Emily St. John Mandel - The Lola Quartet

"My name is Liam Deval," he would say, raising a glass of beer or introducing himself to someone in a bar, or sometimes, when he didn't know anyone else was around, quietly to his reflection in the men' s-room mirror, "and I am going to be famous."

When he did this at bars everyone would laugh and buy him another drink because his delivery was hilarious. Everyone knew he wasn't really kidding, but it didn't matter because he was the best guitarist any of them had ever heard. "The only real difference between me and Django Reinhardt," he said once when very drunk, "is that Django did it first."

"Well, yes," Jack said. "Exactly."

Deval only laughed. Just as they both understood that Deval was going to be a star, they understood that Jack's days were numbered.

Jack had been on his way out almost from the moment of arrival. He couldn't have said how he knew this. He couldn't even have explained what exactly was wrong. He had been touched lightly by synesthesia; mostly it was a small matter of sounds being attached to colors— the impression of red left by car horns, for example, the dandelion-yellow sounds of his parents' doorbell— but music was brilliance, music was light moving through the air every time he heard it.

Playing with the quartet, switching back and forth between piano and saxophone, practicing for endless hours with Gavin and Sasha and Daniel, traveling to competitions— in short, all the things he loved— none of these things seemed to relate in any way to the sudden grind of Holloway College, the evenings when he played piano alone in a small white practice room and got lonelier and lonelier by the hour, the clinics, the harshness of teachers. Music had always been bright and now it was dimming. He knew his teachers only wanted him to be the best pianist he could possibly be but they all knew he was missing something, whatever it is that carries a musician over the gap from merely proficient to outright spectacular, and sometimes he wanted to pack up his car and drive back to Florida when he thought about the things they'd said to him.

The pills helped. He could float a little. In the weeks leading up to the winter break he started to take them more frequently. His skill was unlessened but nothing seemed quite real.

"You seem more relaxed these days," Deval said. They were in their room at the end of another day. Deval was on the edge of his bed, listening to music. Jack had been toiling in a theory workbook earlier, but now he was staring into space.

"It doesn't have to be stressful," Jack said.

"I envy you. I'm more stressed than I thought I would be." They'd been here a few months and Deval's bravado was becoming a little threadbare. Holloway College wasn't Juilliard, but it also wasn't easy.

"You're good," Jack said. "You don't need to. " he was thinking "take Vicodin" but said "worry" instead.

"We're all good," Deval said. "Otherwise we wouldn't be here."

Jack wasn't sure anymore if he was good or not. He'd been confident of his talent in high school, but lately he was certain of nothing. The winter break arrived and on the long drive back to Sebastian he toyed with the idea of not returning to Holloway after the break, of perhaps enrolling in community college in January and getting a degree in something practical. Business management? Economics? Accounting? He wasn't really sure what the practical degrees were. He'd never wanted to do anything but music and now he didn't even want to do that.

It was disorienting, being back in Sebastian. Now that he'd left and seen another place it looked less familiar somehow, as if the town were forgetting him. That was the year when the streetlights turned from amber to blue. The blue ones apparently used less electricity and would save the city some money, but they cast the suburbs in a cold and foreign light. On his third or fourth day back Daniel and Sasha came over and passed an hour or two in Jack's parents' basement, where they'd brought their instruments and practiced sometimes in the days of the jazz quartet. Gavin hadn't come home. He was in a communications program at Columbia, full scholarship. No one was surprised that he'd cracked the Ivy League— his grades had always been better than anyone else's— but they were surprised that he'd stayed in New York for Christmas. They sat together in the basement, Jack and Sasha and Daniel with Gavin ostentatiously absent, and it seemed to Jack that their missing instruments were like ghosts. He'd been thinking a lot about ghosts lately, after a movie he'd seen, and the thought of a translucent ghost saxophone sitting next to him was oddly appealing.

The silence was awkward. He thought of these people as his closest friends, but it seemed that without music there wasn't much to talk about. He was seized by a mad desire to confide in them— I miss everything about high school and I'm not the musician I thought I was, I don't know what I'm doing anymore, jazz has always been my life but now it's slipping away from me and my talent isn't going to be enough— but he couldn't imagine how to begin.

"Do you still play?" he asked Daniel, to fill the silence.

"Haven't touched the bass since that last concert," Daniel said. Jack smiled at this. The last concert, on the back of the truck behind the school, was one of his favorite memories. The heat and the music, a final perfect evening, dancers trampling the grass. He missed the quartet with an unexpected force. It had been a nice thing, all of them playing together.

"I wish Gavin were around," he said.

Daniel made a dismissive noise. "Convenient that he's not here."

"What do you mean?"

"You know what?" Daniel said. "I wouldn't come back here and show my face either. His girlfriend disappears, and he runs off to New York?"

"Disappears? I heard she moved to Georgia to live with her aunt." Jack looked at Sasha. "That's what you told me."

Daniel muttered something inaudible. Sasha shot him a look.

"Anyway," Sasha said, in a let' s-change-the-subject way.

Daniel didn't say anything. There was something altered about him. He seemed more pensive than he had been, his voice strained.

"Let's face it," Sasha said, "I don't think Gavin's parents would notice if he came home for Christmas or not."

"Are they really that bad?" Jack was interested. He'd heard rumors.

"I heard that when Gavin was in the hospital last spring with heat exhaustion, the night after the prom, his sister Eileen was the only one by his bedside. And she goes to school like three hours away. Eileen drove out as soon as she heard and their parents weren't even at the hospital."

"It could be worse," Daniel said. "People have families that are worse than that." Daniel was taking a year off before college. He said he'd mostly been in Salt Lake City since the end of high school, working construction with his uncle and staying with friends, but when pressed for details about his time in Utah he said he didn't want to talk about it.

"What's with you?" Jack asked.

"Nothing," Daniel said. "I just think maybe people shouldn't run off to New York when their girlfriends are. look, never mind. Whatever."

"But she wasn't even in Florida anymore. She'd left. She'd gone to live with her—"

"Can we drop it?" Daniel said.

Sasha looked away. They knew something, and Jack was excluded. He went out that night without them, drove alone through the wide streets until he reached the Lemon Club, a run-down jazz bar in a strip mall on the edge of town. The bartender— an older man with a permanent sneer who usually glared at Jack like he was daring him to order a drink, just daring him— barely glanced up when Jack entered.

Jack had gone to the club one or two nights a week in high school,

but he'd never come in alone before. He listened to a fairly decent trio from Denver and then— because neither Sasha nor Daniel had called him— went back again the next night with his little sister Bridget. It had dawned on him that he didn't know Bridget very well anymore, she'd somehow slipped away and eluded him, and he thought maybe music would help. It did. She was enraptured by the fifteen-year-old jazz violin prodigy they'd gone to hear and seemed happy to be out with him.