BOOK ONE : LISTENERS AND READERS

:: SPRING 2001

Green light on a cinderblock wall, a circle, broken by the milling silhouettes of people. White votive candles at selected points. Thomas is moving among the crowd, looking for his date, a woman he’s never seen. He’s thankful for the bits of light; he’s experienced a few performances here at 6Odum where total pitch blackness had been maintained within the space. He’s not sure how he would have located someone previously unseen under those circumstances. It’s tricky enough even under the current circumstances. See you Friday, she said in her response to his last e-mail. Oh, look for my fabulous Badtz-Maru hat, which has served as my faithful companion all winter. Do you know who that is? If not, refer to the attached image.

So he’s milling about keeping his eyes open for a hat with a cartoon penguin on it. Every hat he sees jumps out from the surrounding visual noise. After seeing a few hats and ruling them out, his expectations of finding her begin to thin; he begins to suspect that he’s been the victim of a prank, that somebody stumbled upon his website and somehow detected his loneliness through it and decided that toying with that loneliness would serve as malicious entertainment. Oddly, he feels somewhat relieved at the prospect. He’s nervous about meeting her; the thicket of directions that the experience could move in are represented by a huge unknown area in his mind; disappointment, at least, would be something that he’s familiar with, something that he understands and knows how to deal with.

And then he sees the Badtz-Maru hat. And then he sees her.

She’s shorter than he’d expected and also younger. She doesn’t look much older than 21 or much taller than five feet. He’s surprised. Not necessarily unpleasantly: he had just mentally placed her at average size and at his age (he’s twenty-seven).

—Hi, he says. —I’m Thomas Wakatami? He hopes it’s her and not just another woman wearing a similar hat—

—Hi, Thomas, she says. —Lydia. It’s the first time that he’s heard her name. She extends her hand and he shakes it. Although they’ve been e-mailing one another a few times a week for almost a month, he suddenly finds himself almost totally without words.

—It’s nice to meet you, she says.

—Yeah, it’s nice to meet you, too.

—Do you want to find a spot to sit? she says.

He nods. —That’s a good idea.

Clusters of people have begun to sit down near the walls, settling in anticipation of the show. They’ve carried in beers and they’re drinking them. Some people have stretched out on the floor. Thomas and Lydia find an open spot and they lay their jackets on the floor beneath them. Overall there is an atmosphere of picnic, which fits strangely congruously with the unfinished concrete of the room.

—I haven’t been here before, Lydia says. —I kind of like this place.

—Yeah, Thomas says. —The first time I was here I was like, wow, um, it’s a big cinderblock box. But, I don’t know, since then I’ve come to feel that this place is perfect. It gives off a sense of things happening in secret.

—Yeah, Lydia says. —It’s like watching a band play in somebody’s basement. (She is remembering her time in Bloomington, Indiana; more than once she spent an evening sipping pisswarm beer from a plastic cup, standing next to a hot water heater or somesuch, listening to weird guys from the music college throw a crazyquilt carpet of musical influences into the smoky air, struggling to make it fly.) —Underground, she says. —I mean in a literal sense.

—Exactly, Thomas says.

They look at one another, and each of them are struck by a crazy, giddy feeling: the feeling that someone else, this stranger sitting next to them, has glimpsed something within them, a self, a secret one, normally nurtured in silence, now unexpectedly, suddenly, seen. It is like a pleasant variety of terror.