Smoke and Melody
The room wasn’t big enough for everything. He got rid of the dresser. Threw most of his clothes in the dumpster. Without the dresser, the piano fit snuggly. It took an army of men to get it hoisted up and through the window, but it was in. A piano, a stool, and a bed — that was the room. The bed wasn’t really a bed. It was more of a prison mattress with one black pillow and one white. He thought about painting the music notes of his favorite song on the ceiling so it would be the first thing he saw every morning, but he never got around to it.
Too busy. It didn’t matter what he was doing, that piano stool was a magnet. If he woke up in the night to use the toilet, he’d stop on the way back, consider the warmth of the bed, the hard cold of the piano stool, his eyes would shift back and forth between the two. It was always the piano. Every time. It didn’t matter how tired, drunk, heartbroken, sick — there was always time for a few songs.
Some nights, a few songs turned into a melodic sunrise. It didn’t matter the time of day, he played all the songs. He played them in succession, in reverse, he played them off key and on, in rhythm and out. If his fingers were tired of playing a song, he contorted himself until it sounded different. He played music standing up. He crouched and played from the floor. One-handed, two-handed, gentle or pounding. If you peeled the white paint off the walls, you’d probably hear music. He filled that room with music until it was gushing out the windows and oozed under the door.
The room had one other objcet. An ash tray, always on the brink of overflowing. Cigarettes and piano were a deadly combination. If the power went out, all you’d see is that glowing red, slow dancing over the piano. He had a way of balancing the cigarette at the furthest corner of his lips. Puffing at it between notes. Blowing coarse clouds of poison into the air. If chain smoking was a sport, he’d be an olympic medalists. He’d play his own theme music. His playing was mostly on point, but every so often, that piano would gag and cough, not from a missed note, but from the smoke. Even then, he knew the instrument so well that he could turn a coughing piano into a groove.
Second nature, that’s what it was. He wore the long row of white keys like fingers, the black ones like fingernails. It was hard to tell which way his hands were moving. One going up, the other going down. A mad scramble. A cat and mouse chase with a thousand near misses. The whole time smoking like an old engine.
To maintain enough visibility to read music, he had to put a stick in the window to keep it open. With the escaping smoke, music would flood the street below. Gallons and gallons of notes would dump out, drenching everything. Each day, he was inventing ten new ways to play ten old songs. He improvised for hours on end, always tapping with his metronome of a foot.
If he ate, he kept the cigarette burning. He set it in the ashtray up on top of the piano, next to the plate of food. Finger food was best. He could play with one hand and eat with the other. He could write notes with one hand and play with the other. He could drink, smoke, make phone calls — all without interrupting the rhythm. If it weren’t for the restroom, I don’t know if the music would ever stop. If the stool was equipped with some plumbing filtration device, I don’t think he’d ever stop. That room would fill up with a swarm of songs. The walls would bulge and the celling would bow upward. Without any release valve, the room would probably explode like a meth lab on a Monday morning.
On average, one day out of three hundred sixty-five, he’d get dragged away from the piano. It was never the fault of the piano. The piano was a part of him. It determined his posture, his disposition, his happiness. And one day of the year, there would always be something to interrupt his happiness. It would start out in a rush. A funeral, an emergency, a twenty-four hour hostage situation.
During that long day, those twenty-four brutal hours away from his room and his piano, he’d loose his mind. He’d smoke cigarettes just the same, filling up cars, filling up designated smoking areas, filling up trains and plane lavatories. His incessant smoking making everything look like a hot shower stall. He’d smoke harder on these days. Smoke to quell his restless fingers. His entire arms would twitch with desperation. They’d kill to be in the comfort his bedroom, bounding and tickling across the keys.
That’s the reason he started smoking in the first place. At first, he only smoked to relieve the rare stress that came about once year, when he wasn’t close enough to reach his piano. Only it never stopped. He kept the habit but continued to wear away at the keys. A cigarette never interfered. It was the funerals, the weddings, the emergency calls — those were the interruptions. If it were up to him, he’d cut those things out and only keep cigarettes and the piano.
When he was away from the piano keys for any length of time, his organs would shrivel inside his rib cage. The whites of his eyes would go veiny and red. His mouth would turn to cotton and his forehead would drip sweat. The next day, or that night when he makes it back to his room, he tucks himself neatly in front of the piano and stares. Without touching a single key, he stares at the instrument as if, in a single day, it has become alien to him. He hesitates, unsure where to lay his hands. His fingers feel scabbed and rusty. He pops the knuckles. Stretches them against one another. And still, the seat feels corrupted. The music on the sheets of paper looks like misspelled braille. The pillows on his bed look like nothing more than two dilapidated pillows with mismatch cases. His breath goes erratic and he swallows tablespoons of saliva at once.
There’s something in him that feels phony returning to the seat. It’s as if he’s betrayed a friend. How is he supposed to call himself a pianist if his fingers no longer recognize the keys? A pianist isn’t afraid to touch his instrument.
He lights a cigarette and sets his hands down slowly, as if lowering them into cold, eel-infested water. The sound starts slow. His fingers limp and stager across the keys. The noise echoes off the walls and comes back like vampire bats. Sometimes it takes hours, other times it takes the entire day to rid the room of those bats. Slowly, the rust and scabs melt from his hands. They become limber again. The stool feels like his again. The smoke fills the room from the top down. The music starts at the bottom and works its way into the clouds. By the end of the day, the room is full again.