Gregoriev was true to her word. Monday’s performance was so immediately a hit that the rest of his run sold out. He couldn’t open his phone without seeing pages upon pages of his own face, staring listlessly from a studio photo, or deep in concentration from a snatched camera shot from the front row. The RachInst didn’t allow cameras, took a hard line on people recording their performances. But word got out pretty quickly that he just might be the one. The greatest pianist alive. Perhaps the single greatest pianist ever.
Marlow thought idly of his old band, Charismatic Megafauna, of how much they’d been holding him back. Kim had been the problem, really. Nasser hated him and always had. If Marlow had stayed in the band, he would’ve had to get rid of him sooner or later, for his own good. But Kim? Kim was just a pushover. She had no ambition. If she’d only been able to imagine what great things they could’ve done together – with him at the front of the stage. But she was too small of mind. Too busy staring at the gutter.
Well, look at him now.
By the second week of his run he was beginning to tire.
“All the hassle of performing every night. It’s exhausting,” he said to Gregoriev, who was sitting across from him in the green room holding her phone like a 50s cigarette holder. “I’d like a break. Spend some time in the studio. Maybe do an album.”
He wasn’t lying about it being exhausting, exactly. He found himself less and less alive at the end of each performance; no longer exhilarated, as though the music and the applause were happening to someone else.
“But Marlow,” she said, “they’re here to see you in the flesh. Hear you right before them, no screen between you. You can’t capture that on a record. Believe me, we’ve tried. And for less talented players than you.”
He ignored the flattery, because he knew she was telling the truth. Well, not the whole truth. He also knew that she made a lot more money from sell-out concerts than she would from an album. That’s why she’d moved his slot from a matinee to the prime-time slot. 7pm. The blockbuster slot. Usually reserved for symphonies and gimmick concerts of film scores. Tickets cost double. Well, he was better than any orchestra.
“I need to be sure I’ll leave a legacy. That my playing won’t be gone if anything happens to me.”
Gregoriev laughed, a short, sharp sound. “Do you think something’s going to happen to you, Marlow?”
Marlow didn’t say anything.
He made it to the final Thursday of his run. Gregoriev had agreed to give him a break after his final concert on the Friday, but warned she’d be back after he’d had a few days to rest to talk about a second run, and maybe a tour. Marlow wasn’t sure about the idea of leaving the city. Why should he have to? If people wanted to hear him, they could come here.
He’d taken to leaving via the service entrance instead of the stage door, because there was always such a crowd. He couldn’t face being accosted again. Gregoriev didn’t say anything about his whims, just ordered the taxi to the loading bay beside the kitchen instead.
The cab drove him home. The driver talked all the way about his performance. “I heard you on Instagram,” he said from the front seat. “You were amazing. I’m from Afghanistan and we are all enormous fans of classical music there. Schubert! Mozart! Ah, what a genius that transcends borders. You have a true talent, sir.”
Marlow didn’t say anything, just looked out of the window and watched the streetlights slide by one by one.
The cabbie dropped him off – “magnificent! Such an honour, I’ll tell my cousin” – and Marlow made it all the way to the door, withdrew his keys, held it up to the lock – before realising he was still wearing the gloves. Had been wearing them the whole time.
He kicked the door shut behind him and went into the bedroom without turning on the lights. In the moonlight his hands looked very pale. He fiddled with his gloves absently, trying to get them off.
He couldn’t get the gloves off.
He worked his thumb around the cuff but it just peeled aside without loosening. He pulled at his index finger but it was like his finger had swollen up inside the glove and wouldn’t give, just stuck there, sticky with sweat. He tried the right hand; the same. The fingertips stretched like rubber but wouldn’t slide. He tried harder but started to fear he’d rip the fabric, knew without any hesitation that he had to not rip it, that something terrible would happen if he ripped it.
He was panicking now. He tried to worm his right index finger in between the glove and his left palm. It was like he was picking away at his own skin. He gasped with pain. He cast about for something to hang on to – his fingers found a curtain, which he grasped urgently to stop himself from being swept away, but he just pulled the whole thing down, tearing the railing bolts from the wall with a sound like breaking bones.
He stumbled, almost tripped on the curtains clinging to his feet, but couldn’t tear his gaze away from his hands. His flesh gleamed in the moonlight, like it was wet. He started hyperventilating. Was that blood? No – more like mucus, slightly stringy. Was it coming out of the glove, or out of his hand itself? He pinched the rim of the glove and started to peel it back. It hurt. He imagined he could feel his very tendons start to tear, the fine capillaries of his hands unknit, the bones in his hand disconnect from one another and splinter into shards. He pictured the glove coming loose and taking the skin with it, the fingernails, ripping into the cuticle. Looking at his own hands and seeing a gore-lathered mass, raw muscle pulsing, veins of fat glistening.
With a strength born of disgust and horror he ripped first the left glove and then the right from his hand and threw them to the floor as hard as he could.
He switched the light on with his elbow. His hands were completely fine. A bit sweaty on the palms. He turned them around in horror, held them up to the light, like he’d never seen them before.
The gloves lay rumpled on the carpet, looking a little like how he imagined intestines to look, or fat maggots.
He Googled “faust ending”.
He found there was not one ending, but two. In the Goethe version, Faust’s weedy girlfriend Gretchen pesters God to let him go, and God does, some kind of literal deus-ex-machina crap that absolves a man who’s done nothing to deserve it, because the author wanted him to be the self-insert good guy for whom everything always works out in the end.
And then there’s the earlier version, the version they were putting on in the puppet theatres of Wittenberg and London, for children to laugh and scream at – in that version, Faust’s term comes up and the Devil drags him screaming down to hell.
Marlow leaned back in his chair and drummed his fingers on his glass of water. The Goethe ending was obviously wrong, self-evidently wrong, like when you misread the stave and start playing treble clef as though it were bass. You know the minute you hear it that this cannot be correct. Faust makes a deal, gets seven years of everything he ever wanted, and then the Devil collects his due. That’s the way it has to be.
The clock on his desk ticked, so loudly he thought they’d be able to hear it all the way from the auditorium at the RachInst. Running out of time.
There was a cracking sound. He looked down. He’d crushed the water glass so hard in his hands that he’d cracked it. Now there was a hair-fine line running down the rim.
He ran it to the kitchen sink and poured it out before it went everywhere. As he stood wrapping it in kitchen roll to put out he made his plan.
Friday came.
Marlow had hardly slept. Instead he’d lain there tossing and turning at visions of brimstone and sinew, not dreaming but picturing so vividly in his mind’s eye that it was more real than a dream.
But he had done it. He’d left the gloves at home.
Put them in a drawer with his winter socks, as though just to tidy up, then slipped out the door quiet as you like, before they knew what was happening, before they could do anything about it.
Closed the door behind him and locked it with trembling fingers, then flat-out ran down the steps and out onto the street, sprinted on legs that felt they were going to give out from relief and hysteria at any moment, could hardly stop himself from laughing.
He walked all the way into town. It took more than two hours. He practically danced the whole way. He stopped off for a coffee, bought a Big Issue from the woman outside the Co-Op and leafed through it as he went. The day was clouded over but crisp, like wrapping paper.
He made it to the street the RachInst was on before he heard someone behind him shouting, “Hey, mister!”
He turned. Someone was waving something white at him. It was the gloves. They flopped about in the air like dead fish. Marlow stared at them.
“You dropped these!”
“Thanks,” he said numbly, and took the gloves. His Good Samaritan smiled and went on their way.
His Big Issue was gone, somewhere. All he had was the gloves. Had he dropped it? Had it been the gloves, in disguise?
Wait, what about the passer-by? He spun around looking for them but couldn’t remember anything about them, their face, anything. Had they been an agent of the voice in the music? Maybe they were the maker of the gloves themselves? He furiously looked to and fro but there were just people, people, streaming past in every direction, and he couldn’t see where they’d gone.
Eventually it was Gregoriev who was passing – “Marlow? Is that you? What on earth are you doing?” – who ushered him out of the cold and into the waiting doors of the RachInst, which revolved like the gears and cogs of Hell.
In the green room he screamed at her.
“You hag! Money-minded cockroach! Leech, parasite!”
She called security on him. They pinned his arms against the wall as he struggled. It felt good, because he couldn’t move his hands, stopped them from doing something he didn’t want them to do.
She spoke to him slowly, like hypnosis. He realised she was seething, but she kept it submerged, a shallow channel through her eyes and out of her mouth. She waved the security people away and left him alone.
Marlow emerged onto the stage and the audience blazed into sound.
Roars, cheers, whistles, applause. He couldn’t even see them through the footlights, just a seething mass of sound in a great wall around him, hungry and teeming.
He forced himself to bow and the wall seemed to grow even more in intensity, burst through with ravenous energy, almost like it was reaching out to touch him, swallow him, a thousand mouths filled with a million teeth.
He sat. The audience quietened until all he could hear was his own breathing and a thousand people bristling with expectation.
Perhaps he could play without the gloves on at all. Just enough to keep them happy. Then afterwards he could take them outside and cut them into pieces with scissors. Or burn them. He’d be free.
But he knew that wasn’t how this was going to go.
He knew if he tried without the gloves now, he’d be unable to play a single note. He’d be better off leaning on the piano with his forehead or elbow. This must’ve been part of the deal. The one he couldn’t even remember making.
He knitted his fingers together, unknitted them. In the audience someone coughed.
Slowly he took the left glove from his pocket and put it on, looked at it, flexed his fingers.
He was about to reach for the right glove in his pocket but something made him look at his bare palm. From his right hand to his left, and back again. Like he’d never seen them before.
Maybe...
He put his gloved left hand on the keyboard, then his ungloved right.
The whole auditorium seemed to hold its breath.
How does it go again?
With his right hand he pressed the E key two above middle C. It echoed through the space like it was the only thing in the universe.
Are...
Then the F# above it.
...you...
And the G. The minor scale.
...there?
His left hand moved without him willing it to do so.
Sweet... Mar-low...
The same rhythm, or lack of rhythm. But lower notes, and discordant next to his. A diminished 7th. Going down instead of going up. Sinister, like fingernails on a blackboard.
I never left you once.
A shiver ran down his spine.
He couldn’t figure out what came next. His right hand was inert. He forced himself to think. What had his left hand just done? It was down on the G. What if he brought it up? Switch to B major. Faster than before:
Who are you?
Again his left hand took it and twisted it.
Don’t you know?
Before he even realised what he was doing Marlow replied:
Well, maybe we’re not great chums after all, if you won’t even tell me your name.
There was a pause after that, for a whole bar. Then his left hand took off, and it was doing something different now, under its own momentum. A swung beat, red-hot in the bassline, jerking around between the octaves – sounding almost like laughter:
I have had many names. The Prince in Darkness, the Mountain of Flesh, Iblis, Ruha, and Samael. But given the circumstances you can call me
and at this point the left hand played out five notes Marlow had never heard before
Mephistopheles.
How can he never have heard those notes before? They were just notes. But they slipped from his mind when he tried to remember which keys his hand had pressed to make them.
Now, kid, you think you’re very clever with this whole one-glove-off charade, shenanigans, whatever, but you made a deal. You said you wanted to be able to play again. Here we are. All those people out there, they’re here for you. What more do you want? You knew the rules. Put on the glove.
No.
Marlow held the note long and hard and it rang out over the raging bassline.
No? No?!
His left hand flung itself up and down the keys, maintaining the bassline while snapping at his right hand like it was going to scratch it.
What do you mean, no?
He’d never heard sounds like this come from his own hands. But it wasn’t his hand, not any more. The style was completely wrong. It was razor-precise with a violent edge to it, like it was just about to do something unexpected.
I said no!
The bassline flexed but this time Marlow was ready.
I don’t want your damn pact! I don’t want fame! I want my life back. I want something else.
His left hand responded:
Marlow, though we pretend, this is all that there is. Glory, fleeting, and death. The puny die without achieving glory. For a moment there I thought you were more than that. But I see I was wrong. There is only one way out for you now. Submit. Put on the glove.
I won’t despair –
Put on the glove.
The sound was deafening. Far louder than something a real piano could possibly make. It persisted, and it wasn’t just an echo, it was a timeless impossibility of sound, that kept going and kept going, in his head, in his skull. Marlow almost lifted his right hand to cover his ear. But he stopped himself. If he lifted his right hand from the keyboard, he was lost, too.
He cast about for some sound with which to drown it out. He hit a note somewhere up in the third octave above middle C. A Db. It had a familiar sheen.
Paul...
Yes, that was it.
Paul, are you there?
What are you doing?
Marlow’s hand trembled, a perfect mordent.
Paul... look. I’m sad. I’m sorry I wasn’t the right person for you.
You could be. All you need is to
But I’m mad, too. How dare you? Without a fucking word, man? “I can’t do this any more”? What the fuck? Four years? What’s in a year? How much of my life is that? Yeah, it isn’t much, in the grand scale of things. The Earth hardly remembers things so brief. But you made me, Paul. You remoulded me in your image.
Take the power. You could remake him in turn
You remember that mattress we got for our bed, Paul? I liked the one we had before, it was firmer. But I bought a new memory foam one because you read a good review on the internet. I’d just lost half my students with the end of the school year. I had to save up for months. I didn’t eat, Paul.
All the riches of the world could be yours to pluck from the very air
I’m memory foam, Paul. Even after you leave I still bear the shape of you. It’s not in my head, in my memories. It’s in my bones, in my teeth. If they took my hair and did that chemical analysis of it I’d see you bound up in every strand. Like tree rings. You ever see the one they have in the museum in town? One of the rings is black. That’s where there was a fire, hundreds of years ago, and it imprinted into the memory of the tree.
Enough of this.
But you know what? It’s not soot. It’s not burn damage. It’s wood, same as the rest. It’s something to do with the chemical makeup of the soil. It changes with the fire. All the ash seeps into the ground. The tree’s roots take in the ash. The impact of the fire is seared into the tree’s being. And it doesn’t die. It keeps growing. It’s changed. And it carries on.
Why do you persist? Submit.
You’re an adult, Paul. You don’t get to take it back, even if you showed up at my doorstep looking for forgiveness, even if you were here, right now, listening to me. You already chose. And I’m an adult, too. I get to choose.
There is no choice for you
I choose fresh air!
I will pull you down
I choose the day after!
and eat your very soul, pick it from your bones
I choose another go at getting it wrong!
then I will drown you in your own blood
I choose life!
and watch as the froth slows from your mouth, breath into oblivion
I choose redemption!
At this his left hand spasmed in excruciating pain. Marlow cried out – though whether it was with his mouth or his right hand he could not say.
Redemption?!
It was the first sensation he had felt in that hand. In his entire life, perhaps. His spasming fingers pressed keys in horrid ways, cacophonous tics, a dissonant and twisted sound, not like a piano at all, more like machinery.
You will never be redeemed. Any power that could grant you such a boon is far away now.
Marlow said, I think that’s wrong.
There seemed to be a melody in what Marlow’s right hand was picking out. He had to push to see it, like it was in the depths of a thicket. But it was pulsing ever stronger the further he went.
I think redemption is made, not given. I think you aren’t what you say you are. We made no deal. You came to me when you saw I was vulnerable. You whispered sweet harmony in my ear. And I believed you! What a fool am I!
Our contract binds beyond body and soul –
Like hell. No contract binds this way. No law governs what I do with my heart, my trust. You’re not a destiny etched in stone. You’re a piece of paper rotting in the rain.
He saw it clearly. Marlow smiled.
You have nothing on me, do you?
He played a low A with his left hand. Then a B. He had control now, he realised. The music would go wherever he wanted it to go.
Your so-called contract is ash and air. The only way you get my soul is if I decide to give it to you. And the only reason I’d give it to you is despair.
An echo about the chamber seemed to whisper, Despair is the only escape from the hell that you are living.
But it’s not, said Marlow. It’s not hell. It’s just life. I thought maybe it was hell. But it’s heaven, too.
He swept his right hand to and fro in a great glissando that carried from the very bottom of the keyboard all the way to the top, exuberant, overwhelming with colour.
As he snatched it back he caught a glimpse of a face in the audience that he thought he recognised, but the music had a life of its own now, and it drew him back in to voice that tune again, to resolve:
I don’t owe you anything.
All the sound in the world became him, and he blacked out.
He heard, or thought he heard, things moving in the darkness: the hospital, Gregoriev muttering into a phone and snatching looks at him like he was about to turn into a bear; lights in his eyes, left and right and up and down; someone saying “It’ll wear off” which made him think, does that mean they’re going to take off my clothes? I need those to keep warm. But it’s so cold.
Someone – Gregoriev – saying, “But we need him back as soon as possible,” to which he said, very clearly, “I’ll never play again,” and then when everyone in the room looked at him in astonishment he began to laugh uncontrollably, a feral laugh that shifted into coughing and then sobbing, and eventually into silence.
He woke up.
The sun was shining through the window, with the curtains still lying in a pile on the floor. Through the bare trees the sky was very blue. He could hear the hum of traffic, and a bird singing. He didn’t know what kind, didn’t know much about birdsong.
Someone went past on a bike with a boombox on the back, playing some repetitive kind of Eurobeat. Usually he hated that sort of thing but something in it caught in his ear and stuck there, a sort of simple hook that made him want to move without really knowing why and stuck around after the cyclist had turned the corner and the sound had faded.
On his bedside table, the gloves were gone.
He visited the Crown and Ha’penny. It was smaller than he remembered it and packed with punters elbow-to-elbow. Ian waved as he came in. The sound of music already seeped through the walls and made the floor thrum in time.
He put in his earplugs and pushed open the door, descended. They were halfway through Sir Duke, Benny belting out the second verse with its potted history of Black jazz greats. Marlow hated that song. Just a crowd pleaser, none of Stevie Wonder’s usual rhythmic genius; he’d always found it square, predictable, somehow shallow.
Or at least that’s what he’d used to think. It sounded different now. There was a life to it, an honesty and generosity he hadn’t listened for before. That wasn’t quite it, but he couldn’t think of the right word. Maybe they’d changed the arrangement.
Benny was completely in the zone, feeling it all over. Nasser frowning furiously at the neck of his bass as he squeezed out the line. Will and Oliver on the brass, nodding in perfect sync. Kim spotted him as he came in and didn’t drop a beat but burst into a smile, nodded at him.
There was the new kid – probably a student, really didn’t look that old at all, held himself straight-backed at the piano like he was playing the harpsichord. Didn’t sound bad, though. Bit off on the timings, the kind of thing you get when you’re not used to playing with others, but hit all the right keys and had a nice little flourish on the diminished G# that Marlow hadn’t thought of before.
Happy, that was the word. It sounded happy.
Afterwards he came over to the stage.
“That sounded good,” he said.
“Timmy’s lovely but not as good as you,” she said. “How are you?”
He breathed. The basement smelled of beer, people, hot dust in the stage lights and the electricity of music. “I don’t know. Not so good. Paul left.”
“Oh my god. Marlow. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”
“I think I’m taking a break from playing, for a bit. Sort myself out.”
“Yeah. Yeah, look, about the conversation we had…”
“Don’t worry about it. Seriously.”
“No, I mean… I’m still your friend, Marlow. If you want me to be.”
“Thanks,” he said, and meant it. “Can I buy you a beer? I’m gonna get a drink. But I’ll be back.”