. . . as he listened, for maybe the thousandth time, to what he termed the tiny, miraculating engines of the sonatas, those double-paneled miniatures whose source he was completely at a loss to explain. Which accounted for the impossible length of the fragment, and his interminable, twitching efforts to maintain it. It was, he often said to himself, the same thing as searching for a word, but in this case the word wasn't meant to explain other words, but music. And wasn't music incompatible with language, even if language at times attained the status of music, in poetry, and song, couldn't it escape the pastime of naming commonplace things? Even if it did this it would still stay separate, he told himself, resisting, in the final analysis, whatever Scarlatti could do with sound. What this strange composer had done with it, compressing four movements into a single, binary unit, which wasn't so much call and response, as Bach's preludes and fugues could be described, or even question and answer—there just wasn't a genre or form for what he had done, and yet, working from an obscure need that had found its most proper expression, Scarlatti had produced 555 so-called sonatas, each one different from the last, encyclopedic in their harmonic resourcefulness, variety and cataloguing of human emotion. Their number, 555, which commentators often were at odds in explaining, resorting to astrology, number magic, or, at worst, the most outrageous kinds of occultism, he was also at a loss to clarify, saying, at different points, that such an impossible sum had probably been the result of a barely controlled mania, or, at the height of his lucidity regarding the subject, a celebration of the hand itself, the five fingers multiplied not just twice but three times, suggesting the supernatural agility needed to play these pieces, which represented the summit of the harpsichordist's art. The repetition of the number five might also be put down to Scarlatti's habit of compositional repetition within the sonatas themselves, which seemed to near madness at the close of his life. Scarlatti liked to hear things twice, as anyone did, he pointed out, and yet more than most, he said, referring the reader to a variety of things it was pleasing to hear twice, such as the call of birds, a knock on the door, the affirmation of a yes . . .