A Jazz of Possibility

It was a large room, mostly empty. Like they had said, there were two beds and the cot was set neatly into a cranny in the wall. The bedspreads were smooth on the beds and clean. A back door opened onto a small square patch of grass with a round table and four chairs situated in the very middle.

When Hannah arrived the front door to the room was wide open. She'd been directed to the room by one of the owners of the bed and breakfast, and she walked into the midst of a bustle of unpacking going on in the room.

Billy had a shirt over his shoulder but wasn't wearing one. His chest looked so thin as to be hollow, nearly caved in, and he walked back and forth as if waiting for some idea to strike.

Michelle was diving into a suitcase on the bed, her head invisible beneath the clothes and small bags that piled up out of the suitcase. Ryan was watching Michelle as he set out the things they had bought earlier in the day. Wine. Crackers. Dry Cheese.

Hannah was about to announce herself when each of the people she had been watching looked up at her simultaneously. She hadn't made a sound.

"Hannah, come on in," Michelle smiled at her.

"Hi everyone."

"We're just, ah, getting set up," Ryan said, moving through the back door toward the table on the grass. Billy went back to pacing.

"I stopped and picked up some hummus and pita bread, for a little snack," Hannah said, "but I see you guys have got all that under control."

"Oh. No. I love hummus," Michelle said with another polite smile.

Anticipating an invitation to sit, Hannah plopped herself on one of the beds and laid back. Billy stopped his pacing to look at her, then raised his head as if the idea he was waiting for had come to him.

"What? What is it?" Hannah sat up and asked.

"...nothing..."

"You looked at me like there was something," Hannah said.

"Well. I was just thinking."

"And?"

"And what?"

"Oh. So you're the evasive type. Alright, Billy."

"I am not evasive. I just..." he trailed off.

"Don't worry about it," she said, lying back against the pillows.

She closed her eyes and breathed through her mouth. Her brown hair looked black against the light blue pillows.

Michelle finally picked out some clothes from her bag and went humming into the bathroom. Ryan was still outside and the room was thick with Billy's silence and Hannah's breathing.

"It's mercy and it's grace," Billy blurted out.

Hannah opened her eyes but didn't move otherwise, looking at the ceiling.

"I've been working on this piece for my master's program - a piece of orchestral music - and, for me, I need to work with a concept, like an intellectual concept before I can really create anything worthwhile."

This was unexpected from Billy, the rail-thin boy who spoke out of turn. He was pacing again and talking in a kind of rhapsody to himself, looking at the ground as he had been a few minutes earlier. One part of Hannah was glad for the outpouring; for the intellectual passion implied in this rush of words. Another part of her wished that someone else was in the room to receive it.

"So far, I've been thinking about all sorts of things. Redemption. Future. Past. Even martyrdom. Because, ultimately, music is a language of nature, of mysticism. So it is always ready to communicate ideas that are, well, I'd say, related to faith. Not religion but faith. I've been thinking - what is the border between religion and faith? A border... And that's what I was asking myself. Then you sat down there -"

He stopped speaking abruptly and saw that she was watching him with her face half turned away.

Abashedly he finished by quietly saying, "The thought came that a person can have mercy and grace. That's what religion sets out to give us, but we can get it on our own, by other means."

His tone as he finished was apologetic.

"I'm sorry," Hannah offered.

"What do you mean, you're sorry?" Billy chortled a confused laugh.

"Just, I mean, I didn't mean to get you -"

He cut her off, "No. I'm sorry for going off like that. I don't mean to be rude."

Not knowing if he meant that he didn't want to be rude by evading her earlier question or by making his speech, Hannah decided to move the conversation on.

Michelle walked into the room as Hannah asked Billy, "So, you study music?"

"I study at UCLA. So does Michelle."

"I just finished my program, actually," Michelle said.

She shook her head at Billy with mock derision.

Then to Hannah, "I just finished a media studies program there. I kind of met Ryan through Billy. They've been friends for a long time and we all met, at a bar, near campus last year.

"Yep," Ryan chimed just audibly from the table outside.

Hannah, Michelle and Billy all looked in his direction, surprised that he had been listening.

The whole meeting began to feel staged. A comedy of some sort. Hannah heaved a deep breath and prepared herself for a long night.

The evening turned out to be a good time though. They took turns telling stories, sometimes about each other in the case of Ryan and Billy, but the conversation ended up focusing on childhood stories.

Ryan's voice was always subdued. His grin constant with reminiscence. Michelle laughed through all of her stories, the dimple dancing on her cheek merrily. And Billy seemed to think his way through his stories, as if they were mazes, as if he were telling them for the first time and trying also to make it the last telling by squeezing all the meaning from them, like found, fallen fruit.

Hannah told her stories with a confident irony, divided the present from the past so completely as to make all stories comical in their impossible distance from the reality that the four of them shared at the table on the little patch of grass, each of them, tonight, sitting at this great distance from home.

Behind Hannah's speech was also the idea of a miscarriage and the accompanying what if thought of a brother or sister, of a life that would unfold differently from the one she lived now and from the one in her stories that was completely gone and now become unreal in its distance from the table on its little patch of grass.

When there was one wine bottle left and each of their faces glowed with the wine and the thrill of commanding the stage, they passed the bottle and each made a toast.

Ryan went first, holding the bottle out in his extended arm at shoulder height, "To the future."

Michelle received the bottle next and also toasted to the future. Then it was Hannah's turn and she toasted to the future too. Billy did the same thing. When Ryan got the bottle again, he hoisted it again and repeated the toast. This time they all laughed, and when they stopped they raised their empty glasses to meet the bottle in Ryan's hand and gave a symbolic toast, "To the future."

The ocean fingers its way into the boroughs, creating islands of the land, defining small pieces of land that would grow like seeds into entire worlds. If the rain came for long enough in this season, maybe the islands would float musically away, like notes on the wind, like birdsong.

The air was full of readiness for anything. Any magnitude of change was possible. Because the old order had been thrown over, and the new one was to be forever new, the potential for change was infinite. A jazz of possibility. A music of randomness. Each day a snowflake, a pursuit of the possible structures of being. A gift from the sky.

With a sun hat, full of loose holes in the straw weave, a woman stands outside above the sunken bar looking in, swaying to the trumpet and drum rhythms from inside. It's as if the sound is coming from her. She is the African bell that drives the music, drowned in the larger sound, but inside it, the heart of it, the beginning and the end, the note clanged against the rod of creation, starting and restarting the song to vibrating. She sways and the rain drips through her hat and off its edges in streaming rivulets. The hat refuses to crumple around her ears.

She makes no move to get out of the rain, to go inside to be closer to the music. She cannot be any closer than she is to the music. She stands and sways and the vibration is in her. The trumpet calls out the birdsong and the city begins to float upward on the sea tide.

Everyone took turns using the bathroom in preparation for sleep. As the honorary guest, Hannah had the privilege of going first. She had purchases a tooth brush at a store on her way to the bed and breakfast; she brushed and washed her face, and put an extra pair of shorts that Ryan had brought along.

The back door was still open so Hannah went outside to the table to wait for the others to make their preparations. The sky was filled with stars, absolutely filled. She watched for a shooting star and wondered if she had a wish to make.

Billy came out to join her and looked up with her at the sky.

"Wow. That is amazing, isn't it?" Billy said.

"Yeah. It really is," Hannah dropped her eyes down to Billy, who stood a few feet away with his neck arched back and his hands on the small of his back, looking like a cock about to crow.

Hannah went back to looking the stars.

"Where are you going tomorrow?" Billy asked.

She gazed at him for a moment with her manner of weighing the outer world against an inner scale, saying nothing.

"I mean, ah, are you driving back up north?"

Instead of answering she said, "Here. Have a seat, Billy."

He hesitated and gazed at her as if he hadn't heard. Hannah returned to the stars once again, her throat glowing with the light coming from inside the room appearing very smooth, porcelain.

Billy shook his head and sat down in the chair nearest Hannah with his back to the open door.

"Do you...are you dating anyone, Billy?" she asked, with her eyes watching again for a falling star.

"Who me?" he asked sarcastically.

"No. The other handsome Billy."

"He is, the handsome Billy, but I'm not. This Billy is free as a bird."

"And is he flying home tomorrow?"

"Yes. He is," Billy said, eagerness seeping into his tone.

Hannah saw the star. One point of light had shaken from its place in the heavens and fell, burning, a streak across the night.

"So am I," she said, looking now into his face which was silhouetted against the light from the room inside. Something glimmered in his face where the eyes should have been, a moist twin light.

A tremor in her voice made Billy move to touch her. Putting a hand on Hannah's thigh he let it rest there. So did she.

He stared at her feverishly and she, evenly, calmly, looked at his shadowed face. Putting her own hand over his gently, she turned her gaze back to the stars blazing their broken chain of stories deeper and deeper into the fabric of the sky.

Sunlight crept into the room, filling the corners first with syrupy red light that became yellow as it spread. Hannah was the first to wake up.

She opened her eyes and looked for a while at the ceiling, as if she was still watching for the falling star, trying to see where it landed maybe. But the ceiling was not starred, it was painted a smooth creamy white.

With a reassuring relief, she ran her hand along the length of her body, as far as she could reach without moving around. Her shirt was on, but the bra was gone. She had taken it off herself, she remembered. The borrowed shorts were still tied on tight.

Billy slept facing away from her, his body turned to the wall. Hannah looked objectively at the back of his head for a moment and asked herself the questions that she had not allowed herself to ask last night.

In this situation, so unreal since the previous morning, Hannah felt unanchored. If she chose, she could drift off and just go...not with Billy, but just with herself.

She thought of the picture of her mother, mid twenties. Hannah looked exactly like her mother did then. But they were so different. Now and then.

What if someone took a picture of her, in this bed with a man she met less than twenty-four hours ago, with a sigh building up in her chest that, when released, would blow the entire world of her past away? What if a picture was taken of her hair plastered to her forehead after sleep, her face pasty and bloodless before sitting up; waking to slow consciousness inside her little adventure to Paso Robles?

Would it be a picture of following your heart, Hannah asked herself, of taking the road that was in front of you and not looking back?

This wasn't the departure she and Cathy had talked about. It wasn't the one final trip from Big Sur. She would go back, today, she would go back, with a few bottles of wine and a story that she probably would never tell.

Well, she didn't have to go straight back. Not right this minute, or even today. There was time to find another story, maybe a better one.

As quietly as she could, Hannah pulled herself out of the bed, picked up her black shorts folded on top of a dresser, and went to the bathroom. She didn't close the door all the way because she wanted to get dressed and leave before everyone got up. She would leave a note.

She would write them a note telling them that she was glad to meet them and leave them her phone number. She would tell them to come up to Big Sur some time and visit. Then she'd go.

She brushed her teeth cursorily and stepped into the big room. A pad of stationary was on top of the dresser, next to where her pants had been. There was a pen there too. She wrote the note and left it on the pad of paper. Then she found her shoes.

There was nothing more to do so with her shoes in hand Hannah walked quietly to the door. She turned around and looked at Billy asleep on the bed. There was no sentiment in her glance, but her face was concentrated with the effort of memorization as she looked at him. For all of his length, he still resembled a boy, sleeping a very complete sleep.

A movement from the other bed caught her eye. Hannah looked up. Michelle was watching her. Hannah waved in surprise and farewell. Michelle smiled, closed her eyes, and turned over on the bed.