Chapter 14: Twenty Songs, Dated

The engineer on Hawthorne Street was a stooped man in a cardigan who asked no questions.

He unlocked the door at one in the morning, switched on a lamp, and tore a fresh page from a log pad.

"Date, time, song, who's in the room," he said. "I write all of it down, and so does the machine."

There was a clock on the wall above the glass, big and plain, with a second hand.

Margo took the chair beside the console with a thermos and said she was the witness.

I sat down at the piano in the live room and opened the green notebook.

Three pages were still missing from it, cut out by Piper on Thursday.

I played the first song anyway.

I said the date into the microphone before every one, the year I wrote it and the place, and the engineer wrote it down.

Basement apartment. Hospital waiting room. The back seat of a tour van in Ohio.

Some of them I had never sung to a living person.

By three o'clock I was on song nineteen, and Margo had fallen asleep with her chin on her chest.

Gideon had been in the control room the whole time, so still I kept forgetting him.

"Do you want the bridge on this one?" I asked through the talkback, on the twentieth.

"I'd like to hear it," he said. "From in there."

He came in and sat on the bench beside me.

We both looked at the keys.

I played the stretch, the held tenth.

He put his hand flat next to mine, palm down, and spread it.

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