The Prelude

This was supposed to be the day of my brother’s concert. Instead, I was trying to figure out how a fish ends up on the sidewalk. One moment I was waiting while Agong walked his second lap around the park. The next, I was in the emergency room. Later they explained: I’d rolled backward down a slope in my wheelchair, dropped over the curb, and hit the pavement. A little girl had seen it. The gash in my head was from the impact. The wheelchair was found pinned under my knees. I remembered none of it. With Alzheimer’s, you rely on other people’s memories.

My son was there, on my right. He had just driven up from New York. My daughter and Agong were sent out—policy, only one visitor per patient. I apologized, of course. I’m always apologizing. Sorry for the inconvenience. Sorry to have fallen on concert day. My son shrugged. He said we could watch the Red Sox.

It was one o’clock. Then it was three. Middle of the eighth, the Red Sox were losing 2–1. The brace hurt more and more. I kept asking the nurses to take it off. I forgot I had already asked. They repeated their line: no, not until the fracture is ruled out. A fractured neck without a brace can lead to paralysis. Fine. Meanwhile, I kept asking.

Eventually they rolled me into the CT machine. Five minutes. Then we waited an hour for the radiologist. No fractures in the spine. The brace came off. Relief. Brief relief. Then another hour for him to look at my hip X-rays. The absurd part was that I had been walking back and forth to the bathroom the whole time. Obviously my hip was functional. But common sense has no visiting rights in the emergency room.

I asked to be discharged. The nurse shook her head: potassium too high. I had just had dialysis yesterday. It never ends. If doctors knew what they were doing, I wouldn’t be here. Their prescriptions destroyed my kidneys. Now I rely on dialysis three times a week. The doctor responsible died during early in the COVID pandemic. Convenient. No scapegoat. Or maybe that’s the point—they know exactly what they’re doing. Billing, testing, covering themselves. A medieval torture chamber of jabs, braces, X-rays. The worst torture is the waiting.

Again I asked: can I leave now? Please? My brother is playing downtown. More blood drawn. My son muttered that radiologists will soon be replaced by artificial intelligence. Instant scans, no waiting. He set a deadline: six o’clock, we break from the jail. We need to go to the concert. 

In the center of the ward the doctors and nurses gathered behind their computers. They had a clear view of us, and we of them. A kind of zoo, but reversed. I thought they had forgotten my hip films and walked over. They told me to sit. Always: sit, wait, we’ll let you know. 

Eventually I did make it to the concert. I wore a hat to cover the staple that closed the gash on my head. I asked my son if this would look ridiculous and he said, no you’ll look like Georgia O’Keefe. Jordan Hall, under the balcony. The light there is dim, and you can hear the creak of the old wood when people shift in their seats. My brother walked out, bowed quickly, and sat at the piano for the encore. He played Chopin’s Prelude 13.

The sound was clear, almost severe, and yet it felt like a letter that had been sent long ago and finally arrived. A message from 1835, traveling through his fingers, through our parents’ DNA, through me. I thought: the egg my brother came from was already in my mother’s body in 1918. Now it is 2025. The time lines don’t match, but they overlap. Chopin, 1835. My mother, 1918. My brother, and me.

The Prelude itself was written during Chopin’s stay in Majorca with George Sand. The whole set of twenty-four carries different moods—storms, prayers, fragments of weather. No. 13 is not stormy. It is calm, lyrical, something like a private thought said aloud. A pause in the middle of difficulty. My brother played it that way. The sound entered me, steady and unhurried, as if nothing had happened.