The Ann Ireland Library. Ann Ireland
worry,” Jasper assures her. “You’ve graduated with flying colours.” This is true. Ivy was a woman fighting for her life and mind less than a month ago.
“So ask me something interesting.” Ivy leans forward in her chair. “Given the fact that I’ve stared death in the face.” Her eyes are milky with medication. She left hospital fifteen days ago, her departure a media event, cameras recording each movement as she was helped from a wheelchair into a waiting car.
“All right, where were you born?”
She lets out a barking laugh, a sound that causes the intern, Rachel, to poke her head around the doorway.
“I’ve been reborn,” Ivy proclaims. “From the chrysalis of pain to my present state.”
“Why do you think you’re here?”
For a moment Jasper fears she isn’t going to answer, but she releases a long breath and says, “Because I’ve forgotten nearly everything. I can hardly dress myself in the morning, and they won’t let me near the kitchen.”
“I can help,” Jasper says, “if you’ll agree to work with me.”
Ivy looks dismayed. “You have no idea, do you?”
“We’ve found notable improvements in such cases.”
“What I really long to remember,” Ivy says, “is being sick.” She hesitates, then offers with a burst of intensity, “Where was I then?”
The panicked stare is chillingly familiar; Ashok, the Emergency Room physician, gazes at Jasper the same way. The illness takes them on an arduous journey to another country, and when they return, they’ve forgotten how things are done here. Mrs. Cronin, according to her file, ran a garden nursery before getting ambushed by the virus.
“How can I possibly return,” she says, “if I don’t know where I’ve been?”
When Jasper suggests they develop a recovery plan, she gives him a pained look.
“We might start with a short routine you can easily follow,” he says.
That look again. Some might call it blank, but Jasper knows better. Ashok says he lost his limbs and was just a floating head during his illness, surrounded by string instead of air. Another time he was an aquatic creature nosing at his own inert body. No one came to see him for months, years.
“Is there something in particular you’d like to learn to do?” Jasper asks.
Ivy brightens. “I’ve never been able to remember a joke and tell it right.”
Toby practises his bows in front of the dormitory mirror, bobbing up and down like a manservant. Ten points will be awarded for presentation, and bowing is a minefield of potential indignity. You don’t want to look like a fool before you begin to play. He grabs the guitar by the scruff of the neck, then bends deeply beside it, demonstrating the dead-chicken bow. Next, as practised by the dazzling Romero brothers, he stuffs the instrument under one arm like a surfboard and strides across the floor, smiling and nodding at an imaginary audience.
Bad idea. The mirror reflects a taut, crazed expression that would spook anyone. He circles the common room, edging past the weathered tables and scuffed chairs, then returns to the ad hoc stage, this time mimicking Scottish virtuoso David Russell. He holds the guitar horizontally in front of him like a magician about to perform a levitation caper, then rotates the instrument so the sound hole faces outward and — here’s the tricky bit — he bows behind it.
Way too complex. You don’t want to use yourself up before the first note sounds.
Armand stomps in, wet hair with towel flung around his neck. “That’s not how you do it, esteemed colleague. You’ll fall on your face. Permit me. I have perfected the ultimate stage bow.” He reaches for Toby’s guitar. When Toby doesn’t deliver it immediately, Armand’s smile grows rigid. “I may not be such a genius as you who have achieved the semifinals, but I do know how to bow.”
Toby relents. “Show me.”
Armand seizes the instrument, lifts the sound hole to his nose, and peers inside to examine the maker’s name. “Who is this guy?” he asks.
“Luthier from Quebec,” Toby says.
This was his standby instrument, until he lost his main performance guitar. Yes — lost.
Armand clutches the guitar mid-neck to his side and bows evenly, the instrument following the tilt of his body, and hovers there for two beats before rising at the same leisurely pace.
“You see?” he says. “No rush. This is a very elegant gesture.”
“Work of art,” Toby agrees, taking the instrument back, then retreats to his room, feeling a tingle of irritation. It’s so easy to get lost in curtains of detail.
Across the hall, Hiro stumbles over the tremolo passage in the compulsory piece and swears loudly in Japanese. If you can’t manage a whirlwind tremolo in the privacy of your room, what hope do you have when nerves bite down? The technique relies on a form of fraught relaxation, achieved after years of practising slowly, then working up to hummingbird speed.
Toby shuts the door, then rolls a towel along the bottom to mute his playing noise and that of others. The single chair faces the porthole window overlooking the courtyard. He switches the chair around so it now faces the door, then kicks the footstool over to its new position: this rearrangement is a trick to keep him from getting comfortable in one spot. Toby has to be able to mount any stage and posses the new space within seconds.
He practises until midnight, then falls into bed, lying there visualizing the way his left hand slides up the fretboard, fingers planting. Toby knows this passage as if it were imprinted on his eyelids, but something is wrong. He jackknifes up in the bed, body licked with heat: it’s the wrong damn piece! All he can see is the music he played in the first round, but that’s over, finished. He strains to pull his mind to the next morning’s program, mere hours away, reciting the name of each work in sequence, what key it’s in, and how the first bars sound. Yet the moment he sinks back into the pillow it’s the freaking Fandanguillo and Sarabande that appear in photographic detail.
In that week of madness leading up to the Paris trip, he’d practised in his rented room ten hours without a break until day bled into night. Fingers grew numb, calluses shredded, and his wrists seized up, deep down the carpal tunnel. Red stop signs must have flashed, but he refused to see them. A spirit state is where it took him, lips cracked, dropping pounds by the day. He was pure mind and ringing tone, a lean mystic of the guitar, death a heartbeat away.
Well, it always is, isn’t it?
No time to shop for food and no desire to break the spell. That’s what no one understands: the so-called black hole was anything but. Nothing could interrupt him, no phone or doorbell, just brother Felix who found him lying on his cot with saliva caked to the corners of his mouth — dehydrated, for starters. It was Felix who lifted him onto the back of his Harley and roared downtown to Emergency. How long was he in the hospital? Four days? Discharge to the halfway house where a man called Jasper greeted him at the door. Lucky to get in such a place, everyone assured him. They’ll soon get you on your feet again.
“What would you do if I hadn’t entered your life?” Jasper likes to ask.
Toby answers the question with a mysterious smile, convinced that once Jasper is sure about him, sure that he’s healed, those sharp eyes will move on.
The first time they became lovers he felt Jazz pucker like a snowflake under his touch, and for more than a year the guitar stayed locked in its case, a pet they weren’t sure about.
It’s almost 3:00 a.m. and Toby’s mind is doing cartwheels. Frantic, he pops a sleeping pill, one of four he sneaked out of Jasper’s toilet bag before leaving home. Jasper will notice, of course. He will have counted the tablets.
At last Toby feels his limbs grow heavy on the mattress as the little blue pill folds him