Strings Of Time

Declan Roe had been playing guitar since he was nine years old, and by thirty-two he was as good as a man could be who had never been quite good enough. Not bad — that was the particular cruelty of it. Not bad at all. Good enough to play session work in the city. Good enough that people at parties said things like wow and you could really be something. Good enough to see, clearly and without illusion, the ceiling between where he was and where the truly extraordinary lived. He played like a man who understood music the way a carpenter understands a house. Every joint perfect. Every beam true. But no one wept at a well-built house. He was at the bar after a corporate session gig — hotel ballroom, the kind of work that paid well and cost something harder to name — when the stranger sat down across from him. Old. Not just old in years — old in the way of things that have existed through multiple versions of the world. A face that couldn't quite be fixed in memory even while looking directly at it. "You play well," the stranger said. Declan raised his glass. "Thanks." "It bothers you that you don't play better." Declan set his glass down. "I don't know you." "You don't need to." The stranger's hands, folded on the table, were very still. "I know what you want. The same thing musicians have always wanted from me. The kind of playing that makes people feel something. The kind that lasts." Declan looked at him. He knew what this was. Of course he knew — every musician knew the old story, the old exchange, the crossroads and the deal. It was a story so old it had turned into metaphor, and metaphor back into story. "That's not a real thing," Declan said. "You're thirty-two," the stranger said, "and you spent tonight playing background music for a pharmaceutical company's sales awards ceremony. How's your position holding up?" A long silence. "What's the deal?" Declan asked. "Your time," the stranger said. "Not your life — I want to be precise about this, because people get theatrical and misunderstand. Your time. The years between where you are and where you want to be. I compress them. What would take you twenty more years of grinding effort — I give to you tonight." "And what do you get?" The stranger tilted his head. "The years. What you would have lived through. The experiences in those twenty years that were not about music. The ordinary accumulation of a life." He paused. "You won't miss them. You'll have everything you wanted." Declan thought about the hotel ballroom. He thought about the ceiling. He thought about the one honest moment tonight — a line he'd played in the second set, unrehearsed, that had stopped a passing waiter in the doorway for exactly four seconds. Four seconds. Twenty-three years of practice. Four seconds. "Do we sign something?" he asked. The stranger smiled for the first time. "We play something." He reached into the case beside his chair and set a guitar on the table between them. Declan had been playing for twenty-three years, and he had never seen anything like it. He reached out and touched the strings. The sound that came was the sound he had been trying to make his entire life.