Camouflage

had taken piano lessons from age ten to thirteen, the teacher was told, but had quit out of frustration, boredom, and puberty. Or so the parents thought. He must have been practicing secretly.
    This current teacher, Jefferson Sheffield, had been hired on Dr. Grossbaum’s recommendation. His specialty was music for therapy, and under his patient tutelage many mentally ill and retarded people had found a measure of peace and grace.
    Jimmy’s performance on the piano had been like his idiot-savant talent with language: he could repeat anything Sheffield did, note for note. Left to his own devices, he would either not play or reproduce one of Sheffield’s lessons with perfect fidelity.
    This morning it improvised. It sat down and started playing with what appeared to be feeling, making up things that used the lessons as raw material, but transposed and inverted them, and linked them with interesting cadenzas and inventive chord changes.
    He played for exactly one hour and stopped, for the first time looking up from the keyboard. Sheffield and most of the family and staff were sitting or standing around, amazed.
    “I had to understand something,” it said to no one in particular. But then it gave Deborah a look that made her tremble.
    D r. Grossbaum joined Sheffield and the family for lunch. The changeling realized it had done something seriously wrong, and retreated into itself.
    “You’ve done something wonderful, son,” Sheffield said. It looked at him and nodded, usually a safe course of action. “What caused the breakthrough?” It nodded again, and shrugged, in response to the interrogative tone.
    “You said that you had to understand something,” he said.
    “Yes,” it said, and into the silence: “I had to understand something.” It shook its head, as if to clear it. “I had to learn something.”
    “That’s progress,” Grossbaum said. “Verb substitution.”
    “I had to find something,” it said. “I had to be something. I had to be some . . . one.”
    “Playing music let you be someone different?” Grossbaum said.
    “Someone different,” it repeated, studying the air over Grossbaum’s head. “Make . . . made. Made me someone different.”
    “Music made you someone different,” Sheffield said with excitement.
    It considered this. It understood the semantic structure of the statement, and knew that it was wrong. It knew that what made it different was new knowledge about that unnamed part of its body, how it would stiffen and leak something new. But it knew that humans acted mysteriously about that part, and so decided not to demonstrate its new knowledge, even though the part was stiff again.
    It saw that Grossbaum was looking at that part, and reduced blood flow, to make it less prominent. But he had noticed; his eyebrow went up a fraction of an inch. “It’s not all music,” he said, “is it?”
    “It’s all music,” the changeling said.
    “I don’t understand.”
    “You don’t understand,” the changeling looked at its hands. “It’s all music.”
    “ Life is all music,” Sheffield said. The changeling looked at him and nodded. Then it rose and crossed the room to the piano, and started playing, which seemed safer than talking.
    I t was awake at midnight, when the door eased open. Deborah closed it silently behind her and padded on bare feet to the bed. She was wearing oversized men’s pajamas.
    “You have clothes,” it said.
    “I just got up to get a glass of milk,” she said, confusing it. The fluid it produced that way was not milk, and to fill a glass would take all night.
    She read its expression almost correctly and smiled. “In case I get caught, silly.”
    A little moonlight filtered through the curtains. The changeling adjusted its irises and made it bright as day, watching her slowly unbutton the pajama top.
    It noted the actual size and disposition of breasts, not the way they appeared when she was clothed. The pigmentation and placement of nipples and aureoles. (It had wondered about its own nipples, which seemed to have no function.)
    She slipped into bed next to it, and it attempted to pull down the pajama bottoms.
    “Naughty, naughty.” She kissed it on the mouth and moved one of its hands to a breast.
    The kiss was odd, but it was something it had seen, and returned with a little force.
    “Oh my,” she whispered. “You’re hot.” She reached down and stroked the part that had no name. “Aren’t you the cat’s pajamas.”
    That