Pianola, A Story

One daughter wraps a scarf around the ruins of her face. The other daughter conceals her nail-less fingers in gloves. Both arrive with their father, the bearded salesman without a suit, who’s dragged them along.

The woman ushers them into her apartment with a gesture of her hand. She is not unkind, but not welcoming either—and watches them remove their snow-covered boots at the door while clearing her throat. The daughters, she thinks, must be ill because they are so thin. Their backs are slightly hunched. They are holding hands. She regards the scarf with suspicion. She does not wonder about the face it protects, keeps hidden.

The woman lives alone in an apartment with starved moths. She drinks tea and sighs while the larvae spin cases around themselves as they feed on fabric. While the woman stares unhappily at her reflection, they drag their cases with their head, their thorax, and three pairs of legs, across the woman’s oriental rugs, and grow within the patterns, lay eggs and eggs. The woman feels porous; when she moves, she feels the air passing through her. When she stops, she does not want to move again.

But she leads them quickly now into a paneled room, past a chaise lounge and tall open windows, though it is snowing outside, to the pianola in the corner. The daughters insert the roll, resting on top of the instrument, into the spool box. Once, the daughters worked in the Asch Building. They were locked in a room, cutting rolls of taupe-colored fabric to be sewn into shirtwaists. They grew thin, thinner. Their shears did not sing a kind song. There was a fire, panic. They dove through a window into a river of smoke. They glided along a current that met the ground. The older daughter bounded first, her fingernails rattling loose when she landed. The second daughter stared into the fire until it became impossible for her to close her eyes.

The father is describing the action to the woman in a whisper. He doesn’t know why he is whispering, but feels that it is the appropriate way to communicate with the woman. There is ice in his beard. The woman stares at the daughter’s red gloves, nodding. The paper moves inside the box, clicks. The keys depress. Chopin fills the room. The daughters work together, operating the pedal levers and the tempo control. Their movements appear simple and correct. The father describes the action, his beard dripping. He tries to catch the drops in his palm. The roll is a transcription of the music, he says. It is not an interpretation, he says. The woman stares at the other daughter’s scarf, nodding. The daughter, through the narrow spaces made in the scarf for her eyes, can spot small gaps in the woman’s sweater. If it were somehow fitted into the pianola, it would play a song not longed for, charming, yet forgettable, the daughter muses.

It is their job to instruct new pianola owners how to manipulate the instrument. The father feared he could not support the daughters, crippled by the fire. But they rose from the bed and he brought them to the Factory, manufacturing rolls of paper and burnished pianolas. He taught them how to insert and manipulate the music rolls for the instrument.

Sometimes at the Factory, there is a slip in the gears and the holes that have been cut into the rolls of paper are not aligned to mimic the music advertised. The rolls are discarded. The father brings these rolls home and the daughters inspect the holes and wonder what kind of music they would make. They try to discern the mistake, but cannot.

The woman does not know how resilient the daughters are—how they plunged nine stories onto a pile of heads, ribs, and pairs of legs. In their dreams, the daughters drag themselves across a coverlet of dead women. The women crumble beneath them like a near-ruined city in a storm. But the woman is moved by how the daughters operate the pianola. When the roll completes its course, and the music has ended, she applauds with tears in her eyes. She turns away and a wind tosses snow into the room.

There are holes in their memories. The older daughter recalls her sister howling on the ledge before leaping. The sound of flames rushing up into the air: a soft and terrible protest. But she does not remember falling herself. The other daughter remembers the bins of scrap material and the bins of finished shirtwaists burning with the same intensity. This was significant—but she has forgotten why.

The daughters prepare the pianola so that it can play again. The father encourages the woman to try and maneuver the levers. The woman, who has met good fortune all her life, is filled with sadness. The moths are crossing the carpet, tearing small holes in it because they are always hungry. The roll begins to move, clicks. The woman fears she looks clumsy operating the levers, and stops. The music is empty and terrible. She shivers. The daughters take the woman’s hands and bring them to the pianola. The woman closes her eyes. She is vulnerable, and angry that she is vulnerable. But she has been waiting for someone strong to show her what to do now for a very long time. 

Restoration, or, It is What You Make of It

The man suspected the middle of cities, the middle of ruins in the mountains. He lived in a building whose foundation stood firmly on the rubble of another building, in the middle of a city.  In the middle of a city, the man could tolerate contradictions and give careful thought to disorderly things, and this upset him. On his worst days, the man suspected himself of everything from clumsiness to utter failure as a person. He asked himself: “Why, why, why?”

In the afternoons he drew little naked dwellers in the middle of ruins in the mountains. He drew them cooling on a bed of ivy under the pressure of the sun. Each dweller signified a past memory, a mistake in the man’s life. He hated each one of them. They lounged, with leisure, and without shame in the middle of the mountains. In the middle of the mountains, a tree could fall and it would mean nothing, or everything. 

The man, when he considered the dwellers, thought: I harm certain others. Because of this, he did not assign them names. In this way, he could begin to forget the harm he would do to them later.

The man, he had lived, like many of his friends, to expect ordinary nothing.  But hairless spots began to appear on his head, and these were not ordinary. They were a condition, rare and terrible, and they were gruesome. They brought the man much attention, and he could not be other than a sad thought.

He believed that everyone sought a center. The center was not the middle, but all middles had a center. But his, the man believed, was a remnant of dust driven by rage like water in a basin inside his stomach. He was an angry man, and he feared this part of him.

In the evenings, he felt his heart eating beyond the open window, contemplating an interference. But an interference did not occur, so the man was able to tear the dwellers into pieces and savor them on his tongue. 

In this way, was he able to feel his center slightly restored.