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126 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 8.17 THE ARTS Brian Schreck uses this device to record heartbeats. Gary Johnson says the chemo doesn't make him sick, like it does other people. (He knocks on the wood- en arm of his chair for luck.) Instead, it takes his voice, which really sucks for someone who's done karaoke for years. e 64-year-old is a real music buff — he has a room stacked floor to ceiling with records, tapes, CDs and 8-tracks. An old reel-to-reel recorder he used to take to concerts sits in a corner. His walls are adorned with Joni Mitchell, the Stones, Janis Joplin — a concert for the ages. Somewhere around here he has the lacy red panties he found in a room Mick Jag- ger had stayed in when Johnson worked maintenance at the Hyatt in the '80s. Johnson has tried a few different kinds of palliative care since receiving his leu- kemia diagnosis — the massage therapy just felt creepy. When someone at Norton mentioned music therapy, he loved the idea. "You like the blues?" he asked Schreck, handing him one of those little cans of Sprite or Sierra Mist you get in hospitals. "Slide," he said, and Schreck's strings groaned and jangled. Johnson made up verses on the spot, and that was the "Chemo erapy Blues." "Did you change it?" he asked Schreck when he heard the recording of his heart. It was hard to believe that beat was nothing but his own pulse, repeating and repeating, that it could repeat forever and ever, without end. Schreck has worked in music therapy for more than a decade, and he's used to endings. When he was in elementary school, his mother, a Eucharistic minister, would take him to a local nursing home to deliver Communion. e antiseptic smells, curtains darkly drawn, IVs drip- ping in half-light — it was all normal to Schreck. His mother was frank: "Mary died," she'd say. "But she really loved the time she spent with you." "Basically, she taught me to not be afraid," Schreck recalls. "I can see you're bored," she told him one day at the nursing home. "Why don't you go practice in the day room?" Schreck was around 10 years old. He'd been learning saxophone, and he "honked out" the tunes he was practicing. An old man got up from his chair and turned the TV off. He asked a woman in a wheel- chair if she wanted to dance. She said yes, and he placed his hands on the handles of her chair, turning circles to the solo horn. Something is happening right now, Schreck thought. He already knew he was going to be a musician, but now he saw some- thing different, something more: how a melody could lift old bones, how playing could pause the world — all its needles frozen above skin, its scalpels stopped, its death, for a moment, relenting — just long enough for a dance.