BOOK ONE : LISTENERS AND READERS

:: AUTUMN 2000

what the mind does :: 10/27/00

He has to wonder. Why the sunglasses? He makes guesses; it’s what the mind does.

—Hi there, he says. —Freya called me up yesterday; she’d put a disc on hold for me?

—Okay... what’s your name?

—Thomas Wakatami.

—I think I’ve seen you in here before, she says.

—That’s quite likely, he says.

Damaged. That’s why you would wear sunglasses indoors. Isn’t it? One wears sunglasses to mask one’s grief. To mask conspicuously is to call attention to. The sunglasses, then, could be a badge of some kind of damage. Sign / warning / point of pride? Announcement: I am broken? But we are all broken. By the time we reach our twenties we are already full of fragments. This is part of why he enjoys drone music so much.

Cute, she thinks of him, as she moves among the hold rack. Jerry B, Frank, Wyler, Dot. I like those quiet Japanese boys. I wonder if it’s true that they’re all into, like, schoolgirls’ panties and stuff. An image, here, of a pair of panties that she owned when she was younger. A field of yellow dots against a paler yellow background: the tiny cartoon heads of lions. Thomas: his name rubberbanded to a bright green case. The idea that the sight (smell? texture?) of those cotton panties could provide someone with a sexual charge strikes her as utterly alien.

—Here you go.

He looks at the disc. Cyclorama Lift 3. Interesting. He’s heard Cyclorama Lift 2 and Cyclorama Lift 4 before, on Aeriola Frequency; he loves them. Shimmering and sad. He looks down the store’s center aisle and sees Freya; he wants to thank her, but she’s talking to some guy. He doesn’t want to interrupt. I’ll thank her later.

—Yeah, he says. I’ll take this.

He looks down the store again, at the posters and the LP covers mounted on the wall. Pinebender. Isotope 217. He hears in his mind a sound that would envelop all of this, make it all part of one thing.

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