My phone buzzed. I had completely forgotten about this phone meeting with a gallery director, who wanted me to write music based on motor cotex data for an upcoming science exhibit.
Two o'clock and my work day had already come at great psychic expense, starting with a battered woman who needed all the injuries photographed for a police report, to the pregnant 19-year-old I'd fished out from under a bridge, now sitting two plastic hospital chairs to my left.
The doctor wasn't coming for twenty minutes. I could take this call.
"Hey there." I said
"Why are you whispering?"
"I'm with a client."
"Oh..."
I don't think the director knew about my day job. He was a nice guy, a There's No Bad Ideas dude which was both freeing and frustrating since every feasible project we lobbed at him tended to escalate in his imagination. Somewhere in these summer meetings the thought of science-based music (think Brian Eno on the Enterprise) lept to interactive sound and incredibly expensive hardware. Audience members wearing Neuralink caps that would feed EEG data into midi converters. A giant brain sculpture covered in heat sensitive material that would play different tunes.
Thankfully we had neither the budget nor time to figure out how to design any of this. Anything getting touched by kids, every day for six months, in a mall, would have to have been made of steel, able to withstand a fourteen-year-old with a baseball bat. So he gathered some composers and asked for my motor cortex compositions instead.
I typed as he talked into my earpiece, making occasional noises. State trooper lights flashed across the window and my client flinched. She'd been on the street since age 14 and wondering if this were such a great idea, a neighborhood cat trying on a collar. I put my hand out and mouthed It's Okay.
"Would you be able to use Dr. So-and-So's data for your music?" he said, "Something related to climate change and neuroplasticity?"
"Yeah sure," I said, "We did a talk last year using her research on rats, she'd raised the temperature to stress them out, watch for spikes in hormone levels. I'll ask her for the paper next week."
"Fantastic! You know, it's been really great working with all these scientists, I learn so much."
More police cruisers, two, three at once. A nurse sat beside my client to sign forms. She was seven months along, her belly moving slowly under her shirt as the baby turned, like tree roots raising a sidewalk.
"Did you know...that one of the key factors for a child's brain development..."
The girl didn't know her social security number, She'd lost count of how many murders she'd witnessed.
"...is nutrition?"
"Is that right." I tried to think kind thoughts. Maybe he'd grown up without TV, without Sally Struthers urging him to spend fifty cents a day to keep an Ethopian family alive.
Someone called our names and I said I'd email him when I had a rough draft. The clinic was emptying out for the afternoon. My client sat on the exam table, paper crinkling under her legs.
She couldn't access any money, but she had Medicaid and knew exactly what she wanted. Intensive outpatient program with in-person trauma counseling, substance abuse treatment, parenting classes, and any residential assistance that got her a hundred miles from her street family.
"They gonna arrest me." she said, eyes on the door.
"No one's going to arrest you."
"They know I had syphilis. That can hurt the baby."
"You had it over a year ago and it got treated. You're fine."
"Why are there cops everywhere?"
"Kamala Harris is in town."
She relaxed, and eventually lay down. "I'm so tired."
"You sleep, the doctor might take a while," I said, "You're gonna be okay."