I could have left campus whenever, but why would I? There wasn’t much beyond its bounds except piney forest, and far away, a donut shop. If students did venture into the bear-infested woods, it was usually for a romantic tryst, though unwitting couples learned that not even true love could protect them from poison ivy, stimulating in all the wrong ways. Having deemed such romantic activities stupid, I kept within the smattering of Interlochen Arts Academy’s buildings—most of which did not interest me. The gym was full of objects too heavy to pick up. The cafeteria’s food looked the same when it went in as when it came out. And so, at almost any given point, I found myself inside of, leaving, or entering the practice rooms. This was no accident of campus design. The purpose of this boarding school was to make me a pianist.
Every fall, a fresh batch of kids serious about music arrives at Interlochen, a boarding arts high school in Northern Michigan—and that’s when those kids will discover that they are not in fact the wunderkind Mom claimed they were. The first thing Interlochen teaches these fresh-faced kids is that they might play some piano; maybe they can trot out some Suzuki or cough up “Moonlight Sonata,” but don’t expect the audience—an audience of older students—to clap for that sort of thing. I learned this lesson at fourteen, when I was shipped off to Interlochen for freshman year of high school, no larger than the single checked bag I lugged on the plane. The only way to progress was to follow the edict issued by Interlochen’s piano faculty: practice four hours a day, and climb, slowly, out of ineptitude.
The practice rooms were in one big cell block of a building. Every time I entered, I was blasted with supercooled air from the threshold AC unit and the roar of about twenty piano pieces layered into a cacophony. Each practice room had a slitted window through which one could see all the other students in their respective practice rooms, creating a kind of panopticon. Room after room, hallway after hallway, students plunked away, cranked the metronome up a few clicks, scribbled on their sheet music, and plunked away some more. The best enforcer of the four-hour edict was neither the piano faculty nor my conscience, but the other students.
Few students made a habit of breaks, and those that did were made the subject of dinner-table gossip. Through the slit in my practice room door, I could see the less mentally fortified wandering around the hallway, perhaps trying to insert their pinky finger into the holes in the perforated wall panels, just for the sake of doing something. It always seemed like a perfect fit, but stick your pinky in and you’d soon be contemplating a pinkiless life—an especially alarming prospect for the un-fingerinsured pianist.
What really pulled me back to the practice room, through Midwest thunderstorms or winter blues, was the thought of twenty pianos roaring on like a steam engine through the night, metronomes ticking faster and faster, while my own fingers idled. The urge to practice gnawed at me constantly and intensified the longer it went unaddressed. When I did practice, I felt a great release; I did not have to worry about anything else. Stepping into the hallway after a practice session, I’d feel the blissful relief of a sinner after confession (along with the self-assurance of knowing that I was really damn good). It was a heady cocktail.
The only thing that could temper my euphoria after a satisfying bout of practice was a double bass player named Yue Zhang. Whenever I entered the hallway, Yue was there, practicing scales; whenever I left, Yue was there, still practicing scales. (He wouldn’t touch his repertoire until he had finished his Byzantine scale routine, which meant most days he only played scales). Bespectacled and squinting, he had this confused way of looking at you, as if you were a bar of Schoenberg that didn’t sound quite right. In fact, he was probably thinking about Schoenberg the whole time.
Even worse, Yue had an irksome habit of practicing bass in a room with a Steinway grand piano, which, if you know anything about Steinways, is a waste of a Steinway. Often this meant I would end up with some ancient honky-tonk whose keys were about as sensitive as a Whack-A-Mole machine. So one day, I made up my mind to kick Yue out. As soon as I knocked on his door, it was apparent that the vibes were as beachy as they ever got with Yue, which was not at all. Glaring at me and for once not seeming in the least bit confused, he opened the door slightly, taking great pains to ensure that my frame could not fit through the crack. Before I had a chance to speak, he said “No finish.” He closed the door, and that was the end of that. Yue’s two words were not only rage-inducing but quite difficult to parse. Did he mean that he wasn’t finished just yet, or that he wouldn’t be finished, ever?
From then on, I was consumed by a perverse desire for Yue to arrive and see me in his room, all settled in for what would certainly be a nice long time. To this end, I checked his room every time I went to practice, but chicanery be damned, Yue was there every time. I’d wave at him—it would have been awkward not to—then curse him out under my breath. One morning, the vagaries of circadian rhythm had woken me up unusually early, and I knew just what to do. As the first rays of the winter sun lit the pines, I stumbled, bleary-eyed, toward the practice rooms. The hallway, for once, sounded like any ordinary hallway; I didn’t hear a single note. I looked through the window, and Yue wasn’t there, but sometimes the absurd goes unnoticed because it should not exist.
Under a soft-cover bass case, lying beneath the Steinway, lay what looked like a cadaver. The back of Yue’s skull made contact with concrete. His jaw was hyperextended, and his mouth gaped open like that of an unwitting bus-sleeper. The metronome was still ticking. I knew that something in me was giving way, that eventually, I would pity Yue the same way one pities a deer’s carcass on the road, but I was scared to let any of that happen. Pretending to pass through the hallway to escape the cold, I walked by the rest of the rooms and out of the building, heading towards the woods, the donut shop, anywhere.