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Francis was eight or nine when he stopped wetting the bed. He just outgrew it. But at twelve, Kerry was still blushing and probably he'd been blushing since the day of his birth. All those strangers—doctors, nurses, aunts—all of them witnessing this, for which he could not have possibly prepared...oh he could pass away just thinking about it.
 "Don't blush!" Francis would say. "Don't go red, Kerry!" The blusher's upper lip began to sweat. The color shot to his face. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.
"Leave him." Mom touched Kerry's forearm and glanced around for the source of his shame.
Friends and family learned to anticipate his triggers—if a girl close in age was playing nearby, if he fumbled with loose change at the register...he was absolutely not to order for the table or answer the home phone. But it was normal, they said, to exhibit shyness and modesty as a young man.
Kerry pressed the inner edge of his pointer finger to his upper lip and dabbed. After some amount of time, the humiliated blood would retreat into the gills of his heart to quietly lap.
Francis said, "You make other people nervous, Kerry. Animals can smell our fear. When Laika runs and hides under the bed in a storm, that's 'cause she can smell our fear."
"She hides because she smells the lightning."
Francis shook his golden head.
"It's fear, Ker. Everyone's got fear in them. Even Dad. And lightning... well, that's too far away to smell."
"Don't say that," said Kerry. "Dad's not afraid of anything."
He looked to his mother for confirmation but she had returned to her vocal exercises. She liked to sit at the piano and sing and play Greensleeves while the boys watched TV in their rooms.
Later their father sold the baby grand and she started going to town for the symphonies and operas. She refused to take Francis, who begged to come along, and Kerry was too nervous to go. One of the performers might mess up, and then what would they do? It would be excruciating, especially if the performer failed to recover.
As Kerry got older, his clothes, sheets, towels, all of the objects nearest his skin were swapped in favor of bluish grays and hospital sage, anything to mute and soothe. He stole his mother's shattered, expired cosmetics, then green-tinted concealers and anti-redness moisturizers, though at best they produced an oily, mottled effect and slid off by the end of the day. His cheeks and chin were prone to clusters of little pimples, irritations from touching his skin so often. Francis said, "You have to do something about this," lifting a lank strand of Kerry. He must cut his long, chest-grazing hair. He looked so "home-schooled."
Kerry skipped prom, senior trip, graduation.
"Isn't there someone?" his mother pleaded. "You can invite them over here—we won't bother you. We don't bother you, do we?"
Of course there were people. Yes, girls, that sent him into fits. Every day he observed something new about them, and every day he brought these morsels of information home and smuggled them into the safety of his cool-toned cocoon to become another node in his private fantasies.
Kerry had a method for everything: he took his food lukewarm and mild in taste, consumed his beverages cold. The glow of a hot drink or a soup too closely resembled his affliction. He didn't like eyes on him. And he didn't like his eyes on other people, for that matter. Meanwhile Francis pushed on, attending singing, dancing, and acting camps, and declared his ambitions as a thespian triple threat.
"What a strange direction," family members said. "You think you'll do this forever? It's a hard life. You sacrifice a lot. There are costs."
"We'll see," Francis shrugged. "I could do anything. You can always change what you want to do, right."
How brave! In this time, to pursue such a risky, unlucky career. People liked this kind of instinct and drive in children. It made them feel better about the future.
"And you, what about you," they said, applying themselves toward the blusher, thoroughly impressed by Francis' confidence and perspective.
"Kerry could beat you in checkers. And he has nice handwriting, even though sometimes it takes him three hours to write a page, and if it's not perfect he has to start all over," Francis said, staring at his brother with loose admiring eyes.
"I like science class," Kerry said quickly. "We're learning about petrified wood."
"Ah," they said, visibly disappointed. "We always need more scientists, right."
"He's a genius," Francis continued. "Just ignore him and he'll loosen up." The child's face picked up. "Want to hear a song?"
Once they ignored Kerry for long enough, a little bit of conversation could ensue. It was like gaining the trust of a small stray animal. If you pretended not to see it, it was emboldened, creeping closer with his furred white belly low to the ground, catching loose leaf and twig until finally, everyone was acquainted and the creature could eat and be in peace.
A prestigious university accepted Kerry. Outside the dorms, a young woman accosted him with her friendliness. She procured spiked frozen watermelon drinks and then beer and cigarettes under a false name and age. They found a private bench in the park. It was still warm out. It was even warmer than summer. It was September.
Maxi's teeth were a bit too large for her mouth and her mouth was a bit too attached to her nose, forming a kind of snout. She had a cheery, weightless disposition that invited the disclosure of several anecdotes involving church, ADHD medication, and Laika's recent death. She'd been run over by a car, Kerry stammered. Maxi also liked dogs, even though she'd been bitten as a child.
"I just wanted to touch it," she explained. "I didn't know it was scared of people."
Kerry was emboldened by the darkness of the bench, and also terrified because he couldn't see her face, couldn't catch the flash in her eyes that signaled whether he should make an attempt. Freshmen collapsed around them. Kerry tried to light her cigarette with matches, tried and tried, throwing the crumbly dead poppyhead stalks over and over to the ground. The firebugs blinked, knocking into each other. The thick shiny plants exhaled. One day a woman would ask him to open a jar for him.
Maxi insisted on his taking her legs in his lap and stroking her knobby ankle, polishing it with his thumb like a stone as they discussed their prospective majors, their families back home—already he wanted her to meet them, his mom, and Francis, who was half a head taller than him now and had an agent. His family would like her, Kerry was thinking, they would be so impressed. Finally they kissed. He opened his eyes and glimpsed the macro flicker of her eyelashes, the soft curve of her cheekbones. They felt like two giant consciousnesses, their faces blown up and the bodies forgotten.
"Did you like that?" he asked.
"Yes."
But Maxi ignored him in the dining hall the next day and every day. They lived on the same floor it turned out, seventeen up, and rode the elevator in silence to class each morning. When he bumped into her at a dorm party one night, he'd already vomited twice. His heart felt like it had moved up to his shoulder or collarbone and just kind of rested there, pulsing like a frog's throat.
"Why?" he asked. Red cup sloshing on his shoes.
"Why what?" Either Maxi could not say or did not know the answer, but Kerry understood. He understood so well he almost wanted to explain it to her. But she excused herself to the balcony and fortified the space between them with the bodies of other girls.
After graduation he was recruited by a genome research company. He stayed in the university town in a dark, well-appointed one-bedroom apartment with white floors and chrome fixtures. During his bi-weekly video calls with his boss and the team, he spoke concisely and with great feeling about his research.
"Everything is not as two dimensional as I once believed," Kerry explained, cracking his knuckles. "We used to think about DNA as these long ropes—braids that looped into each other—but now I think of them more as rosettes. And in this fleur dimension, the end of each petal is incredibly insulated. But at the core of the rose, more long range, dynamic interaction is happening, right at the tight bud," and he curled his fist.
His boss fell in love with the sound of his voice. Sometimes if he was particularly enthusiastic about a project, he paced his house and she heard in the acoustics of the room how sparsely furnished it was. And he wore his shoes inside. He was a man who dressed up for his work even if it was from the comfort of his own home.
Kerry liked to walk to the college town's snack food street and watch the students with their backpacks and bubble teas. The young students thought he was harmless with his navy clothes and shapeless, squashed ball cap. He did everything in his power to make himself dim and undefined.
Women trusted him. They were flattered by his humility and his shyness; they attributed his nervousness to their gorgeous liquid presence and acquiesced to the candlelit dinners in cellar restaurants and the lights-off bedroom policy that he requested. But at some point, the room could not get any darker and he could go no further with them. The women fell back into their lives with a pitiful splash.
Francis married a B-list actress and had a child with her. The baby was like a new piece of equipment that, once introduced, made everyone work harder and faster. Kerry took to the baby very much. At first he stood far from the crib and refused to peer inside, speaking from the corner in soft cooing noises. "Go ahead, Ker," the baby's mother coaxed him. "Just smile." He had once heard that if you drew a smiley face on a piece of paper and held it up to a newborn, it would smile back.
While Kerry was rifling through his parents' kitchen drawers for a chip clip, his mother passed. A spasm of the brain and then boom, gone. Who could have known that the line between mother and child could be severed so quickly and completely.
At the funeral, during his father's speech, Greensleeves rang out in Kerry's mind. He imagined a world in which whole facets of one's personality might be edited out, just snipped from the DNA.
Francis' wife was struggling with the baby. Her whole breast was out and the child had latched. Kerry had to look away. The priest called on the brothers. They started forward, Francis a bit too bouncily until he saw his brother's face.
"Grow up, Kerry. When you're dead you will be pale and cold and you will kill to feel the heat in your face again."
"But I'll be dead," Kerry said.
"Don't be ridiculous," as if Kerry had told a lie. Francis took the baby son from his wife's arms. Some milk on its chin.
"They're asleep," Kerry said softly. In the church, their mother and the child were the only two that were totally unconscious, the baby swaddled, its mind gently spooned like jell-o into the bowl of another dimension, while someone had painted their mother's face with flesh-colored make-up.
"I think they did a great job," Francis said. "Hair and makeup these days...incredible."
"I just wish it could have been a bit quieter," Kerry said. "I think I still heard all of these sounds coming out of her."
"What did you say?" The priest's voice was like something stuffed in a wooden box.
The event proceeded outside. It began to rain and about ten black umbrellas opened. Francis battled one, the wire frame popping inside and out. All these people—his mother's friends?—huddled like cows.
The grave filled with water and the bearers struggled through the slick and squelching grass. Someone held an umbrella over the hole. Francis was busy with the baby, and their father was old and drawn and stationed off to the side, and so it was Kerry who had to go out there. He and the gravedigger dropped to their knees and bailed out the hole in the ground with plastic cups. But the water seeped in even from the sides of the grave, through the earth.
"That's good enough," the priest said, a raindrop hugging the tip of his nose. In she went.
In her youth, their mother had rescued her younger sisters from a burning building. She'd cycled across Europe. She spoke four languages and had personally translated Kerry's favorite Russian fairy tales. Now the last bit of the earth went over her. The sky had thrown off its gray uniform and opened up, and everyone's hair and outfits were attached to their bodies like a second skin.
The family beelined for the catering. A frock mindlessly stirred a bowl of wine with apples, sloshing it all over the tablecloth. There was hardly enough food. It didn't matter. Life went on.
"I'm going to find Dad," Kerry said to Francis and made for the trees past the plots. As he approached, he worried that people might think he was fleeing to the woods, or even worse, relieving himself. He whistled to cultivate a busy air.
There—a line in the trees. Their father had become about the skinniest person Kerry had ever seen.
"Dad," Kerry said. "Are you hungry?"
"Where's Francis? Francis prepared something. Something to sing." The man steadied himself on an American elm. "What's that smell?"
"The storm, Dad."
Kerry watched his father draw into himself. A dog barked. Somewhere a train passed. Time is going by, time is going by, it chugged.
Later, the caterer stuffed a saved but soggy bread roll into Kerry's hand. He stirred the wine with his pinky, then sucked the digit.
"I have twins on the way," the man for some reason confessed. "They put two eggs in there, for good measure, y'know. And they both got fertilized. How do you choose one, y'know?"
"You could give one away," Kerry suggested.
"Or I could accept it, and it'll go away," the caterer said.
"Why would accepting anything make it go away?"
"Did you like your parents?" said the caterer. "Do you admire them?"
Kerry thought for a moment. "In a normal way, like when people go to a famous museum and look at the most popular work of art on the planet. They have to admit that it's pretty good, but secretly, they are not so moved. Still it would be totally lame and pointless to even attempt to denigrate it."
Once when they were young, their father had bullied the waitress at an Italian restaurant so much it made Kerry think they were secretly seeing each other.
"What's that sound?" the caterer said.
"My brother's song," Kerry said. They watched his father sway, holding the baby in one arm. Francis' wife danced a few feet away, wet grass stuck to her ankles, heels slung in hand. "It's a very poorly organized event, really," said Kerry. He turned back to the caterer, ignoring the sheet of water that was pouring off the tent and down the back of his suit. He stared into the bowl of wine-soaked fruits, brain-colored and swollen with liquid. "My mother would have hated this."
Kerry prepared for the adoption on YouTube. He watched videos of people who had done terrible things. That was always the risk, with kids. Some of these men and women in the videos, mostly men on the death row, had ruined other people's lives, but they still spoke freely. They did not register any visible pain or shame. They could stand up and defend themselves. He looked up to those people, not for their crimes but for their radical self-acceptance...
He did not use the restroom on the plane to Tokyo once. He feared that if the plane went down, they'd find him smashed on the ground all wet with himself. So he kept the pale lemon balloon inside and imagined it was his baby daughter.
His child looked nothing like him, of course, when he met her, her skin pale and soft and almost purple eyes like kalamata olives. The blusher tossed the file that detailed the events of Nanoko's life into a pristine trash can. When she cried, he held a piece of paper with a smiley face up to her.
He procured for his tiny family an apartment on the second-floor of a co-op building by the river.
"Extremely foolish," his father said, standing on the balcony with his rings flashing. The river beat in the distance. "In ten years, poof, you'll be underwater, then what?"
"Then we'll move."
"Away from me?"
"Francis is here."
"Don't bother Francis, Kerry."
Francis was constantly changing, he regrew himself over and over again, while Kerry fiddled with microscopic bits of information. Francis was kings, Francis was serial killers. Francis was leads and bit parts and father and husband, he was the son who was everything. He was every role.
By the time Kerry had been Nanoko's father for ten years, many people worked under the blusher. A whole team of them, most of whom he had never met in person. Sometimes his employees fantasized about what he looked like, how he decorated his home. What he fought about with his wife, his wife's IQ, if he had one.
"What're you thinking about, Dad?" Nanoko asked while they watched the evening news. The last viable female African panther had been successfully bred. A grainy camera streamed the animal sitting on a concrete floor with its head in its paws.
"Don't ask that," he said. "You don't want to know. It's private, like asking someone their dreams."
"I like hearing about dreams," the girl rubbed her socked feet together. "What do you—"
"I don't dream."
"Do you want to know mine?"
"No," said Kerry.
Dinner meant Nanoko opening the door to accept the food that a delivery man in thick, padded clothing and a helmet thrust at her. And once Nanoko found a list of names in his desk—Sonora, Amie, Meghan, Jess, Haley...most of the names had a little checkmark next to them, for reasons she could not explain. When friends asked about her home life, it was difficult to explain why they could not come over. Does your dad have friends? they asked. Does he have a girlfriend?
The best way of putting it was the visit to the aquarium on her twelfth birthday. The carpeted atrium smelled of warm, humming electronic devices, soybean oil and feet. The blusher, skin blued by the big illuminated tanks, came eye-to-eye with a great ray. Kerry put a hand to the glass. It winked sadly at him. A few more fish, long and white, swam over. Soon a whole herd of them collected and followed Kerry's every movement like a shadow. He took a step to the left, he waved a hand, and they shifted as one silvery entity. He tried to shoo them away but they would not.
"Sir, you have to leave now," said a curvy Mexican woman in scuffed clogs and a black collared-shirt buttoned to the top.
"Excuse me?" he said. "It's my daughter's birthday."
"Yes, we're sorry but..." her eyelinered gaze slid over his face. "It's time to go. Please," and she gestured to the redlit EXIT sign above the door.
"Please," she repeated, pointing to the exit more desperately.
"Why?" he said much louder now. Nanoko walked over from the starfish tank and tugged her father's sleeve.
"Why? Why?" he shouted. By now, Kerry's face was recipient of many stares. The fish loomed behind him in a swarm.
"We're closing," the aquarium worker whispered. The more eyes landed on Kerry's face, human or not, the more he reddened, as if they had a quantifiable weight and mass under which his very being was buckling.
"People sense when you are afraid," Nanoko explained to her friends.
The blusher did his laundry late at night. He could wash and fold without seeing anyone, and without anyone seeing him as he pressed the warm fragrant linens to his face and breathed in, thinking of ozone and summer lightning. A familiar man, florid and obese, occasionally joined him. "John Cable," the man introduced himself. He ran into John around the building and in the courtyard often, the man's bulldog toddling after him.
Around one or two in the morning, John would bring down bedclothes reeking of urine. He and Kerry would sit in the laundry in their rubber house shoes listening to the water gush in and out of the machines. Kerry folded T-shirts, leaving Nanoko's underwear at the bottom of the basket.
"It's genetic, you know," Kerry surprised himself by announcing one night. "My brother wet the bed as a child. My father might have done it, and his father before him."
The motor of an overloaded dryer beat loudly in its drum.
"Come up for a drink," John said.
"I shouldn't."
"Why not then?"
"Don't drink."
"Don't drink, hey!" John scoffed.
"Chronic exposure to ethanol modifies DNA and histone methylation, histone acetylation, and microRNA expression," Kerry said, reddening.
John Cable stood up to move his load from the washer to the dryer. He picked up a fallen sock and threw it in the drum. "I have cheese and those fancy crackers in the fridge. And German beers."
Kerry froze.
"I'll be honest. When I drink, I usually end up, erm, pissing," John continued, vaguely picking his nose and staring at the concrete wall. "But still I do it. 'Cause it makes me feel happy. Full."
Nanoko cut her hair into a shape that resembled a black lacquer soup bowl, draped her body in half-finished clothing and left her number for waiters. Sometimes Kerry found her cigarettes and burst into her room and threw the pack at her head. Sometimes Nanoko played a bar of Greensleeves and he liked that. She was one of the most accomplished pianists in the state. She presented her father with a list of prospective colleges and left notes on his bedside table. There was no need for the birds-and-the-bees or camping trips or even a push on the swing, but it would have been nice. When she studied late into the night, he'd lean over and switch on a lamp for her. Grains of another life sifted through her mind, sparkling squid that left the wakes of fishing boats aglow.
When she fell asleep on the couch, he switched the lamp off and sat in the dark, staring at the places things were supposed to be.
She dreamed of her father dining at a fancy restaurant, the kind with small bistro tables and no prices on the menu. But his entree arrived before he had finished the appetizer. The food runner clamored to make room but the table was already filled with side plate, silverware, water glass, bread basket, saucer of olive oil and balsamic...he raced to finish the salad, covering his mouth with one hand and chewing quickly. He stabbed rigatoni by threes and fours to a fork, nervous that if he waited too long, the waiter would think he did not like the food or was displeased with the service.
"Can I get this to-go?"
"You don't like it?" the waitress said, glaring at his full plate. "You have to eat it all here, on our premises, the food that we cook."
The whole kitchen came out to watch Kerry eat, his face bent and forehead slick. At the end of the meal, he gave a generous tip and calculated it twice to make sure.
"Now you can go," they said.
Nanoko woke from the dream hungry and damp. It was another day. The phone was ringing. She walked into the kitchen and sat on the hard little piano bench and dropped her hands to her lap. She'd been awarded a full scholarship, a voice informed her. Less than two percent of applicants were accepted, said the voice.
"Will there need to be a ceremony, or something like that?" Kerry called out from his room. "There won't be anything like that, will there?"
The first few months she sent postcards back home, which Kerry kept but never replied to. "Her handwriting, good God!" Kerry's father said, squinting at the fine script.
Professors praised Nanoko's liquidity, her rippling left-hand figures and tasteful interpretations of Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, and Ravel. She noticed another student in the program, a blond boy with brown eyes so deeply embedded into his face they seemed to have been thrown in there.
Every morning, she watched the boy buy hot chocolate and a pastry and sit on a bench and feed croissant flakes to the birds. She saw how he always crossed to the sunny side of the street, and she noted the balled-up papers and loose tobacco in his school bag. How he held a pencil with his fist. He played piano like a butcher, cleanly, matter-of-factly, not a single movement or micro expression wasted.
Nanoko knew that humans are 99.9% genetically identical, and that the 0.1% is contained in a cell so tiny it could easily fit on a pinhead. This brought her great comfort. It actually took very little to get to another person: one basically was the other person. It was incredible to her that the boy could not know how she felt about him: it blasted out every pore of her being. After all, what separated the two of them was a bit of skin, cartilage, muscle tissue and bone—that's it.
One Sunday evening Kerry noticed a long white hair growing out of his temple. He yanked out the greasy strand and examined the little tag of skin, the hair follicle at the root, which contained all of him and none of his daughter. And he ate it. He went to the kitchen and splashed cold water over his face and wrists.
Was Francis grey now too, he wondered. When was the last time he saw Francis? He imagined his brother's gold draining out, leaving a pale husk. Oh how in the end everyone blanched, the color just withdrew, first to somewhere deep and dark within the body, and later, once the heart stopped beating, and the blood no longer defied gravity, lower down toward somewhere deep and dark within the earth. He filled a glass of cloudy tap and padded out to the living room. Blustery laughter came from the apartment next door, as if someone had gathered it in handfuls and thrown it at the walls. As if in reply, Kerry's sleeping father issued a long hacking cough from Nanoko's old bedroom.
In his old age, Kerry's father might sleep so much, and so hard, that his body and his soul, like a worn soap cake in a shower grate, might eventually be pushed by the pounding water, past the catch, down the drain to disappear into the pipes and the darkness.
Maybe he should celebrate his first white hair, Kerry thought. But with who? His father called out hoarsely but the blusher ignored him, zipping his jacket back on. In the foyer, he checked the mail and found a postcard from Nanoko. He read it in the elevator to the basement. She had invited him to her end of year recital.
The bedwetter's sheets were in the dryer, but the bedwetter wasn't in the laundry room. Kerry waited, then took the elevator up to his floor and let the apartment bell bong. In another unit down the hall, somebody softened onions and lovingly berated their child. He smoothed his hair, picturing how huge and deformed his head might look through the peephole, where the bedwetter might already be watching him, deciding whether to open the door, or to pretend not to have heard the bell. Kerry heard the dog scratch and whine at the other side of the door.
"Yeah?" said John Cable's voice.
"It's Kerry," he banged on the door again.
"Who?"
"Open up a minute."
The chain slid off and John bowed before him, one hand on his small dog's collar as she struggled against him, trying to throw her pudgy brown body at Kerry.
"Portabella! What's wrong with you." John restrained her and looked Kerry up and down.
"Would you like to have a beer," Kerry said, and wondered if he'd asked the question backwards.
"I have someone here, actually."
"Oh, you have a guest?"
"Yes—oh! Stupid dog."
The animal growled from somewhere deep in its body. Kerry crouched and extended his knuckles for her inspection but Portabella shrank back and bumped against her owner's shins.
"We're in the middle of something right now, actually."
"I just wanted to tell you your sheets are finished down there," Kerry said.
"Thanks," John said. He pulled Portabella's collar, leading her back into the apartment and leaving Kerry to redden so fiercely and brightly he felt sure John Cable could feel the heat of him through the walls.
He rode the elevator down and stepped out to the twilit street. Large co-op buildings rose all around him. Lights turned on and off. Cars and buses zoomed. It was fall but the flowers continued to bloom, strangely. Kerry took one in his hand. Yesterday, the bud's tight spiral was like an arrowhead and now it just splayed open, resignedly, to any old thing. Truth is actually everywhere, Kerry thought. It is so large and so open but we never see it because we can't narrow our attention to the place where it is. It's impossible to. And so actually it is hidden. It isn't open to us all.
Kerry walked back inside. He and the doorman nodded as was their custom. That tiny interaction had taken no fewer than two years to perfect. Sometimes the blusher imagined the doorman standing above his coffin, administering the nod. It was a perfect interaction, he felt. One of the only of his lifetime.
On the train to the conservatory, Kerry reserved a three-person seat and pressed himself to the window. The sun blushed on the river. A few rows ahead, brunette college students tallied the heights of the men they'd slept with this year.
He entered the concert hall twitching his blazer into place over his shoulders and was ladled a cup of apple juice. Children fidgeted in the rigid seats, their parents scolded them. He folded his body into an aisle seat, clasped his hands in his lap and stared forward. There—a few rows ahead of him, in the front. A young gold man sitting beside her whispered something and she laughed, putting her head on his shoulder, as if laughter was the way to the shoulder.
"Nanoko," Kerry called out, but not quite loud enough, not fully committed, in case she did not hear him while everyone else did. He cleared his throat.
Nanoko spotted her father when he first shuffled in. She lifted her head from the blond's shoulder now and stared resolutely at the stage.
"Nanoko!" His reedy voice pierced her. She blushed.
The program director, a slight man with comb grooves in his thin hair, took the microphone and flinched at the shrill feedback. Then he began to introduce the students.
One after the other, musicians took the stage and played the pieces they'd rehearsed. A tall sunburnt girl brought herself and her mother to tears. The blond boy's performance unleashed something so violently happy, Kerry recognized his daughter's pleasure and admiration by the tilt of her head. They butchered her name and Nanoko floated up to the piano, tugging her short tulle dress over her thighs. She drew in a long breath and began to play. Kerry fanned himself with a program. The world was full of errors, he thought, a bladder of them hanging over everyone. One prick and it would burst.
Kerry rose slowly, as slowly as he possibly could. Nanoko's fingers flew over the keys, pouncing and jabbing. The notes followed him, calling him back. He nodded at the usher, and the usher shut the door behind him without a sound.
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