He nodded at them, a pilot at the ready, all systems go for variation number eight. It was a morose and tentative tune which he knew could be quite deadly on his twanging instrument, more haunted wood than heavenly grove, but he had committed, he would have to press on.

Decrepit eight, airy nine, lovely lyrical ten.

A boy with a shock of orange hair rapped on the plexiglass, startling him. Solomon glanced up and the boy made a conducting gesture with his index finger, drawing a delicate arc in the air. It was Linda’s little grandson, of the folding chair and bird-like countenance. The boy wore a strange expression—what was it? Suffering and what? Affiliation? As though he’d found some precious thing that had gone missing.

But Solomon turned away: it was time for the Adagio. He closed his eyes, sighed, let his shoulders rise and his heart fill, empty, fill as he played. When he came to the fermata—a quick breath before the final phrase of music—he mined the thing for all it was worth, raised his hands high above the keys, let the penultimate notes fill the space above and around him, and silence follow. He bowed his head. One man sat down right on the floor. One woman cried on the shoulder of a stranger. A few people clapped. When he finished the song, the un-visitors drifted slowly away. Solomon was alone.

Shortly thereafter his hours were cut in half, and he struggled to make ends meet. Linda offered him per-diem work folding the face shields printed in the 3-D lab, so he set to work in his spot behind the plexiglass, folding the edges and fitting the elastic straps into place. This was hard on his hands, which grew calloused and stiff. His knuckles swelled with arthritis. But he did his best.

One Friday afternoon while the doctors crept around him, barely breathing as they pushed their stretchers towards the trucks, Solomon sat at his upright and felt that he could not play. His hands ached, but it wasn’t his arthritis; his heart felt heavy, as empty as the sky.

He summoned all his strength and began a lacrimosa. He played haltingly, painfully, sending tendrils of music over the thick plexiglass like little boats onto his beloved Hudson, accepting the twang and buzz of his un-tuned piano, the tin and the echo of it. But part way through, just as Mozart had gunned the motor, Solomon’s heart sputtered and stopped. Not that he died, but his spirit did, right in the middle of the music, and so he removed his hands from the keys and folded them quietly on his lap.