the pulley—I heard the clangor of the collision. Held tightly against the pulley, the naked piano swung wildly. Suddenly the three cables broke apart at the top, opened, and released the expensive instrument and the three red cushions that had been protecting its glossy finish from the sling.
As the huge black piano fell a little crookedly, its lid opened out, flapped slowly like the single stiff wing of a monstrous bird. The protective felt socks dropped away, and sunlight transmogrified the pedals into the brass talons of a stooping bird of prey.
I began to run. Still running, I heard the impact of the instrument, heard how it broke in jangled discord and the terrified screams of people close by. I ran harder. Approaching the door of the café, I gasped first with relief to see our friend Gabriel Plum lying beside the wrecked piano on the cobblestones. Stretched out, unhurt, he held Thom’s eyeglasses with the thick black plastic frame in his hand and seemed to be studying the pavement through one of the lenses. Then I saw a pool of blood seeping from underneath the golden struts and snarled strings, the scattered keys and felted hammers of the shattered piano.
“Thom!” I screamed. My knees buckled, and I would have fallen but felt under my elbow the supporting male hand of some stranger who muttered in an unknown tongue the word Igtiyal!
Three years later, I would learn that this Arabic word meant “murder.”
The day of Thom’s death, I felt myself disintegrating, turning into dust, into nothing.
Earlier that morning, after Thom and I got up, Thom had taken his computer flash drive, which I called the memory stick, though the term usually applies to a device for cameras, from around his own neck and lowered the black silk cord over my head. It was a familiar ritual for the first morning after our arrival for a conference in a foreign country. During the scientific meetings, I would venture out mostly on my own; Thom’s flash drive was a talisman, a love token, and a reminder that he was with me on my rambles. Without fail, I would return the memory stick to him at a shared meal just before he spoke at the conference.
That fateful day in our Amsterdam hotel, as he positioned the cord and its pendant around my neck, he said, “The keys to the kingdom.” Smiling fondly at me, he gave the titanium case of his flash drive a little pat against my breastbone.
Adjusting the stick so that it hung concealed inside my silk blouse between my breasts, I smiled to recall that as a child in Memphis I had sometimes worn the key to my grandmother’s home on a string around my neck.
“The keys to which kingdom?” I asked Thom.
“The inhabited universe.”
“Only that?” I teased.
“Let me show you, Ms. Smarty,” he said.
Drawing shut the hotel’s blackout curtains, he turned morning into night. By lamplight, his large adept hands moved automatically among the utilitarian instruments of his profession: a small projector, his computer, a connecting cable. When he retrieved the flash drive, cupping it in his hand, he remarked, “Already warm,” kissed it, and winked at me. Then he inserted the device into a port on the computer and turned off the table lamp.
In the darkness over our heads appeared a dazzling star-studded sky, clouded occasionally with reddish-pinkish zones.
“Behold,” he said dramatically. Then he spoke in his normal, soft voice, full of intimacy. “The reddish clouds indicate a statistical reality—where extraterrestrial life is most likely to be found.”
So many reddish areas! My knees felt wobbly. The tints of thin red and purple—sunset colors, dawn colors—looked like veils dropped here and there over the vast array of stars.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Spectroscopic analysis—new methods—for detecting the presence of biomolecules in deep space. Other life is very far away, but it exists.”
Like heaven, but where? I wanted to ask. Cloudy wisps of colors represented various biomolecules—pink, magenta, lavender, orange, a waver of green. Overlapping and combining in some places, the colors veiled the swirls of galaxies, stars, and golden intergalactic dust.
“It’s gorgeous,” I said, and my voice trembled. “You represent statistical reality as gorgeous.” I was moved by his graphic, the way works of art sometimes move me in their ability to combine truth and beauty. Sometimes the paintings of my patients moved me that way—I was an art therapist at University Hospital in Iowa City.
“I suppose we’re hardwired to see creation as beautiful,” he replied.