Penny's Hands
It is a strange thing to love another. I had not had much experience. It was Penny, of course, who I fell for. I suppose everyone fell in love with her a little. She is beautiful. Maybe the most beautiful person any of us had ever seen. Even movie stars are not as beautiful as she. They do not put women such as her in films. It is not realistic. Aphrodite could not star in a romantic comedy. Aphrodite has drama in her dealings with gods and heroes but not with modern men.
She looks better, even, than those in fashion magazines. My friend Liam, who is gay, has a theory about it. He claims male models are indeed the epitome of masculine beauty, as you would expect, and he follows their lives on Instagram with great interest - I often mourn for him the sad fact that the traits he most desires seem almost perfectly anti-correlated with an interest in men. But they do not, he claims, put the likes of Penny in fashion shows or advertisements, as it would engender a jealousy in the average woman that is not useful for sales. And perhaps too, because gay men control fashion and they have an unusual, disinterested taste in women. “Walking clothes hangers,” he called female models. I cannot defend the misogyny in this comment and the industry itself, but I will not deny it made me laugh.
Though I was influenced by beauty’s halo, she is also inarguably a genius. And that, too, has its halo. That, too, made me love her. People called me a genius on occasion. I worked so hard. I was the best pianist at UC Berkeley, and the competition was decently fierce. But they stopped calling me that after Penny transferred. They stopped calling me that altogether. She worked hard, of course, but not like I did, practicing maybe two hours a day to my six. I did not believe it until we were together. I did not believe it, but it was true. She, like me, got into SFCM. She, like me, chose Berkeley (though her transferring) as she had other interests. In my case, neuroscience. In her case, mathematics.
“You’re reading Strogatz?,” she said, her first words to me - me sitting in the back of a theory class, bored out of my mind, her choosing the desk beside mine. And on reflection now, I do wonder if it was because she saw that textbook that she sat beside me. The greatest gift Strogatz gave me, if true.
“Yes,” I said. And I felt such nerves; you can only imagine. But I have such an ordered mind; so little of my tumult is ever readable to others.
“You’re also double majoring in maths?” she said, in her charming British accent. She moved to SoCal at fifteen and the valley-girl drawl never took. Thank god for that, as I do love her voice. It is one of my favorite things about her. Such a creature she is. How lucky I am that she is mine.
“Neuroscience,” I said. “But I hope for a career in music. This is a good program. But I am handicapping myself in that respect. I am just far too curious for SFCM.”
And she smiled at that. And immediately, I could see she had some liking for me. Maybe I am not without a halo. There must be a sort of beauty about me, too. Liam, for instance, was infatuated with me for a time. And I count on you to believe me joking when I say, there are uses for all infatuations, even unrequited ones.
“And you?” I said. “Math or music?”
“Music,” she said with a quickness that seemed to betray great offense at the comparison.
Many of my required neurology classes were perfectly boring. And I skipped some of them, particularly the math prerequisites. Has there ever been a topic more amenable to self-study than math? Though those who specialize in pure math are strange creatures and perhaps ill-suited to teach it, and this may be the whole of the explanation here. I did attend, however, NEU 100B: Circuit, Systems and Behavioral Neuroscience, mostly because the professor Dr. Henry Amos (a man of roughly thirty with wild hair and eyes that were oddly predatory in a way that was most pleasing to the female students) had a certain charisma that enraptured us all. He peppered his lectures with asides on bizarre neurological phenomena, all of which were far more terrifying than any horror writer could construct.
He counseled an attitude of disinterested fascination towards such things, and warned that to do otherwise would put one at risk of ruminating on these conditions, to the detriment of one’s mental health. On hearing that, I admit, I chuckled. I thought myself immune to such weakness. But I was not immune. I did not chuckle when he described focal dystonia.
“Cervical dystonia is by far the most common of the general class. It is characterized by periodic, spasmodic contractions in various muscles of the neck - almost universally the Sternocleidomastoid is involved. The etiology remains mysterious. But there are far stranger dystonias. Of particular interest are the focal dystonias, the most famous of which is musician’s dystonia.”
He then played a video of a young, handsome pianist absolutely butchering Fauré - Nocturne No. 13 in B minor, which is one of my favorites. Nocturne No. 13, Nocturne No. 13. How many nights I have sat, alone on my bench, and played it between sips of wine? This act was then, and remains so now, one of the great pleasures of my life. To see it marred this way, his long fingers curling in odd directions as he tried to hit well-practiced chords, roused that mentioned tumult, the look on his face familiar to me now: a kind of resigned, dead frustration, a kind of absolute heartbreak and loss.
He then switched to a different video of this same musician, now with an entirely different expression: that sort of refined, confident smile particular to competent men in their work, one familiar to me, for I wear it often - and, I think, justly. How he played! I am prone to jealousy on occasion, particularly in matters of music. And this ugly emotion serves dual purpose as internal bellwether, informing me I am witnessing genius. And for a moment I was lost in Fauré, lost in its unsettling tonality, its strange French character, that labile twilight melancholy, blind to the terrible context, blind to the first video which was, of course, a prophecy for the second.
“And you will note,” he said as he switched to a different video, this time of that same young man doing various simple motor tasks, “that the dystonia appears only in the context of his instrument. The etiology remains elusive but points, I only conjecture as this is a matter I currently study, to a picture of a cerebellum which contains many context-specific models specialized for practiced behaviors, only one of which is affected by the dystonia. Imagine, then, a ‘homunculus of action’ which is a far stranger and more multidimensional figure than that sensory homunculus mentioned in your textbooks.”
Somehow, the specificity made it more terrifying. Against everything that logic should dictate, it horrified me more than a more general disease ever could. To rob me of that thing I most love and that alone? It spoke of some malignancy; it spoke of something other than indifference; it spoke of a God who was not just uncaring but downright cruel.
I am a man prone to obsessions. If there is a second heart in the mind, then mine is a wayward one. Prone to strange fancies, prone to mistresses even if married to the piano’s unforgiving keys - and I do not marshal it in this aspect. I may master my pieces but I have yet to master myself. And now this second heart was infatuated with this thing that terrified me more than anything else. Now it had to understand, had to understand this strange curse, this “musician’s dystonia”.
As I practiced, I began to think ill of my fingers. As I practiced, I began to suspect their betrayal. Which one of you will act against me first, I thought. My thumb, especially, appeared of low character and birth. The fat one, I thought, will lead the rest to damnation. But for all my neurosis on the topic, the music flowed as it always does, in my strange-but-near-perfect, divisive style, that manner of playing one of my more critical teachers described as an attempt to “clobber Bach to within an inch of death,” which a very effusive one said demonstrated “a mastery of the piece, emphasis on the ‘master.’” And this style is so similar and yet so different to Penny’s, whose very heart weeps as she plays. Trained by a Russian in her youth, she emotes in the Russian way - which is to say, not at all. Yet none in my presence have accused her of being an ice princess, as women trained in this way often are, their unmoving faces of particular offence if beautiful; beauty, it seems, must be humbled, particularly in women. But her music was such that it undid that low desire. If I try to wield Bach, she held his very heart in her own, and to hear her play was to feel more emotion than could be expressed on a thousand faces.
Though my obsession didn’t affect my playing, it very nearly broke my mind. Constantly, I ruminated. I needed an explanation, some means of proving myself either condemned or immune. But there was no such balm. No one knew how it worked. None had a clue. Amos was not lying when he said as much. There were many theories, but nothing even close to a definitive explanation. And in my research, I learned of many great musicians who were ruined by this curse. An interview with Victor Wooten, I found particularly horrible. A bassist, if you would believe it, and specializing in the electric variety. There are few instruments I think lesser of. Yet, it is the remit of a genius to transcend his tools. And he took this hideous instrument, this stick one must plug into a wall as you would a toaster (which I thought capable only of low, electric belches) and made of it a baritone virtuoso. That bellwether rang, as I listened. Jealousy for a bassist? Truly, I was going mad.
And this Wooten, now, is a shadow of what he was. It was not the thumb that betrayed him. It alone, remains loyal. And now he hits the frets as best he can with just his thumb. And there is much that is impressive about this crippled style. He achieves more in this manner than most of his brothers in the art. A kinder man would have felt inspiration watching him. I felt only disgust.
“I would like to assist you, “ I told Amos, a few weeks after that fateful class. “I would like to help with your research on focal dystonias.”
He looked at me skeptically. “Violin?” he said.
“Piano,” I said.
“There is always one.” He said, with a look of amusement and tone of compassion, which struck me as almost simulated. “Every year. Always one who doesn’t listen to my disclaimer about the appropriate attitude. You should talk to someone at CAPS - third floor of Tang - they have free mental health services.”
“I am not in distress,” I lied, “I am fascinated.” I then told him how I had read all his papers. How I read every paper I could find on the topic. And I must have demonstrated a fluency, mental flexibility, and verve that impressed him, as he said, “This sort of thing isn’t exactly unheard of for an undergrad, even a freshman. It will take a lot of time. I will treat you as a sort of grad student, or maybe half a grad student. There are indignities I can really only ask of those who expect a PhD at some point,” he said with a bemused smile. And I admit, I did laugh.
He wrote down his lab’s room number and handed me a bit of paper torn from a student’s exam.
“I am always here, working. When not teaching, I practically live in my lab. Come tonight, and we will see if I can make use of you.”
The next morning, I attended Music 168CS: Piano/Fortepiano Performance Studio. I was to perform for the class, and Penny, too. And I had a show planned; one I expected to be quite dispiriting to the competition. Alkan’s Le Preux. Truly, a masochistic choice. I doubt any other at Berkeley, or even SFCM, could manage it with any degree of true facility. For the weeks preceding, I practiced that piece, that piece which, I admit, does not sing in my heart or move me in any way, which I would never play in near-ecstasy between sips of wine as I do with my favorite of Fauré’s nocturnes. And it was with thoughts of the awe on the faces of my peers that I worked, with thoughts of this awe mixed, too, with those worries I have mentioned of my fingers’ betraying me.
And truly, I wish you were there. I wish you had witnessed the looks on their faces. Even our professor, a woman not without her own formidability, looked downright baffled afterwards.
“That was, well, that was sure, something,” she said. She was jealous of me, I think. Perhaps all musicians of any ambition have that bell in their hearts. And what a feeling, what a feeling, to make them ring. And I trust you to believe me joking when I say, there is no finer carillon.
There was an eerie silence. There was an utter shock. And I kept my expression modest, cool, as if I thought nothing particularly notable about my performance, as if I had not worked myself to the bone to achieve the effect. As if the effort of producing it, then, had not come near to breaking me. And then they clapped, and with more enthusiasm than they did any who preceded me. As with my tumult, I kept that joy hidden. I kept it locked, invisible, within my two hearts. You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I felt myself God, if only for a moment. Like God himself, I felt, until Penny began to play.
She played, of all things, Fauré’s Nocturne No. 13 in B minor. That strange, almost discordant slowness, that feeling of never quite belonging. Her face as still as if carved out of marble, her hands so small and yet doing the work of giants. And then at that midpoint, that slow descent into near silence, I felt myself almost weeping, near-weeping at this piece I knew so well yet had never, truly, understood before. She held dual keys to my dual hearts. And then the piece awakened anew, always with its French discordance, always with Fauré’s paradoxical complex simplicity. The difficulty was rising and she was rising to it. Not towering above it, as I do. Of it. And it of her.
Never have I felt such desire for a woman as I felt for her, then. And never have those bells rung louder in my two hearts.
“You know how to program, yes?” Amos said, as soon as I stepped foot in his lab, a small room filled mostly with computers, what appeared to be a server of his own construction made from gaming GPUs. It seemed he was not accorded a large budget for his research.
“It was a small passion of mine for a time,” I said, honestly. “I think I am good, but not great.”
“Perfect,” he said, “then you’re already better than most academics.” He handed me a laptop. “A spare,” he said, a brief flash of mild disgust on his face, “from a grad student who couldn’t hack it. Anything that idiot left on there, delete. It will contaminate you with idiocy.” I laughed. Amos was, truly, a man to admire.
“I will warn you,” he said, “I take a minority view. Others who research the topic sometimes laugh at me. I think I am right, but if you are to read and trust the literature, you have picked the wrong mentor.”
“Your focus on the cerebellum?” I asked. “I entirely agree, of course.”
He smiled at that. And it was a full and rich smile. It was not like the charismatic smiles he gave in class.
“We will get along, I think,” he said. And indeed we did.
“This is Annabelle,” he said, pointing at the hacked-together GPU farm I mentioned. “And she is like a child to me.”
“But a feverish one,” I quipped. The room was rather hot, despite the open windows and several fans. He smiled at my joke. “True,” he said, and explained, “I have made several innovations in approximating the human cerebellum. I actually understand how computers work, so she can simulate things rather quickly. You will have to keep quiet on this, at least until I publish some papers at the end of the year.” I nodded my assent. “I am interested in all sorts of things about the cerebellum, but I am happy to delegate my fascination with dystonias to you. There is a repo called “wooten,” I have emailed you the details, that contains a toy model of a simplified instrument. I haven’t managed to induce dystonia in this model, but it should be a simple reinforcement learning task. Familiarize yourself with modern RL. You will find it beautiful in theory and ugly in practice.”
“I won’t disappoint you,” I said.
“I have a feeling,” he said, “that you won’t.”
It was a simple thing, to seduce her. Though never before in love, I have had little trouble with women. But she was not most women - I expected love would muddy the waters. It did not. She was lonely, beautiful, and clever, and I was two of the three. It should not have been so surprising, then, that she was amenable to my advances. I thought her only within the reach of gods. And I trust you to believe me joking when I say, perhaps she was. And she adored the way I played. The boldness, she told me, was incredibly attractive to her, summoning emotions in her entirely at odds with those intended by the composer. During my rendition of Le Preux, none in the room that day were more appreciative of it than she. Enraptured, she was - as much with me as I was with her.
I will skip the details of our entwinement. The oldest story ever written hardly needs a new retelling. I will only say, each of us claimed more satisfaction with the other than with any of our previous partners. I, at least, was honest. And though it is in the nature of men to believe lies on this account, I think she was as well.
“Two hours,” I said, after our first time. “Two hours? How can that be?”
She looked at me in that way, that way she sometimes looks when women betray jealousy of her beauty. Slightly superior, slightly arrogant, slightly sad. I was in her dormitory. She was shooing me out, afterwards, so she could practice.
“You’re brilliant,” she said. “Absolutely brilliant. We all have different strengths.”
And she tells her jealous friends they are beautiful, too. And as a rule, they are. Just not as beautiful as she.
Annabelle was amazing. The respect I have for Amos is impossible to overstate. I had in my mentor a true Darwin of the mind. I do not use hyperbole here. There is no man in all of history I admire more. Even Fauré. Would you believe his interest in dystonia was just one of many fancies? That even Annabelle, herself, was but a single step in his grand ambition to understand the mind as a whole? I do not know if such a feat is within the realm of human competence; but if anyone will achieve it, it will be Amos.
Even his code was beautiful. Having seen more of academic programming now, I know he committed no injustice when he mocked his colleagues. Below his cunning abstractions was an implementation touching the very lowest level of his machine, showing an understanding of computers rare even in the best professional programmers. Truly, I was in the presence of greatness. And I felt only warm admiration, as I do for Penny’s mathematical gifts. It is not this sort of genius I envy. It is not this which strikes that cruel carillon in my hearts.
His virtual model of dystonia was a crude thing indeed. A three-fingered hand, a three-button keyboard, a small slice of a cerebellum. I had much work to do, improving it. And yet, I found myself in an almost manic state. Sleeping only four hours a night, I had more mental energy than in any other time of my life - maintaining and even improving on my brilliance in all my classes, reveling, too, in that cruel six hours of piano a day and those times (too few, far too few) Penny and I spent in each other’s embrace.
And from 4AM to 8AM every morning, I worked like a dog in Amos’s lab.
My first task was improving the keyboard. I found an excellent model from a strange fellow in Iceland who had an odd hobby of building highly-realistic, physically accurate, and playable 3D models of famous pianos. I chose his Steinway, of course, for I am a man of taste. The hands were another matter. Out of some perverse drive to amplify my own horror, I chose to scan my own. I then gave this scan to an AI, which did a fine job of filling the pair with the requisite virtual tendons and muscles, pouring into them a digital élan vital. And what a strange sight to see my hands (these hands which Penny almost fetishizes) float without armature above that virtual Steinway and begin to play.
First, I trained it on data scraped from various video sites. It was not imitation learning of the classic type. More similar to human imitation. Annabelle refined herself, as I did, through practice, making small adjustments to her commands based on errors noticed by comparing her performance with that she tried to imitate, viewing and actively copying thousands of hours of videos of skilled pianists playing. In this manner of imitation, she learned to play, and play well - very well. I had constructed, as God did, a creature to fit my purposes. But I was not pleased. Would you believe I felt that mentioned jealousy for my own hands? I trust you to believe me joking when I say, there was within me a snake that craved their inevitable damnation.
To induce within it a dystonia, I would need a metric. Happily, a cleverer man had already constructed one for me. Amos had devised a model of dystonia as a certain set of self-reinforcing correlations of movement. I will not go into the details, but it was a simple matter to adjust his metric to account for my more-realistic hands. I then created a loop which generated synthetic piano videos and a system that searched the space of such videos for a piece that induced such correlations in Annabelle.
Annabelle was timeshared between the two of us, so it took a week to see the results. On viewing them, I knew I had succeeded. The piece was discordant, was a horrid unmusic, perfectly repulsive to myself. But it worked. It induced the dystonia. But I felt a strong distaste for being in any way involved with such a composition. I felt unsatisfied, not as a neuroscientist but as a pianist. It was when I combined Amos’s dystonia metric with one of musical aesthetics (and ran the training run again) that Annabelle and I constructed (to my great shame) Focal Étude-Nocturne in B minor.
It was Liam who damned her. Poor Liam who was, unbeknownst to me, still in love, who was now wracked with a wretched jealousy that bordered on a spiritual sickness. I did not think him capable of it. He is, I think, a kind and sensible soul, and I have come to forgive him for this sin, come to think his crime that of a madman now reformed. But it should serve as a warning to pay attention, to notice when people are infatuated, to watch out for their longing glances, the ice in their words. I will trust you to believe me when I say, I could have predicted nothing of this.
I now see (in a sad retrospect) those emotions were always there when I spoke of Penny to him. And I did so often, and with particular length and intensity on the day, I conjecture, that he resolved to commit his horrible crime. The confluence of circumstances that allowed it to happen was such that I think it more an act of God than man. Liam was just a tool. And if it be an act of God, then God would ask us to forgive his tool, as I have.
It is my greatest regret that I told him of Focal Étude-Nocturne in B minor and offhandedly mentioned that I kept a paper copy in my dorm. But it was a matter constantly on my mind. You will understand the degree of my obsession implied by the fact that I felt considerable desire to play that demonic etude. I said as much to Liam, said how part of me longed to see what would happen should a human play it.
“I trust you to think me joking,” I said, to my great shame, “when I say, it would be fascinating to see how the most talented hands we know would react to it.”
Would you believe he took this as a sign, as some secret instruction? Would you believe he often thought me speaking hidden truths when I used that odd preamble? Truly, the infatuated are deaf and blind - though, as I joked before, they have their uses.
And I think he is right in his theory of the homosexual’s taste in women. They do not see them as we do. And my theory is that (and I have never asked him about it, and I merely speculate in my sad retrospect) he did not consider that I love her in large part for her beauty. He thought it was her music, only, that enraptured me. He thought he could rob her of her enticements while providing me, too, with the experimental subject I so craved.
My poor, sad Liam. My poor, crippled Penny.
She still mourns her hands, as do I. I try to interpret Bach as best I can in her stead. But I will not deny there are baser parts in myself that take some pleasure in being so indispensable to my Aphrodite, reveling in that great compliment she pays me by making me a part (and I think a large one) of what reconciles her to the loss. It was a crime of God to take what she loved, but perhaps not so large as it seems. God has his reasons, I think now. Her hands still work well enough for other things, do they not? They still are so beautiful, too. And all the more beautiful they will be when her engagement ring is replaced with a band.
A fine horror for this Halloween season! Maybe I need to unsub and re-subscribe to see the Pledges option again? Huh, didn’t work; is it turned off now? If you offer Paid in the future, I’m in.