The sea rippled in the blue moonlight.
The ocean liner was like a brown wire worm, roaring and plowing through huge deep blue amber, dragging a long white blistering tail.
The waves were glistening, and the stars were falling into the water, jumping, like the fingers on the piano keys, playing the undulating sea.
The heavenly music of the sea dives breathlessly into the dreams of the sleepers, who turn around and fall asleep again.
Only I, standing on the deck, let the starlight from the distant past burn my eyes.
Occasionally, there are light waves on the bow of the ship, and then the water mist rises, and the eyes will be blurred for a short time.
At this point, I knew that it was his greeting to his old friends passing through his hometown.
One
The first thing I saw was his feet.
His feet looked like they were made for the sea, and they were as immovable as pillars on a small sampan-like deck ravaged by wind and waves.
The first time I experienced the sea, I was on an empty flowerpot and threw up in my mouth.
Hey, trumpet player, are you seasick? Come with me, I can make you feel better. He said, a faint smile on his lips.
He stepped into the empty ballroom as if it were flat, and sat down on the stool in front of the piano.
Loosening the brakes, he said to me, "Sit next to me, or you'll never get a chance.
I climbed onto the bench with great difficulty, and the beautiful notes burst from his fingers. The storm was suddenly mute.
On the empty dance floor, the piano stool embraced the piano, gliding and spinning on the shiny floor. Fingers danced a joyful tap on the black and white keys. Notes burst through the air one by one, like fireworks blooming one after another. Spinning, joyful flowers. A grand, empty musical firework.
The light was brief, but for a moment, it seemed to soothe the despondency in his eyes.
Two
He knew I was from New Orleans.
He said he loved that place. It's beautiful there in the winter. On a March afternoon, you can be caught off guard by a light fog, a white curtain that hangs gently from the streetlights, like a white blade that cuts through everything in the world, and it's magical. The roofs of the houses are cut off, the trees are missing their branches, the steeple of St. Louis Church is hard to find, and pedestrians can't recognize their faces, and everything above the neck is hidden in the fog. In Jackson Square, the headless corpses of people, bumping into each other, will ask each other if their families are still alive.
He described it so poetically that I thought he had actually been there.
However, he just liked traveling to the sound of his piano.
He once visited a beautiful village where the women's hair was perfumed, everything sparkled, and tigers roamed.
He has been to the center of a metropolis, rode a train through an idyllic countryside, stood on the edge of a volcano, wandered through the largest church, counted the stone pillars, and looked up to the gods overhead.
He has been traveling on the lyre. The soul hides in it.
Why don't you get off the boat and go ashore, buy a house, marry and have children, and live the life that the world aspires to? I asked.
People on shore always waste a lot of time asking why. When winter comes, they look forward to summer, and when summer comes, they worry about the coming of winter, so people never tire of traveling, trying to find a place of eternal summer. That, on the other hand, means nothing to me.
I was dumbfounded. The white waves danced on the bow of the boat, the water marks were solemn, and the only thing that passed was the low flight of the seagulls.
Three
Our boat was never short of big names. Jerry Rowe, for example, the father of jazz.
If you were on that boat, you might have been lucky enough to witness a piano duel for the ages.
The man who invented jazz, Jerry's butterfly fingers, like silk gently gliding over a woman's skin, caressing the keys.
The sound of the piano, the clamor gradually disappeared, people's hearts only left a piece of cool.
My friend, we all bet on him to win, but he just played a common "Christmas Eve".
The second round was even more outrageous, as he just repeated Jerry's playing, which, while an admirable gift for memorization, was ultimately boring.
The deciding round came and he strangely asked me for a cigarette.
After Jerry performed a lifelong mastery of rapid-fire strumming, he simply blandly said, You asked for it, asshole.
If Jerry Rowe's piano sound is heavenly, then his piano sound is from hell, devilish notes pouring out, like the siren's long hair entangled in everyone's limbs, and people can't move as if they've met Medusa's eyes.
The sound of the piano stopped at some point, and the hall was silent.
He rose and held his cigarette out to the hot strings. Snorting, light smoke and fire rose from the cigarette.
He walks over to Jerry Rowe and shoves the cigarette into his mouth.
As if the seal had been lifted, people woke up as if from a dream, applauded, and the seething crowd swarmed around my friend, lifting him up and scrambling to shake his hand.
He turned his head laboriously and looked hard in my direction. The normally melancholy eyes seemed to be lit up with pride.
If I had known that this was the highlight of his life, I would have given up my entire winnings in exchange for a slight extension of this moment.
My friend, he deserves the favor and treatment of life, although the world is cool, fate gives him more is to play tricks and cold eyes.
Four
You ask if love has ever favored him?
Love has not forgotten my friend, it has been so close to my friend, so close that it seems to reach out and hold.
He is on a boat recording his debut album.
He was playing the piano as usual, and the sound suddenly became soft and soothing, and I followed his gaze out the porthole to the pretty face of a young girl.
He was hypnotized by that beautiful face and entered a sweet dream, his fingers became gentle, like caressing the lover's lips, like touching the sweetest dream. The sound of the piano is dreamy and beautiful.
The round porthole, the young girl slightly knitted eyebrows, the sea breeze blew her long hair, such as the deep memory of the deep hidden painting. It is so beautiful that it is sad.
He suddenly felt that the record, only deserve to be owned by her alone. Because, when he played it just now, it was as if she was the only one in heaven and earth.
On the bow deck of the boat in the pouring rain, she was holding an umbrella and he was holding the record. The sound of the rain filled the sky and the earth, but not the distance between him and her.
The girl's friends and family came forward, and as they spoke, it dawned on them that they were the daughters of an old friend they had met before.
Admiration grew, he quietly entered the cabin at night, found the girl, and put his lips on her rose-like lips.
The man of the hour, the man of the hour, the man of the hour, the man of the hour, the man of the hour.
He looked at the young girl waiting in line to get off the boat and summoned up the courage to talk to her, wanting to give her the record.
The crowd collapsed, rushing them farther and farther away, and in the scattered voices, her address still floated clearly.
The world is like dust, he was so close to him, she and the record, a few days, will be drifting, and the end of the world.
That as in her dream, such as a light kiss, from now on, he also only to the dream to find.
Five
He was only a few steps away from the nearest shore.
As soon as he had walked those few steps, and once his feet were on solid ground, he would surely go on in, find the girl, and continue his legend on the ship ashore, so that more people could hear the sound of his wonderful piano.
We all thought he would surely get off the boat, and some of us thought he would never come back, and let out strongly stifled sobs.
Instead, his steps lagged, and he stopped a few steps offshore.
I couldn't see his expression from the boat, only his back as if he was confused.
On shore, in front of the cascading, scaly skyscrapers of New York City, my friend's back was filled with despondency.
After standing there for a moment, or perhaps a long time, he suddenly took off his bowler hat, threw it into the air, and turned to walk up the gangway.
The hat whirled and landed in the water beside the gangway, a black period, as far as the eye could see, floating on the water.
The shore was only a few gangplank steps away from him at its closest point.
Six
On the boat, which was about to be demolished by blasting in a few hours, I carried a gramophone and played his only record where he might hear it.
No one believed there was anyone hiding on the boat but me, his best friend, who knew he had to be here.
He appeared, his tuxedo no longer straight, but his eyes were still bright, and his air of despondency and loneliness was as strong as ever.
I persuaded him to get off the boat with me, maybe we could form a band and continue our happy times on the boat.
As long as you have a good story, and someone to tell it to, things aren't over. I talked about something he used to say.
He looked at me with eyes so deep they looked like they were trying to penetrate me, the hull of the ship, the whole ocean, the cosmic flood.
"That day on the gangway, everything was fine, the coat was handsome, I looked good in it, and I wanted to get off the ship. What stopped me from getting off the ship was not what I saw, but what I didn't see. Do you know what that feels like? The city is so big, I can't see the end of it. I can't see the end of all the things that are going to happen when I get off the boat, the end of the world. Like a piano, it has 88 keys, a beginning and an end. You're the one that's infinite. It's on a finite keyboard that you can make an infinite number of tunes. When the keys are infinite, you can't play. For me, the city is a ship too big, a woman too beautiful, a trip too long, a bottle of perfume too strong. It is a tune I don't know how to play. I've never been able to leave the boat in my life, but there is nothing better than that, I can leave my life. Not many people know I exist anyway, except you, so forgive me, my friend. "
It was as if the water of the entire ocean came up and covered my body, crushing my throat and suffocating me.
The hull of the ship, squeezed and rocked by the sea, let out a hyper-hyper-hyper-hyper-hyper-hyper-hyper-hyper-hyper-hyper-hyper-hyper. Thick with despair. And parting.
Despair is only for me. My friend, parting, I clearly saw, the corners of his lips slightly raised, his eyes like starlight shining.
He drew a rest to the music of his life, and rejoiced in it.
Seven
The sea rippled in the blue moonlight.
The sea floor, however, is strewn with beads, large and small, wrapped in the stories of people on shore lost to the sea.
This side of the sea, lying under the surface of the ocean, such as a deep blue beads, in the starlight twinkling, the wind whispered the night, the blue light will penetrate the layers of seawater, through the bow of the boat plowed out of the white waves, lighting up the deck of the eyes of the people standing.
If you are a storyteller, it will emit a strange light that penetrates your eyes and reaches your soul.
It is a strange story about a ship that no longer exists, and a man who almost never existed.
The ship, before the blast was called, the Virginia.
The man, had a long name, but people mostly called him, 1900.