And then there was the *music*. Perry sometimes played with the piano and he'd figured out that if you hit every other key with three fingers, you got a chord. But Perry's dad almost never made chords: he made anti-chords, sounds that involved those mysterious black keys and clashed in a way that was *precisely* not a chord, that jangled and jarred. The anti-chords made up anti-tunes. Somewhere in the music there'd be one or more melodies, often the stuff that Perry listened to in his room, but sometimes old jazz and blues standards. The music would settle into long runs of improvisational noise that wasn't *quite* noise. That was the best stuff, because Perry could never tell if there was a melody in there. Sometimes he'd be sure that he had the know of it, could tell what was coming next, a segue into "Here Comes the Sun" or "Let the Good Times Roll" or "Merrily We Roll Along," but then his father would get to that spot and he'd move into something else, some other latent pattern that was unmistakable in hindsight. There was a joke his dad liked, "Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana." This was funny in just that way: you expected one thing, you got something else, and when your expectations fell apart like that, it was pure hilarity. You wanted to clutch your sides and roll on the floor sometimes, it was so funny. His dad usually closed his eyes while he played, squeezing them shut, letting his mouth hang open slightly. Sometimes he grunted or scatted along with his playing but more often he grunted out something that was kind of the *opposite* of what he was playing, just like sometimes the melody and rhythms he played on the piano were sometimes the opposite of the song he was playing, something that was exactly and perfectly opposite, so you couldn't hear it without hearing the thing it was the opposite of. The game would end when his dad began to improvise on parts of the piano besides the keys, knocking on it, reaching in to pluck its strings like a harp, rattling Perry's teacup on its saucer just so. Nothing made him feel better faster. It was a tonic, a fine one, better than pills and tea and toast, daytime TV and flat ginger-ale. As Perry got older, he and the old man had their share of fights over the normal things: girls, partying, school... But every time Perry took ill, he was transported back to his boyhood and those amazing piano recitals, his father's stubby fingers doing their comic high-kicks and pratfalls on the keys, the grunting anti-song in the back of his throat, those crazy finales with teacups and piano strings.