There is a transition period. It won’t fully hit me until two or three minutes after I wake. Then I will cry out, always, which is why I never sleep in the same room with anyone, because it would terrify them, though not as much as it terrifies me.

“No, no, please,” I implore anyone who will listen, but no one does, because I’m a man alone in a hotel room with nobody near me, this being how I’ve arranged my life—in part to spare others, in part because it’s simpler this way.

It was the worst dream in the world. Because it allowed me to wake.

Chapter 17

17

Chancery Lane

Gail’s mother and Russ Hewett lived at the end of a cul-de-sac that overlooked Fruitvale Creek, one of several clandestine assets of a very agreeable part of Oakland known as the Dimond District (named for one Joseph Dimond), the area being to all purposes an amiable, welcoming town that happened to be pressed right up alongside a major city. The other houses on Chancery Lane were sand-colored stucco, similar in design and neatly spaced to make them seem like two files of sentries standing guard for the one very different house where the street stopped. Hewett’s home was of dark wood, built low and modern in style without making a big fuss about it. It was fronted by a high fence of light gray planks. Parked in the driveway was an olive-green Studebaker sedan. A grassy hill to the right of the house slipped down to friendly trees that were trying to keep the creek a secret, but the stream was betrayed by its benevolent gurgle and the sparkling sunlight that leapt from its busy surface like flames from a log fire, only the fire was a cold, clear blue.

It looked like it would be a particularly pleasant place to work, and that was just as well because there weren’t many alternatives. I didn’t have a piano in my room at the Claremont, of course. I could have tried using the one in the ballroom, but there were a lot of social functions there in the afternoon. Gail said the Berkeley practice rooms were the size of telephone booths and not conducive to spending long hours with the broad sheets of pale green music paper on which I would be writing my orchestration of her Swing Around the Sun.

But Russ Hewett and Gail’s mother shared a house that went virtually unoccupied during the day. (Gail’s mother augmented her housekeeping obligations with temporary office work in medical practices around the area.) Hewett owned a console piano, purchased simply because one bought such things for a house, and on it Gail could play me her award-winning composition, and I could use it to pen my orchestration of same without distraction.