A Piano Full of Dead Spiders

 

 

I HEAR THEM PLAYING GHOSTLY SONGS IN THE PIANO,” Felix said, “but they’re gone when I look inside.” “You don’t really expect to catch them at it, do you?” I answered playfully, tempted to ask whether he meant the spiders or the songs. “Oh, but I do! I will catch them at it!” He gazed at me tolerantly, and seemed to pity not only my skepticism but my lack of a creative life, even though throughout our years of friendship he had never even hinted at feeling this way toward me. He was the creative one, and I simply went my own way, with no blame attached. I didn’t like my sudden, reproachful suspicion of him, either, and felt that I had to be mistaken. “You should write down their music,” I said, thinking that it didn’t matter where he imagined it came from, as long as it came, and that I should encourage him because my friend the gifted composer was only trying to get himself back to work as best he could. June had moved out on him because she couldn’t bear to watch him sinking. At least that was how it seemed to me. I had never truly understood their relationship; it seemed loving and affectionate, but I couldn’t see what she wanted from it except to be the nurturing mate while he worked; but one side of the deal had died, and I had begun to wonder about my own part in the tragedy. When I talked with June she assured me that she had not completely given up on the love of her life, but she wouldn’t tell me what she was going to do about it.

“I don’t have to write it down,” Felix said. “They play my music —after they take it from me when I sleep. I hear them crawling around in my mind.”

“Music you’ve written down?” I asked.

“No—but it is mine, Bruno, even before I write it down. You don’t forget what you’re driven to write down. You carry it around all day, waiting to pounce.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You might never write it down,” he said, “but it’s always yours. If they opened your brain after death and there was a way to hear the music, they’d hear it.” He grimaced, and I had the crazy image of a split brain spilling bushels of black notes, all in the right order.

I gave him an exasperated look, which he didn’t like. “Spiders don’t play piano,” I blurted out, expecting a fit of temper. Necessary fantasies are denied at great peril, and maybe this one was what he needed to get himself composing again.

“Sometimes they sing,” he said calmly, as if he were gazing out across a peaceful ocean.

“Spiders don’t sing,” I said, still unable to restrain myself.

“You weren’t here when it happened.”

“And they don’t steal music from your mind before you’ve written it down,” I said, hoping that the truth would serve him best if he could accept it. “That’s your tip-off,” I continued, unable to hold back. “Your composing comes to you, but you don’t hear it unless you believe that the spiders are singing... or playing. You’re tricking yourself into remembering because you’re not writing it down for some reason but can’t bear to forget it. There’s a part of you that knows exactly what to do and won’t let you forget the work you’re doing. Pretty clever of... the rest of you—to help out, I mean.” I heard the pleading in my voice and knew that it sounded lame to him, even if it was the truth. Worse, my hammering at his delusion might prove disastrous.

But he only smiled at me. “That is clever of you, Bruno. But they do come and crawl around in my mind and take my music. I feel it ripped out sometimes, as if they’re hungry for it.”

“Are there spiders?” I asked. “Are they physical? Or are you talking about ghosts?”

He nodded solemnly, secure in his story, as if he were accepting some inevitable fate as a note-producing cow. “I can’t keep them out. I think they’re physical, but they have immaterial... ways.” He laughed and said, “You’d rather think that spiders had come down on their lines while I slept and crawled into my ears and connected to the nerves of my hearing and played my brain like a musical instrument!”

“But you’ve not actually seen a single one of them,” I said.

“I don’t need to. I hear them. I feel them when they crawl around in my mind.”

“But you’d like to see them going at it, right in front of you?”

“Well, maybe...”

“Then go catch them at it,” I said. “Prove to yourself that this is just... an imaginative way you’ve... dreamed up... to get your work done. Damn it, Felix, that’s all it is!” I was convinced that this was all it was, but a part of me suspected that it could be something worse and irreversible. The bridge was out and I had to stop the train.

He smiled, pitying my frightened disbelief, and said, “You are clever. It could have been that way, but this isn’t a delusion. I don’t need to see them.” He stared at me as if he had delivered himself of a formal proof in geometry. I stared back, determined to be calm and practical.

“But you know,” he went on, “if this is just some fairy tale that I need to have, then you’re doing me harm by trying to convince me otherwise, aren’t you?”

An old, concealed game was playing out between us, and I felt that I had to be the loser.

“You’re hopeless,” I said finally. “But who am I to argue? If you need this vision to do your work, then so be it.”

“Then why argue if you thought that from the start? Why try to throw doubt into me?” He paused. “Oh,” he added, smiling. “You weren’t sure, were you?”

“I was of two minds,” I said feebly. “I wouldn’t like to think my best friend was nuts. But it makes more sense now that I see what’s going on.”

“I’m not nuts or merely deluded,” he said, his tenor strong and resonant as if he were reciting poetry. “And I do hear and feel... spiders, and one day I’ll show them to you, when I catch the little buggers at it.”

I had the sudden image of him laughing madly and dancing a jig around the piano.

We looked across the polished wooden floor, to the baby grand piano. It waited there, shiny and silent, and I thought for a moment that if I listened very, very closely, I would hear the spiders playing his work, such was the spell of his conviction. The man who sold him the piano had told him it had once belonged to Glenn Gould, but I didn’t believe it. Felix would have bought it anyway, since it fit into his new house perfectly. He might be deluded, but he wasn’t impractical.

Felix was a good example of how things go wrong with creative people. They spark, start out with all kinds of irrelevant but necessary justifications, light up and burn for a spell, then reach their mid-thirties and it’s all over. They settle for so much less in themselves, and go thud into middle age as they head for cover and security, throwing everything that’s good in them overboard for a piece of bread, just to fulfill the expectations of other people by waving around a weekly paycheck like a passport to the country of the elect. The ways of piecemeal slavery spread like a cancerous program, which is why even successful writers, poets, and artists are viewed by too many people as only “bums with money,” since they fail to shine sufficiently to dazzle people too dull to notice. And when they tell people that it’s only once around in this world, and if you don’t climb the Everests of achievement you’ll fall forever, these solid folk reply, “Oh, yeah? Well, that’s just too bad. Who in hell do you think you are, anyway?” Most people get little or nothing out of life so “Why should you?” is what they’re really selling. And when the damage is done, the naysayers are secretly glad. It’s their revenge for their own lost dreams. Later, when they hear that so-and-so had become whomsoever, they say sheepishly, “Who knew that’s who he was!” as if it had taken no time at all! And secretly they still believe they’re right, that maybe so-and-so had done it just to spite them. “Well, he always wanted to be famous!” Some even say that it’s only someone with the same name, that it’s not the same person they knew. What always gave me a chill were those who were never noticed, yet had completed their accomplishment and gone uncomplaining into the dark. No one knew their names. How many were there? Hell indeed!

Felix was right on the edge. He needed his spiders, ghostly or real, to provoke the music in his skull; that obligated him to write it down, to work. He had to get it out of himself somehow; it didn’t matter how he did it, or where he thought it came from, because it had to come from somewhere, so what did it matter? He was hanging on to what was best about him in any way possible. He was desperate in a heroically roundabout way, to live up to his myth of himself—and it seemed to be working.

“I’ll videotape it,” he said, “next time I hear them in the piano. That’s what I’ll do.”

“Videos,” I answered with the voice of his enemy, “can make you see and hear anything these days,” and knew at once that I should have said nothing more to discourage him. He might want to prove it to me more than he needed to write the music down, to prove to himself that he had not lost his mind. I wanted him writing it down; but now my doubts had made him wonder, and I regretted pushing his nose in the truth. After all, he had been alone when it happened. A man alone can fool himself. Someone has to witness the miracle, and that runs the risk of exposure.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Maybe you’ll just have to be here to see them at it.”

I nodded, surprised at myself, and afraid that I had only damaged my friend further in my confused self-justification.

June only smiled when I told her—and I felt that she too was deluded. It came out of her eyes, an invincible wave of conviction, defeating all reality, as she told me not to worry.

 

If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll admit that you can’t ever look back far enough to explain anyone or anything; the rich perversity of the universe, which seems to let just about everything happen, just won’t let you see it all. But I kept thinking that you might glimpse just enough. Maybe.

In the early days new music had flowed from Felix with a deceptive ease—in all the older forms and new takes on orchestral, chamber, song and dance, and pop forms, defying classification, instrumentation, and styles of performance. Yet Felix was unhappy in his acclaim and financial security. He respected only those who accepted his work “grudgingly.”

“What is it?” I had asked. “Really, truly.”

“You want to know?” he replied, as if threatening to assault me.

“If you want to tell me.” Sometimes, in telling myself that I was trying to understand him, I felt more like a fishhook than a friend.

“It’s irrelevant, of course,” he said, “but I don’t want to do what’s easy. Oh, I’ll do it, but I most want to do what’s hardest.”

“That might not make your work any better,” I said.

“Maybe not, but I’d like to be truly challenged.”

“Haven’t you been?”

“Not ever,” he said. “Not once.”

“But if you haven’t exerted yourself,” I said, “might it be that you suspect the effort would be unfruitful?”

“No,” he said. “I suspect that all the work I’ve done is not good, and all the acceptance I’ve had is given to me by fools.”

“But is it bad? Surely you know.”

“How can I know, unless I try to surpass... go beyond myself.”

“Beyond yourself you might not be as able as you are.”

“Yes! That would be a test. I would know what the real edge of difficulty is like.”

“It might horrify you, you know. Incapacity is a terrible thing to face. You obviously believe you could face it and rise higher, but you might only confront your limits and fall back frustrated.”

“Yes! On both counts. I want to know where I stand. It’s the only way to even have a chance of exceeding the place where I now stand too easily.”

“You do stand tall,” I said.

He gazed at me as a child might and said, “Thank you, Bruno, but I simply can’t endure where I am.”

“You’ve worked hard enough to deserve what you have. Your dissatisfaction is misplaced.”

“But I haven’t worked hard at all! Can you understand? I must go to the edge—or forever wonder about what might have been.”

“It may turn out to be illusory.” And be a precipice, I thought.

“We can’t know that, Bruno.”

He was right—but in a vacuum of conjecture, and I feared that he would lose what he already had by diminishing himself before the public. Nothing drops into the past quicker than a has-been, even if that term only confirms the prejudices of the talentless.

 

He tried—but faced with the great wall he had set himself to scale he began using up materials from his notebooks. Every old, rejected scrap he had set down in his youth replaced new inspirations. He was eating away at the foundations of his composer’s life rather than building on them with new work. He substituted excavation for a transforming memory, and so the new work did not come. He stole from his youth, in which he now placed a naive faith, with little or no creative change. He strip-mined the past unchanged. Collaboration with one’s youthful self was not merely the eating of one’s seed corn, it was a raising of the dead, I told myself with a growing fear.

His ease deserted him. He lived in a desert of the past, producing only glimpses of what he hoped to find, until he could no longer work and started giving piano concerts, until no one would invite him, because one day he got up and asked the audience why they were applauding something so dreadful.

I was in the audience at that last concert. He played as if discovering each note of his “Athletic Sonata in B” for the first time, as if the strings and hammers of the piano were betraying him. His hands became two monstrous spiders lashed to his arms, and for the first time I admitted to myself that I had wanted to be him, what he had once been, and even what he had become, and I repented my doubts. Suddenly, as I watched him play, I wanted desperately to see and hear his spiders, imagining naively that the delusion would somehow bestow upon me all his talent and skill, and I would become something more than what I was; I would be somebody.

He stopped playing in the middle, stood up, and seemed suddenly naked, vulnerable, bitter, and broken.

“It’s not very good, is it?” he asked the audience, then saw that they had found it excellent—and he became outraged.

“Finish it!” a man cried out, and my heart with him, but this set Felix to shaking and sweating, and he seemed about to dissolve inside his tuxedo. This went on for one eternal minute, and no one knew what to say or do. I sat there imagining that maybe this humiliation was needed, that it might teach him something, move him to another place within himself; but it was all nonsense, and, I knew, too much about me.

June, who had stood listening stone-faced from backstage, finally came out and led him off. His limbs moved stiffly, as if he were a clothes dummy being removed from a window. The audience, to their credit, remained silent. He glanced back at them for a moment, and I heard a collective inrush of breath, as if his look of contempt had been a physical blow. I caught his eye, and he looked at me with shame, as if I had unmasked him. Or so it seemed to me. The audience stared at the piano as if he were still playing it, then slowly people got up and began to leave. The hall was empty by the time I left.

 

I came to his door the next afternoon and heard him arguing with June.

“You don’t deserve who you are!” she shrieked. “You don’t deserve your talent!”

“You’ll say anything,” he answered. “I only want more out of myself, not the praise of easily satisfied fools.”

“Oh!” she cried. “So I’m one of the fools.”

“You love me, and it blinds you.”

“Are you blinded by your love of me?” she asked.

“No, I’m not. I see you for what you are. And I do not love myself enough to be blinded by my failures—successes to you.”

I cringed at the dilemma he had presented to her: which was worse, his ambivalence toward her and her love of him, or his devaluation of his own abilities? And I realized that we had both been counting on his accomplishments, on his doing well for his audience, to which we belonged.

The door opened, and June ran out weeping into my arms.

“I want more!” Felix shouted out of the depths of the house. “And I’m going to get it.”

She turned from me to shout back at him, but I quieted her. “He’ll get it without me,” she whispered as I led her away, and I knew that he was watching us just before the door slammed shut behind us.

 

What the audience at the concert could not have known was that he had been revising his work as he played it, hanging at the end of each note, at the edge of one abyss after another, leaping beyond himself until nothing could ever fulfill his ideal. Every newly conquered note became new ground, and he held it just long enough to spy a new mirage up ahead. Listening to the dying vibrations ruined it for him. To appreciate his work he would have to stop and look no further, but he could not stop himself from running ahead. What would it take for him to love his work? Forget as he attained it and see it as a stranger?

He worked suspended between his settled past and a fading future of new music whose fate was to be abandoned. He could never catch up with himself.

“Consider,” I tried to tell him a few days later, “that your ease of composition came from a lack of inhibitions wedded to skill. You trusted yourself. What was easy for you was in fact difficult.”

“That’s easy to say, but it may be untrue.”

“Your accomplishments say otherwise to many people. Your work speaks of high levels of difficulty. Facts, Felix, bow to the facts!”

“Again—difficult for whom?” he asked.

“You’re contemptuous of those who appreciate your work, of the very idea of appreciation, from what I see.”

“If I can see farther, then you want me to blind myself? Lower my sights?”

“But what do you see if you can’t find it? What do you actually see?”

“Sometimes... I see!” he cried.

“What?”

“A brightness—a great open space.”

“Really?” I asked.

He waved his hand at me, and no insult made of words could ever reach the same level of derision visible in his writhing, snakelike fingers, the same ones he played the piano with, the same serpents that sprang to life in his brain when he composed and were now strangling him.

“Ah!” he cried out. “Look, Bruno, we can go around like this forever. I’ll either do something or I won’t.”

“But you’ll know only if you succeed, by your own lights.” Which may well be out, I did not say. “If you fail, you won’t feel that you’ve failed. You’ll still see a road ahead. You don’t ever really want to succeed.”

He had smiled. “Yeah, I’ll always have an excuse. You’re a good logician, Bruno, but logic only makes decisions. It never creates, but only gets to the end of something, with no more to come. Believe me, I’ll know, one way or another.”

“You’ll only think you know.”

“So what would you have me do?”

“Succeed, by all means. But if time grows long, give it up and don’t look back. You’ve already had enough acceptance for two men.”

He smiled. “I wish I knew those guys,” he muttered. “I’ve listened too much to such be-happy-with-what-you’ve-got talk. I’d have had nothing at all if I’d taken it to heart early on.”

“That’s not fair to yourself,” I said. “Early on is not today.”

He rose within himself and answered, “Who said it had to be fair, that anything has ever been fair?”

 

One night I got a frantic call from him.

“You gotta get over here!” he shouted.

“Now?” I asked. “It’s two in the morning.”

“You’ve got to see!”

“See what?”

“The spiders, Bruno, the spiders! You’ll see them.”

He hung up, and I had to go.

I got on my sweatsuit and drove the few blocks to his house. His garage was open and empty when I pulled into the driveway. Once again he had probably parked the car somewhere and forgotten where, then walked home. The car would be towed, and I might have to loan him some money if he decided he needed it, unless he wanted to hate driving that day.

“It’s open!” he shouted when I rang the bell.

I came in and found him sitting, bent forward, on his sofa, clearly despondent.

“What is it, Felix?” I asked, standing over him, feeling like an executioner.

He looked up at me with a desolate face and said, “I can’t work anymore,” then looked down at his feet in shame.

“Not even on the commission?” I asked, convinced that I had helped weaken him.

“Not even that,” he replied. “Especially that—even if I could.” He hated commissions. They were like school assignments, pure suck-up jobs, a catering service providing fakes to be admired by fools who knew the price of a name.

“But why?” I asked, knowing there was more.

He stood up. “I’ll show you,” he said, laboring toward the piano.

I followed him. We looked into the works, and I drew a swift, deep breath when I saw that it was full of spiders.

“They’re all dead,” he said with the finality of a hammer striking an anvil, then turned to me and added, “I told you there were spiders—physical spiders!”

“But what does it mean?” I asked, shaken but telling myself that they had to be spiders that had come up out of his damp, musty basement into the piano. Pure coincidence with Felix’s necessary fantasy, but a part of me was glad that there were spiders.

He shook his head. “I can’t work now. They were hearing the music for me, taking it out of me just before I heard it. Now I don’t hear a thing, not one note, almost as if I’d never learned how to read music.”

It had all gone much farther than I had realized. Felix was tearing harder at himself, at his talent, and the dead spiders had sent him over the edge.

I looked more closely and saw their bodies clinging to the strings, almost as if they had strung another kind of web, for another kind of piano, and died from the exertion of spinning steel.

How could I insist on my original view—that this was all nonsense conjured up by my friend’s unconscious to fire up his need to compose—a wondrous need that stood outside the ordinary world in which he had to live; how could I tell him that now he would have to stand on his own skill and throw the magical crutch aside?

Yet here were the dead spiders, and my theory seemed to pale as I saw their transcendent presence through Felix’s eyes. I turned away and went back to the sofa, sat down and said, “I don’t know what to tell you.”

He sat down at the piano, as if about to play. “It was all real, Bruno,” he said with a strange, grim happiness that embraced damnation. “It doesn’t matter if you still won’t believe me. It’s all over. I’ll never compose or play again. But it had all been real! Real!” He cried out like a raspy trumpet—and was silent.

I almost bit my tongue to keep from saying that a bunch of dead insects scarcely proved their songfulness, but that would be pointless and cruel.

“You do see what’s in the piano?” he asked. “You’re not humoring me, are you?”

I nodded, then asked, “You still know how to play, don’t you?”

He smiled with a feeble finality. “I won’t even try with their bodies stuck to the strings. How could I?”

“You’ll have to get past this,” I said. “You do know that, don’t you? You’ll have to clean out the piano. I’ll call someone for you.”

He closed the keyboard cover and stared at it.

“There’s more,” he said without looking at me.

“Oh? What?”

“I think they were pulling the music from me without my hearing it at all, even before I thought of it, so I didn’t know what was leaving me. They were stealing it out of my deep places.”

“Now how can you even know that?” I asked.

“Because they’re dead and I feel drained and deaf! There’s nothing left.”

 

I didn’t see Felix for much of that winter. I worked at home for a crossword puzzle company, and won an award before Christmas for my efforts, which brought me a raise. Whenever I called or went over to Felix’s house, there was no answer. Lights were off in the evenings. I imagined that he had gone away to a warmer place, where I pictured him laughing and drinking with all the beautiful women who could never be mine, plunging through their bodies in search of forgetfulness. Felix was amorously skilled and good-looking, but I had often felt that he thought little of it, that the chase depressed him; it was all a put-up job, he had often said, for given reproductive ends, which made him feel like a puppet.

“You know what Liszt once said?” he had asked me in our youth. “That women who watched him play could think of nothing except what kind of lover he would make. Music to send pile-driver fantasies into female brains!”

“He was much better than that,” I had said.

“Of course he was. But you don’t know what people will make of anything! Did you ever watch people at concerts and know which ones were there for the music and which for show?”

Felix had been made for his music; it horrified me to imagine that he might have failed to discover this about himself. Blank sheets of music paper were unbearable to him, as the abyssal void outside of God might have been intolerable during that one eon when the light got away from him and unfolded universes free of his control.

I told myself that Felix had struggled too much to hear his music, and had escaped into some mental space where he was free of music’s lonely demand to structure and shape vibrations eloquent to human ears.

He would never come back, I feared. No one would ever hear him again, or know what had happened to him. I remembered the deluded hope in June’s smile when, despite their several big arguments, she had urged me not to worry.

 

One evening in late March I stood before Felix’s door, knowing that it would not open, that my friend was no longer there.

But finally it opened, and he motioned for me to come inside. The look on his face was unreadable, his eyes unreachable.

“So how are you?” I asked, glancing toward the piano. It was very dusty.

He was silent, staring at it with me.

“I don’t know why the spiders died,” he said softly.

“Are you composing?” I asked timidly.

“No,” he said, “and I don’t seem to care.”

I had a bright idea. “You’ve stopped,” I said, “and so they couldn’t hear you and died!” and felt stupid for saying it.

He looked at me as if I had just struck him across the face.

“You’re saying my... silence killed them?”

I was suddenly intrigued, not knowing what to say next. I didn’t believe it, but I remembered when I couldn’t ride a bike, and my uncle gave me a glass of “magic red water” to drink, and I “knew” how to ride a bike the very next time I tried.

“It just can’t be that simple,” Felix said. “I can’t believe I starved them to death!”

“Maybe you can... bring them back,” I said, noting his dirty clothes. He hadn’t shaved for days. I didn’t want to sound anxious. “What the hell, give it a shot,” I added jovially.

He was still staring at the piano, ill with inner enemies, and I longed to somehow draw them away from him.

Then we heard the music.

I heard it, and wondered if Felix had rigged the piano to play automatically, or had somehow hypnotized me to imagine it.

But the baby grand was playing.

We crept up to it slowly, like pilgrims arriving at the site of a wished-for miracle. We stood close and saw the keys trembling. The music was ghostly, exploratory, seeking its own shape, by turns rhythmic and lyrical, soft and nearly silent, striving to encompass the stars; then suddenly it was inflamed and hurtful, full of sorrow over lost joy. The music craved the impossible, and wanted it with grace, and I felt that the notes were hunting Felix, like a swarm of insects hunting long-sought flowers.

We stepped around and looked inside. I saw hundreds of new, little spiders scurrying out of their birth sacs.

“They’re back!” Felix cried.

We listened, and I marveled at how all the random scurrying and jumping produced music. They weren’t singing. The spiders were playing, leaping up and down on the strings, exchanging places to sound single notes and grouping to organize chords and flowing passages. There was no question that the piano was being played.

“Not mine,” Felix said blithely, but with anarchy in his eyes.

“Write it down!” I cried.

“That would be stealing,” he said, then smiled. “It’s their music,” he added, and I feared disagreeing with him. Too much was at stake. Fragile links must be protected, I told myself, shuddering. Let the music come to him in its own way. After all, they were his spiders, and there was no end of how many would come up from the basement every spring, especially if it wasn’t cleaned out. Felix, even in his silence, had struck the piano strings with his mind, and that vibration had called to them. My explanations were just as strange as his, but I didn’t care. Felix deserved to be protected by credulity, if that was what he needed.

It was their music, but they were his spiders.

I didn’t know which came first, but it was all Felix, exposing his insides as never before; all the pity and fervor of him was alive in the notes that he was denying as his own.

“I’m leaving him,” June had once written to me. “He’s out of his mind. Maybe as his best friend you can do something to stop his drift.” But she seemed not to have gone very far, I now realized, thinking that I had never understood what passed between them. Not even close.

I didn’t care how the music had crept back into him, or out of him. My friend would be all right again, and it didn’t matter what he believed or what I saw.

There was a knock on the door. The music stopped.

Felix was suddenly very still. We waited.

“Felix!” June called to him from beyond the door, and her voice was the airy blue heaven of a flute. “It’s me!” she sang dementedly.

“Stay,” Felix said to me as if to a trusted dog, and I felt that the future was rushing back to him, about to pluck him out of the mire and carry him forward again into starry spaces and caring arms.

He went to the door as if stalking it.

Finally, I heard them talking softly, and wondered why we take an interest in other peoples’ lives, aside from practical motives. We fall into people because we come to know them, or simply like them, quite irrationally, and hold on to them to keep from drowning. Maybe we just want to compare notes, to look out through others’ eyes, to think for a while with other minds. The young just hang out, waiting for something to happen. But the interests of life are surely greater than the repetitive mill of shared experiences. Better questions await, and happier answers beckon. For one thing, the problem of why the mill is a mill, why its repetitive character is so all-encompassing that one can’t imagine stepping outside of it. Miracles don’t happen in the mill. Good things, yes, but they have happened before. We are all inside ourselves, inside our slightly larger shared social inside, yet some of us try to peer outside. Love and friendship are mad dances in which we see ourselves through the other’s eyes. But the recurring interest of seeing beyond our culs-de-sac leads us on. If miracles don’t happen in the mill, then don’t live there. Climb out of people and live alone on some barren shore.

As I waited for Felix and June, I again thought of why second-raters can spot the third-rate and untalented. Because it’s easy to see looking down. But try looking up into the realms of the magicians, and it’s harder, and then all of a sudden it’s impossible. Especially if they seem to be ordinary, and you have to remind yourself of who’s judging. You resent being second-rate, and it makes you blind. Maybe love eases the pain and helps you to see, I thought as I heard June’s voice.

I was second-rate at best, maybe even fifth-rate. Even my crossword puzzles were too easy to solve. “Don’t worry,” said my editor. “We need’m too. There’s more demand for dumber than smarter.” And he meant this with a happy heart!

So I had sometimes resented Felix, but mostly loved him and his ability, maybe more for what it had produced and less for himself. And these delusions of his were his way of saying, “I’m going to rip the work out of myself even if I have to materialize delusions!”

And now, somehow, he had done it—by descending deeper into himself. He would be inevitable, unstoppable, whatever it took to move forward. I could perhaps understand that much, even if he left me to drown within myself.

Felix and June finally stopped their soft talking... and something new slipped into the world with a terrifying beauty as they came in smiling. I turned to leave, knowing from the look on her face that she loved him enough to accept the spiders, the piano, and whatever else made him run.

She and I were in perfect, wordless agreement.

Dutifully, the piano began to play again as she caught up to me at the door and whispered, “You have to know, Bruno, that it was I who taught the spiders.”

She had taught them to sing, she said, and he had taught them to play their own songs. There was not a hint of lying in her face, only the proud, ethereal composure of a truthteller. It shuddered through me, beautiful and humiliating, as I opened the door, fearing to break the spell with a wrong word, grateful as I fled that these were newly born spiders, and that June and I had not somehow helped Felix raise the dead.