Tales From Heller

A Happy Refrain

Near the end of the first year of the reign of terror, when the students in the accounting department were succumbing to senioritis and wondering what they could do with the "good person activities" budget, Alan barged into the leadership room with YouTube open.

"Check this out!" Alan commanded, and they watched as two twenty-somethings played the Moonlight Sonata on a giant floor piano, roughly the length of the walkway in front of the administrative offices, to a crowd of adoring fans. "Wouldn't this be fun? Imagine a bunch of Epsilons, one for every piano key, providing the entertainment for Open House. We have the money. I want this installed by Monday." Alan did not play the piano, but he claimed partial credit, being remarkably skilled at the violin despite his distaste for any and all classical music. When Alan imagined himself clad in a tuxedo dancing for the amusement of the guidance counselors, and them applauding and not snickering, he was far off reality. For one, they would be snickering when he tried playing Christmas carols the following week. His victims du jour, seeing this project as an easy way to get out of doing any work while having a fun story to tell their friends, saluted Alan sharply and promised they'd get right on it.

And they did: Frank arrived at school Monday earlier than usual, with no knowledge of the piano, and wondered what on God's green Earth that infernal noise was—while thankfully faint from outside the central courtyard, inside there was no mistaking that there was a concert with an audience of too many and performers clearly chosen unwillingly. The leadership students who had been tasked with installing the piano noticed that while it fit perfectly, this came at the expense of making it impossible to avoid playing something when entering or exiting the offices without making a desperate lunge for the lawn. On the positive side, as they also discovered, if people were to simultaneously exit all three office doors, they played an inverted C minor chord, so that was good enough.

It did not take too long for the student complaints to come in (the counselors, who had been given noise-canceling headphones long ago, couldn't have cared less, and spent one brunch period jumping through a Bach fugue): it turned out that the Epsilons doing janitorial work outside did not particularly enjoy their new background accompaniment, while the Alphas trying to eat lunch in quiet only approved of the noise when Alan was testing his Epsilon ensemble theory. Frank found the Epsilon ensemble amusing, even conducting them through some of his favorite tunes, but was forced to agree there was something flawed about the entire project.

His focus then became identifying who had approved this: it was unthinkable that something so novel would make it past the club's ever-watchful eyes, meaning someone was acting from within. It was easy enough to stow away the floor piano for another day without too much headache—Behrooz was handy with a screwdriver, and took some joy in taking on the endless renovations the school's budget increase demanded—but the chain of command had fallen somewhere, and Frank was going to find it.

"I swear on my honor, my parents' honor, the school's honor, I'm not asking you because you're going to be demoted. There's no consequences to saying yes if you're responsible. Did you or did you not install the floor piano?" Frank asked politely but firmly, growing a bit tired after ten minutes of increasingly convoluted interrogations.

"We were involved in behaviors relating to physical construction that resulted in the floor piano being present in front of the administrative offices," one of the gathered leadership students finally admitted.

"And were these 'behaviors relating to physical construction' your idea? Or, hmm, let me rephrase this: were these physical constructions also your ideological constructions? You know what, that makes no sense, but let's roll with it." After about thirty seconds of silence, another student piped up, on the verge of tears:

"It was Alan! Alan made us install the piano! He showed us this video on his phone of people playing Beethoven. I knew I should have asked you, but he sounded like he was going to be mad, and I didn't want to be punished!"