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One night when I was living in Portland I ended up at a drum circle with some strangers. I was young and trying to find community, so I slung my doumbek over my shoulder and walked across town.
I thought it was going to be a bunch of pagans who knew one another, but nobody spoke or acted known. The door was open on a big, bright living room crowded with chairs and people sitting on the carpet. The rhythm was already moving, so I found myself a spot and joined in.
My drumhead was tight but cold. My hands were soft and they ached before I'd spent an hour, going where the beat went. Folks smiled and made eye contact and we moved one another the way that an ongoing beat gets people to do. But I kept hearing this sound, like a far-away voice.
Nobody was singing, that I could see. There were no other instruments being played. We went on into the night, right up against propriety in a residential neighborhood. It was nearly midnight before I stood up with stinging fingers and looked for the source of the ghostly sound.
I could feel my pulse down every inch of my forearms. My hair vibrated with the voice of the big-bellied drum in the room as I picked my way across the seated people, inclining my head and listening for that faint hint of melody from nowhere.
Around a hallway corner, away from the crowd, I found it. A white upright grand was up against a wall, keys covered, no one sitting at it. I got close and felt the beat through my socks, carried across the wooden floors of the whole house.
The pianos strings weren't being hammered, but they were picking up the vibrations of the drums, ringing and singing inside the box the housed them, faint like a harp heard in a dream.
I laid my hands on it and felt the pulse from the other room in my beaten hands, felt the carrying notes from inside the piano. I turned around to discover a long-haired barefoot man looking me over, assessing what I was about.
I don't know if it was his house, his piano. We never spoke. He looked at my hands, looked at my face, and I saw realization hit him. He knew what I was hunting down. Maybe he was hunting, too. He put his hands beside mine. He smiled at me, and we nodded to each other.
The clock struck twelve and everybody packed up, put their shoes on. I caught a bus home, my warmed drum cradled in my lap. I never told anyone my name, never met anyone there. I couldn't remember, later, how I'd found out about that event. I couldn't find my way back to it.
I remember, from time to time, the faint and uncanny ringing of the piano that nobody was playing. It's technically a percussion instrument because the hammers hit the strings. But that's not the only way to make it sing.
