Felix Messer, pianist, part-time teacher, full-time cynic and distant relative of Don Messer, never intended to crawl into Bach’s head. It just happened, the way bad drugs or good revelations do. Without permission. It was a Tuesday, the radiator hissed like a reptile in a good mood. Felix sat down to hack his way through The Art of Fugue. He pressed the keys and the notes behaved… until they didn’t. Somewhere in the middle an inner voice head-butted him, like Wesley Willis, in the chest. He played it again. Same thing. A phantom line appeared, a “what-Bach-almost-wrote” counterpoint hovering. The music peeled open. Felix saw the scaffolding, the arithmetic of a man who wrote to keep from going insane. Bach was in the room muttering instructions: Invert that. Flip this. Faster, you coward. Felix saw grief too, like funerals distilled into sound. And just as he was getting used to the madness, the extra secret voice slipped away like a stray cat bolting. Felix didn’t tell anyone. Wouldn’t dare. But some days, he’d hear that invisible line again humming under the notes, daring him to follow. And he felt profoundly alone knowing he had once broken into heaven and lived to tell it but only to himself.