Free Thank You, Goodnight by Andy Abramowitz Page B

god, or bowed his head in a slushy sigh of false modesty. I, however, wanted only to take off down the driveway and never look back.
    Tereza was now standing next to me, having managed to navigate her way through the crowd. Cupping one side of her mouth, she leaned into my ear and shouted above the fray. “Teddy, maybe you’re not the same person you used to be.”
    “You’re finally realizing that?” I yelled back.
    “It’s okay with me,” she said. “But if it’s not okay with you”—she turned an open palm to the crowd and offered up an innocent little shrug—“it looks like you’ve got a chance to go back, even for just one night.”
    Go back where? I wanted to shake her. It isn’t there anymore!
    “It doesn’t work that way, Tereza,” I shouted into the air between us.
    She shook her head in bewilderment. “I don’t understand. You’re holding a guitar and there are people who want to hear a song. Are you really sure you don’t want to play?”
    As we stared at each other, speakers of different languages on theTower of Babel, something inside me suddenly began to shift. As I scanned this mad pack of misbegotten zombies, locked eyes with each and every one of them, it all became funny. They weren’t putting me on. Their hearts were in exactly the wrong place, but their hearts were there, beating up a storm. A bunch of kids clamoring with everything they had to see their favorite musician perform just for them, and they would not be refused. I remembered what that was like. Who didn’t?
    A powerful silence reigned for a moment; they smelled surrender.
    “Give me the goddamn guitar,” I snapped.
    If these fools wanted to hear the feeble warbling of a middle-aged has-been, then tonight was their night. They would recoil in disgust and never listen to or speak of Tremble again. It was high time they were acquainted with what we in the real world called reality.
    So—fuck if I didn’t find myself sitting on an aluminum folding chair, twisting the pegs until the strings were in tune. My fingers, uncallused and alien, moved sluggishly at first, without the speed or agility they once had. But then, as if from hardwired instinct, they placed themselves on the right strings, on the right frets, at the right time. The songs flooded back and I had the random sensation of being rocked on my grandmother’s shoulder like a child, back to where I started after a lifetime of being away. The music came. Chord flowed logically to chord. I didn’t need to go looking for them; they’d been there all this time.
    My thoughts, however, were anything but harmonious. A disquiet gathered in my head, faint at first, like the distant rush of a car engine finding its way through the neighborhood. But then the car was outside, honking in the driveway, and the hinges of every closed door within me started to shake. My mind went wild and my thoughts became unbound and unstable, disobedient and carried by no current. Like jazz.
    Then something completely unexpected happened, and it was like I never saw it coming.

PART TWO
EXCUSE ME, DID I ASK YOU TO BLOW ON MY FOOD?

CHAPTER 4
    I came back weird. On that first morning after the trip, I awakened, showered, and dressed feeling slightly off and a little jittery. It was more than the routine anxiety of not wanting to return to work. I sensed an invisible force telling me I wasn’t supposed to return to work.
    On her way out to an early appointment, Sara poked her head into the bathroom and called to me above the steady teeming of water on tile. “I’m going. I left you some coffee.”
    “Thanks,” I shouted back. Then I pushed open the glass door and stuck my head out like a wet terrier. “Thanks,” I said again.
    She smiled. “Bye.”
    My mind seemed to be circling above something I wanted to say to her; I just couldn’t land on it.
    Buttoning the sleeves of a light-blue oxford while avoiding eye contact with the bedroom mirror, I realized I was humming a tune. My