In the smoky ray of light that cleaved the room there was the silhouette of a man, slumped over the piano in the corner like the engraving of some tragic figure. The others had left, save for the bartender who was wiping the day’s residue from the bar. He flipped the stools up onto the counter one at a time, with the unhurried precision of middle age. A stifled whistle escaped from the corners of his mouth like wind rustling through reeds. 

The man at the piano lifted his head from his arms. His right hand raised itself, a snake poised to snap at the ivory keys below. Down it fell, and a single note leapt into the midnight air. The whistling stopped and the bartender turned. 

“Mornin’,” he said to the stranger. “You sleep well?”

The stranger shrugged. The hair that fell to the shoulders of his jacket was silver. 

“I can’t recall,” he said. “Doesn’t make much difference to me anymore. My dreams are sharper than the waking world, these days.” 

“You get sober, you’ll remember that there’s colors in the daytime,” the bartender told him. “You can’t see anything clearly at the bottom of a cup.” 

A crystalline shimmer on top of the piano marked an empty glass caught in the light. The stranger directed his gaze toward it. “You’re trying to convert me, eh? You’re gonna pry the bottle out of my grip. Well, my friend, it’s not worth your time. Hey, you need someone like me to earn your tips. Now, how about a refill?” He dangled the empty glass in the air. 

The bartender smirked and tapped his watch. “Bar’s closed,” he said, “and it’s time for you to be on your way.” 

The stranger raised his hands in resignation. They were gnarled and knotted with bulging veins. “All right, have it your way. Lemme stay til you’re done cleaning, though?”

The bartender planted his hands on his hips and heaved a sigh. “Hey, if you’re looking for a place to sleep, this ain’t it. There’s a homeless shelter just down the street if you need –”

“No, no, no, it’s not like that.” Shaking his head, the stranger turned back to the piano. “Can’t a man just sit and remember what it’s like to talk to other people? Whatever happened to companionship?” His fingers brushed the surface of the keys again as if he were testing the surface of a hot stove. 

The sound of a distant siren slipped underneath the door at the front of the bar. For a moment, the bartender stood and stared at the back of the old man in front of him, the matted gray hair and the musty black jacket and the mottled, swollen hands. 

“Fine,” he said as he ambled back to the counter and grabbed a broom from behind it. “Stay for a few minutes. I don’t care.” 

There was only silence from the man in the corner. Then, a chord rang out, at once jagged and muffled in the heavy air. Slightly out of tune, it spun like honky-tonk; it was the sound of smoldering cigarettes in damp alleyways and hearts broken in moonlit courtyards. 

“You know, I was a famous pianist once,” the stranger said, once the notes had evaporated. “Toured all over the world.” 

The bartender rubbed a hand through his thinning hair. “It’s too late for a sob story, mister. Come back during business hours and I can give you my sympathies.”

The smallest exhalation of a laugh escaped from the stranger’s nostrils. “You can save them,” he said. “I’m too old for that anyway.” 

There was no response from the bartender, only the whisper of his broom.  

A few more chords rang out beneath the stranger’s fingers. He paused for several seconds in between each one, as if he had to draw up his memory from a deep well. Slowly, the chords took shape to form the beginning of a nocturne or a sonata, easing its way through the hammers and strings in the piano’s belly and oozing out through the wood. 

“I was eleven when I started learning,” the man said, his mouth operating independent of his hands. “Pretty old, compared to most of the pros.” The music fell to a decrescendo, sinking as deliberately as a sunset. 

“I was a quick learner, though,” the stranger continued. “Always have been, with what I put my mind to. Not school, of course. I dropped out in eighth grade, back when you could do that sort of thing – just marched right up to my teacher and said I wasn’t coming back after the summer. I grew up in Iowa, where half the kids ended up working on their parents’ farms for the rest of their lives. But my mother was horrified. She always wanted to send me away to college where I could get a degree and become a doctor or a lawyer or something. My father was happy, though. He thought he was gonna get to keep me there, breaking my back in those fields for him until I was old enough to take over the whole operation. When I told them I wanted to go off to the big city and study piano – well, they thought I’d lost my mind.” 

The old man paused here, and he let the last notes of his song linger in the air. He glanced over his shoulder. The bartender’s back was turned, his movements occupied in the swish of his broom, but the old man saw him stop, his ears dangling on the edge of those last few words. 

“Even my piano teacher discouraged me,” the old man said, watching for the bartender’s reaction. “She said the city was a den of greed and vice, and that a poor young fawn like me shouldn’t get mixed up in all that. Better for me to stay and take her job one day, bundled up in the familiarity of that little town. Ha! The old spinster. 

“Well, I took a few coins from my momma’s purse one day. I’d stayed home from church because I’d said I was feeling ill. They relented when I asked them if they wanted me to vomit in the aisle during communion. Anyway, I boarded a train and went all the way to New York City. That’s right! The farmer’s kid in the streets of New York. I cheated on my entrance exam to the conservatory. I lied about my age. They probably had me all figured out, but they let me audition. Maybe they just wanted a laugh. Well, when I got up on that stage and played Rachmaninoff, they weren’t laughing.”

By now, the bartender had pulled one of the stools over to the old man, leaning forward and massaging his elbows as he listened to the tale. “And?” he asked. “Did you get in?”

The stranger nodded. “They were practically tripping over themselves to admit me. But two years into the program I went and saw S. B. Inslet play a concert at the Carnegie and I remember thinking, what am I doing shut up in this school? I gotta get out there and play – that’s the real thing! So I did. I quit. And next thing I knew, I was in Europe, playing every night in some concert hall or another. I played for the Queen once. God, what times those were!”

A discordant note rang out and ricocheted off the walls of the bar. The stranger winced and pulled his hands off the keys as if they’d been burned. 

“I got arthritis now,” the stranger continued, now accompanied by silence. “Can’t play like I used to. It was early onset. Just in the prime of my career, really. A fate worse than death. I hid it for years – I remember tearing at the sheets in my hotel rooms and groaning in agony. They all knew, though. There were whispers behind my back. And the audiences dwindled, too. ‘Course, I blamed that on the economy, the decline of the arts and all that, but when they started putting me in little basements and unattended churches, I couldn’t ignore my condition much longer.”

The bartender smiled and hoisted the stool off the floor. He sauntered back to the counter and set it down, its legs sticking into the air like some helpless bug. “Is that all true?” he asked. 

For a moment, the stranger stared at the keys in front of him. He ran a finger across them. In silence, he raised his eyes at the bartender and furrowed his brow. Then, his lips curled upward, and his body was racked by a single laugh as long and loud as the blast of an orchestra. 

“No,” he said. “But it’s a nice little story to tell.” 

The bartender turned out the lights, and the two of them walked out into the street. They parted, and were each enveloped in the ashen glare of the city at night.