There came a loud rap from outside his fishbowl. He turned and saw a wild-eyed woman, middle aged, with a child at her side. Her hair was tangled and makeup smeared. She wore sweatpants, a ragged Henley, and dark glasses.

“Play the piano!” She shouted. She pounded against the plexiglass. He scanned the lobby; she must have come through a different door—the one by the trucks—bypassing security. The boy at her side was weeping, and now Solomon could see that it was Linda’s grandson again, with the orange hair. Didn’t he ever go to school? Of course not, nobody did anymore. And here came Linda clacking down the hall towards them, so that the little family—Linda from Special Events, her distraught daughter and weeping grandson—all stood on the other side of the plexiglass, staring at Solomon with bottomless need.

He lifted his hands to the piano but they fell like lead, discord bursting from the little matchbox. He raised one finger and tried to play a few notes of Ah Vous but nothing happened. He shook his head helplessly.

Don’t just sit there! screamed the woman, Linda’s daughter, pounding the plexiglass so that it heaved and shook around him. Have some humanity!

Solomon trembled. How she misunderstood him. The problem was precisely his humanity, which had been sapped, drained, dismissed together with Mack, extinguished beside the piano tuner, and folded, during long hours of painful labor, into the masks they all wore.

Linda apologized. She took her daughter’s hand and led her away, gesturing to her orange-haired grandson to follow. Heels click-clacking, she crossed the lobby and led them out the revolving door to the taxi stand, where she kissed and hugged them and helped them into a cab.

Mother and son rode the taxi through the city’s empty streets and entered their apartment in silence. She put her keys down and opened the window. Closed it, opened it again. When she crumpled at the kitchen table with her head in her hands, the boy sang alone in his room. In a warble full of melancholy, he made up his own lacrimosa for his ill father and the hunched-over pianist who had not been able to play. He sang with the sweet brassy heft of an unfolding life, the ineffable moon, the OCEAN that would always reach for it. His mother sat and listened, her heart breaking, emptying, filling up again.