He waited and waited and sensed nothing but static.
In a beige house in the Cutten neighborhood of Eureka, an orthopedic surgeon named Steve Baker entered the music room, where a dark cherry wood piano stood as a four-legged accusation, a sixty-one key universe of potential sound whose silence was the loudest he had ever heard. He sat on the bench in front of it, on lavender varnished cedar dimpled over time by the hard fingernails of hundreds of frustrated eleven-year-olds sitting through thousands of mother-mandated lessons while thinking of millions of other things. He’d fought over this piano, defended his love of it in sotto voce with nothing-could-induce-me-to-give-it-up conviction.
And Anne, his wife, appealing to reason, had pointed out with growing impatience that he never played it, that he’d bought it for their never-conceived child, for the express purpose of her teaching this phantom progeny how to play, because she had studied it all her life, and she loved it and looked forward more than anything to twice-weekly sessions with Wendy, if it was a girl, or William, if it was a boy. She had oiled its strings, tuned it regularly, polished its fine wood grains and lacquered its ivory keys and fluttered around it during the move from Egret Road to Kroeber Lane like a paleontologist transporting a dinosaur egg.
It was absurd not to let her keep it, especially since she’d been so generous toward him with everything else—with the bread maker and the twelve-horsepower rototiller and the waist-high Klipsch speakers—although absurd was exactly what he felt their whole breakup was. Absurd because it was so rational and calculated. Their love? Plus one. His sterility? Minus two. And it was absurd because she insisted on living in a small town (“Any small town, I don’t care. Can’t you see how much choice that gives you? How many options?” she’d asked), and because he couldn’t do little things like stay with her while she finished her breakfast on Sunday mornings—no, he had to retreat to his work study once he was done eating to work on his models, and he wouldn’t acknowledge the symbolic importance of these abandonments—and because they had voted for different candidates in the last mayoral election (“The presidential election, sure, I grant you,” he’d said, shaking the garlic press at her, “that would be enough for you to get angry and say that we’re incompatible. But the Eureka mayor? Who cares?”). The pros and cons of their relationship were weighed, and a gross imbalance was found. Scales didn’t lie. “But scales aren’t the only thing to go by,” he’d said. “Do you really want—because we could adopt and split our time between big and little towns and move toward political consensus in the future—do you really want to let it go just like that?”
Though it wasn’t just like that. She pointed out that he’d conspicuously not mentioned the issue on which he was solely to blame and which most upset her, his inconsiderateness when she felt alone and needed his company, those times when he’d disappear and say he had to be by himself and that it was chemical and nothing to take personally. But how else could she take it than personally? She wasn’t a machine, no matter how radically our language had upgraded from brain hemispheres to hard drives. And maybe this proved in a way that her love for him was insufficient and had always been insufficient, but that the possibility of raising children in a semirural community overseen by a wise, mutually agreed upon mayor had once been enough to supplement her feelings and make the relationship worth working on. Now, clearly, the situation had been exposed for what it was. She had accepted a job in the town of Willits, two hours south of Eureka—he hadn’t even known she’d been looking—and packed up her things and moved out, leaving Steve with an untouched piano and the feeling that he would soon fade away. This was what he heard in the silence, the sound of his own diminuendo.
He closed the piano lid and pinched the tip of his long aquiline nose. His hair, an auburn brown rusting into gray, dug softly into his neck. His fellow doctor Greg Souza’s suitcase lay open on the couch. Greg was staying with him while initiating divorce proceedings against his schoolteacher wife, Elaine, or maybe Elaine was initiating them against him—Steve didn’t know the details of it and thought only that divorce was spreading like a virus.
He decided to go for a drive, which he did as an offensive against depression more frequently than he cared to admit, occasions on which he’d go anywhere, didn’t matter, so long as he was moving and there was music and lots to look at and to distract him. His depression would be subdued temporarily, and he’d arrive home a few hours later, if not mentally restored then at least closer to being able to go to bed.
Today he drove to Table Bluff, a cliff and beach area five miles south of Eureka and near a recently built Wiyot community housing project, an evolutionary step forward in Indian reservations where the land was governed by the tribe but maintained by the State of California. With independent police and dependent roads. Steve passed it and thought, This is the sort of town where Anne and I could have ended up. Maybe not this particular town, because you have to be Native American to live in it, but somewhere this size where real estate is cheap. I could have made that concession.
He saw the ocean in the distance at intervals as the road wound up and down hills, with undulating fields of buffalo grass on the left and isolated homesteads and dilapidated barns on the right. Something was wrong. Steve pressed harder on the accelerator and found himself going slower. The fuel light had been shining empty for who knew how long. A gas can in the back? No, damn it. Embankment park and a leg stretch around the car and some self-reproach for not filling up the tank earlier. It wasn’t more than two miles back to the Wiyot housing project, though he didn’t remember seeing a gas station there. Noise up the road and Steve saw a truck round the bend at a dangerous clip and he stood helplessly—or with what he hoped was a posture of helplessness and entreaty—waving a hand for the truck to stop. It was maybe seventy yards from him when he saw, beggaring belief, a man clinging to the gun rack on the truck’s roof. Lying facedown and spread-eagle, holding the edges of the rack for purchase, this man was head forward and Steve thought he heard—yes, without a doubt he caught—him shouting “Stop! Stop! Stop!” Steve hoped that his and the man’s combined request would bring the truck to a halt, though this hope was dashed as the truck raced past him, its driver with the tensed and fearful expression of someone trying to escape the hounds of hell. Then the truck was gone and Steve stared after it. A haze of dust, nothing. He resigned himself to walking and the thought sank in that he’d just witnessed an act of recklessness for which he’d probably be called in to surgery later that day. And something else wasn’t right. Something even less right than the obvious not-rightness of two men barreling down a country road in equal states of panic and unequal states of personal safety. Steve thought he recognized the face of the man on the roof. It was the fleetingest of glimpses, but still.
At the Wiyot housing project he received a lawn-mower gas canister in exchange for ten bucks and the promise to return it to a stern-countenanced, gloriously ponytailed man also named Steve.
The days passing meant nothing. At the office, the mental exhaustion that used to take ten hours to develop now happened in less than one. Another patient? X rays to examine? Deposing for a malpractice case filed three years ago? His constant torpor made it all seem so useless and unmanageable, like he didn’t have the stamina and couldn’t everyone see how much effort living cost? How it was a trek too far? He had difficulty listening to people. They wanted to tell him things—“my wife’s cousin’s daughter was a finalist for the Rhodes Scholarship, but was disqualified for lying about her LSAT scores, which everyone knows can be taken a million times before applying to law school and they average the scores, should that even be what she wants to do, and believe me my wife’s cousin’s daughter has some real reservations about that”—that he didn’t want to hear. To foster the sense of self rapidly slipping away from him, he moved from his habitual stimulants (coffee, Coke, ginseng root extract) to borderline legal amphetamines that his friend and colleague and current house-guest, Greg Souza, prescribed for him.
This was unfortunate because as a surgeon he depended