Two young friends read a single book at the same time, together. One of them sits at a table while the other stands behind him, reading over his shoulder. The problem is that the one who is sitting is both a much faster reader and the one who turns the pages. The problem is solved without a word spoken. The one sitting rereads passages, while the slower of the two, so as to match his friend’s pace exactly, begins to only pretend he is reading, preferring the closeness of his friend to the unfolding story.

The only adult performing in the recital loses his place on the page while he is playing. He puts his instrument down and, bowing his bald head to the audience, walks off stage sweaty and red and smiling. He’s a beginner. This is his first recital. Because he works such long hours in social services here in San Francisco, he’s had little time to practice. The music teacher, whose clientele, until the man showed up, consisted exclusively of children, stands in support of the man’s effort, and soon the entire audience is applauding warmly. Having watched the music teacher rise, a boy peels away from his clapping mother and, climbing onto the stage, follows the man into the wings. I don’t know about this boy. I haven’t decided yet. He may be a little Japanese boy. That was my first inclination. Then again he may be blue eyed and towheaded. Given the old rule of thumb “Write what you know,” making him black feels a little beyond me. For some reason the African American experience is more off limits to my mind—more proprietary—than the story of, say, a Mexican. I don’t know why. I have more black friends than I do Latino friends. I’ve never been to Mexico. I’d probably render them both—the black character and the Mexican character—with too many stereotypes. I probably don’t need to make any firm decisions around race in this early stage of planning. For my starting point I may simply state that the music we are going to hear in a few minutes comes out of the Western canon.

Setting ethnicity aside for the time being, the boy may be obese or hyperactive. He may be all skin and bones. I love to connect the word frenetic with him. I love the idea of troublemakers. He picks on kids by reminding them of their weaknesses. He makes us laugh with his fart noises. If not a troublemaker, he’s an introvert with a slew of imaginary friends, a familiar on his shoulder. I haven’t given much thought to how much of this is going to be autobiographical, but if he’s going to sound like me he’ll need to be simultaneously lonely and talkative. He wants to communicate something to you but doesn’t know how to say it. He wants your attention. He’ll talk your ear off if you let him. He fidgets. He grunts. He struggles to enunciate. His nasal passages are clogged all the time. His nose whistles.

He could be a million things really—the son of a banker, the son of a pilot, the son of a writer. He’s a fatherless child. His mother works like a dog to give him music lessons. Or he has a brooding father. Or an effeminate one. He might have four older sisters or be sibling to his twin—a brother or a sister. I could easily make him adopted. Because I have an adopted sister in real life I could give him this characteristic with some authority. In fact, after I’ve finished this story I plan to write a book called The History of Adoption and dedicate it to Laura. My parents adopted her at the end of the Vietnam Era. My own father is a veteran. In my History I will explore the connection between US military occupations and the adoption of orphans by American servicemen from the theaters of operation. My History will also profile famous adoptees throughout history—Daniel Boone, Dante Alighieri, Li Peng, Crazy Horse, John Lennon, Aristotle, Heracles, Bill Clinton, etc.

But I digress. Let’s take it from the top. The boy could be obese, hyperactive, frenetic, constipated, lonely, dying of cystic fibrosis, verbal, oral, a thumb sucker, a break-dancer with a mean moonwalk, picky (finicky) eater, bully, son of banker, son of farmer, makes fart noises, familiar on his shoulder, tall for his age, small, average, a little Japanese boy, towheaded, malnourished, quarterback for the Brown Bombers, future featherweight champion of the world, heavyweight champ, fly fisher, fascinated by piranhas, wearing braces, on the verge of mental illness, wrapped in a navy pea coat, collector of wheat pennies, collector of beer cans, Nike tennis shoes, a pair of topsiders, smart for his age, tough time enunciating, fidget, grunt, clear your throat, listen, elf, orc, demigorgon, the gay protagonist of Soehnlein’s The World of Normal Boys, a devotee of Ferdinand the Bull, afraid of shapes made by moonlight, emboldened by the night, hanging from the eaves, lighting out, stepping through the cattails, tick on balls….

(You never know what memories you’re going to trigger when you start digging. Once as a boy I discovered a bloated tick embedded in one of my testes. I was afraid to touch it and had to go the whole day—until my father got home—with it embedding further because only my mom was home and I didn’t want her near my penis.)

…nose picker, dreams incessantly about caves, ties his own necktie, suffers from enuresis, self administers insulin shot, fan of anime, animated, clairvoyant, the face of joy, skeptical of all holiday characters, of all holidays except birthdays, mostly skeptical of heaven, of heaven and hell, has sleep in his eyes, a strong swimmer, named after a constellation, named like a Native American, sibling of a twin, practiced in the art of deadpan, a battle droid, graffiti artist, sketch artist, expert drawer of Porsches and Lamborghinis, one day dead of leukemia, encephalitis, computer whiz, geek, dork, afraid of heights, of dogs, of being left behind, being kidnapped, raspberries, titty twisters, being pinned down and tickled, greets all scorn with a smile, one day rapes or is raped, one day resuscitates an unconscious stranger, carries a pocket knife, an A student, pothead, daydreamer, a chip off the ole block, a real pistol, mama’s boy, his father’s son, a girl instead of a boy, somebody’s sister, bilingual, itching to play ball, the last one picked, the first one picked, the grotesque, the sentimental favorite….

I now wonder if I needed to lose the thread of the story to understand how superfluous these possibilities can be. It’s as if I needed to lose my way in order to discover the boy’s function. Scanning the list I realize that I may introduce him by way of the tone of his voice, and in this way suggest that he is precocious.

The only adult performing in the recital loses his place on the page, puts his instrument aside, and hurries off the stage, humiliated. A boy from the audience follows him. He says: “Hey Mister, you got stage fright.” Amused, the man replies, “What can I do about it?” “I have a switch in my head,” explains the boy, “my anxiousness switch. I can turn it off whenever I feel like it. I’ll show you in the second half of the program.”

Later the boy walks on stage and, not much taller than his piano, takes a seat. “I will now play Entrance of the Gladiators,” he announces, adding, with a wink to my protagonist, that he is quite nervous.

I wonder if you recognize this tune from its title. The man now waiting in the wings, “my protagonist,” doesn’t, but finds the title fitting from a boy who means to teach him about bravery. He thinks maybe it’s a military march, and he’s right. Entrance of the Gladiators is a military march written a long time ago for the calliope by a Czech composer whose name now escapes me. The man in the wings pictures chariots, chiseled chins, and battle-axes, only the tune’s unmistakable association, as the boy begins, is not with gladiators, but with clowns. Think The Greatest Show on Earth. Think Ringling Bothers Grand Entry. Entrance of the Gladiators is that tune to which too many clowns pile out of a tiny car. They arrive with cream pies, rubber chickens, and squirting flowers. They come in whiteface. They have bulbous noses. Long associated with circus sideshows and carnival midways prior to World War II, Entrance of the Gladiators is better know today as Thunder and Blazes. This famous piece the boy plays on the piano flawlessly. He doesn't make a single mistake. Other kids follow him, playing such standards as Greensleeves, Twinkle Twinkle, and Für Elise.

I had decided how this story was going to end before I started writing it, and now here we are at the end and I’m just not sure anymore. I had in mind a modern-day parable. I was going for something powerful. The man was supposed to peek out from behind the curtain to find the auditorium teeming with kids pressing their parents for fast food or something sweet to eat as they packed up their instruments. Pushing through the crowd to the boy with the anxiousness switch in his head, he was supposed to exclaim, “The most beautiful music in the world is hidden from us by its familiarity.”

This simple phrase was both the seed of the story and my planned-for final sentence. I kept moving toward it, and would have reached it too, if I hadn’t insisted on trying to choose a life for the boy. Then my parable got muddled. The idea of overly familiar music as nonetheless beautiful got lost because I couldn’t leave you alone with the boy. I couldn’t enact the moral of the story by allowing you to conjure him on your own. I had to get in there. I had to start yapping. I made a few preliminary decisions and, as if I could please everyone, proceeded to correct them, creating with my list an improvisation too idiosyncratic for my final sentence to truly ring.

Is it true? I just went back to my manuscript and deleted the list. I was surprised to find so many veiled confessions! I cut the story by two-thirds. No more enuresis. Or moonlit adventure. I removed all conjecture on my part, all traces of the real me. If I were a character you could say that I killed myself off. As the author, I’ve stripped the story down to my initial impulse: nondescript boy (precocious, stereotype) confronts nondescript man (stage fright, awkward new musician, aging) to teach him a valuable lesson. Now my concluding sentence is prominent and may make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. Or not. It’s still not quite right. Something’s still missing. I wish I could reinsert the list, the grunts, the orc, along with a few autobiographical details, maybe the bit about my adopted sister, just to make certain, but I’ve zapped all that information and am too tired to recreate it. I should at least try to get it back again. Otherwise I’ll always wonder if my impetuous nature, even as it makes me cringe—makes me in my weakest moments want to run and hide and never speak again—is in reality a vital part of the story.