by Chris Cander
“He’s there? Jesus, Katya, this is insane. You want me to come to your house while he’s home?” He went back to his professional voice. “Do you realize what might happen?”
“Grisha’s here, sleeping. Mikhail is unconscious from vodka, I think. I can smell it from the living room. He couldn’t do anything even if he wakes up.”
He sounded distressed. “Where do you want me to take it? It’s not like holding your purse while you shop. I’ll need help. A truck, some movers. Have you called that shop? Immortal Piano or whatever its name is?”
“No, I didn’t call them. I called you.”
He sighed. “Of course. I’m sorry.”
“You are a smart man, a strong man. I know you will have the right idea. You will, yes?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’ll think of something.”
“Quickly, please.”
“Okay.”
* * *
—
She looked in on her husband, who was under the covers with all his clothes on. His wiry, graying hair stood out from the pillow in every direction, and his foul breath spilled out from his wide-open mouth. She closed the door as quietly as she could. Then she checked on her son, his face a grimace even in sleep. She kissed her fingertips and touched his cheek, his cast. He didn’t move.
Finally, she sat down at the piano to wait. It was so quiet she could hear the clock ticking off the seconds like a metronome. Softly, she began playing. Scales first, out of habit; then, one by one, she played the best pieces in her repertoire. Mikhail was too far under to be wakened, but her son, she hoped, would see them in his dreams. She began with some of the very short pieces by Milhaud from La Muse Ménagère: “La Douceur des Soirées” and “Lectures Nocturnes” and “Reconnaissance à la Muse.” Then the titanic Prelude and Fugue no. 24 in D Minor by Shostakovich and Chopin’s “Sunshine” étude. She moved on to Schubert’s Fourth Impromptu in A-flat Major, which she loved for its balance between the strong left-hand melody and the right-hand arpeggios. Finally, Rachmaninoff’s famous Prelude in C-sharp Minor, delicate and dirgelike, during which she, as the composer allegedly had when he’d composed it, foresaw her own demise. Heavy tears blurred her vision, so she closed her eyes and let the tears fall down.
Music was her only means of holding off grief. Even as a small child, she’d found her way to it every day. She thought of the terrible years when she’d had to live without her Blüthner beneath her hands, and the increasingly less miserable years since it had been returned. The pressure of her fingers on the keys was how she could tolerate herself and the world, yet she had no choice except to send it away. She couldn’t bear to imagine its absence but knew, at least, that it—and her son—might be safe.
She began again, this time with her absolute favorite, the Scriabin E-flat Minor Prelude, its fevered rhythm demanding all of her concentration, and slipped so quickly into its eddy of color and punch that she didn’t hear the knock at the door; nor did she notice that her son was awake and watching her with deep love and admiration.
“Mama, the door,” he said once she’d finished.
She jumped up, smoothed her dress, stopped by Grisha and again put her hand against his cheek. He closed his eyes. “This will be difficult for you to understand,” she said, then opened the door.
For an awkward moment Katya stood looking at the three men there on her doorstep. Her face burned and she darted her eyes over them like the staccato notes of Mozart’s “Turkish March,” saying a great deal without speaking, until one of the men coughed into his fist.
“Privet, Mrs. Zeldin,” he said. “May we come in?”
After brief introductions, spoken in low voices so as not to disturb Greg, or to waken Mikhail, she led them to the piano and laid her hand on the case, caressing its fire-poker wounds. “Here it is,” she said. There was much more she wanted to say—take care of it, please; let no harm come to it—but she couldn’t bring herself to ask for any more than she already had.
One of them turned to his colleagues and revealed the cover story. “Beautiful. It is just as described. Just what I was looking for.” He smiled at Katya, who turned away.
“Mama!” Greg said, his voice throaty and hoarse. “What’s happening?”
“Chi-chi-chi. You’re confused now. The medicine. Close your eyes, go back to sleep.”
As the men began to manipulate the piano, testing its heft, deciding how they would move it without hurting themselves, Greg watched them with wide and wary eyes.
* * *
—
He was sleepy and confused, true, but he would not go back to sleep. He watched the men as they circled the piano like predators, deciding how to capture and kill it, grunting instructions to one another. He watched his mother bring blankets with which to drape it, good blankets they used every night that were made by his grandmothers and brought over during the emigration from Russia years ago. He watched his mother’s eyes fill with tears when the men finally hoisted the piano—their prey, now killed and covered—with soft grips unaccustomed to such an effort. He watched until, struggling with their load, they moved past the threshold and beyond his view, and he watched his mother stand in the doorway with a hand pressed to her chest.
“Be careful,” she said. “Take care.” Then with desperation in her voice she called out, “Я люблю тебя.”
He did not know if her love was meant for the men or the piano, or both. But he knew that she began crying as soon as they drove away, and there was nothing he could do to help.
THE NEXT SIX MILES down Racetrack Valley Road were the worst thus far: tedious, uncomfortable, and miserably slow. They averaged only about eight miles per hour, and every few hundred feet, when the car felt as if it were shaking apart, Greg slammed on the brakes. Each time, Clara looked behind them to make sure the truck was okay; each time, Juan gave her a thumbs-up. She was worried about the piano, though. The movers couldn’t see into the bed and really had no idea what was going on back there.
Frustrated, she said to Greg, “I know braking’s intuitive, but if you actually go just a little faster over the bumps it won’t be as jarring. I’ll drive if you want.”
“I’ve got it,” he said. He didn’t acknowledge her advice, but did as she suggested. Twenty or so minutes later, in the distance they could see the nearly three-mile-long dry lakebed known as Racetrack Playa, where a huge, dark rock outcrop rose up dramatically out of the wide, flat, bright sand-colored surface. They drove along the western perimeter toward the southern end, outpacing the falling sun, which set early behind the adjacent mountains. The road began to smooth out.
“Let’s stop here,” Clara said. “We need to pump up the tires.”
“Why? Won’t we have to lower the pressure again when we head back out?”
“Yeah, once we’re on that rough stretch, but now that it’s smooth we need a normal psi.”
“It’s only a little farther. We’re losing the light as it is. We can do it afterward.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea. When there’s less air in a tire, it generates more heat and can weaken the rubber. We’re risking a puncture driving too long like this.”
“And if we stop now, I’ll miss the shot. It’s only another ten minutes or so. We’ll be fine.”
The cliffs to the west were already in shadow, and the lakebed’s surface seemed to glow in the lower slant of light. But as they drove along without seeming to get anywhere, Clara grew increasingly nervous.
Finally, they arrived at a sandy parking area. Clara jumped out of the SUV to check the tires. Satisfied that there were no bulges or obvious signs of wear, she decided to let them cool down for a few minutes before reinflating them and wandered over to where Greg stood at the edge of the lakebed. Two hours of pounding on the rough roads had made her tense, and with her good hand she kneaded her lower back to loosen the muscles. Likewise, Greg w
as rubbing his lame leg.
“This was my mother’s favorite,” he said with a wistful reverence as he stared out at the playa. “Her favorite photo from the trip, I mean.” He shook his head. “I must’ve looked at that one a thousand times. It didn’t do the place justice.”
The setting sun illuminated a strangely regular hexagonal pattern of dried mud. “Look at this,” Clara said. From a distance it appeared smooth, but up close it reminded Clara of what the backs of her hands looked like after she scrubbed off the workday grease with Boraxo. Peter’s mother had once taken one of her dry, cracked hands and tsk-tsked. “Rough skin, no good for a woman,” she said. “You still a woman, koukla, even though you working here with the boys. You need to take better care of your hands.” She brought in some heavy-duty hand lotion the next day and set it on the edge of the sink, but Clara wouldn’t use it. It made her grip on the tools slick. Now she felt the itch of dry skin beneath her cast; she’d massage her hands with a whole bottle’s worth of that lotion if she could.
After a moment Greg nodded to the movers, his instructions by then implied by just the tilt of his head. “Come on. We need to hurry if we’re going to get the piano set up in time. Those shadows are coming fast.”
They walked out onto the playa toward a few scattered black dolomite rocks, Greg loaded with equipment, Juan and Beto flanking the piano and pushing it steadily into the wind. “We’ll go to that first one there,” he said, pointing at a small lump. When they reached it, though, Clara was surprised by how much larger it was than she’d expected. Another example of the park’s tricky proportions.
“These are the sailing stones,” Greg said, then pointed to a steep promontory on the southeastern end. “Over there’s where the rocks start out. They crumble off that slope and fall onto the playa. And somehow, some of them start moving around by themselves across the lakebed. It’s almost perfectly level from one end to the other—no slope at all, it’s a real phenomenon—and they leave these long trails in the dirt, like wakes.” Sure enough, there were trails behind several of the rocks that reminded Clara of the slug tracks she used to see on her uncle’s concrete porch on rainy mornings. She crouched down to touch one. Though it wasn’t very deep, it stood out against the tile-like polygons because its smoothed-out surface reflected the sunlight differently.
“How can they move by themselves?” she asked. “There must be something. Wind or earthquakes or some other force. Or maybe people push them.” She tested the possibility by leaning against one and using her legs for leverage. It didn’t budge.
“There are all kinds of theories about that. But here’s the thing: nobody has ever seen them moving. It’s one of the great mysteries of Death Valley.”
She looked around and saw no signs of vehicle tracks. Beyond this were many other dark rocks of varying sizes, all leading their own meandering trails. They were like stock cars that had all stalled and been abandoned in mid-race.
“It looks like they’re trying to escape,” Greg said, as though reading Clara’s mind. “They’re refugees, all sliding away from one place to another.”
“It’s sort of eerie, like we interrupted them. You think that if we turned our backs they’d move some more?”
Greg made a low harrumph. “Maybe. But we’ll lose the light if we waste any more time. We’re late as it is, damn it. It took so long getting here with those crap roads.” He told Juan to put the piano directly in front of a smaller boulder, so that the Blüthner, not the rock, appeared to have created the track behind it on the basin. It became just another one of those heavy objects silently fleeing their histories.
What if the Blüthner, Clara wondered, wasn’t simply an insentient object at the mercy of its owner? What if it was a conscious entity frozen in animation? And if by some magic it could suddenly speak for itself, what would it say? Where would it go, if it could? Would it yearn to exercise its hammers and strings, or wish daily for minute flexions of its soundboard? Would it ache for the human touch that could make it sing once more?
And what about her? What would she do if the piano were to simply glide away, leaving Clara and her past in its wake? She shuddered at the thought of losing either.
She watched Greg photograph the piano amid the trails and sailing rocks until the shadows nearly reached this section of the playa. He seemed agitated as he worked, his limp more pronounced, his movements less fluid. He never seemed to walk with a light step, but now it looked like he was on a forced march. Though Clara admired his self-reliance, she recognized a burden when she saw one. She hadn’t wanted to ask anything more about Greg’s mother, but just knowing that she was gone made Clara feel more compassionate toward him. It also seemed to justify not only these quirky photographs but also his determination to feature her—and his mother’s—piano in them. Also, if her suicide had been recent, perhaps it also justified his erratic moods.
While Greg returned his gear to the back of the SUV, Clara plugged the portable pump into the SUV’s power outlet and reinflated the tires on both vehicles. She gave a thumbs-up to the movers when she was finished, and Beto fired up the truck.
“So what’s next?” she asked Greg as she buckled her seat belt, hoping to draw him out of his foul humor.
“There’s an idea I want to try out at the other end of the playa before we leave. I want to silhouette the piano in front of the last bit of light, maybe climb up on that outcrop we passed to get a higher angle,” he said, without much enthusiasm. He started the car and they drove back out the way they’d come in.
Clara had been paying close attention. “Won’t it look smaller if you’re higher up?”
“Not if I use a wide-angle lens. If I’m above the subject and center it in the frame, the lens will actually emphasize it. And the horizon will look curved”—he made a dome shape with his free hand to show her—“like the piano’s sitting on top of the world. If I can catch the last bit of sunset behind it, it’ll look like it’s radiating light.” He thought for a moment. “But maybe I’ll try both. Make it look grand and important with the wide lens, and then shoot it so it looks small and insignificant under a massive sky. Maybe that’s a better metaphor anyway.”
“I guess it depends on what you’re trying to say.”
“I want to say there’s a point to all this.” He swept his hand across the dashboard toward the horizon, possibly indicating everything under the setting sun. His voice cracked, and he suddenly seemed decades younger, wounded and desperate. “I want to say that there’s a reason this piano exists in the world. This specific piano. That there’s something important about it, to the people who made it, to the people who played it and lost it and found it and lost it again, thinking it was gone forever. This Blüthner made music out of nothing, it thawed frozen imaginations, and then it burned down and showed up again with its old scratches and a new owner. This piano has been playing in my mind all my life, and nobody knows that. Nobody knows how it plays and plays and plays in my head, all the fucking time, and I can’t make it stop, I’ve never been able to get it out of my fucking—”
A horn blared behind them, and Greg looked in the rearview mirror. “God damn it,” he said, braking hard enough for Clara’s torso to strain against the seat belt. “They blew a tire.”
They got out of the car and ran, Greg with his skipping, uneven trot, the fifty or so yards to where the truck had stuttered to a stop against a bank of dirt alongside the pockmarked road, listing to one side. Juan and Beto spilled out of the cab and stared at the right front tire, which was already flat, and then the right rear one hissed, exhaling air until it, too, was worthless.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Greg said. “What the hell happened?”
“Coño,” Juan said under his breath, shaking his head.
“The road, it is very bad,” Beto said. “Lot of rocks.”
Clara bent down to touch the front tire. “Yeah, the
y caught a sharp one with both tires. We can put the spare on the front. I might be able to patch the other, but I don’t think it’ll make it back over all those washboards. We’re going to need a new one.”
“What about the SUV’s spare?” Greg asked.
“It won’t fit. That wheel has a different bolt pattern.”
“Fuck!” Greg said. He waved his mobile phone around in the air, checking it every few seconds to see if he’d gotten a signal; the deeper into the park, the worse the cell reception. “Here,” he told her. “Look on the map and tell me the number for the ranger station.” He was so agitated that she did as he asked, though she resented being ordered around. If he’d let her reinflate the tires when she’d wanted to, they might not have been as susceptible to a puncture.
“Are you kidding me?” Greg was soon shouting. “What do we pay the goddamn park fees for, then?” and “So what am I supposed to do?” and “Fine, will you at least give me their number?” He pushed the End button so hard his thumb turned briefly white.
“What’d they say?” Clara asked. That they might be stranded in the middle of the desert didn’t seem like a crisis to her. It was a beautiful evening, and they had food. Maybe they’d even get to see the rocks come to life and sail silently around the playa. Besides, what else did she have to do?
“They won’t send anybody out here. ‘Not enough staff,’ she said. She told me to call a wrecker service in Beatty because they’re the closest, but then she said nobody would drive this far out at this time of day. We’ll have to wait till morning for anybody to get here.” He leaned back and gave a rock on the ground a vicious, stiff-legged kick. That the rock barely moved only added to his fury. “I’m not staying here all fucking night. We’ll just leave the truck and drive into town ourselves.”
“We can’t leave the truck,” she said. “Not with my piano in it.”
“Clara,” he said, turning his anger toward her and sweeping his arm across the playa, “there’s nobody here.”
