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“You don’t want them to see you when you were younger?”

“No, that’s not it,” he says. “You should meet this person in real time. Not now.”

I wonder if this is a girlfriend, or a wife. In 2055 I will be twenty-six.

“It’s not what you’re thinking,” he says. “Listen: you won’t be here much longer. When you get back to your present, pretend nothing happened. Put your clothes on, sit by the window, wait for him to wake up. Say you woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep.”

“Do you think Mom and Dad know about him?”

“I don’t know. They were desperate. No one else could have got you here. But he doesn’t want you around any more than you want to be near him. You will rarely see him.”

“What will I do?”

“You are going to be fine. Trust your teacher, study hard. You have people who love you.”

I am about to ask him who Isadora is, and what she meant when she said that I am under her protection?—but I am gone, back to the hotel bathroom, kneeling on the cold tile floor, dry heaving. I get up, wash my face and peek into the room. My uncle is sleeping on his own side of the bed. I dress and wait by the window to see what the day will bring.

The Air Becomes Music

Friday, November 1, 2041 (Oliver is 13)

Oliver: The second day I am in England my Uncle Stephen says, “Now it’s time for you to work. We cannot lose a day, and you must apply yourself, Qing. It will be impossible to fool anyone, but you must make a sincere effort.” We are sitting in the restaurant of the hotel, on the top floor. Far below I can see the river. It is dark, slow-moving.

I say, “But I’ve never even touched a piano.”

Uncle Stephen tries to encourage me. “You have long fingers and you are quick at video games. Why shouldn’t you play the piano?”

He has arranged for me to stay with the piano teacher here in London. “I’m in Bristol all week, every week, it will be better and you can learn faster if you live at her house.”

“What sort of person is she?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” Uncle Stephen says. “I’ve never met her. But she is highly praised by everyone I consulted.”

I try the fake coffee with lots of fake sugar and beans on toast. There are foods I have never seen: crumpets and Marmite. My uncle eats nothing. I have the impression that his mind is elsewhere. He sits with me as I eat, jiggling his knee and reading his phone. He offers me the phone. There is a message from my mother: We are so happy that you have arrived safely! Work well, lovely boy, we are thinking of you.

I haven’t unpacked, so it’s easy to put my few stray things into my backpack and carry it down to the hotel lobby. The black car comes to take us to the teacher’s home. We sit in the back seat, and my uncle talks to the driver, a Black woman this time. She asks me something. I meet her eyes in the mirror. My uncle answers for me. I am tired of not understanding already.

We pass many tall glass buildings, but few people. It begins to rain.

“Where are we?” I ask Uncle Stephen.

“Canary Wharf,” he says.

“Where are we going?”

“Crouch End.”

None of this means anything to me. “Is Crouch End nice?”

“It’s high ground.”

My uncle looks at his phone for most of the ride.

The rain lets up just as we arrive. The teacher’s house is humble, a redbrick house; the front garden is paved with cement that has oyster shells stuck into it. All the houses on this street must have been the same, once, but they are so old that each one has a personality now. Most of the other houses look dirty and disagreeable. This one seems feminine, tidy, pleasant. It has a lot of chimneys. There is a gray cat in the window that jumps down and vanishes into the bushes as we arrive at the front door and ring the bell.

The white lady who answers the door is short, middle-aged. She is wearing jeans and a green T-shirt with English words on it, a black jumper with little pearl buttons. Her hair is black with magenta sheen; she wears it in a thick braid that comes all the way down to her bottom. She is drying her hands on a tea towel. She wears dark red lipstick and red-framed glasses with tiny rhinestones in the corners. This is Mrs. Madeline Baxter, my teacher.

She gestures to me, come in. She looks at me without smiling. Through a doorway at the end of the hall I can see a piano in the main room, lots of windows, a carpet on a wooden floor. I remove my shoes. Uncle Stephen says something to Mrs. Baxter in English; she replies. I notice that my uncle doesn’t take off his shoes. Mrs. Baxter is wearing green striped socks. Their conversation goes on for a while. Eventually my uncle says to me, “She wants to show you your room.”