Matthew sits at the baby grand piano with both elbows on the dropboard and applies tension to the tuning hammer. He watches the erratic bounce of the needle on the electronic tuning meter and knows it was a mistake to accept a glass of wine when he is working on a piano. It takes the edge off his finely honed ability to count beats and sense scale compression at the high end of the keyboard. He’ll have to rely on the meter and his ability to dead-reckon the adjustments. Mrs. North will probably never know the difference. Anyone can spot a clinker, when the pitch of any one of the three strings under each hammer is out of the strike zone, but unless Mrs. North has a cousin in the Philharmonic, the rigid, impersonal character of  an electronic tuning job really won’t matter.

Mrs. North—call me Janet. Matthew is unsettled by the fact that he is so attracted to her. She is older than him, more than a little plump, and she talks openly about a skin condition. Hives or something on her stomach and chest. She fills out that black dress like a second skin, stretching the material at her hips and along the vaguely parallel seams that run joyfully across her breasts from shoulder to hip. But it is her face that he finds most fascinating. The first time she looked directly into his eyes he thought his childhood asthma had come back. His chest had tightened, his arms twitched inwards against his ribs. Her eyes are wide, and dark. So black. So deep. She looks into his heart it seems, and when she smiles…

He feels like a teenager around her. It is hard to focus on the damned piano. That’s why he accepted the glass of wine. It’s a fruity tasting Rhone, but he hopes it will relax him enough to concentrate. On the work. At hand. The piano.

Wrong. Somehow it seems that the wine unties every synapse in his brain. Random thoughts dance a tarantella in his cerebella and he feels like a stroke victim, working hard to retrain his thought patterns, trying to organize a system around all the mental chaos so that he can get back to the task of voicing Mrs. North’s Young Chang. Even that sounds suggestive to Matthew. Concentrate, man.

She leaves the room and as he works with the felts and hammer he feels his skills return. He deftly inserts rubber wedges, damping outer strings, striking a key, listening as beats disappear. He repositions the felt and starts on the next octave. Hell, he’s been doing this for twenty years. Nothing to it. He glances at the meter once in a while to confirm what he already knows and feels. This is a piece of cake. It won’t be long before he has Janet’s Young Chang purring like a debutante in the back seat of a… uh-oh. Time for another sip of wine.

“Oh, goody. You like it.”

Matthew looks up and notices that Mrs. North—call me Janet—has changed into a different black dress, this one also very tight and with a low cut front. Big scooping neckline displays the swell and depth of her breasts like a Welcome Wagon fruit basket. He checks out the produce, searching for evidence of hives but doesn’t see a rash. Janet notices the direction of his gaze and is pleased. She tilts the bottle of wine at his glass. “Oh, no. Not while I’m working,” he says, but with a diminishing ability to take responsibility for his actions he leans the glass towards her and continues his search for signs of hives.

“You just keep on working,” she says, very merry. She refills her glass and steps across the room to fiddle with the stereo equipment.

Matthew taps the E, working the inverted fifth, but he can’t get the damn note to settle where he wants it. He glances at the meter, and the needle zeroes confidently into place, but he just doesn’t feel it. The opening notes of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto ease across the room, the light, pulsing strings, the thickening arrangements. He sits quietly for about two minutes, listening, waiting through the setup until the clarinet comes in, and he’s lost. K 622 is his favorite piece of music.

He looks back at Janet. She poses beside the stereo cabinet, a glass of wine pressed lightly between her breasts, her face raised in ecstasy at the meandering clarinet arpeggios. She tilts her face towards him and her eyes smile into his. “Don’t you just love all this,” she says, and he doesn’t know whether she means the music, the wine, her breasts?

Matthew turns back to the keyboard and works for a few minutes under the agile doodles of Mozart’s clarinet. He watches the meter and works through another harmonic series. He tries to count the beats, but it’s pretty useless against the pulse of cellos and basses.

The bench rocks as Janet sits next to him and he smells the freshness of soap and a light, lavender perfume. He’s unsure if he detects the medicinal quality of an ointment for rashes. “You don’t mind if I watch, do you? I won’t touch anything.” She giggles as if she just might touch something.

He tries to work, but Mozart keeps interrupting. It’s the second movement that always gets to Matthew. That first, slow rise from A to D, the plangent, lovely voice of the clarinet, soon joined by the strings. Sometimes, when he is listening alone he is moved to tears by the sheer beauty of the composition, so simple, and therefore so perfectly open to expression and interpretation by the clarinetist.

He stops to listen as the movement progresses. The clarinet holds the F-sharp for three beats, then steps slowly, one simple interval after another, down to B while the strings take a stately stroll up the scale. The clarinet moves up to the G, repeats the steps, then for some reason, when the clarinet hangs on the A, he feels an impending sense of loss. He knows where the note will be going, but he always wants that A to last forever.

Matthew listens, filling his lungs with oxygen, transported by the clear tones of the reed. He remembers from an old college class on the physics of music that the sound of the clarinet is a crude square wave, but to him it is sweeter and purer by far than the sine wave of the flute. Or is it a sawtooth wave? Wave at the funny man, Matthew.

He turns again to Janet and she has placed her glass of wine on the dropboard, the base of the glass hanging over the bare wood of the business end of the keys, a sticky threat to pivot pins and vulnerable felts. She looks intently into his eyes and he is confused. Sure, he’s heard stories of plumbers and cable installers getting a little action from the lady of the house, but a piano tuner?

He’s been here several times. He’s met her husband, uh, what was his name? Mr. North is a good guess. Tenured professor of economics or ornithology or ethics or something along those lines. He is seldom home during the day. And though Matthew has always found Janet very attractive, there was never any hint of a possibility from her. Until today.

And now she’s sitting on the bench next to him. His favorite music on the stereo, shared wine, a revealing outfit. He tries to concentrate on the piano tuning, and his mind jets off in a million directions at once. His skin is hot, flushing. He wonders if his face is red. He wonders if hives is contagious. Airborne pathogen. That’s it. Professor of Contagious Diseases. Mr. North that is. Robert.

“What are you thinking about,” she says softly. Her lips are slightly parted, moisture gleaming from her lower lip. A smile so sweet and dreamy that her eyes are as velvety as a Vermeer. “Come on Matthew. Tell me what you’re thinking about. Right now.”

Inside his head random memories fire off like so many firecrackers. Who’s to say which thoughts are important? The one thing he does know is that when he dies, they all go with him. To the next life, to the afterlife, to oblivion. Matthew closes his eyes and another firecracker goes off. Christopher Columbus. He says it, out loud. “Christopher Columbus.” When was the last time he thought about Columbus?

“Christopher Columbus?” Janet says, incredulous. “You’re thinking about Christopher Columbus?”

“Yeah,” he says, confused. Then he repeats it, speaking very slowly, hanging onto the first and last syllables anxiously like the notes of the clarinet solo. It sounds like a revealed secret. “Chrisss-topher Columbusss.”

He wonders where that came from. Every October we are reminded of Columbus by protests and parades and grade school plays. The rest of the time we never give Christopher Columbus another thought. But memories of Columbus have been sloshing around, untapped, in Matthew’s head for thirty years. Idling, simmering, stored away for no apparent reason. A useless memory that chooses to pop out while he’s sitting on a piano bench with a woman who might be trying to seduce him.

“In fourteen hundred and ninety two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” he says.

How long since he actually said that rhyme out loud? Twenty, thirty years? It’s been stored in brain cells, or protein blocks, or whatever storage medium there is inside your head, occupying space in there all that time. When he went to college, memories of Columbus never came up. He got married, raised kids, realized he was never going to become a concert pianist. Piano tuning was as close as he was ever going to get. No Columbus.

One summer in his thirties, not long after Linda and the kids moved away, Matthew had a garage sale. He’d had a sudden urge to clean up the house, get rid of stuff. Clean up his life. He was ruthless. Old letters, books, banjo, rowing machine, tennis rackets, and his old painting stuff. The easel, the dried tubes of paint, the wooden box with the linseed oil stains on the lid, the half-finished canvasses. He sold a whole collection of discarded hobbies. After the divorce was final he bought new toys for new hobbies. A stained glass kit, and a potting wheel, a Solo-flex. He changed from records to CDs, bought new computer programs to convert all his old vinyl to disc. He bought fly fishing gear, a snowboard, in-line skates, a GPS. All this stuff is waiting for the next garage sale.

And in the years that span so many unfulfilled, discarded hobbies did “the ocean blue” ever cross his mind? Never. But suddenly that little rhyme about a long-dead sailor shows up after thirty years, as fresh as the day he learned it in the second grade. It bounds out of his mouth, as awkward and inappropriate as an angry ex-girlfriend at a wedding.

“Matthew. Are you alright?”

“Yeah. Just give me a minute. I think I might be allergic to the sulfites in the wine.”

“I’m sorry,” she says and puts her hand on his forehead. She leans over him, perhaps an attempt to distract him with cleavage, but his mind will not slow down.

What else is in there, Matthew? As long as we’re visiting old Chris… Remember the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa Maria? Queen Isabella. How about this one? Fourth grade Spanish lessons on TV. Can you even remember your fourth grade teacher’s name? Some old lady with thinning hair, now long dead. At least you assume she’s dead. She seemed so old then, thirty years ago, but remember how old everyone seemed when you were ten? It’s possible she was only in her thirties. Hell, she could still be around. Could be playing bridge at the retirement community. Or tennis, using your old racket.

Look how Columbus has your mind bouncing around like Mrs. Foster’s tennis ball. A TV set was brought into the classroom once a week, and they played this show out of Pittsburgh with a Señor…. Garcia. Man, that old dude with the mustache, wearing a tweed sports coat and a knit tie. The cheap, public studio lighting glaring off his bald head. Yeah, you even remember that. He’s still stored in your noggin with the other dusty memories. Señor Garcia, teaching Spanish to raggedy white kids in rural Appalachia.

Columbus’ real name was Cristobal Colón. Probably. He was Italian. Probably. Was there even an Italy at the time? Hmmm. Some of the details are fuzzy. He died penniless in jail. Or was that Amerigo Vespucci? He made three trips. He brought smallpox and syphilis to the new world. Or was that one of his crewmen? Something about sex with sheep. That was later. Not the sex with sheep. The memory. In Matthew’s head.

All that de-bunking was popular in college. Suddenly it was hip to shatter the old myths. Popular iconoclasm. Christopher Columbus got lost. George Washington was an atheist. Ben Franklin was a dirty old man. Jefferson screwed his slaves.

That reminds Matthew of Janet sitting beside him on the bench. He thinks he really should take advantage of the opportunity. Never look a gift horse in the mouth. Mrs. North’s mouth no longer pouts seductively. It is now pursed to match the concerned tensing of her eyebrows.

Matthew is unable to slow the flood of disconnected memories. Memories that are at least thirty-years-old, spilling from some corner of his head like candy from a piñata. Matthew has never seen a real piñata, but he knows what one is, thanks to Señor Garcia.

So what does all this mean? All these memories? He could spend the rest of his life dredging up meaningless facts and memories. Matthew remembers the flaking galvanized surface of a bent stop sign post in front of his first apartment in Omaha in the mid-eighties. There was that paper umbrella from the Piña Colada on his vacation to Hawaii in 1992. Remember, Linda picked it out of her drink and put it behind her ear like a Hibiscus flower? It was orange. He remembers that. Even the color. Why? He can hardly remember Linda’s face, but he can still hear her laughter and smell the coconut suntan oil on her smooth shoulders.

He can almost feel the ribbed fiberglass pattern on the surface of his first Hobie skateboard in 1973. He sees and smells the oil-coated fins on the cylinders of Mr. Yarvic’s Corvair when he rebuilt the engine. The black rubber handle of his dad’s hammer, the Sears model with the steel shaft. The gouge in the asphalt in the playground outside his second grade classroom. 1066. Geoffrey Chaucer. Chrysler Imperial. 3/16 of an inch equals .1875. Porto-Novo is the capital of Dahomey. Pluto and Charon orbit around each other. The smell of birch sap when he carved his initials on the tree in Schwab’s backyard. The atomic weight of hydrogen is one gram. What is atomic weight anyhow? What is a gram? It was a hundred dollars in 1989.

Why does he still remember that the Minotaur lived in a custom-built labyrinth in Crete? Or that hydrogen peroxide is used both to bleach hair and as a rocket propellant? Switzerland is divided into Cantons; Canton, China is called the city of five rams; a ram is a ruminant quadriped; the lemur is nocturnal; the femur is the same as the thigh-bone; the knee bone connected to the (pause) shin bone; Marconi invented…the Lindberg baby… el Niño… mood rings… Ethiopia… the Diet of Worms… walrus gumboots… Socrates… Pericles… manatees… teepees… Ulysses… blarney… howdy… doody…

#

“Matthew. Can you see my hand?” It’s a man’s voice. Matthew opens his eyes and slowly focuses. He looks to the side, and the first things to come into view are Janet’s breasts. She leans over him, and he imagines a concerned look on her face, but it is only speculation as the breasts fill his field of vision.

Again, the man’s voice. “How many fingers do you see?”

“Two,” he says. Her breasts hang above his face, swinging low against the black material of Janet’s dress. They are full and round. The dark, mysterious depths of her cleavage separate them. Out loud he counts. “One, two. Buckle my shoe.” How pleasant it would be if she leaned just a little farther forward and captured his face between them. Hives and all. Smother his racing memories in their lavender-scented warmth.

“Matthew. Focus on my hand.” Again, that man’s voice. Where is it coming from? Matthew straightens his eyes, tears them away from the twins, (los gemelos to you, Señor Garcia) and stares straight up. There is a bald guy in a tweed coat holding a hand above Matthew’s face, fingers spread wide. “Count my fingers, Matthew. How many fingers do you see?”

Matthew is tempted to pull a finger, but he complies with a shaky voice. “Four. One, two three, four. Does the thumb count?” The opposable thumb, thank you Mr. Darwin. Or who? Who came up with that? Opposable thumb. Separates us from the animals. Except the apes. They have opposable thumbs. Don’t they? Who knows? Who cares? The memory overload is starting to sputter out. Slow down. Matthew is calmer now, and the sidebar on the apes just kind of fades away.

He looks up to the man and recognizes him. Mr. North. Call-me-Janet’s husband. The Professor. He flexes his fingers and says, “Very good Matthew. I think you passed out.”

Matthew hears the clarinet and flutes chirping like sparrows. The third movement. He can’t have been out for long.

“Professor North. Sorry. I’m not sure…”

“Doctor.”

“Excuse me?

“It’s Doctor North.” Let’s set some priorities here, Matthew thinks. I’m passed out on the floor, and the most important thing to the Prof… Doctor… The most important thing to the Doctor is that I get his title straight. Not whether I cracked my skull or had an embolism or something. I should have boinked his wife. Hmm. I hope I’m not thinking out loud. And what kind of doctor is he anyhow? A real doctor? A medical doctor? Or one of those guys with a Ph.D. who insists you call him Doctor?

Matthew is very tired and wants one last look at those lovely breasts before he closes his eyes. A nice memory to hold in his mind, as he thinks he’s going to doze off again. He glances around, and the Doctor says, “I sent Mrs. Doctor North to the bathroom for some aspirin.” Did he really call her Mrs. Doctor North?

Matthew is trying to remember something, anything, and he feels himself slipping off, eyes closed, falling backwards into sleep. There is a colorful expression for that. Into the arms of… what. He can’t remember? The arms of… Hmm.

He feels a moistness on his lips, the tip of a tongue, and opens his eyes. The face of Doctor North is pulling away from Matthew’s. He just kissed him. On the mouth. That wakes him up. The doctor kissed him and woke him, just like that… what? Some prince… something, something, kisses the what… frog or wicked witch or… whatever.

Matthew is awake now, but his mind seems to be performing a data dump. His memories have scattered like bugs on a kitchen floor under a bright light. Scampering under cabinets. Matthew is wide awake, and he sits up easily, calmly.

Janet returns to the music room with her palm up, two aspirin offered like communion wafers, a glass of water in the other hand. Matthew sits up and Janet kneels in front of him. She cups her hand in front of his mouth to feed the pills into his mouth, and over the warm, moistness of her hand he sneaks one more glance and notices the faint blotch of a rash deep in her cleavage. The mystery of the depths solved. Some mysteries are best left unexplored.

The Doctor and the Mrs. Doctor help him to his feet. He is tired, but awake, his mind dull and unfocused, but he retrieves his wedges and hammers and dumps them into his leather tool bag. He says he’ll come back next week and finish with the tuning, but they tell him not to bother, they’re thinking of selling the piano.

At first Matthew thinks that they might be uncomfortable at having made unsolicited advances, but it dawns on him that they are offended by the fact that he had the bad taste to pass out in their nice house. They walk him to the massive front doors and close them quickly the moment he steps outside.

He walks towards his Oldsmobile, down the long steps, across the wide, neat lawn. He wants to be home, in his own apartment. Alone. He will put K622 on the stereo and pour himself a glass of the ’97 Languedoc. He will lie down on the green velvet sofa. He will listen to the music with a clear mind, doze off during the second movement, and enjoy a dreamless sleep without another thought for the ocean blue.

Rhys has worked professionally as a writer, musician and carpenter. His stories have been published in Alibi, Nuthouse, and in the Best New Writing of 2008 issue of Writers Notes. He recently completed a novel entitled No Good Deed, a story of volunteers in Africa who challenge the harsh realities of famine relief.