THE HANDS / WHAT THE INJURY MEANS

The word the specialists keep returning to, in interviews granted with the family's permission and in the guarded language of a rounds report, is allodynia. Pain, they explain, produced by a stimulus that would not, in a normal nervous system, hurt at all. A shirt cuff. A cool room. The weight of a wedding ring, if a thirteen-year-old had one to wear. In Luca Starr's case, doctors say, the misfiring appears to reach into both hands, from the wrist through the fingertips, in a pattern consistent with what neurologists call complex regional pain syndrome.

The bones will knit. The tendons, spared by luck and by a surgical team that worked into the small hours of the twentieth of November, will hold. On paper, in six months, in a year, the hands will look and function as they did on the night of the ceremony. A radiograph taken next spring will show nothing a stranger would flag.

What the radiograph will not show is the tremor, fine and constant, that the nursing staff first noticed on the third morning after the accident, when a resident set a paper cup of water on the tray table and the water, in the cup, would not stop moving. It will not show the way, according to a physical therapist who has since been reassigned at the family's request, the boy flinches when a bedsheet is drawn across the back of his hand. It will not show a skin that reads the lightest touch as fire.

"We treat the pain," said Dr. K. Ramachandran, a neurologist unaffiliated with the case who reviewed the publicly available summary at this paper's request. "We do not, in most cases, cure it. Patients live with it. Many live well. Whether a patient can also, in that condition, perform at the level Luca Starr was performing at, is not a medical question. It is a question we are not equipped to answer."

The Starr family, through counsel, declined to make Luca available. A statement issued the day before Christmas read, in full: "Luca is thirteen. He is healing. He asks for privacy, and for patience, and he thanks the people who have written." The statement was unsigned. It arrived from the same address that, six weeks earlier, had confirmed the September concert billed only as THE SYMPHONY.

In a brief exchange conducted by email and cleared by the family, Luca offered a single line, which he asked be printed in full and without gloss. "I can still hear it," he wrote. "I just cannot, yet, put it down."

Whether "yet" is a word of months, of years, or of a lifetime is, for now, a question no one at Inova Fairfax is willing to answer on the record. The tour is cancelled. The catalogue is quiet. A boy who, in February, walked out of the Staples Center with eight gramophones and a bowl of cereal waiting for him at home is, in December, learning to hold a pencil again, and finding, some mornings, that the pencil is more than he can bear.