i.

Neiman has been everything Fletcher wanted him to be and more. He has bled for this. He is his only Charlie Parker, he is the best thing that has happened to him in sixty fucking years and if Fletcher is really really lucky this is what will put him on the map.

Neiman doesn't even care about what he's doing any more except as a means to pleasing Fletcher and doesn't that just cut him up inside. He doesn't feel like a person anymore, more like a mechanism, an instrument; and if Fletcher can keep him stowed safely away where no one else can meddle with him, tune him up wrong or leave a dent in him, so much the better. Fletcher would keep him in his pocket if he could, if only to cut down on the number of accidents.

It starts with something more or less true. On August the 15th, Andrew gets wasted for verisimilitude's sake and calls up Carl Tanner at his parents' house, on the landline. He must be packing up to leave; Neiman can hear his mom's disquieted grumbling as she passes the phone off -- stepmom maybe -- and Tanner's voice is throbbingly familiar, as he's probably ducking into a bathroom to hiss: "Neiman? Who the fuck gave you my number?"

"Listen. Listen. Okay, it's important, I know you hate me now for really good reasons but I need to talk to you."

"We're not going to talk. I don't want you calling me."

"It's about the folder."

"Oh, are you sorry? Too late now, dumbfuck, do you know what they were going to do to me if I didn't transfer--"

Guess he did switch to Columbia after all. Couldn't take the heat. Andrew rocks back against the frame to his bedroom door, and feels something uncoiling in his throat like a laugh. He channels it into further urgency, the strain of somebody being franker than he'd like to be.

"I didn't set you up. I didn't set anybody up, listen to me. I know it now, I know what happened. I think Fletcher did it." Urgent, rapid, a little slurred. Crazy enough that he'll be thinking about it for the rest of the night, maybe maybe maybe.

"You think Fletcher took my folder, not you. That's physically impossible, did you see how pissed he was? This is bullshit and you know it. You fucked me over, Neiman, don't try to pass the buck on this."

Andrew continues after a stony silence. "You remember how he got you into studio band? Did he ever fuck around with you, make you come early, tell you the wrong time?"

"He made me show up an hour early once." Pulling back, guarded. (Who the fuck ever heard of a college kid named Carl?) Mistrustful.

"When you were at Shaffer, did he ever --" Really pathetic now, Andrew's just going for it. His fingertips drag down his face, as if Tanner can see his performance and be moved by it, this performance of very specific misplaced bashfulness.

"Did he ever what?" Carl questions sharply, not vaguely.

"Did he ever -- you know what he called you, did he ever, did he make you--"

"No! Jesus Christ, are you fucking high? Fuck you, Neiman."

"Great. That's good, that's good, that's fine."

"You, you fucking-- you can go to hell."

So this is what Carl Tanner sounds like when he's not trying to ape his instructor's distinctive swearing cadences. Tanner hangs up first, and Neiman breathes to the night air, like a bubble of laughter, fuckin' asshole. He can't believe his luck. )

ii.

He's doing what he couldn't do at Dunellen, what he couldn't have done at JVC. Fletcher's ideal student is obedient, punctual, obsessively psychotically devoted to scrutinizing his performance for any vagaries in tempo that might bring Fletcher's wrath down on him like the hand of God. He predicts these anomalies before they occur and compensates for them. Broken bones are no excuse.

"He made me play with a broken hand once," Andrew says to would-be friend and foe alike when they're swapping Fletcher-is-an-asshole stories, letting his voice get tight and his face go white and stiff even as the words are a boast, a sharp shard of laughter. "He said he'd break the other one if I didn't go on." As lies go it's cheap and easy to disprove; the incident is part of his records at Shaffer now, incorporated into his time there like a foreign body, and if they can dig up Connolly and the cocksucker they can prove Fletcher never made him do anything. But Fletcher let him, Fletcher let him, Fletcher let him.

Fletcher's ideal student is inexhaustible. Fletcher's ideal student cannot be broken, cannot be hurt. Andrew comes back for more, and tries again harder. Andrew earns it. Andrew is excellent.

Fletcher's ideal student keeps going when it hurts. Andrew jerks him off with blistered hands and tries not to flinch when he touches him back. Andrew lets him fuck him raw without a condom and thanks him afterward, acts like he came because of Terence Fletcher's unrivaled sexual prowess and not because he's nineteen and has never been with a girl and would probably come in his pants if his phone rang in his back pocket.

All summer long, and after, Neiman performs the way he is told to perform -- in jazz clubs and jazz club bathrooms, in recording studios and concert halls. Neiman keeps up. Neiman's on his time.

One day Terence Fletcher will overhear somebody else in a practice room somewhere or playing in a filthy little club and he will be taken with him. He will like what he hears, never mind what it's attached to. But he will never have another Charlie Parker. No alternates.

Fletcher's apartment is about the saddest fucking thing he's ever seen and six months ago he'd have been in awe. It is empty as an eggshell except for jazz memorabilia and bookshelves, shabbily elegant, pre-wrecked for both their convenience. The odor of stale cigarettes pervades everything, though if Fletcher smokes he hasn't in decades. There are porcelain plates that only one person will ever eat off of. There are photographs of Fletcher back when he had hair, for fuck's sake. Fletcher tells him not to touch anything, but Neiman doesn't need to be told.

Once he's in, he's in.

(Andrew lets it slip to one of the women in Fletcher's band who stuck around after the JVC fiasco that they're staying together sometimes -- chases it with a bashful laugh and a tiny glance up at her face, shyly under his eyelashes. He relishes the look on her face and the tension that passes from her intelligent dark eyes the moment she decides she doesn't actually give a fuck. She is the consummate professional. She could have been his mother.)

To live with Fletcher is to capitulate endlessly and to be glad about it. If he talks back, it is only for the particular pleasure it gives the man who has eaten his life.

Neiman lets his eyes get hollow and his face get thin. He'd stop showering to complete the effect, but then Fletcher would really kick his ass (or more likely manhandle him into the bathtub like Neiman is Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now) and those wouldn't be the right kind of bruises for effect. He stops taking his gummy vitamins, and stops icing his wrists. He lets himself degrade. Fletcher kicks the shit out of him anyway and gives him an earful. Andrew makes sure he lets him have it where the walls are thinnest.

They are seen walking together after a performance, so close they are almost arm to arm, rattling with conspiratorial energy. Fletcher is all muscle and he's easy to cling to, once Neiman can get past the sense that he's about to be put in his place. First instincts are best.

("What would you do if something happened to me?" he asks him, with his cheek pressed against his chest. It's an unfair time to ask it; Fletcher's thumb is kneading between his shoulder blades, like he's found a knot in him. They are in bed.

"I'd kill you myself, you little shit." Fletcher says it not entirely without affection.)

They are seen drinking together, though Andrew is still shy of 21. Mostly he watches Fletcher drink, with his eyes locked on his decrepit face, listening raptly to an old anecdote or a complaint. This is the only time Fletcher ever acknowledges that he's old, and not just getting old; something about the consuming focus of a pair of dark, liquid eyes makes him double back into self-deprecation, though never doubt. If he's an old man, railing at a world that is leaving men like him behind every day and clinging to the husk of a dead art form -- well, he's still right, isn't he? It doesn't make him any less correct in his contempt for coddled children, coddled artists, his ex-wife, craft beer, Dean Pence, people who complain about New York drivers, au pairs, and small dogs. He's a talkative person when he gets into something he hates, and Andrew is an adoring listener.

It's almost disappointing that the great Terence Fletcher sullenly refuses to use texts, because that would have been kind of gratifying -- worming his way into Fletcher's dying world via something bright and intrusive and new (not even that new, Andrew's 53-year-old father can send a text) and leaving a trail behind him like a scar, where Terence can watch.

iii.

On the 18th of September he picks a fight with Fletcher in front of his personal assistant, Sophie. He makes sure Sophie is watching as the teeth go in, as Fletcher does the verbal equivalent of picking him up by the back of the neck and giving him a rough shake -- but fuck, she's his secretary, she's seen him yell at children and hasn't quit. She might make a mental note of it, for her when-I-get-the-fuck-out-of-here file, but she won't intervene. The moment Fletcher actually lays a hand on him instead of just metaphorically slapping him around -- just a hand on his shoulder, knuckles against tee shirt -- Andrew goes limp and goes docile again, having been checked.

His eyes find hers briefly when she and Fletcher depart together, a dull doll-eyed accusation. Help.

(Their pattern of reconciliation has been established to involve either some remarkable musical performance or the sex act of the wronged party's choosing. Against all reason it's Dr. Fletcher who blows him, Andrew with his back up against his own mahogany desk and the hard edge of it carving into the backs of his thighs -- like Fletcher is showing him how.)

"I need to get out of here," Andrew finds himself saying a lot to nobody in particular. He buys a train ticket to Boston for November 10 with the credit card his dad pays for, online. He buys a Greyhound bus ticket for November 8, with cash upon pickup. He buys $200 worth of Adderall from his old neighbor at Shaffer, which just about clears the guy out.

iv.

On the 7th of November, Andrew and Fletcher get into a screaming match over something insignificant (and it all is, everything that isn't him on that kit or Fletcher's mouth on his dick is burning away, sloughing away like skin) and Neiman makes sure the neighbors hear it. The serendipity of it is soothing, like he's been standing around up in a castle's ruined tower waiting for a lightning storm, and here one comes. It's an old tune, with some improvisations; Andrew isn't applying himself, Andrew needs to put himself out there more or no one will appreciate the genius of Fletcher's newest protegé. Andrew is hurting himself. Andrew wants to hurt himself. Fletcher pulls an ancient black lamp out of the wall and tosses it at his head like it's a tin can, and that's the end of that.

Terence Fletcher has made him unemployable and then gets pissy that he's not employed. He's beginning to doubt the soundness of this investment. In recompense for the lamp and the raised voices, Andrew lets Fletcher fuck him on an unmade bed. He can show himself out in the morning; this has been a point of trust between them that seems extraordinary.

Andrew leaves Fletcher there where he lies, drunk-sleepy and wheezing like a zoo lion. Tomorrow morning Fletcher will go to rehearsal and lightly brutalize his closest friends for fun and profit. The man needs his rest.

Andrew kicks his shoes far far back under the bed and puts the rest of his clothes back on. He has another pair of sneakers in his bag, a sign that he is truly living the high life here as Fletcher's pet monkey. Rubbing his hands through his hair, he feels dried blood flake away.

Neiman gives the broken lamp a wide berth, but rearranges some of the furniture on his way out to match it. Fletcher would never have; he only throws around exactly what he wants to, and even in the heat of anger would have done better than that.

(Andrew hadn't ducked the way he's supposed to, the way throwing stuff around to intimidate is meant to hinge on despite his rapt attention on the person throwing it. He had stood there with both feet square on the ground and let it strike him. A few strands of his hair adhere to a shard.)

He breaks some of his records while he's at it, which is savage but necessary (Jo Jones, Charlie Parker. Another love note.) He can feel them shatter under his heel as he goes through the solitary motions of a brawl. Fletcher would have killed him for that alone. Justifiable homicide. Andrew wants to destroy himself like he never existed at all. He proceeds to the monastic cell that is Fletcher's bathroom, where he proceeds to flush $200 worth of Adderall down the toilet, minus some off the top for old times' sake. He leaves the plastic bag in the sink. A little love note from one worthless piece of human garbage to another.

Fletcher shaves with one of those ancient fucking razors where the blades actually come out, the kind of naked metal Andrew has only seen in replica on jewelry. Old-fashioned. Neiman had thumbed one out of its box a few weeks ago and kept it in his pocket like a promise until now. Andrew bleeds, is good at bleeding without fainting. He bleeds so freely and so much that at first he doesn't even notice and next without any kind of transition between the two he thinks he might actually die here and the thought is almost more delicious than what he's actually trying to do. Andrew bleeds. Just smears to spread it around, not a flashy trail, and then, dripping down the blade of his young hand onto the polished floor, a pool.

Working fast now, feeling his heartbeat kick. He wipes up the mess just as soon as he's made it and staunches his torn-up arm with a plain black tee shirt. He sticks it at the very bottom of the hamper. He flexes his fingers and watches the scabbing cut in his arm twist like a mouth.

He bleeds a little more in here and lets the tap wash it away until the bowl of the sink shines white again.

It's too easy. The whole entire time he expects to hear Fletcher's tread on the floorboards right behind him, he expects to hear his voice like a thundercrack, what the fuck do you think you're doing? It puts a damper on the explosive pleasure of destroying things, and the necessity of working expeditiously at making this place look like a house of horrors outweighs any sentimental desire to lay this place to waste entirely.

On his way out, he straightens up the furniture again as an afterthought, nudges it those few centimeters back in place. Fletcher wouldn't have left his own place like that; if this imaginary altercation were taking place at Andrew's apartment there wouldn't have been a stick of furniture left standing, but it isn't. Fletcher's malice is exercised with precision, it is rapid and pitiless and anything but scattershot. Andrew will do him one better.

Neiman walks out that door and disappears.

v.

If he is going to be a missing person he would like to wallow in it for a while. He can't situate Nicole in this scene, in the aftermath of his tragic disappearance, however much he tries; what's broken there is well and truly broken off, and he cannot imagine a single scenario that's gratifying. She shouldn't cry about him, she should be sitting back playing with her boyfriend's mom's house cat and feeling satisfied with herself for dodging a bullet. The authorities won't want anything to do with her, in light of the relationship that didn't last out the semester. The authorities, how exciting.

He tries to imagine the scene with Fletcher, though, the genre of it twisting and changing beneath his mind's eye -- Oscar-winning drama, cheap thriller, the last 9 minutes of a crime show rerun, noir. Stern cops circling like sharks, and the prime suspect remaining infuriatingly, incriminatingly indifferent.

("Were you ever worried he might harm himself?" The movie-scene cops have him under the lights, and in shadow his face looks unsubtly like a cadaver's. Bluish lips.

"Neiman?" Like 'Neeman', the full-on Fletcher experience. "No. He wouldn't have the initiative." Which sounds bad.)

Fletcher will end up looking like a monster. He will make it so much worse for himself. Testy and intolerant, track record of physical violence and verbal abuse, abrasive, unlikeable. Found actually, legally responsible for the death of a student -- in the eyes of a prestigious institution, at least. Fletcher did kill, he has killed Sean Casey as surely as if he'd strung him up himself. Mind games. Preferential treatment. Cruelty. Not just torturing his students but fucking them, too, that'll be the selling point. Exposure before the eyes of the same pedestrian tone-deaf assholes he's hated all his life, disgust and scorn from his colleagues, maybe even a little fear. There are limits to artistic misbehavior, and after all, a boy is dead.

(Maybe things get frantic, Fletcher starts to lose it, Fletcher knows how it looks and everything he tries makes it worse. "I didn't fucking murder anyone. I'm not some kind of psychopath. Now if you'd kindly fuck off…" And off they'll fuck until it's time to make the arrest.

In the best scenario, Fletcher cries for him like he cried for Casey and knows that he did do it. One way or another. This possibility is too delicious for Andrew to consider any way other than obliquely.)

They will talk to Sophie and to Carl Tanner, who may even volunteer himself, and to Andrew's dad after the fact, before moving on to casual acquaintances. Had he been under stress lately? Had Andrew seemed upset, scared? How could you tell?

Distinguishing marks: scars from a car accident on his cheeks and chin -- not the car accident, funny how one thing eclipses another -- and two dozen stitches in his shoulder, ditto. No birthmarks, no tattoos. Brown hair -- no, black hair. Brown eyes. No friends, no real hangout spots or haunts that aren't cheap pizzerias or practice rooms. But they won't find him there. Then they'll start looking in hostels and morgues.

(There remains the troubling matter of his would-be replacement. Ryan Connolly has a big square douchebaggy face, and Neiman who knows a thing or two about being mistaken for a douchebag knows how well that would go over. He looked and acted like he belonged in a frat somewhere instead of at Shaffer, like he took up the drums to get girls, and he did indeed get girls -- in bizarro-world, where Fletcher did the impossible and picked this piece of amiable talentless meat over Neiman, he has a girl or two who love him very much. Powerful arms, powerful body, ready to become somebody's uncle in twenty years who loves barbecuing and Pulp Fiction. The unspoken compact between burly Irishmen and high-strung Jews is in full force here. Neiman hates him, Neiman hates him with an unhinged intensity that catches at him whenever he thinks about him like a bad hangnail, but he can't bring himself to hurt him. He'll hurt him later.)

vi.

He's sobering fast. It's weird to be traveling by bus and not be high. Andrew occupies his time with a $2.99 bottle of rubbing alcohol and a $1.99 roll of gauze, while trying to ignore the frustratingly irregular thud and grind of the engine. Nobody even looks at him funny.

This is going to be shitty. This is possibly going to be shittier than sitting around in his dorm room or his paid-for apartment in between rehearsals and performances (lord, how Terence Fletcher hates the phrase jam session with the fiery wrath of a thousand suns) waiting for the sun to shine on him again. But it can't possibly be shittier than staying in New York.

He wraps up his cut-up arm like he'd wrap a busted wrist and hopes it won't go septic any time soon. He would like to die, but he doesn't want to rot until afterward, and he hasn't thought through where he ought to do it. It'd screw up the whole timeline; a good detective could probably unravel it from that alone, though all the cinematic detectives he thinks of when he hears the word would never be believed. At the bottom of his book bag is an ancient mint-green iPod, the kind that doesn't even have WiFi on it so it's probably safe but that does contain a streamlined slice of the music he thought he'd be making one day when he was 14. Buddy Rich's Birdland is on there still. Andrew listens to the greats.

Conservatory student, 19, commits suicide. They aren't even supposed to print stuff about suicides in the news, did you know that? In case other people follow suit. With Sean Casey as precedent, Neiman is really just following suit. Andrew fucks off to somebody else's shitty college town in Virginia, slips into the Craigslisted void left by a previous subletter fucking off back home.

Andrew takes to wearing snapbacks and sleeveless shirts stolen from the laundry room. He drops in on the sessions of his ersatz landlords' rock band and batters away at somebody's school-band drumset, mindlessly and enthusiastically and pretty well. He has siphoned some of the easy confidence of the other boys Fletcher couldn't break but couldn't carve into anything interesting either. (The Ryan Connollys of the world. Some of these boys are girls, and Fletcher has left them alone where they fell.) He has become Andy Connolly, a pleasing unknown.

None of these guys are going anywhere. They're worse than Nicole -- Nicole went to class, these guys don't, these guys are just here to -- what? fuck around? They can't play for shit. Some of them even know it, and grin boyishly -- these kids. To Andrew they're kids, like he's soaked up some of Fletcher's furious senior-citizen disdain by osmosis.

Not knowing is driving him crazy; he keeps feeling for his phone like it will be in his pocket. Nobody here has a TV, and even if they watched the news, his case seems unlikely to be featured as more than a blip. There's too much time, all of it yawningly empty and unregimented, which starts to drive him nuts after less than 12 hours there with fuck-all to do. He makes some money washing dishes at more cheap pizzerias and running errands for people, usually people who are too high to get off their couches and people who are too high on their own weed to sell it to those in the former category. He keeps it where nobody can get at it, gets away with barely eating, and slowly adds to the wedge of $5's and $20 bills he's been squirreling away since before he left. Money adds up.

Most of the time he is either hungry or dirty or both and so are most of the guys he lives with, who certainly have cards in their own name that they can use without alerting the police to a multi-state manhunt. (This is flattering himself. If they think anything in New York they definitely think he's floating around at the bottom of a river or splattered on a tray at the morgue, unclaimed. After the first 48 hours you're basically fucked, right? Andrew is basically fucked.)

He lies on his back with the couch springs digging in against his spine and thinks, I am dead, I am dead, I am dead. Andrew's fingers roll and fold against his palm, splitting old calluses that never quite were, and he bleeds.

vii.

Depressed college student tries to OD on speed, fucks up, and just ends up absconding across four states, no idea where he is, no idea where he went. Or maybe he just wanted to take an extended break, who can tell. Who can blame him for breaking?

He doesn't want to be found. He doesn't plan on being found. It's just the icing on the cake, really, realizing he cares more about seeing Fletcher suffer than not suffering himself. His arm has started to do something really ugly and it's time to call collegiate life quits.

He has left his new friends some clean laundry and a small mound of cash before shimmying into the same filthy v-neck and jeans he brought with him. Andrew Neiman returns to New York, dehydrated and disoriented, emerging from a fugue state, picture-perfectly. His bag, his shoes, and his iPod with its YouTube-quality .mp3s of Buddy Rich all get ditched along the way. They can get picked over by homeless people for all he cares or they can rot there in the street. He is barefoot and blistering.

Being processed is the boring part, which has happened to him before and will probably happen again. The tearful reunion comes next, the recovery. There's no real media circus, which is for the best, that being more for kidnapped heiresses or Lindburgh babies; Neiman wants people to know, but he wants them to know in the distant kind of way that comes with eclipsing achievement in another sphere. This is not his masterwork, after all, and he's not a little blonde housewife with hair clips or a five-year-old child in peril. His fate is of paramount importance only to those that matter and not to every stranger in the street.

A straggler, an absconder. He tried to do it one way and it wouldn't work. He tried to do it another way and it wouldn't work. Now he is a pitiable mess of ropy veins too sick and sad to even give his name at the hospital until 24 hours in. The other pieces have been put together as well in all the possible ways, concluded to be suggestive but not definitive. Even when all put together they don't spell out murder, there's no version of it that looks good, having a barefoot 19-year-old flee your apartment bleeding and high. After sex. Andrew doesn't know if they know yet about the sex; it's the one element he cannot himself reconcile, if he was lonely and hurting or if he was trying to externalize something about the two of them in the ugliest way possible. Or if he just liked it, and that's all.

A grown adult might opt to fall off the map for a few weeks out of spite or for for pleasure, but what kid would? With no phone, with no money. No kid could pull that off.

Every hour that Andrew's there, more people know he's all right, the big telephone chain of suspects and interested parties cascading into action. Not a word from his aunts and uncles. One of his cousins is not so hypermasculine that he doesn't send hypoallergenic orchids along with a stack of novels, like he heard that somewhere that sick people like to read. Andrew's surprised Dustin can read, though he shouldn't be talking; every time he tries to pick one up it's a blur inside like a badly copied chart. Jim Neiman's students had better get used to having substitute teachers for a while. Valiant of him to carry on in the intervening weeks, but not flattering; to his credit he drops everything and shows up as soon as they'll let him.

Andrew hangs on to his dad like he's a drowning man, and he can feel him shake with undignified tears. Dignity has never been Jim's strongest suit, and Andrew just waits it out. He should feel more than he does, but he's so empty inside that he rattles. The tears are coming, but what do they mean? "I thought he hurt you," Jim says, in the thinnest slip of a voice. "I thought I lost you." And other variations on that theme. Andrew's crying, and his dad's crying, and neither of them should be because it's not at a funeral or a movie and Andrew's still critically dehydrated, so he is told. All his veins are flat.

The door's propped open to let some air in and he's contemplating kicking the rubber-footed stand out from under it to give his dad some privacy when he catches sight of somebody out in the hall, dusty black and perturbed skull face.

Fletcher is a ghost of himself, jaw prickling in white beard, and Andrew is something realer than any ghost, arm throbbing with refreshed pain and his dad gripping him bruise-tight. Fletcher stares at him, hard little diamond bullet eyes brimming with pain like a wounded animal, and over Jim's shoulder Andrew melts into one of his hundred-dollar smiles.

If there's ever been a time for an explosive display of contempt, it's now. If there's ever been a time for Fletcher to call him a stupid reckless faggot-lipped motherfucker and to kick the damn door down, it's definitely now. But it's his turn to shrink back from the door and hurry away before he gets caught.

Andrew never has to see Fletcher again. In fact, Fletcher shouldn't even be here, hanging around the psych ward, and that might be the capstone of this whole project: drawing attention to the fact that he's bullied his way in where he shouldn't be just to get a look at one of his former musicians, out of guilt or perversity. Whatever the crime, it is incriminating. They try to drive him away, but he keeps coming back. He's spoiling for a confrontation and he'll get one.

viii.

Batshit jazz savant fakes his own death to get even. It's sick, isn't it? It's really sick, all of it. Andrew's cell phone is back in his pocket. He'd left it at home for the whole debacle -- had entertained destroying it, tossing it in an incinerator somewhere with a bloody jacket and a hank of his own hair or something, but he doesn't know what buildings even have incinerators any more and now the reassuring weight of his own phone makes him glad he didn't. It's heavy with unread texts, a leisurely scroll of which satisfies him are to be enjoyed later -- one is even from Nicole, and it's so long that it's broken into four parts. Maybe she's begging forgiveness and pitching reconciliation for them, maybe she's reaming him out for being a suicidally reckless dipshit. Maybe she put it all together and is calling his bluff. He'll just have to see.

They are in the hospital chapel, which bears no discernible sign of any religious affiliation and is sized to fit a crowd. Right now, it only holds the two of them. Andrew rubs at his head, feeling in his hair for the tiny seam still left over from Fletcher's lamp. It hadn't even hurt. Fletcher won't look at him, huddling away with arms tightly folded. The muscles of his back are tight under his tee shirt.

Don't turn your back on me, Andrew thinks with diamond-bullet clarity, don't you fucking turn your back, what the fuck is wrong with you, you cocksucker, what's the matter, are you upset? and the memory of that day surges up to strike him -- when he'd gone after Fletcher in his office, all first blush of outrage at his replacement, and Fletcher'd been in there crying. He must have been crying his eyes out over Sean fucking Casey. Later he repeated the performance in front of the whole band, but the first time was something special.

Fletcher must be the ugliest person Andrew has ever known and right now he's especially rough, eyes rimmed in red against an otherwise bloodless face. His tee shirt is coming untucked and Andrew has the maddening desire to run his fingers through his waistband to fix it. Fletcher is pathetically rigid with anger.

"They searched my fucking apartment first. You did a good job in there, did some nice little inventive touches. Like you saw it in a movie. Am I right?"

Andrew looks at the floor, uncomprehending.

"You always were a fucking drama queen. What the fuck were you thinking? Did you think I'd go after you and drag you back? You set me up, you fucking asshole, who do you think you are?"

Your Charlie Parker, he thinks with complacent pleasure. Your saving grace. I'm the best thing you're ever going to have.

Fletcher throws out an arm in a big frustrated gesture and a flinch of restraint passes across his face, all in a moment. He resents this space and the proximity of them both in it.

"Why the fuck did you do it?"

Andrew looks him dead in the eye. He's taller than Fletcher is, even barefoot, and quicker, even sick. He's advanced on him without even meaning to, fearlessly.

"You tried to kill me," he says, "you tried to kill me, and I survived, doesn't that just kick your ass?"

(Andrew has earned this. Fletcher has earned this too.)

There is a long silence full of deeply-felt understanding and more than a little dead-eyed horror. All of it predictable and passing quickly; Andrew flexes his fingers and feels the plastic-backed gauze on his forearm wrinkle. Will I still be able to play, he'd asked, and the answer from the cute brown-haired nurse had been yes, of course, as soon as the doctor says you're up to it, that kind of strenuous activity -- you're a drummer, right, those guys are really animals… and an anecdote about Rush. Something in him is ascendant. He isn't broken.

When Fletcher opens his mouth again he is cold, restrained, cautious. "Are you still interested in playing, once they let you out of the bughouse?"

"I came to Shaffer for a reason, didn't I?" (Say it, say it, say it. He came back here for a reason, he came to a hospital for a reason and not a morgue.)

He's very close now, chest rising and falling with pathetic regularity, and Andrew could touch him if he wanted, back him against the wall for an avuncular chat about where he's headed in life. Fletcher's creased, awful, gargoyle face is full of uncertain warmth.

"There's still a place for you, in my band, if you want it."

Like he'll fall for that again. This is only the door to more fucked-up head games, more deafening verbal abuse and punishing preciseness, more pain. He will lose himself, he will cease to exist. He will go back to drumming for Fletcher and for the next ten years of his life until he dies with a needle in his arm, when he dies for real. Fletcher will spend ten years knowing his prize protegé tried to make him look like some sick murderer or a negligent asshole or both and that it nearly worked and that he nearly did, in fact, die. He knows that Neiman is some kind of psychopathic little asshole who responds to friendly competition with psychotic jealousy and violence, who takes enthusiastic pleasure in hurting him. He knows that he is committed. This will kill them both and they are happy for it, happy to believe that it mattered. And if Andrew doesn't like it, he can always leave.

The joyride is over. Andrew will do whatever it takes to be sure it's him that Fletcher's thinking of. Andrew glances down, tugging at his sleeve; all his sick bones ache, and a smile is on his lips.

First instincts are best.

"I wouldn't want to play for anybody else."