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For the first time in so long I was again with my double bass. There it was, propped up on Dr. Sibinović’s desk. Heckler and Koch left me on the chair—free of constraints. Quietly they withdrew from the doctor’s office and shut the door behind them. Remember this instrument? I was confused by the doctor’s question, while she stood there, arms crossed. Of course I remember it, I said, that’s my old Gasparo. What makes you think this double bass is yours? Don’t they all look the same? pressed Dr. Sibinović. Sure, at first glance, but when you become one with them, you realize that each bass has a personality of its own, so to speak. Does that depend on who’s playing it, or is their personality something particular to them? They do possess something special but over time the something changes, depending on who the musician is who’s playing it, I answered. So does it have a memory? Dr. Sibinović was in fine fettle, as if on the offensive after our previous session. Without stopping to take a breath she fired off question after question, like she’d been storing them up for days. A memory? I repeated her question, quizzical. I'm not sure, exactly, but it may have markings. Markings? she asked. What markings? Well, here, my bass has a scratch on the neck, on the back, as if someone nicked it with a knife. Where’s that from? I bought it used at a Frankfurt shop in June of 2002, not far from the main train station. Do you have any idea whom it used to belong to? I inquired, I said, but no luck. Probably several different people, because it was built before the Second World War, though it was in good condition. Why choose this one? That was the hardest question, because on the summer afternoon when I walked into Kontrabass-Atelier with my friend Darko, proprietor of Jazz Cafe Bar in Frankfurt, and first handled my future instrument, my feeling was one of a mystical moment of recognition. Darko laughed when I told him what I’d felt while eyeing the line of the neck through the scroll. It was flawlessly straight, the fingerboard slid under my fingers, the strings thrummed, the Gasparo’s angled tailpiece was like new. Do you suppose that’s how Scott LaFaro felt when he came across his 1825 Abraham Prescott, eh? asked Darko, winking. If he didn’t, fuck it, he’d never have chosen it, I said after I’d drawn the bow a few times over the strings. The sound was clean, the volume full, it didn’t even matter that I was standing there in the corner of the instrument shop. Suddenly I felt that with this instrument I could rule the room with all its hidden sounds, which would have to intermingle through my playing. But, hey, Darko hastened to remind me, LaFaro didn’t end up having very much time with his bass, you know? Less than two years, I said after a pause, that’s how long he had. The bass he’d played before was stolen from his car, and then at last he found his Prescott. No small thing, if only for those two years. Think so? added Darko, doubtfully. The two albums will be with us for all time, I said, resting my cheek on the neck of the bass, Sunday at the Village Vanguard and Waltz for Debby, both with Bill Evans. Did you know Evans composed Waltz while he was in the army ten years before that? interrupted Darko, who was consumed by a passion for collecting trivia from the lives of jazz musicians. Those years gave him dreadful nightmares. What did he dream? I asked. Always the same thing, he answered, that he was drowning in a lake. Later he said he’d heard Stravinsky in the dream and he’d adored Stravinsky as a kid. He sat down and wrote Waltz for Debby and dedicated it to his little niece because she reminded him of his mother who was a Russian from Zakarpattia. If you listen to Petrushka, you’ll hear that Evans was the Stravinsky of American jazz. But only in June of 1961, when LeFaro played the bass on Waltz, ten days before he died, did Evans realize this was the sound he’d been dreaming.

You haven’t answered my question of why you chose this particular double bass, Dr. Sibinović brought me back, as she hoisted my instrument clumsily. She stood there in front of me, plucking the strings one by one. All that could be heard were muffled groans coming from inside this instrument that was now dead to me. I chose this one, I said, because it resembled me. You? Yes, me. It was my height, a ¾ size, it was an ocherish color, spilling over to darker tones around the F-holes. These here, pointed Dr. Sibinović. Yes, these give access to the soul of the instrument. Some bass players call it that. In fact those are the openings of the resonant chamber, the color of your sound depends on their shape, your jazz on the alacrity of your fingers, but the warmth of the tones, if there is warmth, comes from your heart. Show me, she said. What? I was confused. Like this, said Dr. Sibinović, come and stand here behind me. Ah, I see, I said and rose with heavy heart from the chair. When I came near her I picked up on her smell the way I had the first evening after I arrived at the Clinic. She was too short for my bass, so she had to lift her left arm much higher than would do for playing and would tire a musician. I stood behind her and tried awkwardly to take hold of the instrument without touching her. At one point my left arm was above hers on the neck, while I didn’t know what to do with my right. Show me what the right arm does, ordered Dr. Sibinović, so without meaning to I moved a step closer, feeling the warmth of her thigh on my leg.

Again I fingered the strings, first one, then all four, without plucking, slowly, to drink in every unevenness under the tips of my fingers. I’d forgotten that feeling that used to matter more to me than the music—being with the instrument and awaiting the moment when the music inside me moved my fingers. Now I was standing in this bizarre position, my arms around Dr. Sibinović, who was stubbornly trying to do something to my fingers, but in vain, because this was the last thing in the world I wanted to be doing here, with her, in the gloom of the doctor’s office. Show me the basic positions, she said. Is this part of the therapy? I asked, pulling my head back from the back of her head, which was brushing my chin. It’s all part of therapy, she answered after a short pause. So are you taping all this on a hidden camera? I laughed. Yes, everything, she said, pressing the fingers of my right hand to the strings. And you’re set up for sound? Sometimes I am. Have you equipped the electrotherapy room with cameras? I felt how she pulled away ever so slightly and then pushed back even harder against my chest. Yes. That room, too. I thought they were doing that without your knowledge, I said. Play, she ordered, give me the first position! Then she added: Therapy using electricity has never been abandoned . . . I can’t play, I answered, the electric shock really hurt me. It’s not the electric shock that hurt you, it’s your depression, I was compelled to intervene. And what a splendid job you did, too . . . Why say that? So many of the actors in Hollywood are on ECT therapy, she flashed me a wry smile, Heath Ledger was, and Catherine Zeta-Jones, Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford . . . Half of Star Wars was on ECT . . . Apparently Darth Vader was the only one who wasn’t, I interrupted her by disentangling my fingers from hers.

I wanted to pull back, but her remarks stopped me. I saw what happened to you after the ECT, she said in a cold voice. So you rewound the tape? I asked, holding myself upright by clasping the neck of the bass. I did, she answered, I rewound it and played it at a slower speed. This vindicates my diagnostic premise . . . Your premise? I asked, resting my fingers on the E and A strings. You still have the will to live, your depression is not yet at a terminal phase, despite your incident. You concluded this based on my erection? I asked sliding my fingers upward. Yes, exactly. You got it right after the ECT stopped . . . Do you remember what you were thinking? I extracted my hand and slapped the strings, and then twice rapped the body of the instrument with my knuckles. This bass, I said, isn’t played only with the fingers or across the strings. Its possibilities are huge . . . Who were you thinking of just then? repeated Dr. Sibinović, trapping my hand on the body of the bass. I don’t remember, I answered, wriggling out of her sweaty clutch. Therein lies the rub, she said, do you first have to remember so you can forget? To remember? I repeated, confused. I remember everything . . . A few big moments in life, she answered guiding my index finger along the rims of the F-hole. Like playing music. That’s impossible, Larisa, I said, surprising myself by addressing her as I did. Impossible, I said again, because there’s no music left inside me.

We stood there in silence, right by her desk, I was leaning on the bass, and she leaned on me. The desk lamp flickered off and on. From the hallway I heard someone’s footsteps that approached the door of the doctor’s office and then went still. I lost all sense of time, reunited with my instrument. This was happening in the wee hours of the night. At times like this somebody usually comes in, she said and pulled out from under me. When I gazed into her eyes, I saw she was completely poised and calm because she had done everything exactly as she’d planned. My every gesture and word were recorded. The rest of the night, she added, you’ll be spending with the EEG. I have to fully study your head. Then she adjusted her doctor’s uniform of green twill on which I only then noticed that the neckline was cut lower than earlier. Our eyes met for a moment as if she’d caught my last thought. We won’t be needing the instrument, for now, she said and went out into the hall. I lingered a bit longer with my bass. I felt weak in the elbows and knees. My instrument seemed to be feeling the same. What I really wanted to do was sink to the floor and recover from the therapy session with Dr. Sibinović which had tired me out this time. This was harder than the sounds she’d played for me before, I thought, listening to the hurried patter of the orderlies who were coming to fetch me.

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Under the headgear, the visor of which had been lowered again, I wore something resembling a sailor’s skullcap, but this one was outfitted with electrodes attached like moist tentacles to my scalp. Through them Heckler and Koch had injected a kind of jelly, and then they clamped the headgear on over it all. Instead of a desk lamp, they put a sort of blinking light on the doctor’s desk and pointed it at me. Because of the light I could see nothing but the frequent flashes, shifting in tempo and brightness. First close, then moving away and watching me from the deepness of metallic night. At times there was a change of color, a total of three—red, green, and yellow. First climbing upward high into the night, changing the order and pattern of the flickering, and then, as if on an immense wheel, circling back down, summoning the new guests to the ferris wheel to take their seats in the cabin, above which flickered the lights. Ivan, Ena, and I climbed into the first empty cabin, and into the next one jumped Nik, Grujić, and Bozsik, a jazz pianist and our guide around Budapest. We were tipsy, our concert at Jelen Bisztró on Blaha Lujza tér had just ended and the oxycodone–Jameson combo I’d ingested was taunting me to abandon my fear of heights. I settled in comfortably across from Ena and Ivan, flung my arms over the armrests and threw back my head so I could look out the back window and watch the ascent of the grand Budapest Eye up, up into the lit night. Ena laughed while Ivan regaled her with his escapades in the sex shops on Ferenc körút. The salesperson asked him what sort of dildo he was looking for, and he said that what he needed was one with flashing lights, all coated in powdered sugar. The salesperson told him they didn’t have any like that, but as far as the powdered sugar went, he could always ask at the next-door health-food store, and then sprinkle the sugar on any old dildo, if that’s what he liked. Or something else, maybe. There was an excellent Swiss ointment he could recommend, but Ivan wouldn’t hear of it because somewhere he’d read that the very kind of dildo he’d asked for was available in Budapest. He wanted to give it to Ena for her birthday, and she kept saying: you’re so vulgar . . . And rude, Mr. Tom Cat. Then she roared with peals of laughter that pounded on my temples as if they were tympani while the light of the metal colossus with cabins attached rose upward, which would, as they told us that evening at Jelen Bisztró, ascend to sixty-five meters at its highest point. And so it was. Our blue cabin climbed higher and higher with the clank of metal joints and music coming from below, where the bright-colored roofs over the kiosks began to look like mushrooms. I gazed out the cabin windows and saw we were already on a level with the roof of the well-lit Parliament in the distance. Lánchíd Bridge gleamed with its swaying chains and arches like a river divinity that had run aground on the Danube riverbank between Buda and Pest and had resolved to go no farther. Across the river, whose water levels had vastly risen and fallen that day, the Buda hills loomed with rooftops and the fortress, onto whose walls powerful spotlights cast skyward bundles of light.

If I were ever to do the music for a movie, I suddenly announced, then it would be slow like this wheel, but it would move upward steeply and gradually . . . Something like the intro to Sátántangó by Béla Tarr . . . Gradual daylight. I’d throw out the brass section. Only strings. First a guitar. Nik would definitely be up to the challenge, he loves Béla Tarr as much as I do . . . Ivan and Ena stared at me, flabbergasted, as if I’d fallen from the sky into the cabin smack dab in the middle of her thirtieth birthday bash. Who the fuck would ask you to do the music for a movie, snarled Ivan, pulling a bottle out of his backpack. The Jameson has really gone to your head, old man, he added and took a gulp. Ena sat on his lap and snatched a good swig of the whisky from him. She was wearing a silver ribbon around her head, tied on one side above the ear, so the longer end draped across her shoulder and slithered down through the neckline of her green blouse between her breasts. Gingerly Ivan teased the ribbon out and then went on to tickle her down her neck. What do you think, what do you suppose his movie thing would be called? he asked. What about Morning Wood, she said, pretending to fend off his hand. No, no, he corrected her, The Sound of Bullshit. Or Urge to Purge, laughed Ena. Look, what do you think, Ivan grew bolder, that people are such idiots they don’t see that what you’re playing is pure, unadulterated crap? A cheap copy of early Danielsson with two Mingus transitions, and sloppy at that. You didn’t even give the F-Quartet a chance at making a record for PGP, let alone for a better label. Come on, and when has any sort of serious review come out about our work in Vreme, or Danas, in Jutarnji or on Jazzin. Fine, so one did come out in the Politika magazine, where that critic hammered us for, as he put it, overthinking the bass improvisations. In other words you're rubbish . . . Ivan was really heating up. I hadn’t seen him in such a state in a long time. He only lost it like this when Ena pandered especially to him, as she had been doing over the last few days. No, no, Mr. Tom Cat, she said, don’t be so mean to our little buddy boy, I think PGP would have suited him to a T. Maybe he’d make an album called Who’s Fiddlin’ Over There. Or, better yet, Last Tango in Podunk. Ivan was already choking with laughter, and his eyes flashed as if any moment now they’d spew flames. He goes around thinking that any minute now they’ll tap him to record for ACT Music or Razdaz Recordz, but instead here he is playing in bars worse than Black Wave dives. Goulash Jazz, as boring as his Béla Tarr.

I am so fucking sick and tired of you! I yelled and kicked the cabin door. It popped open wide to the silhouettes of the night roofs. Ivan was still gasping with laughter, but Ena was suddenly grave, as if wanting to tell me “at last you’re showing signs of life.” I jumped up, grabbed drunken Ivan by the collar of his plaid shirt, and pulled him over. The old goat’s gone clear off the deep end, he chortled. Gently he swayed, as did the cabin where we all happened to be. Now we’ll see how many lives you have, Mr. Tom Cat! I said, edging him toward the open door. Reflexively he reached for the walls of the cabin that was swinging harder back and forth. Behind me, Ena suddenly screamed as if waking from a delirium. Are you insane? she shouted. What are you doing, you madman! You’ll kill us! But I no longer cared. I was imagining Ivan’s face as it went shapeless with panic while he plummeted to the kiosks below. I imagined how nice it would be if he were impaled on one of those upright posts that was part of the scaffolding peeking out from under the colorful awnings. Out of him would dribble all the bitterness and bile he’d been exuding ever since I met him. There hadn’t been a single day since then that he’d passed up the chance to rail at me, whether about money, or our working conditions, instruments, tours, my attitude toward him or the rest of the band, my habit of making decisions at key moments without running them by the others, the way I played my music, the strings on my bass, the music I composed alone or with Nik, though never with Ivan because Ivan had no talent for anything but plodding along on his sax. I’d had enough, especially of his foul, acerbic humor, now unbearable in tandem with Ena’s double entendre, unbearable like that evening at sixty-five meters above the Budapest pavement, from where I was longing to see the yellow splotch that would be left of him after he’d finally splatted on the concrete. Ena grabbed my shoulder and tried to pull me back in, but I didn’t budge. I was dead serious, while Ivan was still coming to his senses, cackling and raging, because he couldn’t grasp what was going on. And he hadn’t been any too smart the night before either, when I’d missed the door to my suite and walked straight into his, right next to mine. His door wasn’t locked so I didn’t look to check the number engraved on my key ring. Inside I was greeted by the dim light of the spacious suite, with a wall all in mirrors. Two steps in, I stopped and slumped against the wall of the small vestibule after I’d caught sight of the two of them mid-room. There he stood, stark naked, a black bowtie around his neck and a glass in hand, while Ena, in only fishnet stockings, garters, and a large red bow in her hair, was kneeling under him, her back to me. With the perfect curve of a treble clef, her spine bent down toward the garter belt, and from it emerged a long, sinuous tail, trailing down between her white buttocks, falling to the floor, curling in an eight-shaped squiggle ending in an arrow-shaped tip. I stood there as if hypnotized, at a loss for what to do, and stared at the scene in which what I saw was not the two of them but my ruin, assuming the shape of their conjoined bodies like a forgotten souvenir from one of those Greek coastal cities, where erotica of late antiquity could be bought on every street corner for a couple of euros. They were nothing but scenes lifted from antique vases, where, against the black horizontal background, cavorted insatiable satyrs and grinning nymphs, copulating by lakes, in caves, on cliffs, sometimes in a throng of many in the orgies happening at the climax of Dionysian ceremonies. Ivan might have noticed me in the mirror just then, or so I thought, and started giggling out loud, but actually this was him beginning to orgasm, he dropped his glass to the floor and gasped for breath as if choking. His mouth yawned wide, displayed his crooked teeth, and then he monotonously moaned and groaned. Slamming the door shut behind me, I left. Down I went to the lobby and ordered a drink. I believed they hadn’t noticed me, especially Ena, who was focused on other things. And sure enough, the next morning at breakfast we all sat around one table. Nik told us about his visit to the Terror Háza Museum. In the archival footage of Hitler’s arrival in Budapest, among the multitudes of hands raised in salute to the Führer, there was only one poor fellow in a wheelchair who failed to join the salute. When his wife noticed this, however, she was frightened and raised her unwilling husband’s paralyzed arm. Ena smiled wearily and bit into a slice of toast she’d spread with a thick layer of cream cheese, which in one place dripped onto her fingers. Catching my gaze across the table, she raised an eyebrow as if to ask: “So what are you staring at?” That was how she looked at me that whole day. That’s how I knew I’d ushered unnecessary friction into their relationship with my chance intrusion the night before. Ivan said not a word until we started playing the gig, and then he went on getting under my skin with needlessly long solos each time his turn came around.

That’s how things stood as the concert was winding down with our last song: My Favorite Things. This is a gift to Ena, Ivan announced before we began the song, for her birthday which she is celebrating in this magnificent city. The audience applauded. The lights flickered on the black and white tiles of the pillars that supported the Bisztró ceiling. Now we’re totally screwed, Grujić hissed to me as he spun his drumsticks. Nik moved closer to the microphone, and I moved to where he’d been standing. When the champagne cork popped loudly from the bottle at the bar, we started playing, worried about Ivan’s solo on the sax. Everything started slowing down as I plucked the strings, I felt I could trace the trajectory of the cork through the murky air of Jelen Bisztró. It bounced off one of the pillars and ricocheted off the wall, plunking into a glass of beer held by a very tall young man who was standing with a girl in an Indian dress. She burst out laughing. Bozsik slowly picked out the opening bars on the pianino, and I followed him, slowing more with each note, so in the end the Coltrane-esque intro became as expansive as Rákóczi Boulevard, along which we were planning to walk to the Budapest Eye after the concert. Night skulked in the corners, Jobbik sympathizers wearing camouflage pants and hoodies crouched by rubbish bins as Ena and I walked by. Do you know what jelen means in Hungarian? she asked, while tapping away on her phone. No clue, I said, probably not jelen, as in “deer” or Reh. Don’t be silly, she said glancing at me over the top of her phone, it means “the present,” Gegenwart if you like. I’d never have guessed, I said. The present is a time in which you don’t live, added Ena, jabbing me with her elbow as we walked. Why? I asked. Come on, tell me what things mean the most to you in life, she smiled. You mean things as objects? Or things, things in general? Okay, objects first, she said. Well let’s see, I took my time, the silver cigarette case I bought at a street market in Lvov is meaningful to me, then the Sony mp3 player I was given for New Year’s one year, a few garish pairs of socks I don’t wear very often, a first edition of Kind of Blue, which I came across at a Frankfurt used records store, a little rosewood figurine of a rhinoceros from Sithonia, and, of course, linzer tortes, if the jam is good and the pastry’s flaky. I simply remember my favorite things, sang Nik, and then I don’t feel so bad . . . What about you? I asked Ena, after her grimace suggested she was only partially satisfied with my answer. Oof, me, she said, rolling her eyes, that question was for you. But fine, this is a game . . . All sorts of things matter to me, you know. Like, for example, silver earrings with a mystical whorl, then another pair with a lazy blue cat, then a back tickler made of purple feathers, a book of poems by Charles Bukowski, and what else, maybe Grey December by Chet Baker. I also love the smell of early spring, when it is barely beyond winter but you feel it in your bones, you know, so powerfully, unmistakably . . . Those aren’t things any more, I said. Don’t nitpick, otherwise I’ll call the Jobbik pals from over there to kick your ass. You’d do that? You know I wouldn’t, she stopped for a moment, brushing my lower lip with her thumb. Except, except if . . . When the dog bites, went on Nik, when the bee stings, with a voice of resignation, when I’m feeling sad, for whom the most important things have lost all meaning, I simply remember my favorite things, and now he was floating among them, and then I don’t feel so bad. Unless it was a certain saxophone player in question, I winked at her. Fuck off, leave him alone already, snapped Ena, pointing me to a light in the distance, where we were supposed to turn off into our present.

A blow to my crotch brought me back to reality, and as I staggered back with Ivan, he lurched onto a seat in the cabin, and I onto Dr. Sibinović’s chair, who had finally switched off the blinking light on her desk, while continuing to follow the jagged graphs on her computer screen, which flowed by like a river, soundlessly, marking the bioelectric activity of my brain. You fell asleep, she said without looking up from the undulating encephalogram, but only briefly.