Scope

Lisa was late so I sat at the bar and ordered a glass of house red. There was only one other person sitting there, a guy wearing a desert camouflage jacket and a Mets cap. Leaning against the bar next to him was a twisted piece of metal about five feet long. It was a rusted girder from a construction site, the ones shaped like I's when you look at them from the side. I stared at it for a while, paid for my wine, and glanced at the guy. He was staring straight ahead, sipping a clear cocktail in a highball glass.
Normally I don't talk to strangers. I never know how to start conversation without sounding contrived. But this time I had something.
"What's that for?" I asked.
He looked at me and then chugged the rest of his drink.
"Work," he said.
"Construction? Demolition?"
He got up from his stool and sat down in the one next to me, leaving his metal piece where it was.
"Sort of," he said. "I'm an actor."
"And that's a prop?"
"Yep."
"What kind of work do you do?" I asked. Some of my friends were actors and they resented being grouped into one category. I figured I had to make distinctions, for their sake.
"Right now I'm an Iraq War re-enactor."
This was new.
"They have those?"
"Damn straight."
"So you're like one of those Civil War guys. Only you're doing Iraq."
"Yeah."
He inhaled a couple of ice cubes.
"Isn't that a little insensitive?" I asked in my politest voice. "I mean, people are still dying."
"That's the beauty of it," he said. "It's not history. People aren't interested in something that happened two hundred years ago, that they've already studied to death in eighth grade. This is journalism. The closest you can get to the real thing."
I stared into my glass.
"Is it live performance?" I asked.
"We tape some stuff but all of it is done for an audience. We have an outdoor set in Washington Heights and do it all live."
Lisa was due any minute. I wondered if I should put my name on the host's list.
"Does it bother you?" he asked.
"I guess I'm a little uncomfortable. How do you know what you're doing really happened?"
He seemed pleased by this question. He leaned in close, like he had a secret.
"We have a correspondent who's in on it at the AP. He takes the reports that come in during the day and at night he works on the scripts. We change up the scenario every week."
"People pay to see this?"
"They used to be free. We had a government grant for a while. But then we had a depressing run one month. Lots of IED's and bodies. Caught some bad press. So then we had to start charging. Not much though. 20 bucks a seat."
I looked up at the TV screen in the far corner of the bar. A pitcher was stretching his shoulder.
"What's the metal bar for?"
"It falls on me and kills me in the scenario we're doing now," he said. "It's just styrofoam." He leaned over and grabbed it by the end with one hand. The massive metal beam suddenly lost its menace.
"How long do these things last?"
"An hour, usually. We try to condense the action as best we can, but some weeks are real boring, you know. One quick explosion and the clean-up. Soldiers playing poker, that kind of thing."
He put his prop down and shook his empty glass at the bartender.
"The way I see it," he continued, "we're giving people the facts. The news only reports so much and lots of stuff gets lost in the transmission. We're giving them eyewitness accounts. As real as it gets without being in Iraq."
"Does the military know about this?"
"Are you kidding? They love us. We're making them heroes."

Floorplan

There are so many apartments that they all blend together in my memory, a living room here, a hallway there…

I used to draw blueprints of dream houses when I was a kid. They were all apartment buildings—that’s all I knew growing up—but each one was meant for a single resident. I drew cross-sections showing each fun-filled stratum of my digs. Each floor had its own theme: skateboard park, pool with waterslides, library, trampoline room, movie theater. Every room had a soda fountain, which I thought, when I first heard the term, was just a regular water fountain that spouted 7-Up and Cherry Coke. My real childhood homes are just as imaginary now as those carbonated palaces, a collage of spaces from Buena Park, Van Nuys, Northridge, West L.A., Panorama City, Torrance, only my mother and brother are there. There were no separate spaces then, no such thing as privacy. Our lives didn’t just overlap, they were dog-piled and smashed into one another. Every memory singled out from my childhood is invaded at some point by one of the two. I’ve learned to live with them now; they reside in me like squatters who’ve taken root after several generations. I think that’s why I’ve always been attracted to big cities—I can preoccupy myself with lots of new spaces, design new mental blueprints, and push my mother and brother into a dark closet somewhere. But I know they’re there. Sometimes I hear my mother when I speak (those horrifying moments when you realize where a certain phrase came from), and think of my brother whenever I see someone with Down syndrome. They come to me in my tastes for certain foods, in my love for spontaneous travel (my mother is notorious for slapdash budget trips), and in moments of guilt. I know then that they aren’t parts of the blueprint, the one I’ve labeled “my character.” They’re the goddamn architects.

Riot

Dots and dashes was all Sheridan could come up with to describe her paintings. The canvases were always self-importantly large and barely fit through doorways. It took her months to finish a single piece. They were her “spot collections,” cryptic, loosely pixilated images that remained perpetually on the brink of discovery. He could stare at one for hours in her Brooklyn loft, knowing the patterns of dots, lines, and squiggles resembled something, something familiar, that couldn’t quite reveal itself. Fist to his lip, he’d pace forward and backward, focusing and unfocusing his eyes as if he were studying stereograms in those Magic Eye books, until his pains outweighed their mystery. Ji Hae didn’t believe in solutions. She talked about “struggle” constantly. Dancing with him at Nickie’s, she would spout off names over the impossible noise—Sophie Tauber, Piet Mondrian, Roy Lichtenstein—and he’d be rapt just by her moving lips.

They began dating a week before Christmas. She liked his hands.

“It’s a political piece,” she told him, the first time he tried to buy one of her paintings. “The title, Sa-ee-gu, means four-two-nine.” It was a study of her Koreatown roots, of April 29, 1992, when 2,000 businesses were burned to the ground during the L.A. riots. It resembled a newspaper photo, hundreds of dots in different shades of gray and black, densest at bottom center. He looked expectantly for burning buildings or the outline of a body. Chaos in the streets. Los Angeles on fire, Koreans and blacks pointing fingers at each other through the flames, policemen with their nightsticks high in upswing, vandals smashing glass windows and livelihoods. It’s too damn neat, thought Sheridan, who liked it better before she’d captioned it. The dots were spaced equally apart in vertical lines, and the piece reminded him of the grids and pegs in Battleship!, his favorite childhood game. The lines were frank and eschewed meaning. They were militant and coldly stable. He wanted it for his living room.

Sa-ee-gu was not for sale, she said.

Pedestrian

A head grew out of a shoe. It was a boy head. Not really, because it didn't have any sex organs, but it had the features of a young male. We could call it a "he."

He was on a sidewalk somewhere in the city, next to a pile of things someone had discarded. They were mostly shapes to him; the words "bookcase," "lamp," and "record player" had no meaning. He couldn't tell where the sidewalk ended and the lamp began. The whole street could've been one object for all he knew. The only distinctions between things occurred when he turned his head, when the view of the world changed.

He found that he could move by putting his chin down, quickly snapping it up, and allowing his shoe to follow through. With every snap he moved forward half the length of his sole. At first there was a flash of pain in his temples when he landed, but he quickly learned how to dull the impact by landing toes-first. The more he practiced, the better he got and the better his technique became. After twenty minutes of "walking," he could almost keep up with the people on the sidewalk.

The pedestrians saw him with a mixture of amusement and disgust. They kept their distance as they walked past, but there were some who smiled or chuckled. A woman in a short skirt wrinkled her face and walked briskly ahead, holding her skirt against her backside. Shopkeepers watched from their doorways, cigarettes in hand, marvelling at the head's efforts. Redfaced and breathing hard, he pressed on with grim resolve, as if he had to rescue someone he loved.

He walked nearly ten blocks. It was a miracle no one hit him when he crossed the streets. There were a few close calls; he learned to stop when cars whooshed past, waiting patiently at curbs or between lanes until it was safe to continue.

At 14th Street he stopped. Rock music played from a nearby bar and the subway trains below rumbled like movie thunder. He knew more about the world after ten blocks, the patterns and rhythm of traffic, the texture of the pavement through his sole, the difference between shadow and light. Deciding that this was the place where he'd stay, he backed into a cool spot under an overhang and watched the corner for a long time. It was busy. People walked past without noticing him, dogs sniffed at his hair and their owners would pull them away, the sun began to set, and businesses nearby closed for the night or opened for dinner. He grew tired.

By nightfall he'd sunk back into his shoe. The moon was full...

Solution

The pills came in a white envelope, sixteen yellow tablets the size of unshelled peanuts, unmarked. Instructions were typed on a small card inside: "Take one with food every 24 hours, or as needed. Do not take more than four pills in a 24-hour period no matter how severe the symptoms. The most common side effect is drowsiness." I took a pill with a stale English muffin I found in the kitchen and waited.

I guess it's cheating but there's no reason for me to feel this bad. Humans are too hard on themselves. Guilt can become a chronic illness; if you don't quell it early on, it can reshape your personality and turn you into a freak. There are plenty of classic cases: Blanche DuBois, Macbeth, Raskolnikov, Willy Loman. Characters who did what they had to do. Justified in their actions. They suffered long and hard, too much, considering the circumstances. There are criminals who've done much worse, who've raped children, started wars for personal glory, and plenty of them lived with clear consciences.

Greg hooked me up with this guy who calls himself a biochemist. I called the number on the business card and ordered a two-week supply of "conscience pills." They work kind of like anti-depressants, only they isolate and inhibit the neurotransmitters most associated with guilt and remorse. That's what the guy told me on the phone. His spiel was short and vague, just how I wanted it.

I feel a little better after two hours, though I'm not sure if it's because I think I'm supposed to feel better. What do I care if it's all a placebo effect? As long as the pain's gone...

I wake up on the living room floor and it's nearly 7 in the evening. Scanning the house is depressing; I've been living in filth for the last week. Garbage and dirty clothes are strewn everywhere. There are plates of uneaten food. I don't even remember cooking or ordering out. I feel acute, very aware of my surroundings. I notice things I've been missing, like the calendar on the far wall that hasn't been flipped since April. I try to get up to turn it to September but I can't. I'm glued to the wall. My brother bought me that calendar...

The pain's back. It's so fucking bad I take another pill. There's a bottle of Dewar's on the coffee table and I drink the few ounces that are left to wash it down, gagging at the taste. I watch TV, an episode of King of the Hill but fall asleep during the first set of commercials.

My dreams aren't of her, thank God. I'm asleep for who knows how long. That's what they do, the pills...they knock you out so soundly that you don't have time to mull over the what-ifs. You can't remember your dreams when you wake up. I can't see her face, her reaction, the way she lost her balance and fell to the floor when I said what I said. That scene was playing over and over in my head all week; now I'm a baby, passed out like I had too much milk, blind, stupid, and gone. I don't even exist.

Boogie

In her will she wrote that there should be a time for dancing at her funeral. Everyone in attendance had to get up and move to carefully selected tunes for an hour and a half. The bar had to serve champagne and the dance hall had to have at least one disco ball.

I met a girl there. She was leaning against the wall and didn't know the deceased very well. Her father had been Charlotte's ex-fiance some decades ago.

"I hear Charlotte was a comedian," she said. "Her last words were the punchline to a joke."

"What was it?"

"The punchline or the joke?"

"Both."

"The biggest piece goes to the birds."

"That's the punchline?"

"Yeah."

"What's the joke?"

"No one knows."

I thought for a while. There was no obvious wordplay. Sexual innuendo didn't seem likely nor was it Charlotte's style. It was vague and absurd. It sounded like an aphorism that didn't mean anything.

The girl and I exchanged phone numbers. Her name was Freida and she lived in Brooklyn.

The dance session was almost over. People were tired of their compulsory celebration. Most shuffled halfheartedly to the music, looking around as if Charlotte was watching and hiding, ready to pounce on those not granting her her final wish. She was the type to do that too. Occasionally someone would jump into the center and go all out for a few minutes. Everyone would turn and cheer the dancer on or push their friends into the circle. No one wanted to look unhappy.

That night I dreamed of man-eating birds. I imagined Charlotte's body in the coffin being pried open by these huge birds and their beaks snapping at her cold flesh. They tore every bit of skin and muscle off her and gulped it all down until only a head and a skeleton were left. They even took her eyes. She had deep recesses in her face but there were faintly glowing points where her retinae should have been. She was smiling. She was always smiling.

Whim

It began when I was twenty-two and working as a nurse at a hospital in Chicago. One of my patients was James Friedrich Apllo, a.k.a. Jim Truenote, founder and former chief executive of Dreamer Records, who voluntarily spent four months of the year in a hospital bed. He suffered one unlikely disease after another and was paranoid about how he'd go down in music history. Journalists were never admitted during visiting hours. Those who spoke with any degree of intelligence were enemies out to warp his accomplisments, broadcast gross inaccuracies, and cheat him of immortality. I was assumed incompetent after I made some trivial error (I called him "John" once), and he made me his sole confidant. Keeping life a secret is impossible for those on the brink of passing; he would pour out his histories to me every chance he got, and I could never tell embellishments apart from astounding truths.

There was the Cinderella story of Dreamer, how he turned a tiny home studio into an international empire with seventeen subsidiaries. That one was already in the books but I got the dirty details, which I won't mention now.

There was also The Idea. Fifteen years in the making, The Idea was to create the perfect song, one that would survive changing tastes, bridge genres, and cater to groundlings and snobs alike. Focus groups were held, surveys administered across countries, statistical research compiled. Dreamer consulted concertmasters and music theorists, hiring David Cope, the inventor of Emi (Experiments in Musical Intelligence), as an executive producer. Another year or two, Apllo claimed, and The Idea would be ready to become The Song. Apllo had handpicked the artist himself. A relatively unknown composer from Marseilles, Adrien Ganjou called himself DJ Autonom and had five albums and an EP under his belt, all experimental recordings with hints of jazz and West African drum patterns. Senior research analysts at Dreamer coached him, purchasing supercomputers and recording equipment straight from laboratories.

There were no press releases. Autonom lived in the penthouse of Dreamer Studios under a code of silence.

I went off to finish med school and never found out exactly when or why Apllo started refuting the Idea. Biographers write that he tried to shelf the project several times, claiming he'd conceived it during a period of insanity. Pulling the plug at that point was impossible, of course; Dreamer had far too much invested. The board of directors humored Apllo, assured him of his genius, insisted he would go down in history not only as an entrepreneur but a creative icon, a veritable Amadeus of the twenty-first century.

Apllo died of thyroid cancer and pneumonia. In his memoir (Man of Measure, Simon & Schuster, 438pp.), he wrote: "I've murdered my Muse many times over. And my punishment is still to come."

Six years after his death, Dreamer Records released a single called "Hz," which, by then, had become the most anticipated release in decades. The piece was 3 minutes and 9 seconds long, the average of popular song lengths favored across the world according to survey, and consisted of a single audible note (later measured at 318.12hz) divided into thirty-two 5.34-second intonations. This note was sandwiched between hundreds of thousands of others, all at frequencies inaudible to the human ear, precisely callibrated and staggered. While several thousand of these notes have been documented through outside studies, the exact formula for "Hz" remains unknown. There is no sheet music (to score just one measure of the song, one magazine reported, you would need a page the length of a basketball court); the disk is kept in a vault at an undisclosed offsite location.

The song was met with incredulity at first. People immediately dismissed it as subversive, heady, inaccessible, and heartless. Radio personalities panned the work, pundits discussed the death of popular music. "Hz" was played only as a subject of ridicule, introduced as "the Emperor's new song," and rarely played in its entirety. Listeners laughed.

Two months passed before the reports came in, sporadically, from different countries. After downloading and listening to "Hz," the seven-year-old son of a Chinese shoe merchant in Chengdu collapsed after singing a strange tune (a doctor recognized it as Mahler's Symphony No. 9, 2nd Movement) for five straight hours. Some claimed to hear bits of Hammerstein and Kern's "All the Things You Are" peppered throughout it. A 74-year old woman heard the piano sample in Tupac's "I Ain't Mad at Cha" (from DeBarge's "A Dream"). Couples heard songs from their first kisses, teenagers hummed Eric Dolphy tunes, I heard my mother's lullabies. Certain deaf individuals took in Brahms and Dylan for the first time, tears streaming, radios held inches from their ears.

The effects were not just musical. A set of fraternal twins (one living in Seattle, the other in Jerusalem) claimed the song triggered telepathy. Mourners heard the voices of the dead. Synesthesia became common; thousands of listeners saw shifting colors and kaleidoscopic patterns when they closed their eyes.

The single broke every sales record in the business.

Studios at once expanded their R&D departments and began producing their own versions of "Hz." Dreamer released Autonom's first major-label album, Om, which influential critic Julia Simon called "a seamless collusion (collision?) of candor and crypt, of pizzicati and oil pumps, of PBR and pinot noir." It was discovered that certain combinations of frequencies could generate desired emotions, and tracks were custom-blended like perfumes to fit "baffled joy," "ironic self-flagellation," and "horny." A song called "PRV18-9" (Track 172 on Autonom's sophomore album, Gregorian Pants, Dreamer Records) was a workplace favorite for its "motivational" sound. Civic funds were routed to installing speakers in public spaces; music was played everywhere, in subway cars, rare-book libraries, post offices, monuments to dead heroes. Everywhere you went, you could hear the algorithmic mingling of perfect fifths and minor seconds. You could never be sure if the phantom tones you were hearing came from a nearby speaker or the residue of a song you'd heard the day before. You often saw passersby stooped over on the sidewalk, eyes closed, separating timbres and leaning into their own sudden soundtracks.