George had spent months working this out on the floor of his studio with some guitar picks and lengths of piano wire, and the marks were still there in the floorboards as reminders, but whatever the form could mean in his work, he didn’t feel ready to take it on just yet, so he had put it all away carefully to mature, like a potentially great wine vintage.

Fractals and Sierpinski triangles had been of considerable interest to George when he was an undergraduate, experimenting with repetitive downward arpeggiated three-note chords to create a series of scherzi with both ternary and binary forms. He had discovered, dwelling as he did for those years at the intersection of science and music, that iterating binaries are common in dances, from the Renaissance all the way through the Classical period, when iterating ternaries were dominant up through the Romantic period. In his junior year he had written a very long term paper about Sierpinskis and fractals, accompanied by a tape of exemplar piano sketches (recorded on a mediocre tape player that belonged to a strangely hirsute cellist from Indonesia named Marianthe whom he had met at the snack machines in the hideous “machine city” dungeon beside Cross Campus Library, in one long, speed-fueled all-nighter in a practice room in Hendrie Hall). The paper had squeaked him through to a passing grade for an advanced geometry course he had otherwise neglected. George was fairly certain that his professor hadn’t grasped the meaning of his paper entirely, and might not have even played the tape all the way through.

Although it had been a while since George had thought about fractal forms or Sierpinski triangles in a very focused way, the allure of fractal forms had returned one muggy night just this past August, when he was too hot to sleep and had been up listening to some vinyl from the sixties, Alfred Brendel’s Vox cycle of Beethoven sonatas. He had suddenly heard the form, all at once, with astonishing new clarity, in the third movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata no. 15 in D Major, op. 28.

George hoped his life would be long enough to do all the work he carried around in his head in tiny, ungerminated forms that he could sometimes feel just floating there in his frontal cortex like some minuscule yet vast private reference library of ideas. He wasn’t afraid of dying so much as he was afraid of not living long enough. He thought about this all the time because Huntington’s disease ran in his family and the threat of the disease hung over him. George’s mother died of Huntington’s when he was sixteen and a senior in high school. It was the last year he lived at home. There had been a dark decade of struggle and dwindling presence for Martha Botkin, who spent her final four years in a nursing home, imprisoned by this relentless disease. George always felt terrible visiting her and even more terrible not visiting her.