The old woman stopped spinning and took a couple moments to regain her equilibrium.  “You’re talking about the song, I assume?”

“Of course.”

“Well, let’s find out.  Run into that wall.”

He stared at her.  She stared back, seemingly watching for some kind of response.  She didn’t get one, though; he simply stared right back, wondering when his life would start making sense again.

The old woman broke the silence.  “Hear anything?”

“No . . .”

“Then I guess you’re free.”

He searched the corners of his mind, but there was no trace of the Song of Mastery.  Then, unable to restrain himself, he raised his flute to his lips, and there it was again—not a series of notes but a series of breaths and finger patterns.  He lowered the flute, and once again it was gone.

“There must have been a better way to test it than that.”

She shrugged.  “I still don’t know how it got you in the first place.  How am I supposed to know when it wears off?”

“I’m not really free, you know,” she said, while Peter was still trying to come up with an appropriate farewell.  “I’m not handcuffed to a garbage can anymore—and don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for that.  But I’m still stuck in here.”  She lifted her hands to encompass all of Simon Park Station.

“Show me,” Peter said, before his brain could catch up with his tongue.

“What?”

“Show me that you’re really trapped here.”

“You’re seriously asking a fragile old woman to throw herself against an invisible wall?”

It did sound cruel.  She had caused him a fair amount of suffering that day, but he wasn’t interested in revenge.  The woman was right: he had to see it to believe it.  “Just once.  And anyway, you just told me to run into a wall.  It’s only fair.”

“If I do, will you agree to help me?”

“Sure.”

More often than not, it is the shortest words that are the most life-changing.

The Wordsman is taking a sick day.  KYPC will be back next week.

“My hero.”

Peter grinned sheepishly.  “I think real heroes don’t need a police escort when they rescue the damsel in distress.”

“I was talking to the police officer, actually.”

“Oh.”  The grin disappeared.

Officer Escobar, standing at the same respectful distance from the woman as he always had, had not grinned sheepishly since he was fifteen years old.  Nor was he known as much of a blusher.  And, in fact, he did neither of these things.  But he still turned away, just to be safe.

CLICK.  The handcuffs were off.  The woman stood up, her unpleasant garment brushing past Peter’s face.  She stretched, causing her body to make a series of unpleasant-sounding SNAPs and CREAKs that were not entirely different from the noise it had made when Peter turned the key in the tiny lock.  No matter how painful the stretch sounded, however, the old woman appeared to enjoy it immensely.

Peter snatched key and handcuffs from the ground.  He wanted to be rid of them as soon as possible, and it wasn’t like he was busy being showered with praise.  He brought them over to where the policeman had posted himself and deposited them in his hands.  “Thank you.”

Escobar nodded gruffly.  He wanted to stay longer, to see what the woman would do.  But it appeared that she was fully occupied savoring her newfound freedom, and it didn’t look like she was going to do anything of interest for a while.  Besides, he had other things to take care of, such as figuring out how he would explain—or, preferably, not explain—the role he had played in setting loose the woman Officer Tang had called, “the Arrest of the Century.”

He tipped his cap, said, “Ma’am” in perhaps the most business-like voice he had ever used in his entire life, and departed.

Peter would have liked to take off, too, but he had no choice.  There was something he had to find out.

He returned to the pillar, where the woman was doing some kind of victory dance.  “So, you’re free.  Am I?”

He wasn’t big on revenge, really.  He just respected the System.  The System was what allowed him to get away with doing as little work as he did.  The System meant that the men and women in blue represented authority, and if you crossed them, then it was your funeral.  So people didn’t cross them . . . at least, not much.  But if you found a squirrel trying to scamper away with a set of police keys, and then, shortly afterward, a boy trying to catch up with it, and you let them go without punishment, then the System would start to break down.  If the System broke down, Officer Escobar’s job would get a lot harder.

“Sorry,” he said, and he truly was.  “But I’m going to need to take down your name.”

The boy sighed, as if he had been expecting this ever since he had been led into the dull yellow brick room with the fairly obvious two-way mirror.  “Peter Hamlin.”

Escobar froze.  It had been a day of remarkable coincidences already.  Could this possibly be one more?  “Is your mother . . . Joan Hamlin?”

The boy raised his head.  He had the look of someone who has told himself he isn’t going to let anything else surprise him that day but has just failed to not be surprised.  “Yes . . .”

Escobar became a scale.  In each hand, he held something that he believed he could not do without.  For a long minute, the hands remained in balance.

The scale tilted.  “You’re free to go,” Officer Escobar heard himself say as he passed the squirrel across the table.

The System was all well and good, but he could never cause Joan Hamlin to suffer.

Peter took the panicking squirrel and stood.  He walked to the door slowly, as if he thought one misstep could land him in trouble deeper than he had ever imagined.

“Wait,” said Escobar.

The boy’s eyes closed regretfully.

Escobar really wasn’t trying to be cruel; he was just wrestling with the decision.  He knew that it was against regulations.  He knew that Officer Tang might very well murder him for it (she would say it was justified).  But he saw an opportunity to truly help someone in need, and those don’t come along very often, no matter what your job is.

“Now . . . is there anything I can help you with?”

Officer Escobar was not having a great day.  Started too early.  Not enough donuts at the station (and those that were there were of criminally poor quality).  Too many actual crimes.  Not enough down time.  Too much heat.  Not enough fans.

Officer Escobar was not having a great day, but he was willing to admit the possibility that other people were having worse ones.  Take Officer Tang, for example.  She had burst into the precinct mid-morning demanding assistance in arresting someone.  That was astonishing in and of itself, for Tang never asked for anybody’s help for anything, but then when she started describing the situation, it got downright ludicrous.  A person that physically could not be moved from the scene of the crime?  Come on.  No one believed her, but that wasn’t about to stop her.  She tried to convince anyone and everyone she could find—sergeants, lieutenants, the captain, the coroner, homicide detectives, ballistics specialists.

Escobar, luckily, was lowly enough to escape her notice, so he spent much of the morning watching her running around the building yelling at people.  Last he heard she had gone off to the courthouse to try to get the judge to order her arrestee to be removed.

Then there was this kid.  Escobar had taken him into an interrogation room—not because he wanted to scare him, but just because that was where there was space—sat him down, and asked him to explain himself.  Finally Peter was in a position where he felt he had to tell the whole truth.  And I mean the whole truth.  He told him about pouring coffee in his cereal, the muted wrath of Mr. Abrahamson, accidentally stumbling on a couple of sites that may have been pornographic when searching the term “earworm,” being silently mocked by Sourdough for the decay of his musical talent, and stealing a nickel from a saxophone player.  Officer Escobar had heard of bad days before; he had participated in a number himself.  But this one stretched the boundaries of the imagination.

And yet he believed every word.  When the boy mentioned the old woman in the subway station, on the outside, Escobar simply nodded.  On the inside, he jumped out of his shoes.  He had kept his vow to avoid Simon Park Station all those months, but he had never truly forgotten the old woman.  So she had found her champion.  He looked like kind of a mess.  Escobar, in one of his more philosophical moments, supposed that real champions often do.

Even more shockingly, Officer Tang’s story all of a sudden made perfect sense.  In her frantic ravings, she had somehow neglected to mention the age, gender, or location of the person she was trying to apprehend.  If she had, she might have secured assistance sooner.

Escobar wanted to find out more about the woman, for the bits of information he picked up from Tang and the kid really raised more questions than they answered.  And he wanted to let the kid go.  He hadn’t done anything seriously wrong.  But there were some crimes that even Officer Escobar could not overlook.  If you did something to a fellow citizen, he might glance the other way—hey, maybe that person deserved it.  But if you did that same thing to the police, then you would be introduced to justice of the biblical variety.

He’s taking too long.

Peter was not looking at his watch, so he did not know that it had taken him less than five minutes to decide that the hastily laid scheme of squirrel and man had gone awry.

He was standing across the street from the station, trying to look nonchalant, and therefore assuming that he looked like he was plotting a crime no less serious than high treason.  Four minutes and thirty-seven seconds earlier, he had arrived outside the building and thought at the squirrel: Go inside, get the key, and come back here.  He even imagined a key as he thought it, just to be sure, though it was only after sending in Rocky that he realized he had no idea what a handcuff key looks like, or whether it would bear any resemblance to the common house key he had visualized.

Now he was plagued by regret, that uniquely horrifying blend of remorse and anticipation known only to a secret admirer who has dropped a letter with his name on it into the mailbox and immediately afterward starts trying to jam his arm into its depths, desperate to take it back.  He tried willing Rocky to return, but the squirrel would not appear at the open window where he had originally darted in.  Maybe he was out of range.  Or maybe . . . something worse.

“They can’t arrest a squirrel” was sounding dumber by the second.  He wondered what he might do if he stumbled on a small animal stealing his keys.  And what if they weren’t just keys to a house or an apartment, but something far more important?  What if the squirrel evaded capture and was out of reach?  What if I had a gun . . .?

Peter wasn’t about to run off and join PETA, but he still would have felt bad if the squirrel came to harm and it was his fault.  He felt a strange bond of kinship with the rodent; they were both being manipulated by the same evil song.  And then, there was always the risk that the cops would see Rocky and think the same thing Peter did: that no normal animal would come in to steal keys if it was acting on its own free will.  And then they would look out the window and see the guy across the street, with his hands in his pockets, whistling, as if whistling could make a person look innocent anywhere outside of a 1930’s cartoon . . .

His mind was made up.  He was going in after him.  Leave no ma—no squirrel behind.

The man at the front desk inside was thoroughly distracted by the telephone and might not have noticed Peter even if he shouted.  Peter considered this a stroke of luck.  He did not want to talk to anyone, because he could not imagine that conversation going well (“Excuse me, have you seen my squirrel?”)  He crouched down, both to avoid being seen and so that he could get a better view of the station as Rocky would see it.  Where could he have gone?

He crept past the desk and into a hallway, already preparing the defense that there were no signs explicitly telling him that he couldn’t go that way (at least, none that he could see from his squirrel’s-eye-view).  He may have been talking to himself.  When you’re sneaking around the police station looking for your lost squirrel, there really isn’t any point in pretending you’re not insane anymore.

A human can imitate a squirrel’s view of life by bending the knees and leaning forward, but he can only go so far.  The vast differences in stature remain.  Because it is small, a squirrel can be low to the ground and still look up.  Peter was all but forced to look down in that position, which was probably why he crashed into a pair of legs only a minute or two into the search.

After noting the unmistakable dark blue of the uniform pants, Peter looked up, past a respectable gut, into a wide, light brown face with receding black hair and a rather unruly mustache.  The face looked neither enraged nor pleased; it was simply weary.

Well, Peter thought, the 5% of his brain that wanted to remain optimistic somehow drowning out the 95% that wanted to run, at least that solves one problem.

“Does this belong to you?” the officer asked.  He was holding a frantic Rocky by the tail.

Peter glanced around to make sure no one was watching.  Then he bent down and whispered to the squirrel, “Run up that tree.”

The squirrel turned around and bounded up the tree like it was being chased by a rabid dog.  It settled on a low branch and looked back at Peter with that same focused stare.  It was almost eerie, like watching a swarm of gnats fly in a single-file line.

He refused to be convinced by this demonstration.  Running up trees was something that squirrels did all the time.  It was entirely possible that it had decided to race up there on its own, and that the timing was a mere coincidence.  In order to prove it, he would need to convince the squirrel to do something it would never do normally.  Since Simon Park already had one resident who had made a name for herself shouting at trees, Peter chose to think his next command rather than say it out loud: Sing the alphabet song.

The squirrel did not open its mouth and start belting out, “A, B, C.”  It simply continued to stare at him.  It may have just been his imagination, but he thought he could see it shaking its tiny head slightly, as if to dislodge a pesky insect . . . or piece of music.  But the test was a failure.  Peter assured himself that his mind was simply running wild, and that he had no ability to command small rodents to do his bidding.

Unless, he thought, now playing the devil’s advocate’s devil’s advocate (as only a lawyer can), it just can’t obey commands it can’t comprehend.

Peter wrestled for a while with the idea of a command that would be meaningful to the squirrel but still be something it would never do on its own.  After rejecting a number of possibilities as too cruel, he noticed one of his fellow street musicians a little ways along the path.  He was a saxophonist, but at the moment he was taking a food break instead of performing.  The man was eating a large sandwich and making an extremely slovenly job of it: scraps of lettuce and other vegetables, bits of bread, and slivers of meat were scattered around, in, and on his open case.

Run over there, jump into the case, and bring back a coin—one of those shiny metal round things, Peter commanded, before he even really knew why.

As the squirrel dashed off, he realized that there was probably more to the order than a subconscious desire to commit petty theft.  No ordinary animal, he reasoned, would ever run into a veritable feast like that and come back bearing one of the few items that could not possibly be construed as food.

He watched the squirrel—which he had decided to name Rocky—race over and leap into the case.  The musician was distracted trying to negotiate his way through a large meatball and noticed nothing.  A moment later Rocky bounded back, bearing in his (or her—Peter had no idea how to tell with squirrels) mouth a small, shiny metal round thing.  He reached down.  It was a nickel.  He felt a little sorry for the musician.

Then Peter laughed.  What a joke!  The song worked exactly as the woman said it would, but he was so bad at it that it only worked on small animals.  “What am I supposed to do?” he muttered.  “Have this squirrel break into the police station and—?”

It was then that Peter had the stupidest idea he had had all day.

He had had plenty of bad ideas so far, ranging from the inconsiderate (practicing the Speech before sunrise) to the harmless and silly (looking up old annoying commercial jingles on YouTube) to the downright suicidal (running across busy streets without looking), but none of those had been quite this stupid.

It started with a simple thought—They can’t arrest a squirrel—and ended with an image of Rocky bounding toward him, holding a key just as skillfully as he had held the coin a moment earlier.

Even stupider, however, was that he decided to go for it.  Those that knew him—family, friends, less-tipsy coworkers—would have never expected such as decision out of Peter Hamlin.  Then again, maybe it wasn’t really Peter Hamlin calling the shots.  After all, the real Peter Hamlin slept on a normal schedule, worked eight-to-four (three on Fridays), and was a law-abiding citizen.  This man, on the other hand, was manipulated by sounds that existed only inside his head, fraternized with undesirables who got in trouble with the police, had already broken several laws (most of them traffic laws) that day, and commanded the loyalty of squirrels.  Perhaps the stupidest idea of all would be thinking that these two were, in fact, the same person.

Before he could talk himself out of it, Peter—or someone who looked a lot like him—set off for the police station.

The saxophonist had finished his late lunch/early dinner and promptly returned to plying his trade.  He did not even bother to rinse his mouth first, causing woodwind teachers everywhere to wince at the damage he was doing to his reed (they may or may not have been comforted to learn that the reed was already well past its prime and smelled strongly of baloney).  While his attention had been elsewhere for the food break, during the performance his eyes were fixed on his case, which was why he saw a squirrel run up, drop in a coin, and sprint away.

“Damn,” he said, pausing in astonishment.  “I’m even better than I thought.”

It was not the most annoying thing that had happened to him that day.  It was not even the most annoying music-related thing.  But it bothered him.  So he stood there and played the Song of Mastery over and over again, not because he was trying to manipulate anyone’s mind, not because he was trying to rescue the old woman, but simply because he wanted to get better at it.

And he did.  The eight years’ worth of memories hadn’t been erased; they were simply buried and took time to dig up again.  Gradually it came back to him: the flow of his fingers, the positioning of his mouth, how and when to breathe—soon he was doing these things almost as naturally as, well, breathing.  After an hour or so, he even began to think that maybe the song was good enough to take over someone else’s head—in a crazy, alternate fantasy universe, that is.

Completely out of breath from his first extended performance in six years, Peter lowered the flute and looked up.  It was getting late: only an hour or two left before the sun started to sink behind the roof of Simon Park Village.  A quick scan of the park showed that no one seemed to be suffering from the effects of his song, though he realized that even when the old woman had done it, he had been a ways away before picking up the horrid tune, and presumably she was better at this than he was.  He decided to pack it up, go back down to call the woman’s bluff, and then, with any luck, go home and get some sleep.

And he might have done just that if he hadn’t happened to look down and see the squirrel staring up at him.

Being watched by a squirrel was nothing new to Peter.  He had been observed by many before.  He had even once in college gone squirrel fishing, which is a lot like regular fishing in that you drink beer and don’t catch much.  But the look in this squirrel’s eye was different.  Peter didn’t even know that squirrels could have looks in their eyes.  It was staring so intensely, so fixedly, refusing to be distracted by anything else.  It was, Peter thought, waiting for something.

“No . . .”

He walked toward the subway station entrance.  The squirrel followed him.  He stopped.  It stopped.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Simon Park was not much of a park.  It was roughly the length of a football field and surrounded on all sides by five-story apartment complexes.  It had most of the things a park was supposed to have: grass, trees, benches, paths.  Sometimes the benches were even located beneath the trees.  But it was so blatantly artificial that it failed to create the image of nature springing to life and standing against the harsh wilderness of the city; instead it felt more like they had simply painted the concrete green.  It was not a place you would go to take a walk on a weekend afternoon or sit down and read a book in the gentle breeze—it was the place you took your dog to do its business, the extra block you had to walk to get to the subway station.

But people did go there, even if only out of necessity, and so, like all public spaces in the city, it had street performers.  The saxophonist and the guitar player with their open cases.  The infinite number of different kinds of drummers.  The raving lunatic who gets his clothes from the dumpster, his news from The Onion, and thinks that standing on top of things and shouting like he’s in a war zone makes him smarter than you.  All the truly talented artists went to Hayes or Morrison Park, where there were larger crowds and annual festivals (the only holiday regularly celebrated at Simon Park was Day After Monthly Dog Waste Pickup Day).  But they weren’t terrible, either—depending on whether or not you thought the lunatic was funny—and people occasionally tossed them a dollar out of common decency.

Peter was giving these performers a bad name.

He found himself frequently wishing that he had no audience.  On the one hand, this would mean that he would have no way of testing the efficacy of the Song of Mastery and that the entire exercise would be pointless.  On the other hand, he was 80-90% convinced that his performance was pointless anyway, and if no one was around, at least it would be less embarrassing.

Unfortunately, he never got his wish.  The afternoon was growing later, and the thousands of people who lived in the immediate vicinity of the overblown courtyard were emerging from the station in a steady stream.  Approximately half of them passed by where he was standing.  Most ignored him.  Some made a sour face.  A few even flipped him a dollar, though at least one woman seemed to be indicating with her expression that she was paying him to stop.  Not a single person stopped suddenly, turned toward him with a dazed expression, and asked, “What is thy bidding, my Master?”

He kept on playing, perhaps for over an hour.  Most of the time, however, he was not doing it for the old woman; he was doing it for the flute.

For eight years Peter Hamlin had played the flute.  He first picked it up in fifth grade, almost by accident; most of his friends at the time decided to join the band, and flute was the only instrument that the Hamlin family happened to already own.  Despite this whimsical beginning, though, he kept at it, and from middle school to high school there was not a day when that flute case was not in his backpack.   He practiced an hour . . . okay, half an hour a day, took weekly lessons, joined all the various musical extra-curriculars like Marching Band and Orchestra Winds.  He got pretty good at the flute.

But he was never great.  Throughout his musical career, it was clear to Peter that he was above average but not sensational, a distinction that was made all the more clear when his younger sister picked up the trumpet and took to it like it had always been there.  He was in the top band at every level but he was never first chair.  And Peter Hamlin—especially Peter Hamlin the high schooler—had no interest in devoting his energy to an activity where he could not be outstanding.  Music looked good on applications, but he saw no future in it.  So, when he went to college, he dropped the flute and never looked back . . .

. . . until that afternoon when he had stood in his kitchen and struggled to get through “Hot Cross Buns,” a song so easy that you could leave your flute outside on a windy day and it might get played by random chance.  Peter knew that he had never really excelled at the flute.  No one had ever told him—even jokingly—that he should make a career out of it.  But he had been better than this, for god’s sake.

“I’ll bet you spent most of the morning trying to figure out what was going on,” she continued.  “Doing whatever you could to find out what had been done to you.”

“I was looking for a cure.”

“You were looking for an answer.  And you won’t be satisfied until you get one.  Suppose the song just disappeared right now and never bothered you again.  Would you really be okay with that?  Being better but having no idea why, or even what was wrong in the first place?”

“Fine,” he snapped.  The woman’s pressing was starting to get almost as annoying as the earworm.  Of course, he could have just walked away, but then he would be taking the risk of having the vile tune return.  More important even than that, though, was the fact that walking away without saying anything would have been equivalent to admitting that he had lost the argument.  Peter Hamlin did not like to lose, and the thing he hated to lose above all others was an argument.

The woman didn’t even smile.  The experience with the police officer had taught her that gloating brought nothing but trouble.

“But how can you teach me, anyway?  You just said you’ve never played the flute.”

“I can sing.”

“That’s it?  You’re just going to sing it to me, and then I’m supposed to play it back?”

“It should work, if you’re any good at listening.  Now, I shouldn’t even have to do that, because you think that you’ve heard the song many times already.  But you can’t remember it, even if you try, can you?  Gee, that’s awfully mysterious, don’t you think?”  As it turned out, the woman was not as good at not gloating as she thought she was.

“Hang on.”  Peter turned around to look at the crowd of subway passengers, which he had all but forgotten were there (they had been ignoring him, too, so it was all fair).  “What if they hear you?  Will they be . . . affected?”

She shook her head.  “It doesn’t work like that unless you’re doing it intentionally . . . uhh, most of the time,” she added when Peter gave her a dirty look.  “And I wasn’t singing that time, anyway!  I just hit you.”

“Yes, that continues to be a very comforting thought.  Let’s just get this over with.”

The woman took a deep breath.  Peter expected to hear an angry, violent noise, like a cross between the buzzing of a swarm of hornets, cannon fire, and a traffic jam’s worth of car horns, but what the woman sang was calm, gentle, even beautiful.  He began to suspect that her claim of “I can sing” had been a significant understatement.  Still, the tune was immediately recognizable as the one that had nearly driven him mad that morning.

“Now you try.”

So he did.  What he played was the Beherrschunglied, in the same way that a toddler can pile a bunch of yellow Legos in a vaguely triangular shape and call it the Great Pyramid.  The woman, who had never been a music teacher, did a poor job of concealing her disappointment.

“I told you this wouldn’t work.”

“No, no, you’ll be fine!” she said, in the voice of someone who knows a project has to succeed only because she has invested too much for it to fail.  “You just need a little practice, that’s all.  Just, uh, try it a few more times until you get the hang of it.  But . . . maybe you should do it outside.  You know . . . there are fewer people out there, so . . .”

Peter walked off, saving the woman from having to come up with a logical ending to her suggestion that didn’t involve telling the truth, which was: “I don’t want to listen to you anymore.”  He glared at the flute.  “I used to be able to play you,” he muttered grumpily as he went up the stairs.

The woman watched him go.  Her spirits, temporarily raised by the thought of actually getting out of there, were slowly sinking back down below ground.  The boy was right, of course; there was no way this plan could work.  The Beherrschunglied was a fearsome weapon, but it was only as good as the person who wielded it.  For example, an above-average rendition would be required to control Peter Hamlin, at least on a day when he was well-rested and in full possession of his mental faculties.  Legends spoke of the song’s ability to sap the will of entire armies, though such a feat would require a performance the likes of which had never been heard on Earth.  The way he had just played, she figured he would be lucky to get a couple of blades of grass to bend.