Sam Kates II: Chanson Iconique-Part 2

Sam Kates Aspie Sax Player II: Chanson Iconique


VIII.
After the initial slow rouse, Sam acted very nervous. They got him up and walked him around the living room, circling the couch; Sharon and Auntie supported his arms on either side, Sam was in the middle, stumbling, sagging, and lurching like Ray Bolger’s Scarecrow. The doctor had not told them to do this, it was just that Sam wanted to get up, and it was necessary to control his movements or he would have wound up spinning out the door. Obviously, he woke up agitated; it as if the seven hours since he had passed out were a mere second, and the specter of Someone to Watch Over Me were still snarling at his heels. The faceless Sam, that haunted the nightmare of yestereve, pursued him over the same clammy ground, and his only escape was ring-around-the-rosy with Sharon and Auntie. Otherwise, he might have ended up out on Lake Shore Drive, or worse, the Projects.

After about thirty minutes of Yellow Brick Road, they threw him in the bathroom, and closed the door. They heard no singing, but they didn’t hear any moaning either, only running water, so they relaxed and shared a pan of instant coffee.

“I wonder what set him off,” said Sharon, tentatively.

“Who knows? Could be anything, could be nothin’. Don’t happen very often, but every now and then somethin’ just hits Sam between the ears, and he goes off. At least he’s getting’ so’s he can talk about it now—he’s doin’ good, learnin’ ta talk—but usedta, he’d get to moanin’ and rockin’ and he’d do that for hours, until he just stopped. Nobody knew why, he just stopped. Usedta he’d pick up his saxophone and he’d be all right. This here’s differnt—it seems like the saxophone’s what brought it on. New one.” She called to him. “Sam. Sammy boy. You okay in there?”

“Sam,” he called back.

“Yeah, he’s gettin’ better at talkin’ ta folks, but he seems ta go up’n down, back’n forth with that skill, too. You hear him say, ‘Sam’? He’s been getting’ better at sayin’ “I,” lately, but he’s too upset right now.”

“Yesterday, we had a very pleasant afternoon together,” Sharon interjected. “He spoke in complete sentences about half the time.”

“You spent an afternoon with Sam?” Glory be the wonderment!

“Yes. We ran into each other at the Art Institute. I’m taking this class--”

“You spent the afternoon with Sam, yesterday?!”

“Yes.” She can see the astonishment, eyes wide over the brim of the coffee cup frozen at the lips. “What about it?”

“Girl, I ain’t ever heard of Sam ‘spending an afternoon’ with anybody since I’ve known him. You say you was at the art museum?”

“Yes. I’m taking this class in art appreciation, and Sam--”

“I knew he goes to that museum all the time, but--. And you just—uh--walked around that place--together? The two of you?”

“Yes, we had pizza later.”

“You had DINNER with Sam?! Girl, you went on a DATE with Sam Kates?!?!” Her voice was rising in a crescendo of disbelief to a climax of enthusiasm.

“I wouldn’t call it a DATE exactly, we just sort of ran into each other, and one thing led to another, and--”

“Now that is truly somethin’. Sam Kates on a DATE--with a G-U-R-L GIRL!”

“What are you talking about?”

Aunt Maxine got ahold of herself, and remembered that she was standing right outside the bathroom door talking about Sam where he might overhear. She led Sharon, by the arm, gently but firmly into the front room, and, in a tone of secretive confidentiality explained that the only woman Sam had ever had anything to do with besides his mother and herself, was that singer, Susan Wright; and that was always music, nothing else. Nothing else at all. Come to think of it, Sam had never engaged in anything like a SOCIAL event with ANYBODY, male or female, in his entire life--except, maybe, with Aunt Maxine.

“Whadj’all talk about at the museum?”

“We just walked around; Sam showed me where some of the paintings were, and told me things about them, and--”

“Just a minute, now. Sam explained some of the pictures to you?”

“Well, not really explained, more like—told me what they meant to him—how they made him feel.”

“Extr’ordinary.” She had to sit down. She sipped fanatically. Her brow furrowed this unforeseen news into their folds like toes in thick carpet. She chewed the news like tough jerky.

After a moment, Sharon ventured, “You say he’s never been on a date before?”

Aunt Maxine gave a sigh. “Girl, I don’t know that he’s swapped three sentences back and forth with anybody in his life.” She continued to think. They had given up on therapists a long ago. Sam wouldn't open up to a stranger. Wouldn't cooperate worth beans. Damn doctors! This was GREAT news. Sam TALKING!
Maybe there was hope for Sam with this girl. Maybe the girl was the key.

“Hmm,” Sharon added.

“You know Sharon, I know you’re not prepared to make much of this, but this is very good news fer me. If Sam is talkin’ to you, it could be the beginnin’ of a new phase for him. I can't stress enough to you that Sam NEVER DOES THAT.

"Never does what?"

"TALKS TO PEOPLE. ANYBODY! I also think it’s no surprise that he had a true-matic episode jest after he had a social experience, a SEXUAL experience--"

"Hmm?" asked Sharon.

"I know, you don’t have to tell me nothin’ happened, but it WAS a sexual experience, no matter how low-key. Like I say, it’s no surprise he had an extreme episode just after having a had PERSONAL experience with a woman, a very pretty woman too. Oh, pshaw, don’t go on like as you didn’t know. You got both eyes in the right place, nice female figure, and, you know, you got a nice, what do the men call it? a nice rack. That’s a whole lot more than Sam is used to, I can tell you, and that puts you in a U-neek position in Sam’s world.”

“Hmm,” thought Sharon.

IX.
We don’t need to review the negotiations. Bottom line, in the next half-hour, Aunt Maxine talked Sharon into taking on the responsibility for a kind of tutor/guardianship of Sam. She was to get $800 a week for spending at least 20 hours with him. Something was up with Sam, and, whatever it was, Sharon was a part of it. This might be Aunt Maxine’s last chance to prepare Sam for a future without her, and whatever this mysterious chemistry was, that lay latent between Sam and Sharon, she was determined to manufacture whatever conditions were necessary to bring it out, develop it, spare no expense (it was Sam’s money anyway). Maxine wasn’t matchmaking; she didn’t have any illusions about a possible love relationship between the two of them (that would be too much to ask), but Sam was clearly in some kind of growth spurt, and Sharon was involved either peripherally or centrally, it didn’t matter which. She made it clear that whatever they did, where, when, and why they went, was completely up to Sharon; but, always, the task was to get Sam to socialize, verbalize, and externalize the inner changes that were spontaneously taking place in him.

Sharon felt totally unqualified for this job: she didn’t trust Aunt Maxine’s intuition about the magnitude of this unexpected sympathy between herself and Sam, she didn’t trust her own feelings about Sam, which were still in the early stages of becoming, and she couldn’t believe somebody was actually going to pay her to be a—well, a TEACHER. Why her? Why now? They MUST have tried out different therapists on Sam (they had), they MUST have exposed him to other group and educational experiences (they had), they couldn't ALL have failed (they did)? How could a poor white trash girl from the south side succeed where others had not? Nonetheless, with her difficult financial situation the way it was, she couldn’t say no to a good paying part-time job. This extra income could completely replace the money she made at the Moonlight Room and to spare--but Aunt Maxine’s only stipulation was that Sharon stay on at the bar, to keep an eye on Sam at the place where he seemed to be the most vulnerable.

Notwithstanding, they both called in sick that night (Saturday) and Fred had to play a piano single. (Nobody minded. It had been perfectly clear from the performance the night before that Sam was —uh —“sick.”) This would give Sharon at least six days to try and get to the bottom of why Sam had freaked out on Friday.

They stayed home all day at Sam’s house, with Aunt Maxine explaining over and over to Sam about the new arrangement. After many times through the plan, he was still kind of fuzzy on the point of the Talk-to-Sharon part of it, (he was already talking to Sharon, he LIKED talking to Sharon), but when they told him he didn’t have to go to the Moonlight Room that evening, the look of relief on his face like Aurora-dappled dawn after blackest night, and no other explanations were necessary. When it came time for Maxine to drive back to her own apartment, some distance away, Sam became so agitated that Sharon agreed to stay with him, “just until he calmed down.” This, in itself, was interesting, because Sam rarely objected to being left alone; he preferred it. But not tonight. They sat together on the couch and watched a little TV for awhile, but Sam seemed distracted, and kept looking at the clock. He was obviously unaccustomed to missing his Saturday night gig, no matter how relieved he was to be doing so.

Sharon decided to draw Sam away from his preoccupations by getting out her art appreciation book. She had it with her from the night before, and opened it up to where her previous reading had left off. She had to do her homework, and here was a kind of two birds opportunity. She read aloud to Sam about the birth of Humanism, the advent of perspective in Renaissance painting, and the dramatic use of chiaroscuro in the late works of Rembrandt. At this point she turned the book toward him and pointed out the reproduction of that dark self-portrait they had seen together in the museum yesterday.

Sam had been listening idly, not taking anything in, but enjoying the sound of Sharon’s voice; but, when he saw, in the dim lamplight, the small reproduction of the painting he knew so well, it triggered a memory in him. For exactly four minutes, he replayed, in his mind, note for note, the composition that had sprung into being the day before. He re-entered the opaque trance state, and did not respond to Sharon’s efforts to rouse him from his reverie. He recalled every nuance of the musical form exactly as he had previously imagined it, but this time details of orchestration registered on his memory as well; it hit him for the first time, consciously, that he was hearing an orchestra in his head, not a saxophone piece. He would hold onto this impression, too. When the four minutes were up, and the light of the face dispelled the dark of the bordering abyss, Sam snapped out of it.

“Where did you go?” she said. 

X.
Thus followed a richly creative time; for hours, Sharon held up plates from the art book, and Sam responded musically to one painting after another. His eyes would flow over the picture's composition detail after detail, and his mind would create musical mirrors of the figures, the colors, the formal oppositions. Sometimes he would trance-out for two minutes, sometimes for ten. When he returned to the couch dimension (as it were), Sharon questioned him closely, making him describe his inner experience in words. Eventually, words became inadequate and Sharon had to allow him to get out his saxophone and play the compositions he had made up. Only briefly did she delve into the process, HOW Sam made the music, and when he showed signs of freaking out again, she backed off. But even the saxophone renditions became inadequate. Sam experienced some kind of release by playing the themes to her, but he expressed dissatisfaction as well. “Not enough,” he said. “It’s not enough.”

Nevertheless, they strove with Sam’s muse, together, all through the night, finally collapsing onto the couch, an un-self-conscious heap, gathering the early Sunday morning sun into the creases of their clothes, asleep, comingling dreams of Titian and Turner in a peaceful, sympathetic medley.

The next day, they HAD to return to the museum and see the pictures firsthand. Here Sam did something he had never done before: he took out his saxophone and played the compositions in his head RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE PAINTINGS THAT HAD INSPIRED THEM. At first the security guards reacted badly (“Sam, this isn’t frickin’ San Francisco!”), but before the first guard had arrived, Sam had attracted a crowd of twenty to thirty people who, with a single will, strong-armed the guard into letting Sam finish; and when Sharon suggested they all follow them around to the next painting on Sam’s list, everybody cheered and followed. They did this six times, and when they finally got around to the Whistler, there was a crowd of four guards and about a hundred visitors, all crammed together into those narrow corridors listening to Sam’s music with avid attention, and unbridled enthusiasm. Everybody there was aware that something special was happening. Yes, a reporter from the Sun-Times made it just in time to hear Sam’s impression of Symphony in Black (AKA, Whistler’s Mother), and an account of the spontaneous event, along with a photograph snapped over the heads of the crowd, appeared in next Sunday’s Arts supplement. Twice that following week, the guards had to roust a couple of copycat vocalists out on their ears.

XI.
Clearly, Sam's life had launched itself into a new phase, the parameters of which were still only partially defined, the direction of which was still a mystery. One week off from the Moonlight Room stretched into two, then three. Sharon still went in, so she would still work there when Sam returned; but, for Sam, they had hired several different temporary replacements--some had worked out, some hadn't. There was this one kid from Northwestern who was doing pretty well; although he was no match for Sam on a good night, he was still good enough to play casual background music at a bar. True, Sam had made the Moonlight Room into a sort of shrine, to which not a few jazz devotees made regular pilgrimages, so this step down was a doozy; indeed, the regulars complained bitterly about Sam's absence, and wanted to know when he would be back. However, the prestige and the history all very nicely notwithstanding, the bottom line in booze consumption had not changed significantly, one way or the other--yet. Jim Meyer was still the manager from way before, and he was going to remain loyal to Sam for a few additional weeks; but the more time off Sam took, the more strained that loyalty became.

The loss of income was not a serious concern for Sam right now; remember, he was never very good at SPENDING money, and except for the house, and his Selmer Paris Model saxophone, both paid for in cash, Sam had never really BOUGHT anything; his savings had continued to pile up, and his overhead was, and always had been, practically nil. His savings from the heyday of his touring adventure amounted to several hundred thousand dollars--enough to keep him in comfort for years. The interest wasn't QUITE enough to live on, so he would have to return to work at some point; but this was not worrisome to anybody, least of all Sam--his idea of the future was "tomorrow" and, at a stretch, "next week". It was the music he would soon miss, and nobody knew when that would be. He was certainly enjoying his vacation--his sabbatical.

Meanwhile, Sharon was pushing him. Anything to stimulate his mind, provoke any kind of articulate reaction to the world outside his head. It was kind of ironic in a way, how they were BOTH suddenly motivated to wake up and smell the world they had been living in for decades. The glamor and excitement of Chicago had heretofore been rendered invisible to both of them: to Sam by virtue of the mental blockages of Asperger's Syndrome, and to Sharon from lack of bus fare. Together, they set out to discover the city like tourists. You would never have guessed, from the innocent enthusiasm with which they savored all the new sights and sounds, that they had spent, cumulatively, over forty years living within minutes of all this virgin territory.

First stop: Museum of Science and Industry. At first, Sam wouldn't set foot in that confining little model airplane, but, just like a kid, when he got used to it he went back through it six times, fingering the lights and actually reading the placards (very short sentences and labels). The museum was especially good because so many of the exhibits had those little headphone things; you pushed a button and a canned voice told you all about the wooly mammoth, or the cotton gin, or the suit of armor you were looking at. Now, don't get your hopes up: Sam's perfect photographic memory only applied to music, not words. His memory for words he was just about normal, maybe a tad worse, since he tended not to remember sentences that he didn't understand, and those were many and close between. Nevertheless, these massive doses of new material to which Sharon was subjecting him, were providing a context in which new ideas could ferment and must eventually become full-fledged, operational concepts.

They checked out the Sears Tower, Navy Pier, and the Lincoln Park Zoo. They even took in a baseball game at Wrigley Field; Sam responded to baseball with the aspie's typical sympathy for repetitive acts, but after six innings he'd had enough hot dogs and organ music. The Public Library was an important stop. Sharon had not intended to visit there, but it was right on the way home, a few blocks past the Art Institute on Michigan Avenue, and Sam had always wondered about that big building. They made their way down marble corridors to the music room where you could listen to recordings through nice headphones, not those funky ones like at the "airplane place." Sharon randomly chose a Beethoven 5th recording (Bernstein, luckily). Sam listened transfixed. When they got home, Sam took out his sax and played through the entire symphony jumping appropriately from 1st violin to the wind parts.

"That's terrific, Sam," said Sharon.

"Not enough," Sam said.

From this offhand remark, Sharon put together a couple of things about Sam she had not yet completely understood:

1.) Sam, for all his jazz erudition and virtuosity, had not been exposed to ANY classical music since his early childhood watching the PBS broadcasts his mother had turned on; absurd as it sounds, Sam's teachers, Suzy Wright, and before her, Red from the Mellow Four, had only been interested in cultivating his talent for playing with the combo-- it never occurred to either of them (shame on you, Suzy) to expand his horizons with Bach or Mozart; and
2.) Sam was starting to get frustrated with not being able to play ALL THE PARTS.

She had heard Sam say, "Not enough." over and over lately, when he was playing his picture music, but she always figured it was some artistic "failure to achieve perfection" kind of comment. Little did she know that aspies live in a world of perfection that challenges the power of human language to detail it. No, Sam's music was perfect in his head, like a diamond, or an anomalous snowflake is perfect; indeed, it was a struggle for Sam to OPEN the door to his unconscious, but, once the door was open, only perfection flowed through it into the mundane world. So why "not enough"? Finally, when she heard him express dissatisfaction with his rendition of Beethoven's 5th, she realized the "not enough" meant that he was not able to play, with one line of saxophone music, everything that was in his head. Every once in awhile, when she dragged out of him those verbal descriptions of his picture pieces, he had mentioned things like, "That shadow is the trombone, that little dog is in the oboe." She finally made the connection. It was a pretty hip connection for a uncultured white trash girl to make, but it could not be denied that she was starting to get it. She made a mental note to start playing him 19th century orchestral music.

The solution to "not enough" came sooner than you'd think. A proper discussion of the presence of "accidents" in the warp and weave of destiny is beyond the scope of this narrative, but--enough said.

As mentioned above, even with all this sight-seeing, reading (yes, she continued to read to him out of her art appreciation textbook), and talking, Sharon kept on working at the Moonlight Room; she also kept up regular attendance to her college classes. It was a full schedule. The day after their trip to the library and Beethoven, Sam was feeling very clingy and got terribly upset when Sharon told him she had to leave to go to class. He made her go through what four-year-olds make their mothers go through when they have to abandon their children to the care of a babysitter, only Sam had no babysitter. It's not a pretty sight to see a thirty-eight year old man blubbering like an infant. It was worse with Sam: not that four-year-olds don't buckle under the weight of the world, that tender fragility collapsing in desperate shards on the linoleum, great bulbous tears tracking the cheeks in quiet battalions; but Sam's face had a depth of depression, an underplayed suppression of pain that amplified rather than reduced the appearance of despair. Four-year-olds can't express that emotion--they don't have the experience yet to give those tears the salt and fire with which only age and PROLONGED suffering can imbue them.

"I have to go to class, Sam."

"Sharon!"

"Sam, I HAVE to go to my class now!"

"Sam!!"

"I have to--"

"Stay with Sam. Pleeeze." That was new.

What to do?

She exhaled a decision, inhaling at the same time. "Sam, would you like to come to class with me?"

No Irish rainbow can smile so brightly. Noah never saw the end of stormy night like Sharon did in that Chicago kitchen. They went.

XII.
They got off the bus at Montrose and Austin, and walked the block to the main building of Wilbur Wright College, one of the best (sic) of the Chicago City Colleges. Students were flowing in and out in pressing streams, and Sam held onto Sharon's arm tightly and nervously. Carried through the swinging doors by an irresistible current, they entered the high-ceilinged lobby and saw a mob of backpacks standing all along the wall of elevators. Screw that. They hiked up three flights of stairs, tapping in rhythm to some great drum machine whose contrapuntal ticks and booms resonated up and down the stairwell, swirled at the ground level door like a dust demon, then slipped out of the lobby and off down the street, blowing toward the lake, still tapping. They came out onto a long dimly-lighted corridor, the kind where the waxed floor sends up, into downcast eyes, vague reflections of the feet and legs of the pedestrians, mingled with vestiges of the pale 30-watt fixtures. They passed rows of blonde wooden cell-block doors to stop and stand before Rm. 311, a little black sign with white letters right beneath a tiny square window. This was the door to the front end (the teacher's desk, whiteboard, computer set-up); there was another door at the back of the classroom, fifty feet further down.

It wasn't the art appreciation class--it was the Introduction to Computer Applications 101 Class. Sharon didn't know how to handle it, whether to introduce Sam to the instructor as a visitor, or just slip him in at the back of the room. She didn't have to choose. A hurried student exited, and pushed past them, leaving the door standing wide open for a moment. Thanks to the Sun-Times Arts Supplement article, the instructor, (young guy, geeky, black plastic-rimmed glasses, name of Rex Highroad), recognized Sam by sight, and rushed out into the hall to greet them.

"Sam Kates, the saxophonist, what a pleasure, an honor, sir," effused Highroad. "Sharon, you didn't tell me you traveled in such distinguished circles."

"Sir?"

"Hell yes, Sam Kates has been a celebrity in the Chicago music world for many years. That episode at the Art Institute recently was just another chapter in a long story."

"Sir?"

"Hell yes, Sam Kates broke onto the major league jazz scene back when I was an undergraduate at DeVry. Hell yes. I've got one of his albums."

Pause. He holds out his hand. Aspies don't shake hands.

"Mr. Kates?" Longer pause. "It's a pleasure." His hand sinks to his side, like that was where it belonged anyway. "Mr.--"

"Sam," said Sam, autistically.

"Of course," said Rex. . . .

Having recovered from his attack of rebuffed celebrity-itis, Rex escorted Sam and Sharon into the room, seating Sharon prominently in the front row, Sam one desk behind, and called the meeting to order. If they had been able to bill the class as "Computers for Dummies" they would have. The idea was to introduce computer illiterate people to as many basic programs as possible in a 10-week quarter, and hope that, by osmosis, the students would at least be able to manage email by the time it was over. Tonight it was "creative arts" applications. In the middle of the room there was a cute little computer station, with several kinds of electronic modules all compactly organized on a combination desk/rack-mount on wheels; with the lights dimmed, Rex projected his computer screen onto a reflective whiteboard at the front of the classroom, his cursor deftly flying from window to window, cramming it all it. He spent 20 minutes on a computer graphics/paint/photoshop program (how many ways can you draw a circle?), 10 minutes on a speech recognition/dictation program (how many ways are there to misspell "generality"?), and then came the LAST program of the evening--you guessed it--a music notation program.

Sam had been cowering ever so slightly, trying to hide himself in the complicated metal framework of his desk, at the same time leaning over as close to Sharon as he could get without falling out into the aisle. He accepted the existence of thirty strangers crammed into the sterile, windowless, fluorescent college classroom, but it was weird experiencing their presence at such close quarters; he usually had the edge of the bandstand as a clearly defined boundary between himself and other stationary people; and, of course, he always had his saxophone demarcating a final defensive frontier. Here he was, now, sitting in a room where half a dozen people could reach out and TOUCH him if they wanted to. He was handling his fear pretty well, because Sharon would be mad if he  fretted or moaned, but it was a supreme effort of will to remain silent and still through the torturous minutes of Rex's incomprehensible presentations computer-projected onto the whiteboard.

Then the music presentation began. Sam's attention was attracted immediately and fixed on the screen.

Here we need a sidebar about Rex Highroad:

To his credit, Rex was pretty much of a pinball wizard with this program. Indeed, there are so many computer geeks who dabble in music, it's irritating--it's like track and field 30-yard dash runners pretending to be ballerinas. But Rex was a cut above most of these music dabblers. He got into music late in life, (sixteen), so he was never able to achieve a professional playing level; but he had a natural feel for music, and had applied his expertise in mathematics and computer science to music whenever he could. He was a musical amateur in the best sense of the word--he loved music, and, better yet, he RESPECTED music and musicians. He had been messing around with computer applications and recording for a long time, and had worked with enough garage bands over the years to know the difference between bullshit and the real thing. He knew from his album, "Blue Enough", that Sam Kates was the real thing--it really was exciting to have him in the classroom. It was not surprising that he had recognized Sam, because Rex prided himself on being hip to the musical scene in Chicago. To be sure, Sam was not a household word, but anybody who had kept even casually in touch with the Arts section of the Sun Times over the past several years had read about Sam Kates, Musical Savant. Anyway, Rex was a good guy, working below his level of expertise as adjunct faculty at a junior college, waiting for something to happen. Sam Kates happened, as we shall see.

Rex already had the program's output linked to the computer's onboard General MIDI synthesizer, but he also had a cheap musical electronic keyboard, cleverly hidden in a slide-out drawer in the guts of the computer station, to input notes with. He quickly typed in Row Row Row Your Boat and then started a series of copy-and-paste manipulations of the round--assigning different instruments to each of the several staves, changing tempo, articulation, etc. He imported MIDI files and made them change into black dots on the overhead screen, he scanned a page of sheet music and turned that also into black dots (with about as many mistakes as there are misspellings of "generality", but what the hell), and he performed a simple piece on the keyboard (something from the Anna Magdalena Bach Book) to a click track, and THAT was turned into black dots. Sam's interest became more intense with every step.

THEN, he took out a guitar with a microphone attached to it and ADDED a track to the Bach keyboard track--the computer transformed it into a simple notated bass part. When Rex played back the two tracks at once, Sam stood up. It was a weird moment. The music finished, this strange man standing rigidly at the front of the class. There was a silent expectation from all concerned, and Rex almost began an introduction of Sam to the rest of the class, but, thank you Jesus, a buzzer sounded faintly but obtrusively, signaling the end of the 50-minute hour, and the trance was broken as the lights came up and waves of students hurriedly crowded out both doors.

Sam shouldered past the throng toward the computer.

"Show me," he said.

"Mr. Kates?" said Rex.

"Show me." He fingered the microphone on the guitar--not the guitar, the microphone.

"Show you how the program works? I'd love to, but right now I have to--"

Sam unclipped the microphone from the bridge of the guitar, and held it up in front of him, the wire dangling. Rex thought he was offering it to him, but he wasn't.

"Sassa--saxophone?" His mind was reaching further into the world than it ever had before. "Will it work--saxophone?"

"Can you input with a saxophone? Yes, I think so. It works with flutes and clarinets, I don't know why it wouldn't. I've never tried it but--"

"Sam wa--I want one."