Shelter
Dressed in all black, standing not too far from a busted streetlight, Sisu felt the touch of a distant bass against his back as he leaned against the front window. Holding a half-smoked American Spirit between his thick, frozen fingertips, he stared at a passing train above that he couldn’t hear beyond the music that stirred within his headphones and tore through his eardrums. Behind him, a hellish-orange sticker clung to the window: NOTICE TO VACATE PREMISES, or something to that effect. He purposely had not read it. He didn’t need to. If he could, he would use one of the blades on his Swiss Army knife to scrape it off. But it was on there good (the city used stickers that were made to be indestructible), and removing it wouldn’t accomplish anything.
Doorman. Bouncer. Gatekeeper. Now, he was a mourner. He was mourning the death of a place he had called home for eight years. Aside from Embeth, the owner, he had been at The Virgo longer than anyone.
There had been talk about a protest that would happen in a few days. Maybe as many as a hundred people would show up. Mostly musicians, maybe some performance artists. He could join them and help delay the inevitable, but he knew it was no use.
He knew it was wrong to think like that. He tried not to think about it.
Another song came on that he hadn’t heard before. He took the pink iPod that belonged to Aduri, the sound engineer, out of his pocket and checked the title. It was hip hop, but it wasn’t. It was hip hop because of the breakbeat and the sub-bass that sent shock waves through his brain. But the underlying music didn’t seem to come from an analog synth or a turntable or a computer; it felt like it came from the future, or from somewhere slightly below the earth. The shadow of a stringed instrument would appear, transform seamlessly into a wave of static, and shatter into a storm of echoes. There was no MC, but the sample of a ghostly voice held it all together, either a man’s or a woman’s slowed down. He couldn’t understand the words but it didn’t matter. All that mattered was the feeling behind them. A non-verbal cry from the heart, nothing else. Sisu was reminded of the pre-War Blues 78s he inherited from his father, who had inherited them from his father. Sisu always felt a wall exist between him and that music, the melancholy on those records stubbornly confined to its own time and place. He felt like an intruder as he listened to them. Right now, he felt that he was listening to the sadness of his own generation. He envied people like Aduri, who could be moved to tears by listening to music. This was something that wasn’t inside of him. But as he heard this particular track, he knew it had probably made her cry and it made him happy to know that she’d be willing to share it with him.
He flicked the extinguished cigarette into the cold, empty, moon-shrouded street, put his right hand into his jacket pocket, and held onto the frozen flashlight he used to check IDs, a flashlight he once thought could be used in the subway if it ever shut down on him.
*
Lights that were made to look like stars scattered across the ceiling, and one was burnt out and swallowed by the overriding darkness. The black walls were smooth from the many years of never displaying posters, and on either side of the floor were chair-less tables with a pale blue candle slowly burning at the center of each. A limited light source above the stage revealed a crimson curtain as the backdrop, along with a window to the far right that offered a view of a brick wall. Standing in front of an altar of young and aging instruments from every corner of the earth, the middle-aged balding man on stage, encircled by a plethora of delay, reverb, compression, overdrive and distortion pedals, played his bass guitar through a vintage tube amp in front of an audience of one.
In the back of the house, a few feet above and to the right of a glowing bar, Aduri, providing the sound check, controlled the midrange on the mixing board, and felt the pressure of the bass pulsate incessantly against every inch of her body. Her eyes were beginning to fail her again, and through her glasses she could barely decipher the vertical numbers that lined the faders, numbers she didn’t need to see because she had been working on pure instinct for some time now. What she looked at now was the homemade tattoo on the bottom left corner of her right hand, which she had seen in her dreams long before making it with the inking kit she had gotten off the Internet. The initials “A.D.” suggested Anno Domini to some, but that didn’t explain the perfect heart that encircled it, and she didn’t bother to explain it, unless she had a few drinks in her. She looked up from the tattoo after two or three long seconds, tucking her long red hair behind her ear, and her eyes drifted magnetically toward the black Pearl drum set on stage with no one behind it. The bassist, locking eyes with Aduri, pointed towards the left monitor at the foot of the stage and raised a skinny finger upward. Even as she turned it up to the near maximum level, feeling the bass so intensely it reached the back of her throat, she could still hear the silence of the black Pearl, and even as she closed her eyes she could still see the tattoo on her hand.
*
Jeremy had dressed up for the occasion. A black suit that he had only worn twice before and the pea coat his ex-girlfriend had helped him pick out years ago. He walked alone toward the club at a slow, deliberate pace, feeling the whisper of a cold mist against his face, and glanced at the bouncer who stood against the weathered building.
Through a cheap pair of headphones, ones he had found at Duane Reade for ten dollars, he listened to a live track from a band that no longer existed, a group once known for its volatile behavior and cathartic performances. Led primarily by one man, their songs had been built on towering walls of feedback, pounding, repetitive drumming, and a relentless sincerity that few bands in their time could match.
He found himself wishing that they were the ones he’d be seeing tonight. A perfect ending. All the right doses of sadness, beauty, and possible hope for redemption. He felt guilty for wishing this. He knew that the artists playing tonight would be great, not only because of the music, itself, but because of all the emotional shit lying beneath the surface. For the life of him, though, he couldn’t fathom a performance greater than the one he listened to right now. He listened to a band that had been slowly dying, and were no longer struggling against death but embracing it, which seemed far more tragic than the death of a venue. But maybe that feeling would change once the song ended. Or maybe the feeling would change once he stepped inside the building and felt the weight of it all. Maybe the performances tonight would eclipse all of his memories of previous music and would become the first and last music he would ever hear.
The cassette he listened to had been made by his father, who for years would send him homemade tapes through the mail enclosed in small, brown packages. He had stopped making them recently when his third cassette player of the past year had stopped working. Now, he burned CDs from iTunes, but very rarely. During the peak years, he would send Jeremy at least one tape every week, and he would sometimes come up with clever names for the mixes. This one was just called September ’06. Besides the club, Jeremy’s main source of music was his father. A former drummer who’d been in a few bands in the late sixties and early seventies. If they had made any recordings, all were lost. He had brought his father to the club once when he had come to visit. Unfortunately, it was one of the few truly forgettable shows he had seen at The Virgo. Lots of beeps and bleeps. Nothing more.
He watched the bouncer take an iPod out of his pocket, which provided a shell of light on his dark face. Even though Jeremy had never talked to him, he had been seeing him standing there like that for years, and many times had wondered what he thought of the bands that played inside. Jeremy always saw him wear MDR-7506s, headphones that were made for people who were serious about music. He would wear them on his ears when he stood outside, usually taking off one but leaving the other on when checking IDs, and he would wear them like a broken necklace when he went inside.
Jeremy walked past the bouncer without looking at him and started to pace along the edge of the curb, waiting for the song to end, drumming along to it in his head, now and then using his fingers to drum on the air. Once the coda began, the vocalist, the leader, let out a low, terrifying, guttural scream, which seemed disconnected from the song’s overall structure but at the same time breathed life into it.
This place, he thought. It couldn’t have lasted forever. But nine years seemed all too brief. The good always die young. A stupid adage, and a cruel one at that.
Removing his headphones, having his license ready, he walked toward the door. The bouncer, also removing his headphones, held up his right hand and, without speaking, though he must’ve remembered him from countless shows in the past, made a C shape with two of his fingers, as if to say “ID,” without the “please.” As he used a flashlight to check his date of birth, Jeremy noticed the orange sticker that the bouncer blocked, almost defiantly, with his towering physique. There was no need for him, nor anyone else, to read it. It reminded him of the shade of orange they use on cars during funeral processions.
*
The Virgo occupied so much of Aduri’s waking life that it would often spill into her dreams. She had always alternated between having trouble sleeping and having trouble staying awake, and once she started working twelve hour shifts between six and seven days a week, it was often hard for her to remember the difference between the real Virgo and the dream Virgo. She once found herself among a group of friends, reminiscing about a show that featured a gray-bearded ukulele player, until she stopped herself and realized that the show had never existed.
Most of the time, she knew when she was awake and when she was asleep. In a few extreme cases, though, she couldn’t tell the difference.
When she first saw the enigmatic, sunglasses-wearing Japanese guitarist take the stage years back, using a Gibson SG and Marshall half-stack to drench the audience with cacophonies of noise and feedback, while at the same time provoking tears with his angelic voice, she thought it was a dream. When she first saw the young, troubled Japanese saxophonist abusing his instrument in a way that only love can do, emitting a volume so terrible and great that it caused not only audience members to leave the floor in disgust but his fellow band mates to rush off the stage in sickness and agony, she thought it was real.
Besides the sunglasses-wearing Japanese guitarist, her favorite living artist, the real musicians included: the gray-haired American guitarist, who placed his guitar on a table and used household instruments, including spoons and screwdrivers, to operate the strings; the ageless Japanese-born American drummer, who had abandoned her drum set in favor of a drum machine and intended to make her beats sound ‘broken;’ the iron-mask-wearing Icelandic laptop composer, whose music combined electronically processed piano, voice, guitar, and radio static in a way that it sounded like it all came from a cave at the bottom of a digital ocean; the outsider Norwegian piano/cello duo who never went anywhere without each other, whose instrumental passages reminded some of painful, unrequited serenades and others of Italian horror films of the late 70s; and the burqa-wearing Senegal-born Kuwaiti sound artist, who used samples of her own voice to create layers of haunting, ethereal chants.
Besides the troubled Japanese saxophonist, the dream musicians included: the flannel-wearing British guitarist, who was well-known for his abrasive tones, as well as his disdain for melody and lyrics; the dark-haired Georgian violinist, who played her delicate instrument with heavy distortion through a bass amp and whispered her lyrics in the absence of a microphone; the hooded German turntablist, who played with his back to the audience next to a rack of wind chimes, and used only 78s; the suit-wearing Russian composer who created electronic choral sounds using a thirty-pound tape machine and a two-ton synthesizer; the emaciated South African trumpet player, who could play only two or three minutes at a time before nearly collapsing from exhaustion, but whose occasional melodies could melt the heart of the lowliest of misanthropes; and the abject Finnish guitarist who never left his chair nor lifted his head and played louder than loud, slower than slow, depressive, blacker than black metallic riffs, which were accompanied by the sound of his dead girlfriend’s voice that poured through the monitors.
The dream musicians consisted of two types: the ones who had actually lived, but had died, and the ones who Aduri had unwittingly made up in her mind. The troubled Japanese saxophonist had actually lived, and had died at the age of twenty-nine of a drug overdose. The abject Finnish guitarist had never existed, and therefore neither had his dead girlfriend.
She had begun seeing the dream Virgo not long after she had begun seeing the dream version of Alisa. Unlike the Alisa from real life, the one in her dreams had no trouble smiling, and once wore a pink bow in her hair instead of the black skull cap she had worn year-round during her life.
The dream Virgo always changed with each visit. Once, it had no ceiling. Another time, it had a ceiling that slowly descended onto everyone’s heads. The only constant was the music, but she didn’t always see the musicians. Sometimes, they hid behind a hallway of curtains. There would often be a number of private shows playing simultaneously, but one performer would always stand out from the rest and a hapless crowd would surround that particular area, and even after the music stopped they would hover there yearningly like moths after a light is turned off.
She had a recurring dream about a question game involving the life of the sunglasses-wearing Japanese guitarist that took place in front of a crimson curtain he stood behind. It was always his final show he was playing, one where he performed his greatest works in a state of unbroken illumination and unprecedented volume, and while she could feel the music through the thin layer of cloth, she wanted to see him, and she couldn’t unless she answered correctly. The first question would be rudimentary, like where was he born, what was his favorite American band growing up, or what was the name of the troubled saxophonist he would’ve started a rock band with had he not died of an overdose. The questions that followed would always be more strange, bordering on unanswerable: While his childhood peers built sand castles, what did he build? What is the connection between Aldous Huxley and the first song he ever wrote? What is the predominant color of his music? The one asking the questions would change, sometimes from dream to dream, and often from question to question. Most often, it would be the guitarist’s interpreter, whom she had met several times in real life. Once, it had been Brian Jones with a thick Norwegian accent. Several times, it had been Alisa, and Aduri always woke up crying before she had a chance to answer the question.
A.D.
Alisa D. Her ‘drummer girl’ in life. Her elusive angel in death. A death without dignity at age seventeen. On the floor of her mother’s kitchen.
Days after it happened, Aduri spent countless hours in her father’s basement, having no energy to listen to anything beyond a constant drip from the faucet in the laundry room, and she went through Alisa’s LiveJournal archives, which she hadn’t known existed until that morning. The posts from the last month she read again and again through her tired eyes.
June 3: I feel like shit...
June 6: I love you, Aduri...
June 10: I’ve been having more and more trouble breathing...
June 12: Aduri and music are the only things keeping me going...
June 15: I feel like I'm disappearing...
June 23: Aduri said she’s learning the bass. I knew it would happen. We’re gonna start a band and it’s gonna be fucking amazing...
July 13: I've come to the obvious conclusion that the end is nearing. I know it wont be very soon, though. So, for now I'm stuck with asthma attacks everyday, fucked up sinuses, blinding headaches, sleepless nights, awful fast heartbeating, and no Moog in sight to give me comfort.
When Aduri thought of a moment of stark happiness, she had to go back in time six years to the night she held Alisa at the front of the stage during an opening act at The Offering, holding onto her stomach, feeling the comfort of her steady breathing, kissing her neck, and moments later seeing her onstage behind the black Pearl drums she had saved up for during the last full year of her life, the only things in the world Alisa had loved unconditionally, the ones her mother would one day decide she could no longer look at and give away practically for free. It made Aduri happy because this was the only time she saw Alisa happy, even if neither of them realized it at the time. She wasn’t a great drummer, but what she lacked in ability she made up for in passion and dedication. As she watched her perform, Aduri was almost frightened by the look on her face, a look that was devoid of pleasure or pain. It was a look of complete and utter possession. She tried many times to lock eyes with her, tried getting her attention by taking pictures with her Nikon, but nothing worked. She was somewhere else. Somewhere Aduri wasn’t allowed to go, because she wasn’t a musician and never would be.
In death, their love would never die, but Aduri knew that, had Alisa lived, their love wouldn’t have lasted. It never does, and it’s often no one’s fault. She knows that now, being a grown woman. They would’ve grown apart for one reason or another. Alisa would never know this, because she would forever be a naive teenager. But her drums would’ve been there long after it ended. Music was Alisa’s first and only real love. In a letter she wrote to her after she died, one that she had intended to place inside her coffin but couldn’t find the strength to do so, she promised that she would learn to master an instrument. That was the first broken promise. She promised that she would make an album and dedicate it to her. That was the second broken promise. She tried learning bass, then the guitar, then the cello, but nothing came of any of them. She ended up going to college for photography, and abandoned music altogether.
One night, nearly a year removed from high school and hundreds of miles from her old life, she dreamt about Alisa for the first time since her death. She was sitting on an empty stage in a room with no sound. A blazing light that shined on her began to slowly fade, and in the moment before the darkness took her completely, Aduri woke up.
A few nights later, some friends invited her to a club she had never heard of in a neighborhood she had never been to. She arrived late. The bouncer, a large man with sad eyes who was not much older than her, gave her a smile that she didn’t mind when he handed back her ID. When she went inside, she had to pass through an empty lobby that led to a door with a small window at the center. Through the window, she saw a beautiful woman in a green dress at the center of the stage, a light shining down on her. She then walked through the door and with a layer of glass no longer between them, the woman seemed like nothing short of an apparition. She looked in one direction without blinking, and sang in a tone unknown to her or anyone else in the crowd. The woman’s eyes and voice seemed to be turned inward, towards a place no one was allowed to go but herself.
The people who invited Aduri that night had not shown up, but she didn’t notice. The woman on the stage, the music, the setting. It was all new to her, yet it seemed so familiar. When it ended, she didn’t want to leave right away. She was the last person standing there until the bouncer approached her and said in a soft, almost inaudible, voice that it was time to go. She decided right then that she wanted to be a part of it all.
Three years later, Aduri finished what would be the final sound check at The Virgo and went into the lobby that was filled with strange faces. She found Embeth, the owner, her mentor, her friend, among a sea of journalists and whispered something in her ear.
*
Jeremy looked through the window at the center of the door, the place where he had seen the sound checks of three acts on this particular night, and so many others in the past.
It was strange to think that one of the greatest performances he had ever seen was during a sound check there on a November night two years before. “Japan’s prince of noise and space,” as The Virgo had once called him. He couldn’t have been more than five feet and three inches tall, had long, thick gray hair, walked with a cane, and wore all black, which included a pair of sunglasses that hid his eyes completely. There was still about twenty minutes before the show, and he and his bassist went on stage for one final run. As soon as he plugged in his guitar, he seemed to grow several feet and all semblance of his middle age disappeared. The electricity flowed through his veins and caused his limbs to go into impossible convulsions. It became hard to tell whether the music was coming from his guitar or from deep inside of his body. His guitar became a part of him and, within the violence and sexuality of the performance, he lost all control and inhibition. He played as though he was fighting for his life, for the life of modern music, and for the life of the club that was slowly dying, even though no one knew it at the time.
The most memorable performance he had seen at The Virgo, though, came out of no where. It had happened on the first warm night of the Spring earlier that year. A band that he liked, but wasn’t overly excited to see. Like a lot of bands he listened to these days, they were Japanese. Four of them. Two guitarists, one with a beard and one who was clean shaven. Both were average height and incredibly thin. One stood up and one sat down. The bassist was a devastating woman with long, straight black hair who wore a dress the color of fire. The drummer had a beard, was a little more heavy set and wore a Misfits T-shirt. None of them smiled, but of the four of them, the drummer seemed the most serious. As the music began, he sat behind the drums and put his head down, holding onto a pair of mallets, with a cage of hair hanging in front of his face.
Jeremy stood in the front, forgetting the space and people who stood behind him. The music began very slowly, first the quiet, hypnotic melody of the standing guitarist. Minutes later, the sitting guitarist added a riff infused with reverb and delay. The drummer and bassist came in together, the former using his mallets to softly tap the cymbals, the latter providing the music with an irrevocable structure and weight. As the music steadily rose toward its crescendo, Jeremy looked behind him at the anonymous faces, and further back at the girl who ran the sound, that beautiful glasses-wearing, red-haired girl he had seen so many times before, her eyes unmoving, her head slightly tilted, suggesting a feeling of affection and empathy toward the artists onstage.
He turned back toward the stage and watched as the band moved in unison, swaying to the noise that bled from their amplifiers, keeping their eyes closed and heads down. At the same time, nothing seemed rehearsed about their performance. They looked as though they had never known a time without their music. He couldn’t picture them learning their instruments, or even practicing. Their instruments seemed to be a part of them.
A momentary pause. The standing guitarist played alone, so quietly that it felt like an extension of the silence. Moments later, they all came together in an unprecedented display of volume and beauty. Ethereal melodies, shards of feedback, and relentless drumming. Music too great to exist, Jeremy thought. Music that makes the past more vivid than the present.
Jeremy was a drummer, like his father had been years ago. The song he listened to at that moment made him remember he had given up on his dream to become a great musician, just as his father had given up, which was something he promised himself long ago he would never do. He felt tears well up in his eyes, and as soon as the set ended he left the club and went out into the night, determined to steal back what he had lost.
*
Aduri stood outside for a cigarette with Sisu. Some good shit, he said as he handed back her iPod. I’ll make you a CD, she said. That means we have to hang out sometime, he said.
Yeah, we’ll hang out.
A train passed slowly along the tracks, too far above for them to see it was nearly empty. Once it passed, a silence broke in. They could barely hear the people inside.
Sisu broke out a one-hitter and held it up for Aduri.
Why not? she said, as she flicked her cigarette into the street.
He handed it to her first, along with a lighter. She took a hit and then handed it back to Sisu. He packed some more weed and took a long hit, and handed it back to Aduri.
Did I ever tell you about my Dad’s sound studio?
Aduri exhaled, and handed it back to him.
No, you never did.
My family used to own a building. My Dad had spent his most of his life playing the piano, but never made any money off of it. He was one of those child prodigies that never really went anywhere. Suddenly, he was twenty-seven, hadn’t played a note in four years, lived with his mother, and had no skills. This one night, he went out to a club and stayed there for hours, not talking to anyone, watching all the bands. He did this every night for about a week. Always stood in the back. Never said a word to anyone. The last night, he paid, walked in, and when the opening band started he left before they finished their first song. The next day, he enrolled in school to learn to become a sound engineer. Five years later, he ran his own studio and five years after that he bought a building. I was two when he bought it, and we had it until I was about eight or nine. I remember a lot of the bands that came through. Every type of music you can imagine. Some of the musicians were like family. When I think of my childhood, the sound I think of most is the sound of drums. No guitar, no bass, no vocals. Just drums in a practice space. It’s weird how they can disappear once the music starts. Always in the background. An afterthought. But by themselves, they command attention. Especially from children. There’s something primal about them. Something that kids feel closer to than other people, but I’m not sure they know why. Kids can ignore music, but they can’t ignore drums.