As will become readily apparent quite quickly, I have a slightly imperfectly-wired brain. It functions quite well on the theoretical and anachronistic level, and it can achieve some pretty impressive things under pressure. However, in any given routine situation, it has a tendency to some rather bizarre reactions. Take the morning after that first class, for example. A normal person, on being awakened by a phone ringing in the dark of an autumn morning, would rise and answer said phone, with or without a due sense of impending catastrophe.
Not I. By the time I was actually aware of what had woken me, I was out of bed, across the room and furiously flipping away the light switch until the strobe-effect of the overhead light bulb finally forced me into consciousness. I turned off the light, stumbled back to the night table, and flipped open my mobile phone, which was blinking up at me indignantly.
"Hello?"
"Kipling? Are you alright?"
"Mitch?"
"Yes"
"Are you on fire?"
"Umm...no."
"Then why are you calling at 6:30 in the morning?"
"Oh. I, uh, I wanted to know if it would be alright if I practized for a bit. I didn't want to wake you."
I sat on the edge of the bed, resting my now pounding head in my free hand.
"You woke me up to make sure that playing the violin wouldn't wake me up."
"Right, I....oh. Sorry."
I couldn't help but chuckle, "It's ok. In the future, though, I can barely hear you anyway, so don't worry about it."
"Ok. When do you have to be in to work?"
"About 12:30. Why?"
"Good. I have to leave by 10, so get ready and put some coffee on and I'll be round with the toast at, say, 9?"
"Sounds good."
Mitch is my next-door neighbor, and fellow Economic Orphan. His aunt and uncle own the house, but are receiving a large stipend to move out of London for their work, and thus we are both squatters while our homes refuse to attract any attention on the market. He works as an usher some theater in the City and can usually be seen on dark days playing his violin either in tube stations or near Covent Garden. We had become friends about 6 weeks earlier, just after I moved in, when I had unwittingly let a pigeon into my kitchen and was too petrified to do anything outside of waiving a badminton net in its general direction and yell very loudly. It turns out that he has a passion for making toast (it might be the only thing he knows how to make, come to think of it, but at least he enjoys it), so we had most of our breakfasts together. This enterprise was rendered even easier by some sort of subterranean tunnel that connected our two basements, and if you had the courage to brave the clammy, spider-kingdom of my basement, and the labyrinth of discarded toys and gardening implements in his, it was actually incredibly convenient, especially as neither of us was very good with grocery shopping.
I took a shower and cobbled together an acceptable wardrobe out of the still-clean options in the drawers, and was just dumping coffee grounds into my inherited French press when I heard three sharp raps coming from under the floorboards at my feet. Mitch and I both felt that the scraping and shuffling noises that accompanied our trans-domestic journeys were unnerving enough that we tied a broom to a hook in the ceiling between the to houses in order to alert the other of a friendly (and non-spectral) arrival. Seconds later, there were shuffling footfalls on the stairs and the door creaked open, allowing the smell of warm toast to flood the kitchen, followed soon by Mitch and his tray.
The sight of Mitchell Berenson could inspire maternal instincts in a stone. He is small and impossibly thin--not rakish, not wiry--just about as lean as it would seem possible to be and still remain functioning. In fact, he eats more than I do, but somehow it never seems to be enough to get him to cast a shadow. He has wide blueish-gray eyes that always seem somewhere between giggling and weeping, a smile that makes him look positively angelic, and a head of blackish hair that has a personality unto itself and, at the current moment, was swarming over to the left side of his head in a damp, tangled mess. He was wearing a pair of dark jeans that were held on by a belt with makeshift holes bored along its length and a bleu sweater that probably would have fit me well. On him, it was engulfing.
"How did the practice go?" I asked, snatching the topmost piece on the stack and going to work with the butter and jam.
"Amazing. Well, I mean, I've still got ages to go, but the piece! Aw Kip, it's incredible!" He sat folded himself up at the table with a dancer's grace and began slathering. "It was written for Kiesler's fiance and it--this sounds absurd, but--you can hear the love in it." A shower of crumbs scattered on the table.
"Sounds amazing," I said, putting the coffee pot in front of him and taking a stool opposite.
"It is. I worked with a guy once--brilliant. A total drunk, but brilliant all the same. Anyway, he was convinced that love was like energy. You know, in science, how, like, energy can never be decreased? It's always there, just not always--in motion, like?" I nodded, trying to keep up with the speed of his monologue. "Anyways, he used to say that when a piece was written, the emotion that went into it, the love, the anger, the hate--well, you know what I mean. Anyway, that whatever inspired the piece went into it and became part of it. That it became the energy of the piece, like. And when you play it, that energy is what drives it."
"That's beautiful."
"I know. Unfortunately, he was completely out of his head on bourbon when he told me that, so I don't know how much stock to put in it, but it's a nice story all the same."
"I like it, bourbon or otherwise."
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