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I turn to the keys. So many; how do I choose? Does it matter? I press a key. Mrs. Baxter presses one of her black keys. I press two keys together, keys that are next to each other; it sounds okay, maybe not good, I try pressing two keys that are farther apart and Mrs. Baxter presses a key that seems to supply a missing sound. I play some of the lowest keys, I make sounds like thunder; Mrs. Baxter plays high keys that sound like sad rain. I look over to see what she is doing. She uses all her fingers, bunched up as though she is tickling the piano; I try to do the same. “Curl your hands, pretend you’re holding an egg,” she says. I curl my hands; I pretend that the piano is ticklish. My sounds are not as nice as hers. I try other keys, I crash and I tickle, I play lots of keys together and one or two keys, slowly and then quickly. Mrs. Baxter does not make terrible sounds like I do, but she seems to be circling around my sounds, changing the colors; she takes my randomness and makes ideas grow, she is replying to my questions—I stop and she stops.

We sit side by side, listening to each other in silence. The air around the piano seems to shimmer with all the sounds we have made. A feeling of sadness comes at me, sadness and distance from home, darkness—I know that I am about to cry. I struggle to suppress my tears and Mrs. Baxter stands up and says, “Well, that was very interesting, and now I think it must be time for lunch!” I hear her walk briskly out of the room and into the kitchen. I sit at the piano trying to understand what just happened? wondering was that music? What is music? I feel as though I am in outer space, floating alone in the terrible dark. I begin crying silently, holding the sounds inside me. The noises in the kitchen pause and then resume, and then I see through my tears her hand placing a small packet of tissues on the keys in front of me. I wipe my eyes and blow my nose.

“Are you ready, Oliver?” says Mrs. Baxter, from the kitchen.

I stand up, feeling dizzy. “Yes, Teacher, I’m ready.”

Night Music

Tuesday, November 5, 2041 (Oliver is 13 and 35)

Oliver: I’ve been having trouble sleeping again. I have tried melatonin and hot milk, white noise; I have tried to cut out caffeine, but that only makes my head hurt, and I end up drinking tea anyway. Tonight is the fourth night of bad sleep. My flat in Belsize Park is quiet, but when I can’t sleep all noises demand my attention. I lie in bed listening to the wind and the sirens coming up Haverstock Hill Road toward the Royal Free Hospital. A long train moves through Primrose Hill. Then I must have been dozing, because I wake up suddenly and I am in Madeline Baxter’s house, in the dark, lying on the floor of her music room, looking up at the underside of her piano. I hear scattered fireworks in the distance. Gwen the Cat is staring at me from Madeline’s chair, her eyes strangely reflective in the moonlight. I roll over and stand up. I peek at the music on the stand. It’s very basic, scales and fingering exercises. I go to the cellar door and creep downstairs as quietly as I can. The washing machine is down here, and there’s damp laundry hanging on the wooden racks. Madeline is shorter and thinner than I am, and my own clothes are too small for me. I go back upstairs and into the front hall. There’s a black raincoat that I remember Madeline wearing, big and billowy; it will have to do. As I put it on, her smell surrounds me, sweaty and smoky; it is comforting. I button it and tie the belt. The sleeves are too short, but the coat covers my knees.

I go upstairs, cautiously. The grandfather clock in the corridor shows almost three o’clock, but it has always run fast and it must be closer to half two. My room is on the left. Madeline’s is across the landing. Her door is slightly ajar and her reading light is still on, but I can hear her snoring softly. I open the door to my room.

Thirteen-year-old me is sitting up in bed. He’s awake and peering at his phone, his face blue in the phone’s reflected light. What a funny creature I was then! My features are too big for my face, and in the phone’s light I look like a sad little gargoyle. He looks up, not too surprised to see me, and puts the phone away. I remember: I was looking at a video from my birthday dinner the previous August. My parents are in the video, smiling and reciting the poems they wrote for my birthday. I used to watch it several times a day, and my heart hurts, remembering.

I sit on the bed. He looks so miserable that I reach over and gather him up, the way my mother used to do, and we sit like that for a short while. “Okay,” he whispers, and I release him.

“Hello,” I say. “How are you tonight?”

“Lonely,” he says. “I can’t sleep. There were lots of fireworks. It’s some sort of holiday.” We speak in Mandarin, very softly, though the house is old and has heavy walls and thick doors.

“I was awake all night, too.”

“What year did you come from?”

“2063. You never sleep well in London. I’m not sure why.”

“Lessons were hard today. She says I must learn to read music.”

“She’s right, it’s impossible to go forward if you have to memorize everything. Though you will have to cultivate that skill, too.”

“I don’t think I will be able to do it,” he says. “It is too difficult. There’s too much to learn, no time.”

“You don’t have to know everything at the beginning. Don’t worry so much. Mrs. Baxter is a wonderful teacher.”

“She’s kind,” says Oliver. “She took me to a Chinese restaurant yesterday.”

“Did you like it?” I ask, remembering the alien tastes and smells, the quizzical glances from the waitress who seemed to wonder why a Chinese boy was dining with a white lady, why the boy was speaking only Mandarin and the white lady only English.

“It was . . . new,” he says. “Nothing tasted right. They gave us ‘fortune cookies.’ Mine said, ‘Your luck has changed.’ Do you think that’s good?”

“Yes,” I say. “It’s very good.”

“I wasn’t sure,” he says. “I don’t know if my luck was good or bad, before.”

“What did Mrs. Baxter’s fortune say?” I ask.

“‘Happiness will come through hard work.’”

I smile. “You should have had that one. You are about to work harder than you ever have or will again.”

He frowns. “I wish I could play. Everyone keeps saying I have to work.”

“Work and play are the same thing if you love your work.”

“Do I love it?” His voice is urgent in the dark.