The man who could not speak had wandered in the snow for what seemed like centuries. When he finally arrived at the bar, he stepped inside swiftly and began gesturing at bottles of amber liquor. Although he could not speak, his drinking was unobstructed.
When the Jez arrived, Tom without words was preparing his instruments on the wooden stage. She was wearing a chartreuse nightgown that was far too elegant for the dive. She had been dropped off by her handler, a gaunt, shrouded man whose vulture nose stabbed out from beneath a hooded ebony sweatshirt. He stepped inside, walked the beauty to the wooden bar, and retreated to a bench in the shadows.
When Tom saw her, he leaned his cello against the slant of his thigh, crouched slightly, and began to play. He first said hello of course, directly to her. He then proceeded to describe the snow outside. He strummed of the long and frozen saga that a field mouse was experiencing underneath the very floorboards of this bar, the endless search for food and warmth and a continuation of the same. He spoke of those who knew the true meaning of January. He spoke of increasingly brittle whiskers, of a pale pink nose, and he asked her if she felt pity.
“Of course,” she shouted from the bar. The cello stopped on a dime. Patrons gasped and bobbed their heads in confusion. Mugs of beer were returned audibly to the glass surfaces of tables. “Of course I shall feel pity. But that does not mean I disagree with it. May it be gentle.”
It was a grace that she was not able to see the way the other men and women gaped. Their mouths dropped and sagged in confusion like baggy clothing. Somewhere in the darkness her handler twittered.
No, Tom replied with a few bracing high notes. There will be no mercy for the tiny and soiled rodents of the world. There will be death in the winter. There will be filth attached to the sides of their ribcage as they fail to crawl far enough. That must be accounted for. Shed tears, but it is the way things are.
She smiled, and obliged her consort. She imagined him in hale health, cleaving at logs outside a wintery cabin. She imagined him finding her buried beneath the leaves of an elm tree. She imagined anything. Liquid trickled from her eyes and down across her cheek.
Tom began a second movement. It was a trite topic, and one they had discussed before. In descending registers he made reference to his disability. He jangled and shook with anger as he spoke of the day of termination, that spring morning in the seventh year of his life when he lost the ability to generate words. When over a bowl of cereal shaped like letters, he lost his ability to form consonants of his own. He spoke of the decades of silence, of street corners and empty, leather instrument cases. He spoke of the day when he found a trampled ukulele in a subway car. He spoke of his christening, and his voice. He spoke of repeating the same sentences to strangers in stairwells of urine. Of saying, “Hey, come here, touch my arm. Hear this. Understand this,” over and over, and wanting just once, just once, for some sage or ocher faced monk of a man or woman to reach a bony arm from out of some tangle of rags and touch his weakened shoulder. He spoke of the confusion he felt at the end of days of work. Of not knowing what to do with himself. Of stumbling to the sorts of dark water holes that men seek to drink quietly and weep. He was never spoken to in these places, and it was a relief.
The lady at the bar had an inclination to shout, for she had her crutch as well, and every crutch has its very own ocean of shouting and punching and rage. But she knew how Tom without words would finish the song. She leaned her head towards the bartender. “Stay with it. It’s about to get good.”
The bartender grumbled in response and truly thought nothing.
Now Tom without words described a different sort of day, when from out of the rubble of subway grates, he asked the same question he always did. It might have been the case that the light was different on this day. That pillars of blank, yellow sun were penetrating more than usual, and that the smeared linoleum squares underfoot were experiencing photosynthesis for the first time. That roots beneath roots were devising an architecture fathomless. But in truth it looked all the same. It was indistinguishable from any of the other mornings on the subway corridor, and that’s why it was so surprising when, while reaching for an A chord to sound out a curlicue mark and articulate his familiar question, Tom felt a light pressure on his forearm and listened to the following words, delivered so lightly they might have been built out of fog.
“Why on earth are you asking? I’m a stranger. I don’t know you at all.”


