“We will today,” Jared says. “Today is magic.” And they do, right across from the Four Seasons.

Jared counts out the cash. Somebody has actually tossed in a fifty, maybe the beret guy mistaking it for a five. There’s over four hundred dollars in all. Jared has never had such a day. Never expected to. He sets aside Mac’s ten per cent (Mac is currently standing at the edge of the pond, feeding the ducks from a package of peanut butter crackers he happened to have in his pocket), then begins to divvy up the rest.

“Oh, no,” Janice says when she understands what he’s doing. “That’s yours.”

Jared shakes his head. “Nope, we split even. By myself I wouldn’t have made half this much even if I drummed until midnight.” Not that the cops would ever allow such a thing. “Sometimes I clear thirty bucks, and that’s on a good day.”

Chuck has the beginnings of one of his headaches and knows it’s apt to be bad by nine o’clock, but the young man’s earnestness makes him laugh just the same. “All right. I don’t need it, but I guess I earned it.” He reaches out and pats Janice’s cheek, just as he sometimes used to pat the cheek of the lead singer’s potty-mouthed little sister. “So did you, young lady.”

“Where did you learn to dance like that?” Jared asks Chuck.

“Well, there was an extracurricular called Twirlers and Spinners back in middle school, but it was my grandma who showed me the best moves.”

“You?” he asks Janice.

“Pretty much the same,” she says, and blushes. “High school dances. Where did you learn to drum?”

“Self-taught. Like you,” he says to Chuck. “You were great by yourself, man, but the chick added a whole extra dimension. We could do this for a living, you know it? I really think we could busk our way to fame and fortune.”

For a mad moment Chuck actually considers it, and sees the girl is, too. Not in a serious way, but in the way you daydream of an alternate life. One where you play pro baseball or climb Mount Everest or duet with Bruce Springsteen at a stadium concert. Then Chuck laughs some more and shakes his head. As the girl tucks her third of the take into her purse, she is also laughing.

“It was really all you,” Jared says to Chuck. “What made you stop in front of me? And what made you start moving?”

Chuck thinks that over, then shrugs. He could say it was because he was thinking about that old half-assed band, the Retros, and how he liked to dance across the stage during the instrumental breaks, showing off, swinging that mike stand between his legs, but that’s not it. And really, had he ever danced with such elan and freedom even back then, when he had been a teenager, young and limber, with no headaches and nothing to lose?

“It was magic,” Janice says. She giggles. She didn’t expect to hear that sound coming from her today. Crying, yes. Giggling, no. “Like your hat.”

Mac comes back. “Jere, we gotta roll or you’re gonna end up spending your take paying for my parking ticket.”

Jared stands up. “Sure you don’t want to change career streams, you two? We could busk this town from Beacon Hill to Roxbury. Make a name for ourselves.”

“I’ve got a conference to attend tomorrow,” Chuck says. “On Saturday I’m flying home. I’ve got a wife and son waiting for me.”

“And I can’t do it by myself,” Janice says, smiling. “It would be like Ginger without Fred.”

“I hear that,” Jared says, and holds out his arms. “But you have to get in here before you go. Group hug.”

They join him. Chuck knows they can smell his sweat—this suit will have to be dry-cleaned before he wears it again, and strenuously—and he can smell theirs. It’s all right. He thinks the girl nailed it when she used the word magic. Sometimes there is such a thing. Not much, but a little. Like finding a forgotten twenty in the pocket of an old coat.

“Buskers forever,” Jared says.

Chuck Krantz and Janice Halliday repeat it.

“Buskers forever,” Mac says, “great. Now let’s get out of here before a meter maid shows up, Jere.”

* * *

Chuck tells Janice he’s headed to the Boston Hotel, past the Prudential Center, if she’s going that way. Janice was, the plan had been to walk all the way to Fenway, brooding about her ex-boyfriend and muttering doleful shit to her purse, but she’s changed her mind. She says she’ll take the T from Arlington Street.

He walks her there, the two of them cutting across the park. At the head of the stairs, she turns to him and says, “Thank you for the dance.”

He gives her a bow. “It was my pleasure.”

He watches her until she’s out of sight, then heads back down Boylston. He walks slowly because his back hurts, his legs hurt, and his head is throbbing. He can’t remember having bad headaches like this in his whole life. Not until a couple of months ago, that is. He supposes if they keep up, he’ll have to see a doctor. He supposes he knows what this might be.

All that’s for later, though. If at all. Tonight he thinks he’ll treat himself to a good dinner—why not, he’s earned it—and a glass of wine. On second thought, make it Evian. Wine might intensify his headache. When he’s finished his meal—dessert definitely included—he’ll call Ginny and tell her that her husband might be the next one-day Internet sensation. That probably won’t happen, somewhere right now someone is undoubtedly filming a dog juggling empty soda bottles and someone else is memorializing a goat smoking a cigar, but it’s better to get out front with it, just in case.

As he passes the place where Jared set up his drums, those two questions recur: why did you stop to listen, and why did you start to dance? He doesn’t know, and would answers make a good thing better?

Later he will lose the ability to walk, never mind dancing with little sister on Boylston Street. Later he will lose the ability to chew food, and his meals will come from a blender. Later he will lose his grip on the difference between waking and sleeping and enter a land of pain so great that he will wonder why God made the world. Later he will forget his wife’s name. What he will remember—occasionally—is how he stopped, and dropped his briefcase, and began to move his hips to the beat of the drums, and he will think that is why God made the world. Just that.

Act I: I Contain Multitudes

1

Chuck was looking forward to having a baby sister. His mother promised he could hold her if he was very careful. Of course he was also looking forward to having parents, but none of that worked out thanks to an icy patch on an I-95 overpass. Much later, in college, he would tell a girlfriend that there were all sorts of novels, movies, and TV shows where a main character’s parents died in a car crash, but he was the only person he knew who’d had that happen in real life.

The girlfriend thought this over, then rendered her verdict. “I’m sure it happens all the time, although partners can also be taken in housefires, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, and avalanches while on ski vacations. To name only a few of the possibilities. And what makes you think you’re a main character in anything but your own mind?”

She was a poet and sort of a nihilist. The relationship only lasted a semester.