New York, 1926.

Arthur "Art" Delaney woke to the smell of damp wool and something older—something like the ghost of a perfume he hadn't yet encountered but would, in some later version of this particular dream, come to associate with a woman named Nora who sang in a club on 135th Street and whose voice, when she hit the high note on "St. Louis Blues," made the gin in his glass vibrate just enough to catch the light like a diamond catching fire.

But that was later.

At this moment, Art didn't remember any of that. He sat on a bed that felt too luxurious for a place he couldn't name, his mind a fog of half-remembered conversations with men whose faces dissolved when he reached for them—much like the faces of the men he'd met at the club the night before, which was, he noticed with a strange detachment, the only thing he remembered clearly.

The club. The music. The woman.

Everything else was fog.

Around him, four others stirred. A woman with hair the colour of burnt honey—Eleanor, her name whispered itself into his consciousness, though he couldn't say from where. Another woman, younger, with sharp eyes and a mouth perpetually set in protest—Margaret, whose name came to him next, accompanied by the inexplicable certainty that he had once, in some earlier version of this particular morning, owed her money he never intended to pay.

And then there was the bird.

It rested upon an old upright piano in what might have been a drawing room if drawing rooms in houses this size had pianos made entirely of brass—a mechanical creation of such exquisite precision that Art found himself staring at it for long minutes each day, tracing the individual brass feathers with his eyes until they ached from the effort of not touching.

When it sang, the sound was so perfectly avian that Art would catch himself tapping his foot, expecting the rhythm to sync up with whatever jazz record Eleanor had left playing on the gramophone in the corner—a record Art didn't remember hearing her bring.

The bird's melody reminded him, strangely, of the way Nora sang "St. Louis Blues" on a Tuesday night in November, when the club was half-empty and the heating was broken and the cold was trying its best to get in. It had the same precise, mechanical perfection. The same impossible beauty.

And underneath it, in the silence between notes, Art swore he could hear something—a whisper, or maybe just the memory of a voice, or maybe the gin talking to him because he'd had too much.

His own name.