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Train to West Ruislip

Yura Riphyak

I. Shrek

“Your attention, please! The Central Line service to West Ruislip has been delayed. Please listen for further announcements.”

The ride to Tottenham Court Road is six stops: eleven minutes. The change to the Northern Line takes five minutes. Tottenham Court Road to Mornington Crescent is four stops: seven minutes. Two minutes to leave the station, then seven more to walk to the BioScience building. Door to room 106, three minutes. Total: thirty-five minutes.

I’m probably going to miss Josephine’s presentation.

I look around. There are just two more people on the platform: a man in his sixties, wearing an expensive-looking trenchcoat; and a black teenager in a hoodie with the “Shazam” logo.

Trenchcoat is looking at the platform screen that displays three identical lines of text:

1 West Ruislip – Delayed

2 West Ruislip – Delayed

3 West Ruislip – Delayed

Like a spell, you have to repeat it three times for the magic to happen. Perhaps this is what Trenchcoat is doing; he has not taken his eyes off the screen, as if he is trying to change the text through sheer force of will.

“Magic does happen sometimes, just much slower than in the fairy tales.” Mother was always proud of that phrase.

Well, magic certainly did happen to me once.

But the problem with magic is that it’s unreliable. You cannot build on a foundation of magic. Once you want to put another brick on, it vanishes, and all you are left with is rubble.

That is why I chose science.

A woman is coming downstairs to the platform, sticking her Oyster card in the back pocket of her jeans. She is not very young—around 35 perhaps—but still pretty: petite, and not too skinny. Her hair is dyed purple like Tonx in Harry Potter. She has a piercing in her nose.

I like the Harry Potter books.

We recently had an exchange meeting with a group working on another rare disease: Stoneman syndrome. There is approximately one case per two million of population. It’s pretty horrific; the muscle tissue slowly turns into bone. Myocytes calcify and become osteocytes, until the patient becomes a living statue.

This is a good description of how I feel in front of an attractive woman.

I did have some dates in college. However, it was always the other side’s initiative.

I’m not sure what they saw in me. I’m not particularly handsome. In high school, my hormones went all over the place, plastering my face with terrible acne. By the time I went to college, the acne was gone, but it had left traces that made the skin on my forehead look like an orange peel.

I’m also slightly overweight: not much, but just enough to wear suspenders instead of a belt.

Jake sometimes calls me “Doctor Poo” because of that.

Perhaps it was some kind of a motherly impulse, back in college, I mean. Young women sometimes have misplaced instincts. But that’s also the reason it never worked. Since Mother had died, I couldn’t imagine another strong woman in my life.

Purple Hair sits on the end of the same bench and gives me a quick glance.

What is this? A smile? Should I smile back?

“The Central Line service to West Ruislip is delayed by approximately ten to fifteen minutes. We apologize for any inconvenience caused.”

As I said, magic happened to me once. Or it almost did.

There was this app where they put you on a video chat with random people, and you both wear masks. Not real masks, of course: a video filter that a face-recognition AI paints over your face.

“MaskApp. Who are you today?”

You can choose from hundreds of mask designs: animals, cartoons, video-game characters, movie characters, Venetian, voodoo, kabuki …  – you name it.

I chose Shrek. I did feel I had something in common with a green ogre who lived in a swamp and ate pickled eyeballs for dinner. A preference for solitude, perhaps?

First, it was primarily hookers—-just like any other dating app I had tried. I could soon guess their occupation from the mask they chose—all hypersexualized female characters: multiple Sailor Moons, Lola Bunnies, Princesses Leias, and Alices in Wonderland. There were also plenty of men who pretended to be women, Asian teenagers who didn’t speak a word of English, and folks just having fun. The genie from Aladdin once tried to sell me life insurance.

And then I met Marge.

Yes: Marge Simpson. Yellow skin, overbite, popped eyeballs, and a grotesque blue cucumber of hair.

And – she was different. For a start, she didn’t open with one of the “usual icebreakers” (“Where are you from?”, “Do you like my mask?”, “Oh, I love Shrek! That is my favorite show!”).

Instead, she asked, “So, are you a cake or an onion?”

Her voice sounded like a dull piece of chalk on a blackboard – just as anyone who watched the cartoon would expect. Perhaps I was focusing on the voice because the question itself didn’t make any sense.

“A … what?”

“Onions have layers. Cakes have layers. And ogres have layers,” – She said this in Eddie Murphy’s voice. – “Oh, for god’s sake, have you even seen the movie?”

“Yes …” – This felt like the moment when I needed to say something clever. – “I do have layers. But it’s … It’s a tough choice, really. Onion cake, perhaps?”

That’s all I had: not much.

Her video froze for a moment – as if a trivia show host was taking a theatrical pause before unveiling the correct answer (and telling you that your answer was wrong).

Then a second later, it unfroze back – and I heard her laughing. No scratchy pitch, no Eddie Murphy – just a normal human laugh.

We went on to chat for another twenty-four minutes – and ended up adding each other to “friends.” Then, the next day, we jumped on another call. Then on another one.

It turned out that both of us liked J.K. Rowling’s post-Harry-Potter mystery thrillers, Chinese Sci-Fi, and Stranger Things. We also agreed that Witcher III was the best RPG ever made and that we definitely aren’t living in the most exciting version of reality.

However, there were just the right amount of things that made us different. She was a liberal arts person – a musician. She sang for me several times – with a beautiful jazz voice – and even played guitar once. Nobody had ever sung or played for me before – just for me, that is.

In the next few months, Marge gradually took over more and more bits of my life. As well as our regular lunch break call at 1:42 pm (yes, we both liked Douglas Adams too), we would jump on quick ad-hoc calls four times a day on average – just to talk about something fun that had just happened.

I stopped doing any other MaskApp chats. I wasn’t excited about meeting another Sailor Moon or Catwoman.

I actually renamed the app to “Marge” and added it to my quick access menu, along with the calculator and Sudoku Pro.

There was one button in MaskApp that I never pressed. It said “Mask Off!” According to the rules, it had to be mutual consent. I never tried to do this with Marge; we never even spoke about it. It was a kind of silent agreement that we both assented to, in order to protect this better version of reality.

This period of my life lasted a total of 196 days.

My phone rings and vibrates briefly.

It’s an email from Josephine, with a pdf report attached.

Josephine, who always cleans her lab desk before going home, decided it wouldn’t hurt to send everyone a copy of the report before the presentation – just in case.

Josephine is our “mice lady.” It was, of course, Jake who had come up with this nickname. Jake had a handle for everyone, but this one was precise, unlike the others. This was not only because Josephine was miniature and quiet, with a light French accent, but also because she did work with actual mice. She was inserting human genes in their DNA, so that their little bodies react to different drugs in ways similar to ours.

Once, when Josephine was distraught with Jake, she had said that those mice have more human in them than many actual humans.

Yes, Josephine took good care of her little rodents. She had names for every one of them. She kept them warm, well-fed, and clean. She also infected them with one of the most horrific diseases known to humanity.

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, ALS, Lou Gehrig’s Syndrome, Charcot’s Disease, Motor Neuron Disorder. No matter which name it is listed under, every encyclopedia article about it ends with “there is no cure.”

And it’s not an easy death, to be sure. For some reason, the nerves connecting your muscles to your spine start dying off. They just jam, like old wires.

Initially, your hands just start trembling a bit too much. Then, after a few weeks or months, depending on how lucky you are, you lose control over them completely. Now you need someone to put a spoon in your mouth when you eat, unless you want to slurp from the plate like a dog.

Then your legs follow. One day, completely unannounced, they just betray you – and you can’t even stand. Then you lie there and look at those two useless rolls of soft rubbish, still unaware that you will never be able to walk again. Now you need a motorized chair just to be able to move around. A regular wheelchair doesn’t solve the problem, since your hands are already not working.

A retired navy seal with ALS once “told” me that, when your body stops functioning like that, you start thinking of it in engineering terms. The levers, the screws, the wires – you imagine every detail in this intricate mechanism that has served you so well for many years without you ever appreciating that.

“I feel like a broken toy,” he “said,” after I wiped down the tear that ran down from the corner of his eye. I’m using quotation marks because what he did wasn’t exactly talking. Instead, he used an input device that tracked the movements of his right eyeball to pick words on a small screen, and then sent them to a voice generator.

When your facial muscles stop responding, you lose the ability to talk. Also, your face is frozen forever in a horrid grimace of agony.

The final stage is your breathing muscles. Initially, this can be aided by a tracheotomy, but death from suffocation is now only a matter of a few months, or a few weeks – depending on how lucky you are.

Many choose not to wait until then and end their lives while they still can.

Needless to say, since the 60s, when humanized mice were introduced, ALS has been the Holy Grail of drug discovery. Hundreds of smart people in every part of the world spent the best of their careers trying to crack it. Tens of thousands of mice were sacrificed on the sterile altar of science.

All of this research has been fruitless so far. At best, they learned how to slow down the decline of the neurons to provide a few extra months of agony to the damned, but no one ever was able to reverse the process.

However, this time, we were doing something different.

And the difference was me.

“The next train will arrive in four minutes; it will be a Central Line service to West Ruislip.”

Suddenly everything is set in motion – as if the invisible train and the passengers at the station are all parts of the same colossal mechanism hidden deep underground.

The Hoodie jumps from the bench and starts pacing the platform. As he passes me, his phone slips from the pocket of his hoodie and smacks down on the yellow dots of the sensory marking for blind people at the very edge of the platform. I could almost hear the sound of the screen cracking, but the Hoodie doesn’t initially seem to have noticed.

I wonder if I should let him know.

The Trench is faster than I am, though. He picks up the phone and runs along the platform edge after the Hoodie.

I can’t help taking a quick glance at Purple Hair. She isn’t looking at me anymore; she is looking at the tableau.

Apparently, Trench’s magical stare has finally done its job.

The numbers on the tableaus woke up too – the triple “Delayed” changed to “4 min,” “7 min,” and “11 min”.

4,711 hours is the same as 196 days.

On day `197, I woke up at 6:43 in the morning, and grabbed my phone to see if there were any new messages from Marge.

Nothing.

Weird. She would usually go to bed much later than me and send a couple of lines – there was always something else she wanted to tell me. But not on this day.

I tapped on the MaskApp logo. Nothing. It just wouldn’t open. Okay: this happened sometimes.

I hauled myself into a vertical position, shuffled into the bathroom, brushed my teeth, and went to the kitchen to brew some Earl Grey.

With a tea mug in one hand and my phone in the other, I deleted the app and opened the AppStore to reinstall it. But the “MaskApp” search query wasn’t showing the familiar icon with Ariana Grande’s face half-covered with a mask (they changed the pop star and the mask every month). Instead, there was a list of icons and titles I had never seen before: “MassCarate,” “Masquerade”…

Seven minutes later, I already knew what had happened.

I was staring at the screen of my laptop. The steaming tea stood forgotten on the tabletop beside me. Suddenly I didn’t see any point in hurrying anywhere or doing anything. All I could do was just sit there in my empty kitchen until my tea turned into ice.

On my screen, the Forbes website displayed a picture of a skinny man, roughly my age, with long curly hair. The man was smiling conspiratorially and winking. He held the half-mask from Phantom of the Opera in his right hand. The title below the photo said:

“MaskApp CEO gets arrested on multiple wire fraud allegations.”

Below, in smaller print:

“Investors filed a class action against Evan Oldman, 39, after discovering he spent over $40 million on a 14-bedroom Malibu villa and parties with Victoria’s Secret models”.

I had never exchanged phone numbers or emails with Marge. We didn’t even know each other’s real names. We had never pressed the “Mask Off!” button. We had cherished our anonymity like some special gift. We had preferred to remain in our fictional reality, a better one than this.

“Central Line: the next train to West Ruislip will arrive in one minute.”

I click on the pdf attached with Josephine’s email.

The report is seventeen pages long. It starts with the usual methodology overview and a short bio of every member of the working group. The title under my old university mugshot says “Chief Data Scientist”. It is an unusual position to see in a drug discovery team.

However, if we succeed, every drug discovery team will have a data scientist.

I keep scrolling the little screen down until I finally find what I’m looking for: the numbers.

What I see on the next slide sends a warm wave of excitement up through my stomach and chest.

I knew the numbers were good, but I haven’t imagined them being THIS good!

Fifty-two percent of the test group of mice have shown the signs of their motor neurons regenerating!

Fifty-two! Five plus two equals seven.

Seven years!

Seven years spent perfecting the algorithms, feeding them with every bit of data from every clinical report, and going through millions of possible molecule configurations – again and again, and again … It had all been worth it in the end!

This moment will go down in history as the first time an AI has discovered a new drug.

I’m sure that by the time I get to the the lab, everyone there will be familiar with the numbers already. Obviously, Jake knew them before everyone else. This explains why he chose such an early hour for the presentation: he wants the Sydney group to be able to share in the triumph. I also suspect he’d already ordered champagne. Knowing Jake, it is going to be Ace of Spades, no less.

There will be little work today. Instead, there will be lots of cheering, recalling the great and funny moments, patting each other on the back, and occasional hugs – there might also be a ceremonial filing of the clinical trials application with HRA, with Jake pressing the “Send” button with a glass in his left hand and everyone counting down together.

Then, after it is over, I will head back to the tube, a little woozy from champagne, and a train with red livery will take me back to my lonely swamp.

“Central Line: The train now approaching is to West Ruislip. Please stand back from the platform edge”.

The train rushes from its dark pit, pushing an invisible carriage full of hot air in front of itself. This underground wind blows my hair and swings my jacket as if it is a superhero cape.

I suddenly feel like I am part of something much bigger and infinitely more powerful than me – as if if I too became a detail in the colossal mechanism hidden deep in the ground under London – and just like everyone else here, I have been set in motion by the train to West Ruislip.

This feeling is not entirely unfamiliar. I already felt like this once.

Magic …!

The red door slides to the side in front of me. However, before stepping into it, I turn my head, meet the eyes of the woman with purple hair, smile, and say “Hi!”

II. Shazam Man

“YOUR ATTENTION, PLEASE! The Central Line service to West Ruislip has been delayed. Please listen for further announcements.”

Bollocks!

I’m seeing Mikey this morning – and I’m not bloody missing it! That’s why I took the fuckin’ tube that cost twice the bus fare.

Every cunt’s got a plan until they get punched in the face …

You wanna hear about it, do ya?

Alright, if you really want to hear about it, the first thing you probably want to hear is where I was born and what my crappy childhood was like and how all seventeen years of my fucked-up life led to this very moment – at this poxy tube station, with two dry old chaps, getting delayed for an appointment with my brother before he gets locked up for twenty years.

So how about this: I ain’t telling you nothing.

Ma wouldn’t like it: she’s very sensitive about privacy and shite – do you know what I mean?

Pops probably wouldn’t care though. He doesn’t care now – that’s for sure. I don’t remember much about him, just that he was a large man. He played basketball before Mikey and I were born. Then he washed windows in skyscrapers in Docklands. He had the range; do you know what I mean? It just turned out that his cradle had one worn-out mount.

And so it goes …

This was when Mikey became everything to me.

We really are programmed for that kind of crap, aren’t we?

Just like when little brats come for their first day at school, and, before the end of the day, they know who is the boss, who his goons are, who is the jester, and who is the untouchable.

Similarly, when the oldest male in the family dies, the next oldest one immediately takes his place. And it was like he had been doing it his entire life. No one had taught him – just like no one teaches little kids how to walk and talk. He just KNEW how to be a father to me.

He was just running a bloody program: working odd jobs to put food on the table;

teaching me to shoot hoops on a basketball court with a barbed fence, where cracks on concrete coincided with the three-point line; driving Ma to the hospital when that drunk wanker crashed his bike into her; bringing her to the doctors’ every month; and buying her a walking stick and painkillers because her leg never really healed.

He was always there. He never complained. And he always had the right words for Ma and me.

“The Central Line service to West Ruislip is delayed by approximately ten to fifteen minutes. We apologize for any inconvenience caused.”

I glance at the old chaps. They aren’t moving – like damn mannequins. Everything seems frozen, like a YouTube video when your neighbor forgets to pay his Internet bill.

A bird with purple hair comes over and sits on a bench next to me.

She looks up at the screen. Both old blokes are looking at the screen. I look at the screen too.

It says “Delayed” three times.

I return to my stolen-credentials Spotify and find “Rhapsody in Blue” by Gershwin.

An American in Paris is beyond genre. It’s as close to jazz as you can get without being jazz, do you know what I mean? The whole rhapsody is a basic blueprint you can play in a thousand different ways – and it will still be recognizable. Like Pachebel’s canon or jazz standards, it’s not a score; it’s an invitation.

But only the worthy can pass.

I remember the first time I realized I have a special relationship with music.

It was three days after Pops kicked the bucket. The wake was at Aunt Marta’s house. Our third-floor birdhouse was too small to squeeze in all the sad old black people. I got bored and sneaked out to explore.

One bedroom was completely dark – and I didn’t want to draw attention by turning the lights on. But the other had a window. In the dusty air, the rays of light got a texture that made each separate beam distinctly visible. In churches, they use smoke from candles or whatever to get the same effect – so it feels like the Almighty himself is peeking in. The rays created a natural spotlight in which there was an old piano.

I had seen pianos at school before but had never got to play one.

I looked over my shoulder and closed the door behind me, dropping the volume of the, sad respectful voices from the living room by eighty percent. The piano stool was too high for me – so I carefully moved it to the side, then stood myself in front of the two brass pedals and lifted the brown wooden lid.

First, I tried all the keys, one after another, both ways.

Then I tried to combine them: one and one, one and two, two and two. It was easy to find the harmony: the keys went in bunches of seven that repeated each other, like steps, going higher and higher, floor after floor.

Then I remembered a tune I heard on the TV and tried to find the right keys. It took some time, but eventually, the melody did come together.

I got so absorbed that I didn’t notice how the volume of the hubbub in the living room had gone from twenty percent to zero.

“I know this tune,” one sad old voice said.

“Who is playing this? “ said another – “Is it Patty’s junior over there?”

The next day Mikey brought home a keyboard. It looked as if someone had removed the central section from my aunt’s piano and had a “Casio” logo printed over it. We only had one room – so he cleaned all the empty jars and old newspapers from the windowsill in the kitchen, and put a chair there for me. That was how my music studio came together – between the fridge and the stove.

In about a year, I became so good I started making money.

Every morning I would put my Casio on a stolen Tesco cart and go to Mile End tube station.

This new app, Shazam, had just came out. You played a tune to it, and it told you the song name, artist, and whatever. This gave me an idea.

I printed a large blue Shazam logo on my piano stand and made myself a superhero costume with a blue cape and t-shirt that said “Shazam Man.”

I would ask the passers-by to name any melody or play a tune on their mobile – and then immediately continue it on the piano.

I was making fifty quid on a good day.

Once I made over a hundred. I went to Sainsbury’s and bought three one-pint Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream tubs: vanilla for Ma, chocolate fudge for Mikey, and cookie dough for myself.

That night, we were sitting in our tiny shitty kitchen, each with a personal bucket of ice cream on their lap, eating it with tablespoons, faffing around and laughing.

Then Mikey asked me to play. I played at home all the time, rehearsing new melodies and shite, but Mikey wanted something special – a concert just for him and Ma.

So I sat on my Baby Grand Kitchen Piano – and played.

I played “Caravan” and “Take Five”, I played Ray Charles, Duke Ellington and Thelonius Monk. I played Gershwin. And I played it all differently this time, adding a bit of cookie dough and the joy of that minute.

When I finished and turned back to them – Ma was clapping, with a spoon of ice cream in her mouth, and her walking stick lying forgotten under the table. But Mikey wasn’t clapping. He just looked at me, smoking his cigarette – and there was something new in that stare of his.

The next day, Mikey came home after midnight. He told Ma he’d got a new job that paid twice as much as the current one, but he would need to work late hours or even overnight.

Then he came up to me and gave me a flyer. It had a picture of a beautiful red-brick building and a girl playing grand piano on stage in a big room decorated with wooden panels. The rays of light from an invisible window somewhere up to the right were falling on the girl, like a natural spotlight.

The flyer said, “The Royal College of Music.”

I looked at the flyer in my hands for some time and then looked up at Mikey. He had the widest, whitest smile shining on his black face.

“Yeah, little brother! You. Are. Going. To. College.” With each word, he jabbed the flyer in my hands with his index finger as if adding a full stop.

I was looking at him, absolutely sure he was mugging me off:

“College … Is what? Ten grand …?”

“Seventeen.” – his smile disappeared. He leveled his face with mine and looked me right in the eyes: “Do you understand what that means?”

Okay, maybe he wasn’t mugging me off.

“This means that you gotta work hard. Very hard. And I’m gonna work hard too. You understand?”

So I started working hard. Shazam Man went on a sabbatical. Mikey was now bringing home enough money to put food on the table and still save for my tuition.

I spent days practicing. I was looking for every slightest improvement in my technique – and then I polished it to perfection. I ventured into areas I had never tried before: Mozart, Chopin, and even Liszt. I also doubled down on jazz improvisation. I scraped around for every bit of information, and every video I could find on YouTube. I tried to understand how the greats played – and imitate them. Art Tatum, Bill Evans, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett: they all became my teachers. Then I started finding ways to surpass them. To add my own layers below and above theirs.

I lived music, dreamed music, ate music, and shat music – day by day, with no weekends, and no vacations.

However, this was nothing compared to Mikey. I barely saw him, except for briefly at the weekends: he would be off to work when I was still sleeping and come back late at night.

Then one morning, eleven months later, I entered the beautiful red-brick building. The flyer was there too – in my pocket.

I asked where the auditions were, went through some beautiful corridors with chessboard floors and staircases with sculptures, and followed the signs. Then I sat on a chair waiting in a room full of other nervous chaps and chicks until my name was announced. I stood up, opened a massive wooden door with a golden knob, and entered the room with wooden panels.

The piano was different – black, not brown, and I didn’t see any rays of divine light. Perhaps the Almighty was tending to some other business that morning.

Instead, there were four people in the audience: three men and one woman, all of them old, and one very old. They asked my name, then they asked me to play something.

I sat down and played. It was the same song I had played on Aunt Marta’s piano, only now I knew its title and the name of American man who had written it almost hundred years earlier. I also knew its inner structure and moods and harmonies, the stories it told, the voices it uses, and every flavor, colors, and accent. The song was me, and I was the song.

They didn’t stop me, even though I probably played for quite a long time, especially the part when I went all-in improvising.

When I finally stopped and looked up from the keyboard, the woman said, “Thank you.” The oldest bloke was smiling.

I don’t know why, but I decided to walk back home, even though that meant quite a long stroll. Maybe I still had too much music in me and didn’t want it to get spoiled by the hubbub on the bus.

Instead, I just wanted to walk and walk and walk: through trees, benches and the useless red phone booths covered with graffiti; then past the half-sunk houseboats in stinky canals, the old buildings that looked like birthday cakes and the new buildings that looked like piles of crap. They all were instruments in my song – and each followed the rhythm of my steps.

The sky was already red when I got to our home. It was the same red color as the paint they use for the mailboxes, double-deckers and the phone booths – and all the usual beautiful London crap.

When I opened the door, I saw Ma sitting by the kitchen table. She hadn’t put the lights on yet – so the entire kitchen was painted in the same red color of the setting sun. Ma had a napkin in her hand – and when she looked at me, I saw that her eyes were red too.

“Michael … Michael … Michael … Michael …” All she could do was to sob and keep repeating his name, as if it was the only word left in the English language.

It took some time and a glass of water before she finally gathered herself and told me what had happened.

That conversation felt like falling through a series wooden floors. When you think you have hit the ground, it breaks under your weight – and you fall deeper. Then again. And again, and again – until darkness is all you see.

Mikey didn’t come home last night. I was too focused on my exam to even notice.

Mikey didn’t come home last night because he was arrested.

Mikey didn’t come home last night because he was arrested as a suspect in a double murder.

Mikey didn’t come home last night because he was arrested as a suspect in a double murder and was facing twenty years in jail if convicted.

“The next train will arrive in four minutes; it will be a Central Line service to West Ruislip.”

I suddenly realize I’m up on my feet, pacing along the platform. Also, Gershwin is no longer playing in my headphones. Silence is the voice of darkness – is that what they say?

I feel a touch on my shoulder. I turn around, and see the old chap in the brown coat handing my phone to me.

“You dropped this, mate.” – he is trying to put a friendly smile on his face, but when I meet his stare, something in his eyes scares the bloody crap out of me. I grab the phone, mutter “Thanks,” and turn back to my bench.

The other job Mikey had found was security in a night pharmacy in Brixton. It paid well because no one wanted it. No one wanted it because it was dangerous. That part of Brixton is full of crackheads. Like zombies, they crawl out of every filthy alleyway at nightfall, drawn to the light of the pharmacy windows. They want ketamine. They want codeine. They want tramadol. They want whatever crap will make them fly.They beg, they threaten, and they show fake prescriptions. Robberies are frequent too. There is nothing they wouldn’t stop at. Dope is like oxygen to them.

That night there was only Mikey and a pharmacist gal – barely older than me. Two junkies – a “husband” and “wife” decided to test their luck. They had a fake prescription for Maxitram, and when Mike told them to fuck off, they started throwing a wobbler.

“The Wife” – I learned later that her name was Pam – was lunging at him or something. Mikey lost the plot and pushed her away a couple of times. She tripped over something, fell to the ground, and smashed her nose. Some blood dripped on Mike’s uniform. This cooled the cunts down, and they ran off.

Three hours later, Mikey heard a ring on the pharmacy door. It was two constables. The police questioned Mikey and the gal. The stupid cunt told them she had seen the quarrel and Mikey pushing Pam away but hadn’t seen what had happened next because she had gone to the storage room to sort the new arrivals.

When they heard that, the feds arrested Mikey.

The “couple” had been found in the backstreet, just one block away from the pharmacy, their necks cut ear-to-ear. There had been so much blood, the police had actually found them after a neighbor had seen it draining over his basement window.

They took Mikey to the police station and sent the blood on his uniform to the lab.

The blood matched. This was enough for them.

“Central Line: the next train to West Ruislip will arrive in one minute.”

The next day, they gave us eighteen minutes with Mikey. We couldn’t afford bail, so that was as much as we could get. We couldn’t afford a lawyer either, so they gave us a state solicitor – an old fat lady with fake blond hair and giant red hula hoops in her ears. Every time I saw her, she looked tired, and her gray suit seemed too small for her. I don’t remember her actual name. I called her Ms. Dontgiveashit.

Ma’s leg had got much worse by then, so she could barely walk. Also, the second she saw Mikey, she started crying – and she couldn’t stop until a constable opened the door and said our time was up. So it was me carrying out most of the conversation. Ms. Dontgiveashit was on her phone the entire time.

After we left, Ms. Dontgiveashit said there were some papers she needed Ma to sign.

I told her Mikey hadn’t done it. She looked at me, smiled, and said nothing.

Three days later, I received an envelope with the Royal College of Music logo on it – the crown, belt and all.

The letter said “they would be delighted to offer me a spot on the next year’s course and an annual scholarship that would cover 100% of tuition fees”. They said they believed I “possessed an exceptional talent for improvisation and excellent mastery of the instrument”.

They have asked me to come to the RCM between nine and twelve today to sign the admission papers.

I take the envelope from my pocket and look at the logo again. The flyer is there, too, crumpled like an old fiver. The print over the girl’s face is worn off. I look at it for some time – then get up and throw it into a litter bin.

“Central Line: The train now approaching is to West Ruislip. Please stand back from the platform edge”.

After I meet Mikey, I’m paying one more visit to the red-brick building. However, I’m not signing any forms today. Instead, I’m going to tell them I have to respectfully reject their offer.

Shazam Man is back, cunts! His exceptional talent for improvisation and excellent mastery of multiple instruments will serve well to buy food and medicines for Ma’s leg. Maybe, if I double down, it can even pay for Mikey’s lawyer.

III. Devil’s Advocate

“YOUR ATTENTION, PLEASE! The Central Line service to West Ruislip has been delayed. Please listen for further announcements.”

I could have taken a cab, but I’m not in a hurry. As always, I packed a forty-five-minute buffer into my schedule to accommodate any possible contingencies, as well as to have my usual walk around the courthouse grounds before the appointment with the judge. It always helps me clean my head and do the best job for my client.

Even though my client today is very different from the ones I defended throughout the thirty-five years of my career.

There are just two more people at the station beside me. I turn my back to them and pretend I’m looking at the tableau showing the forthcoming trains. This allows me to close my eyes and whisper a quiet prayer:

“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name; Thy kingdom comes; Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us, forgive us, forgive us, forgive us, forgive us …”

Yes, I spent the better part of my life working for a rather specific clientele.

The most specific thing about them was that they were all … well, guilty.

However, if you think about it really deeply, what is “guilt”? Isn’t the concept of “guilt” nothing more than another social construct – just like “good” and “evil,” “success,” “reputation,” or, yes – “justice.”

Nature, for example, knows no such thing as “justice.” The only thing it knows is efficiency.

Actually, if you bother doing just a bit of research, you would inevitably conclude that there is no such thing as “reality,” either.

When we think that we’re seeing, for instance, a tree, what we actually see is a stereotypical picture of a tree, constructed by our brain, not an actual plant with particular roots, bark, leaves and flowers.

This is just an evolutionary mechanism. Perceiving reality in all its infinite complexity is not an optimal strategy for survival.

Instead, we have stories. Stories are much more efficient than reality: they are simpler and faster, and they inform our actions.

I became a master storyteller – and this earned me multiple six-figure cheques, a five-bedroom mansion with a private cypress alley in Benthal Heights, a small park of brightly colored sports cars, and the nickname the “Devil’s Advocate”.

I inflated small, unimportant details, making them seem like the essence of the story, while pushing the parts of actual importance far into the background. I exploited alternative narratives and carefully constructed elaborate arabesques of minor story points to make them sound more important than they were. I defiled the truth by questioning the credibility of those telling it, sticking rhetorical fingers into tiny holes in their and stretching them to enormous size.

I was like a venture investor in the world of jurisprudence: my risks were high, and my wins were few.

But when I was winning, I was winning big.

My clients were the bottom-of-the-barrel on the one hand, but crême-de-la-crême on the other: wealthy enough to pay me in six figures and desperate enough to accept the fractional odds of success. The status ladder is really a Mobius strip.

A former Russian deputy Minister of healthcare had laundered money stolen from the budget for medicines for cancer hospitals to buy real estate in the West End. All charges dismissed.

A pedophile movie star with a spree of over thirty-five reported molesting cases had his sentence reduced to a fine and probation, with no jail term.

The teenage son of a liberal MP had killed two people driving at 120 mph through a residential neighborhood after a hefty dose of methamphetamine and at least a bottle of bourbon. He was acquitted.

An heiress to old nobility had killed her husband and maid, who she suspected of having an affair. Acquitted. Four months later, she had killed her cousin by slicing her artery with a broken “Ace of Spades” bottle at a party with multiple witnesses. Newspapers nicknamed her the “Bloody Baroness.” She was deemed criminally insane and moved into an institution where she occupies a separate three-bedroom cottage with six servants.

These are just a few of my many masterpieces.

From every conventional point of view, I was outrageously successful. By thirty-five, I had hit the £10 million liquid assets milestone. My colleagues, even those who publicly despised my methods, secretly admired me. I was routinely invited onto talk shows and gave interviews in newspapers. Penguin Random House bought rights to my biography.

For the last twenty-five years, my life has been nothing but a continuous ascent.

And then Anne fell over.

“The Central Line service to West Ruislip is delayed by approximately ten to fifteen minutes. We apologize for any inconvenience caused.”

You may think someone like me would collect women like sports cars or at least be married to a decade-younger Victoria’s Secret model – a union to seal our double victory in the genetic and social lottery. However, it turned out that this was the only area in which I didn’t live up to the stereotypes of the rich and famous.

Anne was three months older than me. We met in law school when we were – what? – eighteen? She had a pretty round face with kind, soft features, but, other than that, she couldn’t be further from model standards. She was so short, she had to stand on tiptoes when we kissed; her nose was too long and crooked for her face, making her look like a little owl; she had folds of fat on her back below the straps of her bra when she was changing. Her fingers looked like little carrots, and her nails were yellow, as were her teeth – since I’d met her, she’d been smoking a pack of Gitanes a day.

Her social skills were rudimentary, and so was her taste in clothing: everything she ever wore was either gray or green, with varying degrees of fluffiness.

Overall, you might say Anne was a rather unremarkable little creature. But I loved her more than anything in this world.

Many times I asked myself why.

Perhaps it was because of how perfectly content Anne was with reality. She never had any significant interest in Buddhism, nevertheless, Tibetan monks could definitely have taken a page from her book.

She just accepted all that happened without any resistance. Unlike many, and unlike me, she never seemed to suffer from reality being different from what she had imagined.

Perhaps it was because of the ease with which she supported my every idea, and my every turn on the road. It felt like her mission was always to pull me a bit closer to that inner peace in which she bathed effortlessly and permanently. It didn’t matter what my next worry or next crazy idea was about: her focus was on ME – the human in the center of it all.

I sometimes wondered whether, for Anne I was just another force of nature, which it would be meaningless to resist. She loved me like she loved the rain and sun or any turn of events – just because loving was her natural state.

Perhaps it was my way of balancing things. Our marriage acted as a counterweight to my otherwise cynical life. It was the one delusion I deliberately chose not to dispel, the one story I would never change a single word in.

Until someone else changed it.

Anne fell exactly halfway through the French door that led from our living room to the open terrace, where we liked to have our evening tea and look at the sunset over the pointy tops of cypresses bowing to the wind. She was carrying a tray with the teapot, cups, and pastries on a three-tiered stand. Like any respectable West End family, we had a maid, but Anne always insisted on doing this herself. It was our little wife-and-husband ceremony, which had taken place a thousand times. Only this time, it occurred to me that the dishes on the platter were jingling a bit louder than usual.

I remember it happening as if it is a slow-motion movie. Anne appeared through the French doors, with her usual meek smile. Then her expression changed to surprise as she watched her hands throwing the platter in the air, and the rest of her body set off on a flight after it. All the crockery arched off into the air and then slowly descended on the ground, one item after another. The china burst into little fireworks of sharp white pieces, mixed with the brown drops of tea, and silverware dancing and spinning around, Viennese pastries, macarons and chocolate truffles were rolling out in every direction. The camera would then switch to show the final scene from above: a weird flower with petals of brown, silver, and white and a short stem made of a woman in a green robe growing from the open door. And then the screen would go dark.

When I ran over and helped Anne sit, I saw blood on her right cheek with a little white piece of porcelain poking from the wound. She looked at me and said, “I’m afraid we have run out of Darjeeling.”

Two months later, I watched Anne rolling through the French doors on a motorized wheelchair. She did brilliantly this time: managing to steer her way through the door and hitting the table only gently as she stopped, with no fallen pastries or cups turned over. We didn’t know, however, how long she had before she would need to re-learn again. She could still drink her tea without help, but most of the contents ended up on the tablecloth or her green robe. Smoking was easier, perhaps because cigarettes weighed less – and this seemed more important to her. Her speech started to change too, becoming “chewy,” or nasal – as if she was a bit drunk or sleepy.

By then, we already knew what it was.

Anne’s doctor showed us the MRI scans of her spinal cord and explained that the neurons that connected it with muscles would just fuse one by one, like rusted wires. The hands and feet usually switch off first, then the arms and legs, the mimic muscles and vocal cords, and breathing muscles – so a patient needs a tracheotomy and a ventilator just to keep breathing.

At the same time, all the neurons responsible for sensation and cognition remain intact – to ensure you see, feel and understand everything in full detail while you are being gradually locked in your own body.

I remember walking with him under the elms down from the hospital’s neo-gothic splendor while Anne was in her physiotherapy session. He was a Sikh, with a turban and a long white beard – which made the entire experience feel like some weird spiritual practice.

I had two questions. Anne had the same questions, I’m sure – but I wanted it to be me, and only me who would bring her the answers.

I pointed to a small bench under one of the elms, with armrests cast in the shape of dragons. We sat down, and I looked into the wise eyes of the guru. He already knew what I was going to ask.

“Two to five years on average.” His light Punjabi accent made every word sound softer — like if your death sentence came written on top of a cake. “In some cases, the projected lifespan might be much longer. Steven Hawking lived for fifty-five years.” Everything was so kind about him: his voice, his eyes, his eyebrows, his beard, and even his turban. “Though your wife’s disease is showing different dynamics, I’m afraid.”

I looked down at the leaves, shivered in the gentle wind – and asked my second question.

The guru sighed:

“We don’t know exactly why it’s happening. It’s … ten percent of cases are heritable, but for the rest, the causes remain unknown.”

Well, I did have one idea, if you allow me.

I was thinking a lot about how the choices I made in life might … could … have … must somehow be connected to Anne’s sickness.

If there are any laws governing the universe, that kind of balance must be one of them. One merely needed to add two and two to understand that this must be my punishment for all the evil I had propagated in this world. The Devils’ Advocate now belonged to his client’s realm – and I’d just been handed the keys to my private apartment in hell.

All my life, I had been defying justice. This was the time for justice to strike back.

And if justice is to be passed down, then there must be a judge.

A Judge.

His Honor had found me guilty in multiple instances of the aggravated murder of truth, and I had been sentenced to losing the only light in my life.

However, every verdict can be appealed.

I started building my case just as I had done so many times for those of my clients whose guilt was undeniable: focusing on the reduction of the sentence. I had collected – and sometimes created evidence – that the defendant was, in fact, a decent person and good citizen, so that the mistakes they had made were merely the results of confusion and misfortune.

However, the most crucial part was building a relationship with the Judge.

It took some time to develop my faith. This is where my storytelling skills came in handy. A good storyteller can make himself believe in his own stories, just as he makes other people do.

Of course, some affirmative action is required too.

I pray several times a day: “Holy Father” and “Hail Mary” plus something customized and personal. Usually, just “Forgive me, please, forgive me” and “Save her, let her live,” – repeated hundreds of times.

I also attend Holy Mass every Sunday, and confess and receive Holy Communion every two weeks. The first sin I mention is still not believing in Him, but I’m working on It.

I’m working on it, Your Honor.

“The next train will arrive in four minutes; it will be a Central Line service to West Ruislip”.

Something hits the side of my shoe. I look down and see the bright screen of a cheap smartphone. The music app on the screen is showing a retro image of New York: “George Gershwin. Rhapsody in Blue. Columbia Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leonid Bernstein.”

I look around and see the skinny back of a teenager with massive headphones over his ears, pacing energetically towards the other end of the platform.

I pick the device up and press “pause” in the app. The back stops as if its owner had just stumbled upon something, which allows me to catch up with him and poke him on the shoulder. He is black.

“Is this yours, mate?” – I ask, putting on one of those smiles that always helped calm down particularly anxious witnesses.

He looks at me, then snatches the phone out of my hand and retreats to a distant bench.

The expression in his eyes…

“The wind seems stronger today, doesn’t it, love?”

I have to wait for almost a minute to hear the answer. Anne is now using an eye-tracking device with a voice generator to communicate. Her mimic muscles stopped working two weeks ago, changing her usual faint smile into a permanent grimace of deep disgust.

I couldn’t recall Anne ever being disgusted by anything before.

Her nose also looks even more crooked than before.

“Smoke” – the answer finally comes. It will take me some more time to get used to Anne’s new robotic voice. I pick a cigarette from the blue pack of Gitanes lying on the table, light it up in my mouth, and then bring it to the short connector of the tracheostomy tube in Anne’s neck. Her chest raises, and the end of the cigarette lights up. I take the cigarette back and watch a puff of white smoke coming back from the tube.

The doctor is giving her six to nine months.

I’m well aware that faith per se is not enough. To build a genuinely robust case, I had to present some hard evidence.

In the United Kingdom alone, over a thousand cases are successfully appealed every year.

However, the total number of wrongfully convicted prisoners is likely to be many times higher. Most of them serve lengthy jail terms; some serve life sentences.

I became their savior.

Locating miscarriages of justice was a piece of cake. The pattern was easily recognizable: the convicted come from poor, disadvantaged neighborhoods, the crime is usually violent: robbery or murder (there are plenty of petty crimes, but I had to prioritize for higher ROI), and an accelerated procedure: just a single hearing, less than two months between arrest and sentence, and a badly developed defense case.

In a sense, this work was the direct opposite of what I had been doing before; I was restoring a story that had previously been distorted. I just needed to find the most apparent inconsistencies in the prosecution for the case to fall apart.

A Polish construction worker was sentenced to ten years for assisting in an armed robbery. He wasn’t even there that night. His brother-in-law had a gambling debt with the Polish mob, and turned him in to save his own hide.

A gay couple were sentenced to fifteen years each for drug trafficking allegations by a homophobic judge. It turned out that a key witness was their dealer, who was covering for his boss.

A single mother was serving life in prison for the murder of her three-year-old child, having been sued by her former husband’s family. The child had a severe case of autism and constantly choked itself by putting too much food in its mouth.

A schoolteacher was framed for the rape of a student. He was beaten to near death by other inmates, one of which overheard his phone conversation with a lawyer. He could have been acquitted on the spot through a DNA test, but the rape kit was “lost.” The clerk at the forensic lab just messed up the labels, but the barrister was too lazy to check.

The most extraordinary moment is always that first conversation with the family: a dusty second-hand coach, a tea bag floating in a cup – and several pairs of eyes looking at me, with their disbelief slowly giving way to hope.

At first, I was coming up with all kinds of stories but, eventually, I realized that just telling the truth is best. I told them about how many terrible people I’d saved from what they deserved, that I had enough money not to worry about anything, and that I just wanted to do some good to make it right, to restore the balance. The only thing I didn’t tell them was about Anne.

They embraced me, and said “God bless you” and “You’re a good person” hundreds of times. The Polish guy’s mother kneeled before me and started kissing my hands.

More importantly, they prayed. That’s the only payment I asked them for in return for my services.

I’m accepting my fee in the form of prayers.

Hundreds and hundreds of them.

“Central Line: the next train to West Ruislip will arrive in one minute.”

Adding one more wouldn’t hurt.

Hail Mary,

Full of Grace,

The Lord is with thee.

Blessed art thou among women,

And blessed is the fruit

of thy womb, Jesus.

Holy Mary,

Mother of God,

Pray for us,

Pray for us,

Pray,

Pray,

Pray,

Pray …

IV. Rainbow

“YOUR ATTENTION, PLEASE! The Central Line service to West Ruislip has been delayed. Please listen for further announcements.”

My hair is Cadbury Purple.

The stairs heading down are wet from the morning dew. There are three men on the platform. In the dim light of the underground, they remind me of the Three Ages of Man by Giorgione: a black boy, eighteen maybe; a chubby man in his late thirties; and a senior gentleman in a long coffee-and-cream coat.

The chubby guy is looking at me. He could lose some pounds, of course, but then he would lose his … roundness, too. I smile at him, and he immediately looks away.

I sit on the bench, take my phone from my purse and run the camera app, switching it to selfie mode.

“How do I look?” – I ask the purple-haired woman with wrinkles around her mouth.

We both know the answer: “You look desperate.”

I met Denzel at one of the jazz nights at Ronnie Scott’s. My hair was Starbucks green. Tony, our freelance sax, had a schedule conflict – and Denzel was a last-minute replacement. I found him through a Gumtree ad – and all we had time for was a couple of phrases over the phone. He said the earliest he could make it was fifteen minutes before the gig, which obviously didn’t leave any room for rehearsal. But we were mostly going to play the standards – so it seemed like it would be fine. Also, it wasn’t like I had any choice.

He showed up precisely at quarter to seven. He was wearing a red shirt, two top buttons unbuttoned, and a coffee-and-cream suit. It looked good on his dark-brown skin.

For the next hour, I sang, and he played. It was mainly classics: Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and Nina Simone. Saxophones and vocals have a special relationship. They play similar roles in the melody, following and supporting each other, and sometimes replacing each other.

Denzel knew his instrument well – and played masterfully, putting every note where it belonged.

We usually culminated with Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good.” There is this moment, right before all the instruments rush into the final crescendo, when I sing the refrain for the last time, extending the “good” as much as my breath allows. I always try to sound like Nina, who mesmerized everyone when she performed this song. That night though, right at the height of it, my eyes met Denzel’s – and suddenly, my breath failed, cutting my “good” off halfway through.

Then we had some pizza and some decent Pinot – courtesy of the venue. There were three more people at the table: Mike the pianist, Jeff the drummer, and Ivan the bassist. Yet by the end of the night, it felt like it was really just Denzel and me. Something in the way he was looking at me made me feel this way.

He proposed six months later.

The diamond on the ring was almost invisible. But for me, it looked like the Koh-i-Noor.

I dyed my hair Tiffany turquoise for the wedding.

By then, Denzel had joined the band full-time. We were still mostly playing standards and classics, but we had also started trying our own thing: jazz covers of famous pop and rock hits. I stole the idea from some American band on YouTube, but we took it to the next level. Adele, Lorde, Sia, Ed Sheeran, Imagine Dragons, Coldplay – we made them all sound as if they were born before World War Two and started their career in the smoke-filled bars of New Orleans.

It worked well. People liked the combination of new and familiar. Like chips, it was crispy on the outside, and soft and creamy on the inside.

I think it was Ivan who first came up with the idea to apply to Britain’s Got Talent. Yes, that one – with Simon Cowell and Amanda Holden and the audience going “Aaaahh” in admiration when Susan Boyle starts “I Dream a Dream”.

At first, everyone took this as a joke. I never even liked Britain’s Got Talent. It was … low?  Mauvais ton? We had always regarded ourselves as true artists, playing for sophisticated audiences. We were above this cheap TV fast-food entertainment for the masses.

A week later, I submitted our application.

I didn’t tell the band.

However, later that day, I dyed my hair EasyJet orange. 

A couple of weeks before our wedding, Denzel into my tiny Hoxton apartment, full of Ray Charles and Ella Fitzgerald vinyl records.

We would sleep until noon, then I’d brew two Nespressos and cook us brunch. I tried to make something different every time: omelet with red pepper and sausages; bagels with Philadelphia cheese and salmon; avocado on rye toast; Eggs Benedict on English muffins with Canadian bacon; four-minute eggs with a French baguette and liver pate from the Polish shop down the block; peanut butter and jelly pancakes with sliced bananas; almond-milk chia bowls with nuts and berries …

Then we would go for a walk along the canal and through the park. Sometimes we hit Selfridges for groceries, and I would cook a late lunch. Other times we would grab lunch at Pret-A-Manger.

After lunch, we would ride two stops on the tube down to our tiny music studio and meet up with the guys. Ivan would usually be there before us, and Mike would usually be late, but Denzel played a little piano – so we would often start the rehearsal before Mike came. We would practice for a couple of hours, then take a cab to the venue where our gig was that night.

We would play until nine or ten, then stay in the same venue or go to a nearby pub and have some wine and some beers. Friends would sometimes come to join us – and we would hang out until one or two at night.

Then Denzel and I would go back home, and, if we still had it in us, we would make love before going to sleep.

The same things repeated with minor variations – again and again, day after day.

That stream of days had a rhythm in it – but it wasn’t a jazz rhythm – wild, swinging, alive. This rhythm was more like electronic music, with a single drum piercing through the entire song, getting faster and faster and faster …

Denzel seemed to love the lifestyle, though. In fact, it felt like it was almost not enough of a routine for him.

Once, when I cooked peanut butter pancakes on a Monday, he looked at me in confusion and asked what was wrong with the omelet.

“It’s just that I thought we’re having pancakes on Friday. Monday is an omelet day, isn’t it, babe?”

It’s not as if I surrendered without a fight.

I tried to come up with some new ideas for pastimes every weekend. A trip to Stonehenge. A board game night. An art gallery crawl.

I made us take a different route to the tube or pick something different for lunch every time.

I dyed my hair MacDonald’s Yellow.

I dyed my hair Hello Kitty Pink.

I dyed my hair Coke Crimson.

Also, every couple of months, I would submit another application. They kept rejecting us, of course. Every time this happened, Mike would be the first to know. Something in the way I looked or talked that day made it as if there was a neon “This happened again” sign floating above my head.

He would then repossess my phone, put it on his piano’s music stand, and open up with something like:

“Lady and gentlemen. This next song is a tribute to our good friend and an exceptional asshole, Mr. Simon Cowell.” Then he would read the letter line by line, accompanying himself lightly on the piano – as if this was some Jack Kerouac poetry reading. We would all laugh and have a champagne toast. After the third rejection, I always made sure to keep a bottle in the tiny studio fridge.

The next day we would just record another demo video and send it again.

For me, this was a statement of hope. It was an opportunity to tell myself that I hadn’t yet given up on that last childhood dream, to conquer the world one day. It expressed my faith in a better version of reality.

Nonetheless, so far, this version was winning.

The days, cast out of the same mold, were falling one on another like dominos.

Wake. Brunch. Walk. Lunch. Tube. Studio. Cab. Club. Wine. Chat. Sex. Sleep.

A visit to Denzel’s parents’ home on Saturday.

A gallery on Sunday.

I dyed my hair Apple Silver.

I dyed my hair Facebook Blue.

“The Central Line service to West Ruislip is delayed by approximately ten to fifteen minutes. We apologize for any inconvenience caused.”

A sad little girl is looking at me from a poster on the tiled wall. The poster says “Les Miserables.” Someone tore off the bottom left corner so I can see part of the older poster underneath. It says “MaskApp. Available on the Appstore.”

Yes, that app.

I think it was one of those pub nights when someone showed it to me.

“Look: it’s like Chatroulette, but with masks. Now, who do you want to be? How about an Alice in Wonderland?”

Somehow that was precisely what I needed. Changing the masks felt like dying my hair – only I could do it ten times an hour.

I’m a yellow Minion from Despicable Me.

I’m a Little Mermaid.

I’m the Queen.

I’m Darth Vader.

I’m Pikachu.

I’m Shaquille O’Neil.

I’m an unimpressed Simon Cowell.

I wasn’t that interested in the people I met. Most were either bored teenagers, impossible to talk with, or undersexed middle-aged men – hooker prey.

What really clicked with me was the character part. I tried not to just to look like a yellow cartoon one-eyed talking banana or a seven-foot retired basketball icon, but also to talk like them, move like them, and feel like them.

Denzel and I were talking less and less those days. We were actually doing less of everything: less looking at each other, less listening to records together, less improvising together at the rehearsals and concerts, less touching each other, less sex, and more drinking every night. Yes, that was the one exception. However, even our drinking was separate: he had a Guinness, while I preferred Pinot.

It felt like our instruments had got more and more unsynchronized, until each was playing a completely different melody.

The app made me look for little solitary escapes: in the bathroom, in my bedroom, waking up earlier than Denzel to have a couple of chats before breakfast, staying awake for a few more minutes after our standard intercourse.

“Who are you talking to, babe?”

“Oh, it’s just … It’s just an online acting school.” I have no idea why I lied.

I never added  “friends” on the app – I didn’t want to spoil the randomness. All until I made one exception.

There was this one guy that was just … different. All the others reminded me of those slightly overweight amateur cosplayers wearing pieces of rubber over their faces. While this one … This one felt like meeting the actual character.

But he was also more than that.

I had felt like this once, many years earlier, with one of my first “real” dates. He was studying to be a banker and, in order to demonstrate to me what this meant, he booked a table at Claridge’s.

Everything was going more or less according to his plan until I realized that Nina Simone was sitting at the table next to us. From that moment, all I cared about was how to nod and laugh in all the right places to whatever the person who was going to pay the bill was saying – while simultaneously not missing a single gesture, word or look of Nina’s.

There she was: precisely the image of the woman I knew and admired: a jazz icon, a legend of the same caliber as Ella Fitzgerald and Aretha Franklin. The face printed on one of the first vinyl records I had purchased. The voice I had listened to for hundreds of hours.

I watched over my date’s shoulder, seeing the way she talked to her two companions, the way she listened, nodded, and smiled at something they said, slightly tilting her head, and the way she ate her truffle risotto and Beef Wellington and drank her Ace of Spades from a tall glass. There was this unfathomable divine grace to everything she did.

Then, suddenly, she looked at me – it felt as if she could hear my thoughts about her. At that moment, I could easily believe she was capable of reading minds. Then, still looking at me, she licked her finger, picked the crumbs of puff pastry from the impeccable white tablecloth in front of her, and put them in her mouth.

She died less than a year later from breast cancer in her apartment near Marseille.

This was the first time I dyed my hair.

And now – with a guy in a silly mask on a dating app – this forgotten feeling suddenly came back.

There was a character – but there was also a human behind the mask – and this made him different. It gave him… layers. Like chips: crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside.

The fact that he never changed his mask reinforced the impression.

I liked it – so I decided to stick to my character too.

I also stopped changing my hair color – this deep Facebook blue had something in it that looked … final. Everything else felt like a step-down.

My breakfasts became simpler too: oats, a rapidly fried egg with toast, or just something easily microwaveable.

When the app guy learned what I do for a living, he asked me to sing for him.

It had to be something from Nina, of course. I picked “I Put a Spell on You”. When I finished – he didn’t say anything. No feedback, no comments, not even scant applause. But somehow, this silence made me feel similar to the way I had felt when Denzel looked at me in our early days.

It was a long time since I had last caught that look of Denzel’s. Anytime he looked at me now, it was more like a short, affirmative glance, the same as when he used to check if his saxophone case was still by the table where he had left it to join the line at Pret-A-Manger.

He was also profound. Not Denzel, the app guy.

Whatever we were talking about, I learned something new from him every time. It felt as if he had access to another layer below everything. Sometimes I wondered if he was just constantly googling stuff to impress me.

Once he told me about that philosopher … Joseph Campbell, who lived among the Indians in his teens and was amazed how similar their myths were to those of the Ancient Greece. He went on studying thousands of stories – from the Iliad to The Lord of the Rings – and concluded they are all, in fact, variations of the same story. There is always a hero who lives an ordinary life until something happens that pushes them into a crisis. For Odysseus, it was a storm sent by the vengeful Poseidon. For Harry Potter, it was an admission letter from Hogwarts. For Luke Skywalker. It was a message in the memory of a robot he had bought in a scrapyard. At first, the hero is desperate, as he can’t see a way out. Then a stranger comes out of nowhere: an aide who saves the hero and helps them to continue their journey: Athena, Ariadne, Gandalf, Hagrid, a burning bush in the desert, Obi Wan Kenobi, the Scarecrow …

“The next train will arrive in four minutes; it will be a Central Line service to West Ruislip.”

I was in the middle of a Wikipedia article about Joseph Campbell on my phone, when I heard that Denzel, who was finishing his slightly burned toast on the other side of the table, was saying something to me. I looked up, and Denzel repeated that he wanted to move out.

I probably should have cared more. I probably should have suggested we talk about it over a bottle of Pinot, then looked him in the eyes and asked why. I probably should have cried – just a little, to experience how it feels. It is, after all, the usual ceremonial way to signify the loss of something that used to be part of you.

However, at that moment, I just put my phone down and listened to myself. And what I heard was nothing. Just the faint echo of an electronic beat – slowly fading away.

I watched from the corner of the room as he packed his socks, red shirt, and coffee-and-cream suit in a large sports bag. Then he picked up the bag and the saxophone case – and paused as if he wanted to tell me something. But at that moment, my phone buzzed. It was my app guy. I went to the bathroom to pick up – and heard the front door open and shut.

The day after Denzel left, the app went bust.

I typed my usual question, “What’s the thing you hate most this morning” to my guy – but this time, when I hit “Send,” nothing happened.

I tried again; I retyped the message, logged in again, reinstalled the app, and restarted the phone.

I waited for an hour, then tried again, and one more time.

My first thought was that Denzel had somehow packed that hidden part of my life away in his large sports bag along with his socks and red shirts.

About an hour later, I received an email with the subject “Good Bye, MaskApp.” I left it unopened. Instead, I just looked at the little envelope icon until the battery-saving algorithm switched the screen off.

We had never exchanged names, emails, or phone numbers. That was the whole point.

I was looking at my silhouette reflected in the glossy black rectangle, crisscrossed with a craquelure of cracks  – and felt … empty: empty like never before. It was as if all that emptiness within the atoms and molecules that comprise every item in the universe had been sucked inside a supermassive black hole that had opened up in my core.

That day I didn’t go to the rehearsal. Instead, I put my dead phone somewhere between Louis Armstrong and Herbie Hancock and went outside.

Like some blue-haired female version of Forrest Gump, I just suddenly felt like walking.

A sideline of a canal with clustered home boats. A tiny square with autumn leaves on black cast-iron benches. Red-brick facades flashing through the tangled branches. Big parks with swans in the pond and so many squirrels you almost scatter them with your feet. Dots of sun piercing through the leafage. Gentrified neighborhoods with walls covered by colorful murals, and tattoo salons, and cozy book shops. Bridges over the River Thames. Busy shopping streets blazing with light, sound and crowds.

I walked, and walked, and walked. Sometimes I slowed down, to better immerse myself in the surrounding beauty. Then I sped up, to accelerate the change of scenery. I ended up almost running, to feel the breeze on my face. I didn’t have any particular place to go to, so I let this wild, swinging, rhythm of London guide me.

I don’t remember the exact moment when I started singing. Perhaps it was when I was crossing the Jubilee Bridge, and white seagulls were sweeping over my head. Or maybe it was after I had an egg sandwich from Sainsbury’s on a bench with dragon-shaped handles under an ancient elm. First, it was just humming the tunes that the rhythm of my steps evoked in my memory, but at some moment, I started brimming with songs, so I took off and ran, singing at the top of my lungs.

I ran along the Thames, singing “Respect” by Aretha Franklin.

I danced on the red walkway of the park, scaring the squirrels away, and sang “At Last” by Etta James.

I lay on the green grass, feeling the dots of the sun on my face, and sang “I Wish I Knew How it Would Feel to Be Free” by Nina Simone.

I waved to the people sitting on the patios of sidewalk cafes and sang “I Got Rhythm” by George Gershwin.

Somewhere far, far away – I heard people cheering and clapping. I saw them waving back and filming me on their mobile phones. I heard several “Bravo”s, and a couple of whistles. A gentleman with long silver hair who looked like Geralt of Rivia asked where he could buy my CD. A little girl gave me a purple tulip – and then ran away before I could say “thank you.”

When I finally got home, I found my phone between the records and put it on charge.

Then I went to the bathroom and dyed my hair Cadbury purple.

The next morning – and all the mornings that followed I was in the studio at seven-thirty.

I started to excuse myself right after the gig: no more Pinot, no more pub crawls.

Instead, whenever there was an opportunity, I just kept walking and singing. I walked back to the tube from the club and sang “How High the Moon’’ by Ella Fitzgerald. I listened to crackly Duke Ellington and John Coltrane records before going to bed – and sang along to them. I sang “Georgia on My Mind” by Ray Charles while brewing myself a Nespresso, “Strange Fruit’’ by Billie Holiday while plating up Eggs Benedict on top of a muffin, and “What a Wonderful World” by Louis Armstrong while smearing peanut butter and jelly over the pancakes.

The boys were sure this change in me was because of the breakup with Denzel. Apparently, Denzel himself chose to believe this explanation. A couple of times, he tried to start a conversation, but every time I just looked him right in the eyes and shook my head. Then, two weeks later, he brought divorce papers to the rehearsal. I signed them without reading them.

Eventually, I infected the rest of the band with my zeal. Now we rehearsed twice as long and added an extra session on the weekend. Our experiments became bolder too. Our covers now were more than just a crispy coating on the familiar potato. It was a new, distinct flavor – an art of its own. We knew we had reached a new level of mastery – beyond anything we had ever done before. One critic wrote that our versions often sounded better than the originals.

“Central Line: the next train to West Ruislip will arrive in one minute.”

I look around.

The gentleman in the coffee-and-cream coat has turned towards the tunnel as if he wants to be the first to greet the coming train. From where I am sitting, he now looks like the faceless man from the Magritte painting. I can swear I hear him whispering something. It sounds like he is just repeating the same word, again and again – but he’s too far away for me to hear exactly what it is.

The chubby guy is reading something on his iPhone, his face illuminated by the light from the screen. He smiles – not to me this time, to himself – then he looks in the direction from which the train is about to appear too.

The boy on the other side of me takes something that looks like a twisted flyer from his pocket. He looks at it for some time, then stands up and tosses it into a trash bin.

I wonder what each of my three companions would feel if, instead of the much anticipated rumble and light approaching from the depth of the tunnel, the familiar voice said that the train was delayed again – this time for good.

I look at my phone again and notice some fresh cracks. The screen is off, and all I can see is a dark silhouette of a woman.

I don’t need to see this woman’s face again to know that she looks desperate.

Two weeks ago, I received another email from “Britain’s Got Talent”.

It was right after we finished our final jam and the boys were packing their instruments.

All the emails I had received before had been short and had used the same words. This one was twice as long and had a date and time in it.

I turned to the boys and said I felt like having some Pinot that night.

Once everyone was sitting around the round table – like the good old times – I took a sip of wine so big it took an effort not to cough it all back, and passed my phone to Mike. Mike read it, looked at me, then read it again – this time aloud. No Jack Kerouac anymore. Everyone looked dead serious. Mike passed the phone around – as if everyone had to touch this magical glowing rectangle with a miracle inside to make sure it was real.

For the next two weeks, we all were at the studio at seven in the morning – and we played until it was dark again outside. We canceled all the gigs, living off credit cards. We had never been so happy and productive.

And then, two days before our audition, Mike tested COVID-positive.

I know four piano players – I called each one of them yesterday. Two have other commitments they cannot break. One is in Paris for her brother’s wedding. The last one agreed enthusiastically – but when he showed up at our studio, almost an hour late, it was obvious that he was so drunk he couldn’t play,

Perhaps it is finally time to admit this version of reality is the only one.

“Central Line: The train now approaching is to West Ruislip. Please stand back from the platform edge”.

I hear the clang of the train in the tunnel and stand up. I look around and see that the chubby guy is looking at me again. He still has some of that new light in his face, even though his iPhone is back in his pocket.

I check my hair automatically.

He smiles and says, “Hi!”

There is something familiar in his voice.

The train arrives, pushing a wave of warm air in front of it into to our faces. There is a white, blue, and red blur in front of me, followed by the sharp squeak of the brakes.

I smile back.

Then I turn away, go down the platform and enter the train through another door.

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Born in Ukraine, Yura Riphyak holds an MA in Pharmacy with a focus on Drug Discovery, as well as a Diploma from the London School of Economics. While studying in London, he co-founded a software development company with a former jazz musician. One of their first projects was an anonymous dating app. Yura currently lives in the Bay Area, California, working in the field of Artificial Intelligence. His stories have previously appeared in Eclectica Magazine and Black Sheep Magazine. Read the author’s commentary on his story.

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