The Music of Chance Read Online Free

calming effect on him, as if the music helped him to see the world more clearly, to understand his place in the invisible order of things. Now that the house wasempty and he was ready to go, he held back for an extra day to give a long farewell recital to the bare walls. One by one, he went through several dozen of his favorite pieces, beginning with
The Mysterious Barricades
by Couperin and ending with Fats Waller’s
Jitterbug Waltz
, hammering away at the keyboard until his fingers grew numb and he had to give up. Then he called his piano tuner of the past six years (a blind man named Antonelli) and arranged to sell the Baldwin to him for four hundred and fifty dollars. By the time the movers came the next morning, Nashe had already spent the money on tapes for the cassette machine in his car. It was a fitting gesture, he felt—to turn one form of music into another—and the economy of the exchange pleased him. After that, there was nothing to hold him back anymore. He stayed around long enough to watch Antonelli’s men wrestle the piano out of the house, and then, without bothering to say good-bye to anyone, he was gone. He just walked out, climbed into his car, and was gone.
    Nashe did not have any definite plan. At most, the idea was to let himself drift for a while, to travel around from place to place and see what happened. He figured he would grow tired of it after a couple of months, and at that point he would sit down and worry about what to do next. But two months passed, and he still was not ready to give up. Little by little, he had fallen in love with his new life of freedom and irresponsibility, and once that happened, there were no longer any reasons to stop.
    Speed was of the essence, the joy of sitting in the car and hurtling himself forward through space. That became a good beyond all others, a hunger to be fed at any price. Nothing around him lasted for more than a moment, and as one moment followed another, it was as though he alone continued to exist. He was a fixed point in a whirl of changes, a body poised in utter stillness as the worldrushed through him and disappeared. The car became a sanctum of invulnerability, a refuge in which nothing could hurt him anymore. As long as he was driving, he carried no burdens, was unencumbered by even the slightest particle of his former life. That is not to say that memories did not rise up in him, but they no longer seemed to bring any of the old anguish. Perhaps the music had something to do with that, the endless tapes of Bach and Mozart and Verdi that he listened to while sitting behind the wheel, as if the sounds were somehow emanating from him and drenching the landscape, turning the visible world into a reflection of his own thoughts. After three or four months, he had only to enter the car to feel that he was coming loose from his body, that once he put his foot down on the gas and started driving, the music would carry him into a realm of weightlessness.
    Empty roads were always preferable to crowded roads. They demanded fewer slackenings and decelerations, and because he did not have to pay attention to other cars, he could drive with the assurance that his thoughts would not be interrupted. He therefore tended to avoid large population centers, restricting himself to open, unsettled areas: northern New York and New England, the flat farm country of the heartland, the Western deserts. Bad weather was also to be shunned, for that interfered with driving as much as traffic did, and when winter came with its storms and inclemencies, he headed south, and with few exceptions stayed there until spring. Still, even under the best of conditions, Nashe knew that no road was entirely free of danger. There were constant perils to watch out for, and anything could happen at any moment. Swerves and potholes, sudden blowouts, drunken drivers, the briefest lapse of attention—any one of those things could kill you in an instant. Nashe saw a number of fatal