BEFORE THE AUDITION
Nick Faustino woke in a panic, mistakenly believing in his half-drowsing state that he had already overslept, fully two seconds before the chintzy digital alarm clock on his nightstand started issuing its shrill mantra.
The intrusion of the alarm buzzer on his senses when it came—which in a less confused state he might have recognized as reassurance that the fears he’d woken to had not materialized—only rattled his nerves more. His agitation swelling up, he groped in the semi-dark for the alarm reset button, but his hand caught instead on the electrical cord.
Peevishly, he jerked the plug from the wall outlet and sent the clock clattering to the floor where it lodged in the space between the wall and bed, waking himself and failing to stop the alarm buzzer in the process.
A few moments later, he fumbled his way along in the early morning half-light of his one-bedroom apartment out into the main living space and over to the kitchenette, where he expected to find an urgently needed pot of steaming hot coffee waiting.
He had carefully planned out every aspect of this morning beforehand, in order to leave no potentially nerve-rattling contingency unaccounted for.
So when it turned out the auto-brew mechanism hadn’t engaged to start the coffee maker’s brew-cycle (which happened from time to time, he noted ruefully, but not often enough he’d taken the possibility seriously until now), he let out an audible groan.
Impatiently setting the coffee maker’s switch to the brew position and slumping into a chair next to the ugly Formica-topped kitchen table that constituted his apartment’s sole dining area, he listened, half-mesmerized as the ancient coffee maker sputtered to life and gradually settled into its familiar, gurgling rhythm.
He’d known this day was coming for years, had fretted and fussed over it, and yet somehow it still seemed to arrive without warning. The day of his audition for the masters program had finally arrived. Passing this audition represented what he had long viewed as his one and only real chance to continue along the upward trajectory he’d been on for the last four years, as he’d hustled, borrowed and worked his way toward an undergraduate degree.
It was his one chance because he had no other immediate prospects remaining. And at the same time, he had no reserve of shored-up resources to tap into in the event of a serious setback. He currently lived from pay-check-to-paycheck—and only barely at that.
Failure at this stage would leave him no recourse but to capitulate, to turn back and solicit his father’s support—like a beaten-down dog that chews through its rope and escapes for a fleeting night of freedom, but then skulks back to its master’s house with its belly rumbling before sunup, ready to take its beatings so it can get a fat ham-bone to gnaw on in the moonlight. The thought made his stomach turn.
And even that escape route wasn’t certain. He’d had no contact with his father since that night he’d first set out four years ago in his rust-speckled ‘76 Volkswagen Scirocco—without a word of warning to the few loved ones he would miss and against his father’s explicit wishes—on a one-way trip two hundred miles up the coastal highway to accept a partial scholarship from a prominent state university. For all he knew or cared, his father could already be dead by now. He should be so lucky.
But this was no time for dredging up the past, he decided, restraining his thoughts.
Thinking along these lines was counter-productive, a waste of psychic energy, because in fact he couldn’t be better prepared for today’s audition. He would not—could not—fail to deliver the virtuoso performance he'd been born to deliver. He'd rehearsed obsessively—even dropping weight he spent so much time at his instrument. Not a doubt existed in his mind: when he performed at his peak (as he would today), his technique equaled or surpassed that of any other undergrad in the music school. And even when he didn’t perform at his peak, he was still very good. He wasn't being immodest in observing these facts. He was merely being unsentimental and clear-eyed. That was his nature.
By now the coffee maker was a quarter of the way through its brew-cycle, and Nick was in no more mood for waiting. He shambled over to the cabinet above the sink and removed two large cups, one to hold under the filter basket assembly to collect the coffee flowing out as it brewed, and another to fill from the partly-filled pot before quickly returning the pot to its rightful place.
He’d used this trick on previous occasions to fast-track a desperately needed caffeine fix. But it had never occurred to him the technique carried a risk of injury until the precise moment that, inexplicably, his left-hand jerked apoplectically, and the cup collecting the scalding black liquid escaped his grip.
He’d used this trick on previous occasions to fast-track a desperately needed caffeine fix. But it had never occurred to him the technique carried a risk of injury until the precise moment that, inexplicably, his left-hand jerked apoplectically, and the cup collecting the scalding black liquid escaped his grip.
“Dammit!” Unconscious reflex mercifully took the motor control away from his sluggish conscious mind, enabling his body to respond deftly to the danger on its own. He somehow managed not to spill a single drop of the coffee from the glass pot whose handle he still clenched in the fist of his right hand.
But he hadn’t made it through this micro-calamity completely unscathed: the back of his left hand had been caught in the backsplash as the stray cup had somersaulted through space and the freshly-brewed coffee had kept flowing, indifferent to the hissing burner plate. That cup now lay smashed into dozens of lethal pieces on the porcelain floor.
After quickly replacing the glass pot, switching off the coffee maker, and tidying up the rest of the mess, he inspected his injuries.
Small patches of raised, red flesh had formed here and there on the back of his hand, but the pain from the wounds seemed negligible, a nuisance at worst. He felt his heart beat settling back into a less frantic rhythm.
The coffee was meant to help cut through the residue of the early morning fog. And so in a round-about way, it had done its job perfectly, even though he hadn’t drunk a single drop. He felt more alert now than he usually felt by the middle of the day. Caffeine, he decided, might as well have been a placebo compared to the adrenaline jolt his sympathetic nervous system had just delivered.
Though he no longer needed its active ingredient, he finally poured himself a cup of coffee. Then he crossed the main room and seated himself before the boxy, functional-looking upright piano in the corner. This item also happened to be the most valuable piece of personal property he currently owned. He’d sold his Scirocco for the cash to buy it from a local junk shop to use as a practice piano during his first year of school.
When the piano had originally been delivered to his apartment, it had been in a state of near-total disrepair and neglect. A dull, yellow film coated the entire run of major keys (several of which also stuck), and the flats and sharps offered almost no dynamic response; spidery hairline fractures and scuff-marks marred large sections of the exterior cabinet’s finish job. And more than an entire octave range of notes the instrument produced came out sounding either sharp or flat.
But working steadily on weekends and late nights over a couple of months, Nick had stripped and refinished the cabinet, and then painstakingly repaired the hammers and retuned the strings himself, using tools borrowed from the music school’s piano labs.
As performance pianos went, it didn’t amount to much. But it made a more than adequate rehearsal piano. And Nick believed, almost to the point of superstition, that the many hours he’d spent restoring the instrument gave him a special understanding of its tonal characteristics, special insight into the subtleties and quirks of the sounds it could make.
Setting his cup down on the floor beside the piano bench, he raised the keyboard cover, and began playing his customary battery of warm-up exercises, taking a deep, calming breath as he did. He played tentatively at first, almost too cautiously, as if the tiniest slip might shatter the keyboard to bits, like glass. His confidence had been deeply shaken by his accident with the coffee maker.
Had anxiety over the audition triggered the little nervous twitch that had sent the cup and its scalding hot contents tumbling from his hand? Or had he, on some unconscious level perhaps, been bent on self-sabotage and trying to injure himself? And what if he experienced just such a nervous twitch in the middle of his audition performance?
But even as he entertained these worrying new doubts, he knew he couldn’t afford to let his thoughts continue in this fashion. He knew what it was like to choke under pressure, so he recognized the warning signs when they began: how the many small anxieties lying dormant in the mind began to thrive and multiply by feeding on each other, until at just the critical moment, all those isolated anxieties coalesced into a suffocating and certain paralysis of body and mind.
The burns on his hand ached dully as he played. But he forced himself to filter out the distracting signal by focusing only on the rising and falling mechanical action of the keys under his fingers. The trick wasn’t completely effective, but it worked well enough.
By the time he arrived at the more technically challenging exercises in the series, the last traces of morning stiffness in his wrists and fingers had departed, and his confidence had finally begun to return.
Two hours later, freshly-showered and refreshed, he shoved the three-ring binder that held his sheet music selections for the audition into the canvas tote bag he wore on his shoulder and rushed out the door of the apartment.
*****
He was almost ten minutes into the twenty-minute trek it took to reach the performance hall by foot when he suddenly found himself caught in a heavy summer downpour. Not knowing what else to do, he clutched the tote bag and its precious cargo to his stomach, hunched his body to form a protective shield around it, and started running as fast as he could.
