BOOK ONE : LISTENERS AND READERS

:: AUTUMN 2000

message received :: 10/19/00

Hey. They both say this.

This guy digs you. She can remember talking to him, maybe a week ago, a friend of a friend at the Rainbow. The two of them shouting back and forth over crowd noise. She’d said something something work. Oh, where do you work? he’d asked, and she’d told him Tympanum. Oh, he’d said. I go in there sometimes. The two of them in a room dark enough to make everyone look a little bit beautiful, all minor flaws erased with the makeup of half-light. What days do you usually work? She’d suspected it then, maybe — but now she’s sure.

—Good to see you again, she says.

—Thanks, he says. He looks around the store as if he’s never been in there before. Which maybe he hasn’t.

Radiohead. Kid A. Say something.

—It’s good to see you again, too. Freya, right?

—Right. And you’re . . . Jakob?

—Right.

She looks down. Damon and Naomi with Ghost. This pile still needs to be shelved. But she wants to give him her full concentration. She doesn’t want him to think that she’s not interested. But her body wants to follow the routines of work. She freezes—

—So, he says. He gestures at the pile, having seen her look at it. —Anything good come in lately?

—Depends, she says. What kind of thing are you looking for?

—I dunno, he says.

He doesn’t. Music has somehow become irrelevant to him. Jesus Christ she’s gorgeous. He is twenty-nine years old and he has lost interest in much of what twenty-one-year olds have to say about love. That rules out a lot of the music he liked ten years ago. I know I’m unlovable / you don’t have to tell me / message received, loud and clear, loud and clear / message received. In those ten years he has not learned to like new kinds of music; he has only come to like older music, anthologized music, the music that critics like to write about. Bob Dylan. But he’s afraid to say Bob Dylan. Girls just want to have fuh-uhn, oh girls just want to have fun. How the hell did that even get in my head? He just wants to give an answer that she will think is cool.

—Wellll, she says. An indication that time is passing. She stretches the syllable to slow time down, to give him a chance. She does this because she wants to like him.

—What have you been listening to?

—Hmm, she says. —That new Queens of the Stone Age is pretty good. It’s kind of like a stoner rock thing, if you’re into that.

—Uh huh, he says. He has no idea. —Listen, he says. I should probably get moving but I just came in because I wanted to, well, um, Fletcher and I and maybe some other people are going to get together at Nick’s on Friday and I wanted to see if you maybe felt like joining us.

—Yeah, she says. Sure. That would be great.

—OK, look, he says. Let me give you my number.

—Do you need a pen or something?

—No, I think I’ve got one: and he has one. He writes his name and a number that locates him in the telecommunications grid.

—So maybe I’ll see you then?

—Yeah, she says. I’ll call you.

—Great, he says.

A pen. The back of a Walgreens reciept. Ten digits, five letters. And, with the addition of these tiny nouns, the data of their day has altered, taken on something of the shape of a love story—

:: permanent URL for this entry