Proteins and the genes that encode them have structure. Proteins, if you are willing to think about them this way, are composed of phrases that are organized into themes. A protein sequence can be easily converted into a musical sequence. So what? Amino-acid sequences have complexity and patterning that can be used to inspire musical combinations that have aesthetic value, is what. That doesn’t mean that every amino acid can hit the charts, or even that any amino acid can just be translated into its musical analog according to a system and you’re done, it’s a hit number in a Broadway show. Here’s one way to look at what I might do. Say there are twenty amino acids in proteins—right there that’s two pitches shy of three octaves in a diatonic scale. Seven pitches make the scale, and the sequence repeats, if you continue, just up the octave—then the eighth becomes the first, and the sequence begins again. In nature, you find structures and sequences like this everywhere you look. But as is true with any conventional music, anything you write, whatever it is, is altered radically when you change the tempo or the instrumentation. You can sing “Summertime” as a lullabye or a march. So that’s a starting point, a jumping-off point. It still has to be aesthetically pleasing and inventive music, or you have nothing, just a system and a formula and a curiosity, an artifact of your process. A lot of people are making these sounds today, and some people might call it music, but I don’t call that music.

Six

Rebecca arrived at the West Village Jewish Home a few minutes after seven the following morning. It was a perfect early September day, the sky a piercing blue, the air fresh and summery. It was a day filled with sunlight and promise. Rebecca regretted that this was probably the last of it she would see except for the little slice of sky visible from the window in her grandmother’s room. She stopped on the corner for a double latte to take up with her, regretting the cliché that it was and, she supposed, the cliché that she was for craving it. But she knew the coffee at the Jewish Home was horrible—sort of amber and weirdly transparent, not to mention so entirely decaffeinated that George had a theory that it actually sucked the residual caffeine from out of your bloodstream and you ended up with a caffeine deficiency if you drank it.

Rebecca drew in a deep breath of scrubbed morning air before going inside the home. The staff greeted her warmly. She found her grandmother sleeping.

Sipping her coffee, Rebecca regarded her grandmother’s slight form in the hospital bed, which was cranked up halfway to a sitting position. Barely five feet tall in her prime, Esther Gottesfeld had become tinier and tinier in recent years, until now she was a miniature woman, child-size but lacking the sturdiness of a child. She wore a white nightdress with a pale blue quilted bed jacket over it, though the room felt too warm to Rebecca in her thin cotton shirt and jeans. Someone had brushed Esther’s wispy hair in the wrong direction (she had always parted her hair on the left, claiming that a left part showed a sense of humor) and fastened it with a hairpin on one side. Her head hardly made a dent in the middle of the pillow. Her face seemed closed in on itself. The long, jagged burn on her neck that ran up to the edge of her jaw, an angry red welt that still attracted stares in Rebecca’s childhood, though by then it had been a fact of Esther’s life for nearly fifty years, had faded in recent time to a more delicate pale mauve.