piano bench, sat down. His sheet music stood open to the page he’d been playing. I rested my fingers on the keys in the same places his fingers had rested last. Looked at the page, a song called “Don’t Fence Me In.” After the first few hesitant bars, I recognized it as a song he had played when I was a kid, and I picked up the tempo a little.
“You play so well, Katja,” said another great-aunt. “Why didn’t you stay in conservatory?”
“I don’t know, Aunt Bianka. I guess I got bored.”
I had gotten bored, it was true. Bored of playing and studying in nonexistent spaces, hundreds of miles from my classmates. And then I was booted, but I never knew which relatives had been told. My parents were still angry.
Pop had been more philosophical. “You don’t need a school to tell you you’re a musician. You’ve got music coming out your ears.”
I wanted his piano, but I had no room for it. I shared a house in the city with six others, writing earworms for online ads. The piano went to Great Aunt Bianka’s, though nobody there knew how to play. I considered getting a tattoo like his, but it wasn’t quite the memorial I wanted.
I tried composing something for him, but nothing came. What I wanted to write was there inside me, somewhere just beneath my skin. The music I made didn’t say what I wanted it to say. He was right all those years ago. It didn’t have enough weight, but nothing I did fixed it.
Twenty-One Years
It took me six months to come up with the idea. The night it hit me, I couldn’t go to sleep until I had figured out the logistics.
I stumbled down the stairs at four in the morning, triumphant, over-caffeinated, looking for someone to share with. I’d rather it had been Lexa or Javier; but Lexa had recently papered her windows and started working nights, and Javi was in bed already. Kurt sat at the table, a chipped yellow mug of black coffee in his hands, a notebook on the table. He was the only other musician living in the house, and we often ran into each other in the kitchen in the middle of the night when everyone else was asleep. Once I had made it clear I wasn’t interested in fucking him, we had settled into a friendship of sorts. I didn’t like him very much, despite our commonalities.
“What are you working on?” I asked, even though I knew.
He flipped the notebook shut. “What do you think?”
“I think it’s hilarious you’re working on a concept album called the Great Upload but you write on dead tree paper. What I probably should have asked was ‘how’s it going’?”
“It’s going okay song-wise. There’s still something missing in the actual arrangements, though. I go to record them, and they sound flat. Are you still willing to put down some piano parts for me sometime?”
“Sure,” I said. “Say when.”
I poured myself some cereal and sat down in a chair opposite him.
“You’re welcome. Now it’s your turn to ask me what I’m working on,” I prompted him after a couple of minutes of crunching.
He looked up again, looking slightly put out. “Hey, Katja, what are you working on?”
“I’m glad you asked. As a matter of fact, tonight I figured out my first tattoo.”
He still didn’t look all that interested; but I motioned him to pull up his hoodie, and I did the same, sending him a snapshot of what I’d been working on. He sat silent for a long minute.
“It’s playable?” he asked at last, dropping the hoodie.
I nodded. “Thirteen notes, thirteen triggers, thirteen sensors under the skin of my left forearm, plus a transmitter. After the incisions heal, I’ll have the keyboard tattooed over it. I just need to find someone willing to do the work and save up to pay for it.”
“That’s an awesome idea, K.”
We spent a few minutes chatting about tattoo artists and body mod shops. Eventually, the adrenaline that had kept me going all night started to ebb, and I headed back up to my room.
It took me three more months to save the money to get the implants done, three months I spent writing commercial jingles on commission and searching for the right person to do the work. At night in bed, I’d spread the fingers of my right hand and lay them over my left arm. I gave it muscle, weight. Imagined wrenching songs from myself, first for my great-grandfather, who had always known I was full of music. It felt so right.
Kurt hadn’t been around the house much lately, but he’d left a poster on the fridge with a note asking us all to come to a test show for his Great Upload song cycle.
“Don’t make me go alone, Katja,” Javi had pleaded, and I had agreed.
The club was a few blocks from our place, a row house basement turned illegal performance space. I’d played there a few times sitting in with various bands. It smelled like cat piss, looked like a place time had forgotten, but sounded decent enough.
Kurt had a crowd, though there was no way of knowing whether they were there for him or another band. He had billed himself as “KurtZ and the Hearts of Darkness,” the Hearts of Darkness being a drummer and a guitarist. A second amp’s red eye glowed from a dark corner; a guest musician’s for later in the set, maybe.
He looked nervous, buttoned up. He wore a three-piece suit, and his hair was plastered to his face before the first song. The songs were okay, nothing special. They sounded a little unanchored without bass. He had his eyes closed like he was reading the lyrics off his own eyelids.
By the third song I had stopped paying attention to the stage, so it was my ears that picked up the difference. The third song felt rooted in a way the previous two hadn’t. I looked up to see who was playing the bass part, but there were only the three of them, and Kurt didn’t have an instrument in his hands.
Except he did. I saw it then. He’d taken off his jacket and pushed his sleeves up, and I saw it. My tattoo, my trigger system. He was playing his arm. People were eating it up, too, whispering, pointing. That wasn’t what I had wanted it for; it wasn’t meant to be a gimmick. I didn’t stay to see the rest.
“You should be happy, Katja!”
It was three a.m., and I had waited up like a pissed-off parent, chewing on my own thumb and thinking of all the things I’d say to him.
He burst into the house drunk and giddy, bouncing right off my attempts to shame him. “Everybody loved it. It’s awesome. I’m already thinking of getting a guitar put somewhere, too.”
“It was my idea, Kurt. My design. You had no right.”
“Where’s the harm? You should be thanking me. I tested it for you. Imagine how heartbroken you would have been if you’d spent all your money on it and it hadn’t worked.”
“But why?”
“Why?” He looked confused.
I tried to tell him, but nothing breached his mood or his self-righteousness. And what could I do? I’d shown him the design. I hadn’t patented it or copyrighted it or whatever you did with inventions. Seething was my only option, so I seethed. I lay in bed furious with myself, tired and hurt, but mostly furious. We all knew what Kurt was like. I should have known better.
At some point in the long night, a calmer voice took over my head. My grandfather, calm and philosophical, like when Corrina had moved away. “You can’t help what other people do, Katja. Learn from the experience and decide what you’re going to do next.”
What had I learned? Not to trust Kurt Zell. What else? How did it sound? The song had needed bass, and the tattoo-keyboard had fit that spot well. The tone was decent but not great; I could have done better. A single octave would have worked as a tribute to my grandfather’s tattoo, but it was limited as an actual instrument. Maybe multiple octaves would be better, but I’d still be stuck playing with one hand if I placed it on the opposite forearm. It was like a logic puzzle. I lay awake poking at it until the pieces came together.
Kurt was right: I should be thanking him, though I wouldn’t give him that satisfaction. I’d been thinking within the lines. If he hadn’t stolen my idea, I wouldn’t have had a better one.
Twenty-Four Years
Saving for my second plan took longer. I bided my time, testing designs on a model, not sharing them with anyone except the body-mod artist who did the implants.
The same club Kurt had played opened their doors to me. I called the project “Weight,” left a note telling my roommates to come, told Kurt he owed me and he ought to show up.
I’d borrowed a bassist and a drummer. They were comfortable with the structure I’d given them. I let them start the first song, set the receiver to interpret everything within the key of D, and hit the stage.
Four to the floor, anchored, insistent, a beat that made people want to move. Everybody was watching me. I touched a spot on my left forearm, a nondescript spot, no tattoo to mark it. A note rang out, clear and pure, interpreted into key by the receiver on my amp. Then I twitched my right wrist, and the gyro beneath the skin took the note and spun it. I played a few more, shaping a melody. Pressed the spot that locked the notes in as a sample, sent them to the receiver to repeat over and over.
I wore a tank top and shorts, so everything I did was evident. Kurt’s keyboard—it had almost been my keyboard—was so limited. I slammed my palms into my skin, leaving pink spots, leaving musical trails. My hands were hammers hitting strings. The notes were hidden everywhere. There was no map anyone else could see. I was the instrument and the chord and the notes that composed it. A song transposed to body.
When I stepped off the stage into the audience, I had to show them how to touch me. They were gentle, much gentler than I had been, at least at first. Hands pressed into my arms, my shoulders, my thighs. Everywhere they touched, my skin responded. It sent signals to the receiver, to the synth, to the amp, and the sounds were broadcast over the PA. I’d set it to translate this first song into a single key, so the notes built into chords, then broke apart. I had ways to distort, to sustain, to make a note tremble as if it were bowed. It was me: I was playing me; they were playing me. I was the instrument, the conduit, the transmutation of loss into elegy, song into prayer, my own prayers into notes, notes into song. Body and music, fingers and hands, they drew me out.