The Wrong Hand

The room smelled like rosin and old radiator dust. Everyone else had gone home. Soren was still at the piano, playing the same eight bars he had played four hundred times.

"Stop," said Maya. "Do it again, but watch your hands."

"I am watching my hands."

"No. You're watching me. Your hands are doing it without you."

Soren looked down. His right hand was three notes ahead of where he thought he was. He had not told it to do that.

"That's weird," he said.

"Play it slow. As slow as you can."

He tried. And the strange thing was, slow was harder. When he crawled through it note by note, he kept stumbling, hitting the gap between one finger and the next like he had never seen the keys before.

"I can't play it slow," Soren said. "That makes no sense. Slow should be easier."

"Faster is easier," Maya agreed. She sat on the edge of the piano bench. "Why is faster easier?"

He didn't have an answer. He pulled the notebook out of his bag and drew a little hand, then crossed it out.

"Okay," said Maya. "Try this. Play it with your eyes closed."

He closed his eyes. His hands ran the eight bars clean, no mistakes, smooth as water down a window.

"Now play it," she said, "and tell me which finger comes after your thumb on the third note."

He stopped dead. His hand froze in the air.

"I don't know," Soren said. "I lost it. The second I tried to think about the finger, I lost the whole thing."

Maya grinned. She loved this. "So thinking about it breaks it."

"Thinking about it breaks it," he said slowly. "That's backwards. You're supposed to think to do things."

"Where's it kept, then?" Maya asked. "The playing. If it's not in the part of you that thinks."

"In my hands," Soren said automatically. Then he heard himself. "No. That can't be right."

"Why not?"

He held up his right hand and looked at it like it belonged to a stranger. "Because hands are just bones and meat and strings. There's nothing in a finger that remembers anything. A finger can't know what comes after the thumb."

"So where's the memory?"

He was quiet. He flexed his fingers. "It has to be in my brain. But not the loud part. Not the part that does math."

Maya stood up and walked to the music stand and tapped it. "My swim coach says don't think at the wall, just flip. Every time I think about the flip turn I do it wrong. Every single time."

"Same thing," said Soren. "It's the same thing as my hands."

"So somewhere in there," Maya pointed at his head, "there's a part that learned the flip turn and a part that learned the piano, and it's not the talking part, because the talking part wrecks it."

Soren wrote two words. Quiet part. "Try this," he said. "Play it with your left hand doing the right hand's notes."

Maya frowned. "That's not even my piano."

"Just the shape. Put your left hand where my right hand goes and copy what I do."

She tried. Her fingers stumbled like a newborn deer. Mush. Nothing.

"See, you can't do it," Soren said. "And your hands are fine. Your hands are great. You can do a flip turn. So it's not about the hand being strong or weak."

"It's about whether the quiet part learned it," Maya said. "My quiet part learned flip turns. It never learned your eight bars."

"And the only way to teach the quiet part," Soren said, "is to do it over and over until the loud part isn't needed anymore."

They looked at each other.

"That's why slow is hard," Maya said. "Slow makes the loud part come back. The loud part is clumsy. It was never good at this. It was only ever good at the first day."

Soren felt something tip over in his chest, a good kind of falling. "The first week of piano my teacher said I'd never get this part. I cried about it. I was so bad."

"And now you're so good you can't even watch yourself do it."

"I didn't get smarter," Soren said. "My loud part is exactly as clumsy as it was. I just moved the whole thing somewhere else. Somewhere underneath."

Maya sat back down next to him. "All those four hundred times. You weren't practicing with your fingers. You were building a little machine inside your skull that runs the fingers for you."

"And once it's built, I can think about anything," Soren said. He started to play again, eyes open, looking right at Maya. "I can talk to you. I can plan dinner. The machine doesn't care."

"Do the wrong hand thing again," Maya said suddenly. "On purpose. Tell your right hand to play, and then start thinking really hard about the third finger."

He did. The music stuttered and collapsed the instant his attention landed on the finger, like a bicycle that falls the moment you look at the front wheel.

"Okay," Maya breathed. "So the smart part of you and the part that can actually do it. They're not the same person. They're roommates."

"And mine don't even talk to each other," Soren said. "The good piano player in me can't explain anything. It just plays. It can't tell me how."

"You've got a genius living in your head who never says a word."

Soren laughed, but it came out shaky. He put his hands back on the keys.

"Watch," he said. "I'm going to think about absolutely nothing."

He stared at the wall. His face went blank and easy. And underneath that empty face his two hands rose and crossed and folded through all eight bars perfectly, fast and certain, while the boy on the bench thought about nothing at all and the room filled up with music that no one in the room was deciding to play.