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  8

  Edward larent and his could-be drummer were thirsty, and the bar was not far now. Their first rehearsal over, the two had walked from the drummer’s loft, lodged in the dying industrial heart of the city, to the large cobblestone square that was Carrell Plaza. In a recent renovation, the facades forming the square had been lined with massive high-definition screens, each assembled from smaller screens of the same proportions. Usually their faces gave you incandescent Dodges, Sprite cans, MacBooks. Today, though, a live newsfeed offered up a different kind of vision. Thick gray-brown billows, twirled by a corkscrew wind, rushed out of a battered fountain. From beneath chunks of pale yellow marble, clouded water spewed along the stones and across the benches edging the fountain. A pair of marble legs, one severed at the patella, the other at mid-thigh, remained upright, stoutly projecting through the shards from the whirling fountain floor, where the feet remained bolted.

  The two of them didn’t know what face to make. Something less than shocked. That would have been unreasonable at this point, after everything that was happening. More like unhappily curious, the sort of look that didn’t last.

  “Must be Brandt?” Larent said.

  “I think,” Li Moto, the drummer, said.

  Hundreds were collecting in the plaza, all caught in the imaged wreckage of another, Brandt Square. The density of pixels marginally exceeded what the eye could resolve, so it was only the lack of a third dimension that disqualified these immense pictures from the status of self-standing reality.

  In front of them, at the base of one of the screens, a pair of sneakers shone absolute white. Fraying jeans draped over the tongues and laces and led on to a Redskins sweatshirt; atop that, a pair of dry yellow eyes and a roiled mouth were affixed to a small black face.

  “This,” the rasp came, the man looking into the screen behind them, “I’m telling you, this is real. This shit.” His left heel shook in a quick rhythm, pivoting on a sneaker toe. His thigh bounced and rippled his loose, stained jeans. His eyes surveyed the crowd and found only Larent’s and Moto’s. The rest were on the screens, the skies, or the cobblestones. The man’s face went blank and stiff before an easy grin came across it. “What do you think of this?” he squeaked.

  Moto reflected back something of this oddly timed grin, though his was milder, and its cause was the man not the circumstance. Larent, for his part, only stared into the brightness of the man’s shoes, observing the double-stitched, unscuffed uppers, the “14” inscribed on the tongue in a tall skinny font. High-tops, just out of the box. How many jump shots will they see? And how many Crip walks?

  Larent had clicked on “Crip walking” a few weeks ago, a link in a history of blacks in American music that was itself only something he had fallen into in a search for free jazz. It took him to a clip, a tutorial in fact, according to the tag: black teens in perforated football jerseys, bandanas just above the eyes, in a circle in the middle of a residential street, taking turns bisecting the ring in a sort of languid shuffle. Their upper bodies were slack and slightly hunched, but their legs were in constant motion and seemingly autonomous, carrying the rest of them in tow. Loose legs and bent knees turned stiff and straight in alternation, right then left. Their shoes, like this man’s, whiter than white, or else a perfect black, went toe to heel, then effortlessly across the asphalt as the other leg tautened. They crossed at all angles, sliding past each other but never colliding. Having made their crossings, they would take up positions on the perimeter, reinstating the form of the circle as others broke off from it and floated through the space within.

  The clip seemed to end just before perfection had set in and their movements had the chance to jell into some broader choreography, an organic orchestration. That was just beyond the tape, probably. Or perhaps gunshots were, and everything had turned to chaos. Whatever it was, Larent had felt compelled to watch the clip at least a dozen times.

  “Why you looking at the ground, man?” the black man said to him. “There’s nothing there.” There was no menace in his voice.

  Larent wished he would do the walk there, a perfect dance in those perfect shoes.

  “Can’t you see?” Moto said, playing along with the man. He grasped Larent by the shoulder and gestured at the screens.

  “That’s right, man. Now he’s got it right.” The man’s face got smaller as he squinted at Moto. He drew the back of his hand across his stubbled chin. “You Chinese? Japanese?” he said, pushing one of his sleeves up to the elbow and dropping his head slightly as he studied the stones underfoot, yellow and gray.

  “Yeah,” Moto said.

  “Which?” the man said, lifting his eyes but not his head.

  “Yes, which?” Larent said. With a jaded look he grasped Moto’s forearm and guided him off his shoulder.

  The extent of Moto’s glibness troubled Larent, more than the destruction itself almost. Perhaps he could be so playful, so detached, because it wasn’t his country being sundered. He could always jet back to Japan, or Monaco, for that matter.

  At Deerfield he’d been a parachute kid. But a gifted one, Renna had said. She’d re-introduced Moto to him just days ago as a possible bandmate. He’d been in her class, one behind Larent, and though, according to her, the two musicians had met before, neither could remember anything of it.

  Moto’s money, the leisure it brought, had freed up his gift for unprofitable things like experimental music. (From the little Larent had heard from him, earlier in the afternoon, he had to agree, Moto had talent, though he was unsure how or if it connected up with his own.) A few years after finishing at Deerfield, Moto went back to Japan with the noise-rock band he’d formed across the country, in San Francisco. They’d broken up for no good reason, as far as he was concerned, and he’d only just returned to the States, to that artfully spare loft—paid for, Larent assumed, in yen. He had no reason to begrudge him, though. Larent’s family’s money had done much to free his own creative impulses. There just wasn’t quite as much of it, none to carry him now.

  Larent regarded the black man, who along with Moto was grinning more freely. Really it wasn’t his country either. He could never be free here. History, the sugar trade, wouldn’t let go of him. And unlike the drummer, there wasn’t much chance of his escaping. This, Larent thought, might have darkened the man’s amusement with this chaos that was rolling in waves around them—all of them now, not just his kind, and for months.

  The black man pulled his sleeve back down and gripped his face. He started tapping his pockets with his other hand, searching. The screens emptied. After a long moment they were reanimated not by a ruined courtyard but a razor blade, as tall as a man, briskly circling the plaza’s digital perimeter. The blade shimmered as it flew through the deep black nonspace of the screens and glided into place alongside several other blades in a cartridge. A razor flying in the opposing direction met the cartridge, fastened to it, and fell into the palm of a waiting hand the width of three men.

  Just in front of this race-indeterminate palm, the black man was lost in concentration, on a point inches from his nose. He flicked his thumb along the strike strip of a white book, dragging the crumbling pink match head across it. Still attached to the book, but with its cardboard stem bent around to reach the strip, the head combusted as his thumb withdrew into the space beyond the book. The stem held the flame as he maneuvered it to his unwavering point of focus, the tip of a short filterless cigarette.

  The digital hand behind him and the razor in its palm faded. The first traces of the razor maker’s name gathered in their place. But a thousand footfalls were already echoing through the plaza. The crowd had lost interest, had perhaps never had any, having probably seen the ad many times, on many screens—just like what had come before it, the billowing smoke, the dust of another detonation.

  Larent and Moto pushed through the crowd toward the edge of the courtyard. The man, smoke swaddling his head, lurched toward them before they could make much headway. A pocket of space enveloped him
, but it moved with him owing to the fire jutting from his mouth.

  “I bet I can help you,” he said.

  “I’m fine, I think,” Moto said.

  “Why?” Larent asked the man. “Why would you think that?” Larent didn’t know quite why he’d asked the question, though the man offered a creditable answer.

  “Because.” He held out a crumpled soft-pack of Camels toward him. “Because can’t anyone?” The pocket around the man hardened in place, penning him in, just as the two of them drifted away on a current of foot traffic toward the shops beyond the screens.

  ■■■

  They stepped through the beaten doors of Moto’s haunt, The Round, a pedigreed rock club on the courtyard’s eastern edge. The bar itself was no more than a low-ceilinged corridor line with a dozen cherry stools. Behind it were three local drafts that Moto attested never changed, and a modest shelf of spirits, mostly common stock, though spiked with a few rarities the owner apparently enjoyed, things like Green Spot, or Yoichi.

  No one was tending bar. Moto scraped past the two vintage Rickenbacker F-holes hanging on the wall and clutched the shoulder of a bearded man on the farthest stool. Larent, who had slowed at the head of the bar, near the door, searched the eyes of the four men for the bartender, the one indulging his regulars in the slow hours of early evening, he assumed.

  Before he could single him out, Moto caught his eye and waved him on past the bar. By the time Larent entered that cube of a room at the back, Moto was comfortably seated at a long unvarnished table near the entryway. Larent looked over the stray music gear that demarcated the small stage beyond: the Korg keyboard, the well-used twelve-string, two pre-war steel strings in slightly worse shape, and the powder blue Fender bass with oversize tuning pegs like cloverleaves.

  Clustered near the gear, around what looked like a plastic patio table, were several twenty-something girls, all of them in threadbare sweaters, one in white jeans, and two more like twins, though not, in leggings and gauzy skirts. A bottle of Campari sat on the table, and their mouths moved violently, probably with gossip. What else inspired that kind of passion? But all he could hear was the Fahey record jangling through the sound system. The music soon vanished the girls from his mind, and as it did he began to study what was left in that peculiar blue-walled space, what Moto would later point out was actually a white-walled space bathed in pale blue light (hence the peculiarity).

  You couldn’t say what Fahey was, really, Larent thought. Or how exactly he’d arrived at the music he did. Probably Fahey couldn’t have told you either, even afterward. Or he’d give you the wrong explanation. No one seemed to think that was a problem. Larent liked the thought. Maybe he needed it too.

  He hadn’t sat yet. He looked back at the bar from the doorway. “Drinks, yeah, he knows, he’s coming,” Moto said over the music as he ran his hands through his hair.

  Finally Larent sat, still bemused. Moto began to tell him of the bands of distinction who’d played there—The Fall, Embrace, Can, and twenty years on, Gastr del Sol, June of 44, Polvo—often to audiences that were, though modest in an absolute sense, large enough to make the room, not the audience, seem to be what was too small.

  All of this was mostly lost on Larent, preoccupied as he was with the musical failures of that first rehearsal. It was fine to talk of seminal bands, but what could the two of them hope to achieve, if that, the flatness of the afternoon, was ground zero? Beginnings mattered. Nothing was just practice. Or you could say practice told you more about everything to come than you would ever have wanted to believe. And he hadn’t liked what he’d heard. He could remember this same feeling, with other musicians, on the cusp of stillborn projects.

  The worthiest material Larent played that day was never heard. It came in between, after they’d let a feeble improvisation shrivel and die. He was hunched over his double bass, with his right hand blindly fingering chords, or if not quite blindly, then in the dimmest light. Nothing could be heard because nothing was sounded; his left hand lay flat along the strings. He had that talent for hearing unsounded notes, and what he was hearing seemed to him to make more sense than it strictly should have. It was something to unravel, these new instincts his hands were turning up more and more now.

  It helped him ignore what he was actually hearing, with his ears. Then, as now, it was Moto. He was retuning his drums, directly behind Larent, with what must have been, judging by the sound, little quarter twists of the drum key, moving from one lug to the next along the smaller tom’s perimeter, tapping his stick against the center of the head. The pitch dropped as the drum deflated. He kept loosening the head until it fell a whole tone above the larger tom he’d already tuned. There was a pause before Moto smashed the open hi-hat. The rattling alloy cut its way through Larent’s silent song.

  He bent his head around to Moto. The drummer’s hair seemed to glow under the white lights crossing the loft’s ceiling along a concrete beam. He was expressionless, or perhaps he wore the thinnest-lipped smile, and it seemed as if he had finished adjusting his setup, though the differences looked meaningless to Larent. Now, the splash cymbal was just to the right of the hi-hat, and the crash hovered over the left tom, overlapping it slightly. The ride was still on the right, and for whatever reason the china had been pushed away from the set.

  Moto dropped Larent’s gaze and stared through the transparent heads of the toms. A deep, compact note answered his taps of the bass pedal as an eighth-note pulse took shape. The snare flams came next, interlaced with a roll so slow you could pick out every strike.

  Larent returned to his silent fingerings, though, to the inner music that seemed to be leading somewhere. But Moto persisted, and eventually he relented. He set aside the baffling chords he’d been toying with and returned to the scales of earlier, bowing every third note, sounding ascending fourths and sevenths, flattening and sharpening notes as he crossed through several modes. Having won Larent’s interest, or at least his commitment, Moto distilled the thick rhythms down to a quiet line on the toms, a tapping of the ride, and a sharp snare.

  Larent switched on the amplifier and the delay pedal. The notes collected in layers, mode on mode, his route through one superimposed on the others. A kind of aural fog emerged, with only Moto’s snare-work, increasingly central to the sound, making it through.

  It was painfully indistinct. He threw the bass onto the bed in the corner and dropped to the floor, his back against the nightstand, facing Moto, and his arms wrapped around his knees. The bass notes continued to flow from the speaker, though slowly the haze thinned as the layers fell away, one at a time, the delay being less than infinite. Moto carried on unperturbed, his stare deep into the drums unbroken. It wasn’t clear if he’d noticed Larent had stopped playing or whether he assumed this was the bassist’s intention, a piece that, once set in motion, faded away in its own time, a release of potential energy.

  The bass notes finally disappeared. Moto carried on a few more bars and let the loft go silent.

  “Well?”

  “Nothing, really,” Larent said. “That’s the problem, I guess.”

  Moto paused a beat, raked his hand through his long black hair. Four cracks of the snare and then his sticks were on the floor. They rattled and spun, settling into circular sweeps that barely began their motion before being interrupted, one by the wall in a too-bright yellow, the other by the olive couch pushed up against it, across the room from the bed. Moto smiled and sat down on the couch.

  “What were you expecting?” Moto said. “We barely know each other.” He laughed into the empty space between them.

  “It’s been half a day and we’ve found nothing at all, not even the beginnings of something.”

  “We could go back to something unamplified, really clean, simple, start from there.”

  “A single instrument—a melodic instrument—and it’s a bass. It’s too little.” Larent put his hands on the bed behind him, pushed up, and sat on its edge.

  “And these?” Moto
asked as he tapped the tuned toms with his fingertips.

  “We need more, however you want to put it,” Larent said, the curtness growing in his voice.

  “Well, if you want a fuller sound—”

  “Every group you’ve played with had horns, guitars, keys. Usually all of those, and other things too. There’s not enough friction here, even for harmony.”

  Moto stood up, pulled his black long-sleeve taut along the bottom. “I don’t mind the change really. My drone groups, these ensembles with lots of friction, however you want to put it, started to outnumber the audiences. They just kept shrinking. Scaling back, even way back, to something just a little bigger than nothing, that doesn’t seem so weird to me now. But it takes a while till you’re okay performing to yourself.”

  “The composers, the poets. I’m aware.”

  “But even a form of rock. All of it’s arcana now.”

  “Drone was always, though.”

  “Oh that’s not true. Maybe here. But in Tokyo you could actually have a show with a sea for an audience. You didn’t have to play to a hundred ABDs in a gallery or a factory loft. But that was a while ago, in another country. Now we’re just like you, the conservatory crowd. I don’t have a problem with small, even very small now. But then I’m not against some expansion either. We’ve got to play around more, I think. The ideas will come.”

  They’d left for the bar after that, the amplifier still on, humming in the empty room, its power light shining red in the dark as Moto shut the door.