Later that night, at the hotel in front of the Grand Central Station, the girl’s father still hasn’t gotten back, and she’s sitting beside the telephone, waiting for a call. She doesn’t know from whom, although she doesn’t expect the brilliant composer to call again. He was drunk as usual when he called earlier, so the girl, likewise as usual, cut the conversation short. She doesn’t want to hear about him, the young conductor, or any of that riffraff. She doesn’t care. As usual, she’s sitting in her room doing nothing. She certainly can’t write. Should she just wait around until something happens? She gets up and starts pacing up and down, growing angrier with every pace. Then she strikes the walls, again and again, before closing her eyes and gritting her teeth to hold back the tears. They’re not going to make me cry, she says to herself, before repeating it again and again. Idiot, idiot, idiot! she cries. Once again, she’s allowed herself to be made a fool of. To be made ridiculous. She feels like a laughingstock. She calls herself a stupid bitch for taking so long to wake up, to snap out of her fantasy, like a drunk who’s finally sobered up after amusing everyone with her antics the previous night. Now they’re all laughing at her. No, her mother just thinks she’s crazy, and as for her father: well, he doesn’t give a damn. But then there are those fuckers. She won’t let them depress her. Maybe she should say goodbye to her father before going back to her native city. The girl wonders where he could be. She doesn’t think there’ll be any trains arriving at this hour. She presumes that neither her father nor Cousin McGregor is in the station. She wonders what would happen to the voices she hears if the aliens were to finally appear. She’d probably lose her connection with them. They’ve already been communicating with her for a few years now — perhaps long enough. She walks up and down the hotel room, shaking her head, gesturing nervously, with her hands in and out of her pockets. She can’t seem to make a decision. Her stomach’s completely empty, and it’s starting to ache with all its churning, but she notes that the pain itself is killing her appetite. Like the pain of a wounded ego, she says. She’s thinking about waiting for her father to get back so she can tell him she’s going home. That she just can’t take it anymore. He didn’t tell her what time he’ll be back, but she doesn’t think it’ll be too late. She leaves a note on his bed and goes out to a nearby restaurant. Although she’s not hungry, she decides she must put something in her stomach. The night could be a long one, and she won’t be able to stand the constant churning. She picks up a newspaper and flips to the ads section. Still there: “I hear voices. 1. The No World is all that is the case. Ka.” Perhaps she’s made a mistake, and that’s why she hasn’t received an answer. Not that it matters to her now. Now she’s finally given up hope of ever making contact. She never thought her obsession with finding out whether or not she was hypnotized would affect her so much. Now, instead of aliens, she’s going in search of some elusive hypnotist. She reads that the coach of her favorite soccer team has fined the star player for his overlong vacation. She smiles, but it’s soon cut short when she stumbles across a picture of the scientist in the classically-cut suit. Before she reads a single word, she knows he’s dead, as if she can augur the contents of the article merely by looking at the photo, the layout of the page, the type, or something. She’s surprised he was found dead in a hotel. The astrophysicist had apparently been living there for the past few years. The newspaper says nothing more about it, so the girl reads the article again and again, while eating, without relish, what she can of her meal. They could have at least given the name of the hotel. She goes back up to her father’s room. Perhaps this is what’s been keeping her father away from his post in the station. The girl feels a little despondent over the news. She’d been expecting it for some time, but now that it’s happened, she’s still taken aback. She feels as if something’s suddenly changed, that nothing will be the same from this moment on. She’ll wait for her father to get back so she can say good-bye, then she’s going back home to try living her own life. She’s mad at her mother for having colluded with her ex-colleagues. Shouldn’t she just group them all together and refer to them collectively as enemies? If it weren’t for them, she’d have completed her cycle of concerts and done the recording by now. What does the young conductor know about performing the
5 Pieces for piano anyway? Neither he nor her mother seem to understand that her disposition inclines her more toward performing in a recording studio, where certain effects can be produced and experimented with, and where subtle nuances can be captured on tape, which an audience in a concert hall couldn’t possibly register as they would when listening to the recording. When it comes to the business of wounding her pride, her mother’s as dispassionate as a corporate executive. She’d put a lot of stock in the girl one day becoming a great pianist, and she’s determined to see a return on her investment. But the girl ended up taking a different path. Besides, she’s not a commodity to be traded on the market. She has ideas of her own. What did her mother expect? She didn’t even know where to draw the line between parent and manager. And her father hasn’t exactly been a model parent either. So when it comes to choosing between them, her dilemma is more a case of picking the better of two evils. There’s still the screenwriter, she thinks. But the screenwriter’s just an innocent, unwitting participant in this cruel and perverse game. Perhaps she hasn’t been very honest with people generally. If something goes wrong, it’s part of the game, she repeats. She’s said it so many times it’s become like a mantra. Perhaps looking to blame others for wrongs done to oneself is also part of the game. How are the others playing the game? Is it she, or is it everyone else that’s not playing the way they should? She sits in a chair and makes a note of all the ways she plans to reproach her parents, then repeats them aloud to herself, as if rehearsing for a performance. She sets the first scene in the hotel room she’s sitting in now, where she’ll bid her father farewell by first incriminating him for his cold indifference, his unfeeling aloofness toward his own daughter. You damn egoist, she’ll say on marching out the door, after packing her bags in front of him. Then she’ll go to the hotel with the English name to spend the night, but only for the opportunity of haranguing her mother as well. Then she’ll get up early in the morning to begin her journey back home. Of course, she may only be a piano starlet because of mother’s connections. So she supposes it’s possible she’s only a commodity after all. Outside, fireworks are exploding to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the city’s liberation. Her mother could be a special guest at the fireworks display. The girl’s always seen her mother as an executive of sorts, but there’s nothing to say she isn’t a high-class hooker, rubbing shoulders with the rich and powerful. The girl is still waiting, and beginning to think it’s a pointless vigil, because her father hasn’t even called. She forces herself to stay awake, even going so far as to hold her eyelids open, as children do, when she feels them beginning to droop. She forces herself to stay annoyed at him, finds that rehearsing her reproaches against him help to keep her frown intact. She knows that if she falls asleep her anger will have diffused by morning, and she won’t have enough fire left in her belly to really read him the riot act for all his years of neglect. But she also knows that if she falls asleep the voices will be there waiting for her on the other side, waiting in that world that overtakes us when we sleep, a world to which we all go to make our dreams a reality, and our realities a dream. When the girl eventually falls asleep, she dreams her reality is a game; that her father and Cousin McGregor are playing a game she doesn’t understand; that her mother is sitting on a throne in a palace somewhere seeing everything unfolding before her. Then the Queen speaks. She says the whole world functions as a game, that the young conductor and brilliant composer aren’t alone in understanding it as such. The girl pinches her arm to check if it’s real, and awakens. She sees that it’s dawn and that her father still hasn’t gotten back. Her arm hurts like hell. She sits up to contemplate the surrounding gloom. She does what she always does when she wakes up, except this time she’s fully clothed. She can never get any rest when she sleeps in her clothes. She gets up and goes to the mirror. She looks like shit, she thinks, and then notices the small bruise on her arm. First she goes to the balcony to wait, observing the traffic in front of the Grand Central Station. Then she goes back inside to continue her vigil in bed, staring at the ceiling, counting the minutes as they pass, her eyes opening and closing, sleep threatening to overtake her again until she gets up and splashes some cold water on her face, because this time she’s determined to stay awake. She puts on some music, sits down with her diary, and writes that she dreamed everything was just a game. After she’s done writing, she puts her earphones back on the nightstand and turns toward the balcony — toward the noise of the traffic outside, feeling reassured the world is once again on the march. After a shower and change of clothes and another futile attempt to continue her novel, she decides to just pack her bags and not wait for her father to return. She wanted him to see her pack her bags. It would’ve made her exit more theatrical. But she needed something to do, something to relieve all the tension. She’s not as angry as she was the night before, but she still has something in her belly that will singe his hair, so she decides to wait a little longer. Before long, though, she’s back in bed asleep, tossing and turning, the very picture of someone having a nightmare. The last one she had was about her mother conspiring with her father and Cousin McGregor to have her locked up in an institution. It’s the only way to snap her out of her hypnotic trance, they said.