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“Maybe you could have a secret identity?”

He laughs. “What for?”

“So I can hear you play a concert.”

He’s quiet. Finally he says, “I’ll think about it.”

There are two lanes open at the checkout and no one in line. The cashiers are speculating about their husbands’ snow-shoveling capabilities as we place our oddly assorted haul on the conveyor belt. They are the only employees we’ve encountered since we entered the store. Night has fallen abruptly. Through the plate glass windows we can see the almost empty parking lot. It’s only five o’clock and still snowing. We bundle up again and head out.

The path we made on our way to the store has begun to fill—already an inch of snow disguises our boot prints. When we turn onto Ravenswood we are walking with that low-center-of-gravity waddle peculiar to people too familiar with snow, trying not to slip; we are scanning the snow in front of us, our heads down, and we almost miss our filing cabinet.

I see it in my peripheral vision: the filing cabinet is sturdy, four drawers tall, painted a rather military shade of green with brass handles. It is standing in a parking space with some broken chairs and a few plastic egg crates. Dibs.

“Isn’t that our filing cabinet?” I ask.

“I think so. Yes, look, there’s the Greenpeace sticker. And the side is scratched.”

“How funny,” I say. “I thought it was in the closet already. You stay here and guard it, I’ll go get the dolly.”

“Guard it?” Oliver says. “Why?”

“The scrap-pickers might come by. You never know.”

“Of course we know,” Oliver says. “It’s going to end up in the closet. It will be in the closet for the next hundred years.”

“You have a point.”

We walk to the Yellow House, put the groceries away, retrieve the dolly from the basement, and go back to the parking space where our filing cabinet is patiently waiting for us. As we are angling it onto the dolly I see an older white lady watching from the front window, but she doesn’t come out to talk to us. I’m a little apprehensive because people have been shot at for messing with the random junk other people put in parking spaces they have shoveled out. We wheel the cabinet back to the Yellow House with great difficulty. The dolly gets stuck in the snow repeatedly and leaves deep tracks. Finally, we take it off the dolly and carry it. The hard part is getting it up the stairs, but we manage. By the time it is standing in front of the closet door we are sweating and panting. “Drinks,” Oliver croaks. I head down to the kitchen.

Oliver: As soon as Alba is out of the room, I open the combination lock on the closet.

Alba’s music is stacked neatly in four piles of file folders, anticipating the four drawers of the cabinet. The files are in chronological order. In the future they will be color-coded, though the age of decorative office supplies hasn’t yet begun, so all the files are manila now. I smile at the familiar names. Chaos Monkey; Ravenswood Sonata; A History of the Weather. Many of the named files are empty. Some have a page or two. Some are fat and grubby with handling. I hear Alba’s steps on the stairs, the tinkling of ice.

“Is that all?” she says. “I thought there’d be a lot more by now.”

“It’s only 1979,” I say. “Don’t worry. You’ll get it all written.”

“I guess so,” she says. “It’s funny to see the closet looking so bare. It’s like all my music has vanished.”

“Never,” I say. “It’s all in my head. I’m your external hard drive.”

Alba laughs. “You’re so sweet. I bet you’ve never even seen an external hard drive.”

“I’ve read about them.” We toast the filing cabinet. It’s always exciting when we manage to acquire a thing that belongs in the Yellow House. I pick up the piles of music and relocate them to the top of Alba’s upright piano. Then we shove the filing cabinet into place. I resist the urge to flip through the scores. Alba and I have an understanding: I pretend that I don’t play her music when she isn’t here. Sometimes when I’m improvising Alba says, “Play that again.” If she likes it, she might say, “Can I steal that?” I always say yes without telling her it’s hers, that I’m playing some fragment of her own music. Where does it come from, then? Alba’s music is music of displacement.

Alba has told me that she knows—with certainty, without thinking—what belongs to her and what is other. It needs to sound like this, not that; it makes itself by being wrong until it is right. These files are full of mutations; in the future this music is complete, but in order for Alba to make it, I have to hide it from her. The files all have dates scribbled on them. My task is to retrieve files from the cabinet on the right dates and leave them out for Alba. She slides them under the closet door when she wants to hide them from herself. Somehow, eventually, the piece of music is completed. Then we celebrate.

The doorbell rings. Alba whispers, “Stay here.” She goes downstairs. I hear the front door open, a man’s voice, a woman’s voice. Eventually, the door shuts, and Alba comes upstairs. I hear the woman still complaining as she walks away, crunching boots on snow. Alba sits in her chair and drinks the rest of her Scotch. “What happened?” I ask her.

“That was the woman who owned the filing cabinet. She brought a policeman with her. She said we stole her filing cabinet.”

“But it was in the street! She threw it away.”

“Not exactly,” Alba says. “In Chicago, when it snows a lot and people have to shovel out their cars, they put things in the spaces so that other people don’t park there. The things aren’t valuable, but people get mad if you mess with their stuff. It’s called ‘dibs.’ People have been known to slash tires and break windshields.”

“Do we have to give it back?”

“No, I offered her some money, and she took it, so it’s ours.”