The Loudness Page 3

  The band. My eyes dilate as their heads look suddenly enormous; terrifying. To my credit, my mouth isn’t hanging open. I know because my lips are dry and sticking together.

  “Henry?”

  Tom, the spastic guitarist, is holding his hand out like he wants to shake and—startled—I grab it with the wrong hand. Wincing at my own awkwardness, I commit to my very dumb handshake anyway, gripping the outside of his right hand with my stupid left hand. I wonder if I should make up for the misstep by adding my right hand to the mix and double shaking, but by the time that plan of action occurs to me it already feels too late. And my heart must be beating double-time, because Tom twitches strangely and, after a shocked moment, pulls away.

  In addition to being a total idiot, I’d forgotten about my “side effects” . . . but thankfully, he regains composure pretty quickly.

  “Heck of a handshake, Hank—nice to meetcha.”

  Dad smiles down at me. “I was just telling Tom here about our old records—he’s running a sort of studio down the strip and wants to start a station as soon as he can get wavelength going.”

  “Radio,” Tom chimes in proudly, rubbing the hand I buzzed on his dirt-worn jeans. “Once the power’s back up and everything.”

  “Oh . . . cool,” I say, noticing that Dad and Rachel and Tom are all smiling at me encouragingly. It’s strange, but a relief to see that everyone’s head is back to normal. Greg is behind them, beating a rhythm with his bare hands on the wall by kitchen window. The cook starts to yell at him to quit it, so I have to raise my voice.

  “You guys were . . . really good today,” I say, just hanging out with the band.

  And end scene, clueless Dad for the win.

  The scene doesn’t really end there, though.

  Tom’s curious to see the attic records we’ve lugged from home, and Dad makes it dorkily clear that we’re curious to see his set-up, so—stuffed—we all leave Foods together and walk our bikes over to Tom’s studio-slash-store, which is in a mostly-restored building about a block off the strip. Mostly restored, because it’s sort of a dump, but livable.

  Or, at least, Tom lives there with Rachel.

  Their house is a squat, single-story shotgun, a kind of building that’s pretty common in the Grey Zone. They’re called “shotguns” because they’re long and skinny, about five rooms deep and one room wide. All the doors are typically aligned so, if you wanted to, you could shoot a bullet straight through the house from the front yard to the backyard without hitting anything. Of course, no one’s actually recommending that you try that—it’s just a turn of phrase from Before, when people had time for that kind of thing.

  On the outside it looks like most of the other houses on the Other Side, which is to say it’s less a house than a carnival. In fact, it makes the rest of the Other Side look like the Green Zone. The entire facade is spray-painted a metallic gold, and it reflects the noonday sun so effectively that I have to shield my eyes. On the porch, a line of department store mannequins (also metallic gold) vogue in various states of disrepair.

  And that isn’t the extent of their renovation; the inside is a carefully choreographed explosion.

  Unlike a traditional shotgun, Tom and Rachel’s place is completely gutted—there are no doors, no interior walls, no rooms. Just stacks of records and piles of salvage. And in the far corner, a worn mattress on the floor, a few rugged amplifiers, and a record player. Knotted next to the mattress is a fire hazard of electrical cords, the largest of which feeds through a back door that doesn’t shut all the way to a rusted generator abutting the rear of the house. Looking around, I notice there isn’t a kitchen or a bathroom in sight.

  It’s not exactly the most comfortable space, but what it lacks in utilitarianism it makes up for in design. The walls are plastered with the same flyers that are up in the strip, but coated with a thin layer of white paint so they act as a subtle, slightly crinkly wallpaper. Which would be interesting enough in itself, but lining the makeshift wallpapered walls are at least fifty portraits, all of people pictured from the shoulders up, all clearly by the same hand—I recognize the style from the monster cookout mural next to Foods.

  The portraits circle the entire interior of the house, making it more art gallery than living room. They’re all roughly the same size, but variously framed: some have heavily ornamented, silver-leafed arabesques holding them up, others just simple wooden squares. But the frames hardly matter—it’s the faces staring out at me that really make an impression. They’re all glossy, brightly painted with the same colors that make the rest of the Other Side so interesting: neon pink hair and tangerine faces, blue pupils and copper lips.

  And then I realize, with a start, that I recognize some of them. “This is . . . amazing,” I whisper, out loud but to no one in particular, as I place Tom with his skinny turkey neck, and werewolf Greg, and the Food Eats cook (his black waxed mustache turned lilac purple). Looking for more familiar faces draws my gaze around the interior, which slowly comes into focus as the kind of treasure trove you can lose days in: a wooden crate of old photographs, some really old; more mannequins, mostly torsos and heads without bodies (one has a scuffed-up old guitar hanging around its neck); a sewing machine; piles and piles of clothes; boxes of books . . .

  Tom and Rachel must be used to first-timer gawking, because they just stand near the front door smiling while we take everything in.

  “Paintings by Rachel, clutter’s all mine,” Tom says, jolting us back into the moment.

  While Dad claps Tom on the back and says some stuff about how he “likes to see a place that looks lived in,” that the Other Side is “really something,” I keep looking around at the paintings, wondering what color face I’d have if I was up on the wall. I think probably a light green, since I’m so obviously from the Zone, but there are already a few green faces up on the wall that wouldn’t fit in at all in our neighborhood.

  Rachel falls in step with me while I pace the room, which has to be done very carefully because of all the clutter—it’s less a pace than a hopscotch, really. “So, your dad’s pretty friendly,” she says, smiling. She looks so nice that I instinctively copy her smile, then frown when I realize what I’m doing. She laughs, silently, like a cat yawning.

  “He’s not that bad, is he?”

  “Oh, no—my dad’s great,” I say. “I just . . . I dunno.”

  She nods, sympathizing so sincerely that it has me genuinely smiling again.

  We both turn around to look at Dad, who is very obviously friendly in the best possible way. He’s still talking to Tom, who’s nodding in quick, vigorous bursts, agreeing with Dad about “the importance of self-portraiture in urban planning.” You wouldn’t think a scuzz punk squatter and a guy in orthopedic shoes and cuffed shorts would get along so famously, but maybe that’s just the magic of what’s happening on the Other Side.

  “Get a load of these guys,” Rachel stage-whispers out of the side of her mouth, finger pistols waggling at Tom and Dad like she’s some corny comedian from way Before. I laugh a little too loudly and both of them look up, startled, remembering that maybe not everyone in the room is so totally absorbed in their conversation.

  “Oh hey, before I forget,” Rachel says in a normal voice, plucking a record off the top of a precarious stack and flipping it at me. “Our thing.”

  It doesn’t have a cover so much as a blank paper sleeve, and the vinyl feels thicker than the ones I pinned to my wall—more rustic, if that makes sense, with rough edges. “We actually press those ourselves,” she says proudly, watching me rub my thumb across its ragged edges. “Tom learned from our friend in Baltimore.”

  I don’t know where Baltimore is, and it seems crazy to be able to imply intimacy with other cities, like it’s no big deal to make records in Baltimore. I look at Rachel to see if she’s putting me on, but she just wipes her face with the back of her hand, leaving a streak of sweaty dirt on her forehead. She’s definitely—I decide, slipping the record back into its sleeve
—the coolest person I’ve ever met.

  Meanwhile, Tom yelps.

  He and Dad have moved on to looking over the records we brought, and a quick glance confirms that he’s okay . . . he’s just seen something he likes. Dad is still feeling magnanimous, maybe even more so than before, and tells him to take it, to take the whole stack of them, that the whole reason we were over here in the Other Side was to get rid of the stuff.

  “Oh but no, no. No, no. I can’t—I don’t even have . . .” Tom balks, wanting to take Dad up on his generosity but also stuck. “We’re trying to build our record library for the station—I just don’t . . . I just don’t think I can trade right now.”

  Dad holds up the record that inspired the swallowed yell. On the cover is a photo of a guy with crossed eyes and a clarinet or something surrounded by girls in tassled vests. It isn’t even one of the ones I’d chosen to hang up on my wall—a loser through and through. “I didn’t even like this when I bought it thirty years ago,” Dad says. “Just thought it was funny . . .”

  Tom looks at me for affirmation, which he doesn’t have to do—it’s Dad’s music collection—but I’m flattered to be considered part of the deal.

  I nod encouragingly.

  “Listen, really . . . just take them all,” Dad says, wedging a few records into a precarious mountain of books next to him to prove his conviction. “For the station. We’d consider it an honor to be your first sponsors.” A thick textbook of Mesoamerican culture through the ages clatters to the knotty hardwood floor, setting off a dusty avalanche.

  “Well, all right then,” Tom says, tentatively—but resolutely—shaking Dad’s hand and looking relieved when he doesn’t get shocked. “But let’s still make this thing a thing.”

  He spins around, knocking into the remaining book pile and dislodging a few more dusty volumes. Rubbing his knees, he makes his way toward the mannequins at the back of the room, and I wonder what Mom would say about having one of them, gleaming gold, on our porch swing.

  If we’d use some scrip to at least get some shorts on it.

  But Tom isn’t heading for a mannequin. He’s heading for the electric guitar hanging on a headless mannequin by a tatty leather strap. I hold my breath and snap my neck around to catch Dad’s reaction, but he’s picked up one of the books that had fallen and is flipping through it, totally and immediately immersed. Rachel just smiles.

  “It’s an old beater, found it down the block when we moved in,” Tom says. “The screws are a little loose, and it’s a junior model, but if you’re looking for some rock and roll, you might as well try to be the band you want to hear.”

  His voice gets sort of reverent for that last part, like he’s quoting something.

  “Anyway,” he says, handing it over to me. “Here ya go.”

  I take it from him with a sinking feeling. For him to be giving me a guitar feels like too much—a gesture too big for the circumstances. I try to keep my face stiff so Tom won’t realize what a raw deal he’s getting, trading a few crummy records for a genuine guitar, but he looks so happy to be handing the thing off that I can’t stop myself from breaking out into a big, lopsided grin.

  We stay on the Other Side for a few more hours after saying our goodbyes, walking up and down the strip and then, when our eyes can’t take it any more—Dad calls it “color fatigue”—sitting on the levee watching the river go by. It doesn’t look particularly dumb, I think, fingering the Dumb River record Rachel gifted me. Just slow. Which it isn’t. One of the first things you learn in the city is not to trust the river. It’s unreliable; it tries to jump its banks every rainy season and has a current that’ll pull you under before you even have a chance to yell out for a rope.

  Which is pretty dumb, I guess . . .

  More dumb is that we have to get home before sunset. The Grey is as dangerous as the river after dark. Dad offers to carry my “new” old guitar on his back for the return trip, and even though that sounds like a good idea, I find myself double-checking its braided strap and slinging it over my own shoulder, its finger-worn neck jutting out diagonally and downward. I feel a little silly because it doesn’t feel like it’s mine yet, but its heft and pull feels just right.

  Like it’s a part of me.

  And then, after only a few minutes of standing-in-the-stirrups pedaling, we aren’t on the Other Side anymore.

  It may just be the caffeine from Foods finally wearing off, but the instant we roll into the Grey Zone everything starts to feel heavy again, like we’d spent the morning high-stepping on the moon and now, back on Earth, the increased gravity is too much to bear. I sit in my saddle, suddenly tired, and try to gauge if Dad’s feeling the same way . . . but his eyes are determined slits, impossible to read.

  The sun is still pretty high in the sky, but our ride back through the Grey Zone feels like a midnight retreat. The air is thick with magnolias and something dark beneath, like rotting leaves—a sinister bouquet that was replaced on the Other Side with the happily overwhelming smell of baking bread and brewing coffee.

  I’d been too distracted with excitement on the way to the Other Side to really take the Grey Zone in—my attention had been focused almost completely on the resonant thumping of cement mixers and the shouts of the orange vests, the promise of short-distance horizons. On reflection, I realize that I’d actually tried not to look at the Grey too closely—the Grey Zone as it is, not the Greened-over Grey.

  And I still don’t want to look too closely, but—once I realize I’ve been avoiding it—I find I can’t tear my eyes away. Even so, the damage is so random, so chaotic, that my impulse is to lose myself in the horizon or the ever-changing canopy of the oak trees overhead, like usual.

  Instead, I force myself to I focus on doors.

  A peeling light pink one, half-open and bleached by the sun. A glossy red one, somehow freed of its frame, resting against a rusty wrought-iron fence. A bent metal garage door.

  And after doors, windows: the mostly-intact stained glass of a church on the corner with tall arched doors, wooden and starred with iron bolts. A bay window with an enormous dead branch sticking out of it, weather-damaged curtains rustling in the wind behind it. A propped-up facade, just the front of a skeleton house with nothing but windows and the blue sky beyond.

  Before long I’m considering houses as wholes, not just doors and windows.

  The shotgun without any visible damage in the middle of one block, skinny but standing brave despite its neighbors. The fallen friends: roofless, half-demolished with overturned cars in the front yards and only three standing walls. Refrigerators spilling long composted insides onto overgrown lawns. A calico cat with a nice face licking its white paws on a front porch.

  I start to feel less heavy, like I could float away at any second if it wasn’t for the guitar on my back weighing me down. Even with the guitar, I feel as if I’m floating away: as soon as I’ve started to get a handle on the Grey Zone, it’s gone, melted away into the fast-approaching night.

  I blink.

  We’re back in the Green Zone, coasting comfortably up the Avenue; the street lights overhead remain dead despite the darkness. The only light is from the windows of houses with generators and a harvest moon hanging low in the sky. Compared with the out-loud life of the Other Side, everything feels a little less familiar than I expected it would, a little more strange.

  Our house is dark, which means Mom isn’t home—a suspicion confirmed by a note on the door telling us she’s staying late at Grammy’s for a Zoning meeting. It’s not a surprise: if she isn’t at work, she’s at Grammy’s, which is work, but with finger sandwiches. I drop my bike in the hallway and run upstairs, clicking the unpowered light switch to “on” and waiting for Dad’s “All clear?”

  “Clear,” I yell, sticking my head out the window.

  It’s best for me to be in my room on the third floor when Dad cranks the generator, so I keep my head hanging out the window until I hear the motor turn over and the snap of my bedroom lights jo
lting back to life. And then I keep it there a little longer, watching Dad wipe the grease from his hands on the sides of his shorts. He inhales deeply, looking critically around our pitch-black lawn, and seems reluctant to come inside. When he finally does—letting the door slam shut behind him—I hang out of the window for a little longer still, hypnotized by the big yellow moon nearly kissing its reflection in the not-so distant river.

  Back inside my room, nothing’s changed.

  And everything has changed.

  Like the Green Zone on our way home, something is off—like we’ve biked back to a parallel dimension. The only thing that feels really right is Tom’s old guitar, resting heavily on my bed like it’s always been there. I pick it up by the neck, strum it once, and lean it behind the closet door—hiding it to see if that will somehow switch everything back to normal. The feeling doesn’t go away, though, so I pick it up again, pull the strap over my head, and try to get the weight of the thing. It’s smooth black, glossy, and just a little chipped on the head and where the body meets the neck. The frets are dusty and one of the volume knobs is missing, but it still turns. It easily trumps Mom’s old bike as the nicest thing I own.

  Remembering the concert earlier in the day—how Rachel had held the microphone like it was a snake she wasn’t afraid of—I pick up the Dumb River record and, holding it by its rough edges with the tips of my fingers to keep from getting shocked, drop it smoothly onto the spindle of the record player Dad set up . . . it feels like a hundred years ago.

  After a few seconds of scratchy buzz, Greg counts in (“One! Two! Three! Four!”) and the first track starts all at once, the drums and the screaming and the high-wire guitar, a barely contained frenzy of fuzz punk and roll. It’s rough, but on record I can actually hear some of what Rachel is yelling about. Something something, “Do it! Do it! Do it,” something, “Yeah!”

  And that’s when I make my big mistake.

  It feels like the most natural thing in the world, too. I barely even notice that I’ve set the guitar down—that I’m pulling the drawers out of my fat wooden dresser—until I’m standing in a pile of neatly pressed shirts and shorts from City Clothes that I’ve dumped unceremoniously on the floor. I don’t know that I’m going to cut all the cuffs from my shorts until after I start scissoring through them—it’s pure impulse. And then, gathering momentum, a goal taking form, I vanquish the tyranny of shirt sleeves. The record blasts out fuzz-pulses of inspiration, and I time my cuts to match them: