Ethan Chatagnier - Warnings from the Future

All those beautiful brunches: the berries he bought, buckwheat waffles, hand-whipped cream, light-filled Sunday mornings with the most obvious Sunday morning music. It was a heaping half of the life she wanted. He had never made her lie naked, facedown, on the top of her piano. He had never pricked her skin with the long tines of a fondue fork. He did puppy-dumb things like drip wax on ten thousand dollars of piano. She blew out all the candles and touched a knuckle, not a fingertip, to a little gleam at the top of one of them, and she felt it turn into a thicker second skin inside the little folds. The antidote. The antidote to the antidote. What could she do but alternate? She did not want sweetness only. She did not want roughness only. She especially did not want anything in the middle.

HOW HER MOTHER TOOK IT

Like a shattered windshield. Her mother did not fall apart, but she collapsed into a web of opaque pebbles. For the rest of her life she projected an imminent disintegration that never came. She wept for years, of course, at church services and TV commercials and offhand comments and at nothing, but those outbursts were only the surface of her mourning. Exhibit A: days after what would have been his twenty-third birthday, at a dinner in the city with the Patels and the Rosmunds, she improvised a speech about what an asshole Charlie had been sometimes.

“Such an asshole,” she said. “I’d tell him to get his dirty shoes off the coffee table, and he’d say, ‘Get a life, Mom.’ When I told him once how high my expectations were for him, he said it was because I’d given up on myself. You can’t say something like that and not be an asshole.”

“Marie,” her father had said, “he was fourteen.”

“Do you mean to suggest, Ben,” she replied, “that being a teenager and being an asshole are mutually exclusive?”

Exhibit B: at a church brunch, years after that, she was on her way to cut pound cake, and she froze, standing there with an eightinch kitchen knife held upright in her hand. At first she seemed to have zoned out, but after two-and-a-half minutes, it looked more like catalepsy. Failed interventions included a soft and then firm calling of her name, a hand on her elbow, snapping in front of her eyes (which did induce blinking), and gentle slaps on the top of her wrist. Only after her father delicately peeled back each finger from the handle and slipped the knife from his wife’s hand did she return to life. “Have you ever gotten lost in a train of thought?” she asked.

Exhibit C: a longitudinal study of her conversations. Her mother had always made her and Charlie laugh with adult laughter, and the adults around her laugh with childish laughter. In the early years afterward, her mother’s humor was bitter and sometimes elicited smirks but never anything audible. But by the time she was an adult, her mother made no jokes, only smiled with a waspy politeness. As she progressed into her fifties, her mother failed to even recognize jokes.

She remembers dubbing her father, dressed one day in a steelgray double-breasted suit and a matching vest, the USS Monitor , and her mother’s dry response: “Why, that’s a boat, dear.”

She imagines that behind the grim, pale person who keeps the curtains closed and prefers only white flowers, her old mother is tumbling down an infinite staircase, that the notes of life all sound out of place just so. There’s the Ligeti again. Another metaphor. It’s not a good sign, she knows, when you think about someone you love primarily in metaphors.

THE GENDER OF THE PIANO

In the Spanish it is masculine. In the French it is masculine. In the Italian it is even more masculine: il pianoforte . Latin came and went too early. The Germans have come the closest: an upright piano is neuter. A grand, however, is still masculine. Bless the neutered language English: a grand piano can be what it wants—or, some would say, what one wants it to be.

After she announced her program, that old wreck Havelin devoted his column in Pianist to a technical analysis of why a woman would never manage Baird’s études, let alone be the first. The average man’s hand, at 8.9 inches, could not manage the gaps that several of the pieces required, nor could that of a woman in the 99th percentile for hand width (here he made some facile joke about courting a gorilla). He cited a questionable study from the state university of Moldova about the relative speed of synapses in men and women. He cited lore about higher-order thinking.

She let the crowds shout him down for her. She thought about sending him pictures of herself hanging weights from her fingers every day in the kitchen: stretching, stretching. She had taken the pictures. She decided she would send them after the fact.

DIFFERENT IMPOSSIBILITIES

Difficulties of the mind, like those in the first of the Tantalus études, some claim, cannot be classified as impossible. The mind is only about as well-mapped as the ocean, they say. Its depths are not known. Besides some apophatic arguments about God, its limits are not circumscribed. She thinks the lack of a map does not erase the territory.

Impossibilities for the hand are the easiest to outline. Some spans are just too wide for a hand that tops out at five fingers. Baird has claimed, somewhat coyly, that his pieces contain no six-fingered chords: “Not if you’re clever.” But it’s not just about sprawling chords. Some call for clusters of four fingers near the top or bottom, with a pinky that has to reach for the ninth above the octave. She’s found that in Baird’s music there is a quantum uncertainty to the impossibility of reaching any particular note: On a given attempt, your finger might or might not make the stretch. Probability has to be on your side. But in all of the pieces, there are many such stretches. Probability must remain on your side more times than probability can possibly remain on your side.

There is science, too, to back the limitations contained within the piano itself. The quick repetitions of notes in numbers 3, 4, and 7 push the responsiveness of the instrument. Each string vibrates on a wavelength. Strike the hammer too soon and it’s like a raw bounce on a trampoline. The string quiets or goes on a chaotic fritz.

And then there is simple endurance. Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit was the famous test of will before Baird decided it was soft. When the quickly repeated notes are grouped into quickly repeated chords, there is no tag-teaming of fingers against a key to sound the note. The whole hand must rise and fall at a rate of blurred vibration that challenges all those minuscule, almost undiscovered muscles in the metacarpal network. No one wants to believe that endurance tests cannot be overcome. It’s a culture of sports movies, ultramarathoners, Jamaican bobsledders, and daredevil magicians. She can say this: Any time she’s played more than half of them in a stretch she’s had to soak her hands in ice baths, and they’ve still felt the next day as if they had been run over by a delivery truck.

LAYLA

The fondue fork. A kitschy Santa candle she’d inherited from an aunt. A magazine rolled so tightly it looked like a baton. Every time she saw what was coming, she flushed down to her bare hips. Every time it began happening, she felt the glue of gravity seal her seat to the ground or the bed or the piano or the counter. She felt her heart go tachycardic, a seizing hand banging crazed notes against the white keys of her ribs and the sharp black keys between them. She was always mute, stuck between the impulses of surprised laughter and a scream of terror. That was okay. As far as she could tell, Layla wanted her mute. The problem was the hours afterward. Layla left every time: for a walk, for coffee, for another girl in the registry of her phone—she didn’t know, and was left with an empty bed in a dark room with a view of the half-lit city, with the pungent pressured air of atomized old sweat. In those hours shame and regret became a literal black fog in her vision, and she’d lie curled up, immobile, blinking into it. She couldn’t see the door of her refrigerator or the bright Kandinsky print on the far wall. Her table and its three rough-finished chairs seemed to swim in a swamp. Though sometimes she considered throwing herself out the window, she wouldn’t brave stepping off the bed for the fear that, though she knew it was irrational, there were supernatural beasts in the fog. She believes now that she came close to psychosis. Another word for it is delirium. A nicer word. And the truth is she could have lived with the balance, the dark hours weighed against the most vivid in her canon. She was Layla’s passenger, and a part of her enjoyed that. Except that Layla was accelerating. The pain she wanted to inflict had to be pushed further. Layla began leaving scars. Not pinpricks but little stripes, and in semi-visible places like the insides of her upper arms. It was the look in Layla’s eyes as she did it: no longer cold coals, now more afraid than she was herself—terror, loss of control. Layla never let on much about the life of her mind, but she could see the being inside scrabbling, tumbling, the infinite staircase: there was the Ligeti again.