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 moves among the crowd, looking for his date. He's thankful that there's some light; sometimes at 6Odum they do performances in total pitch blackness. He's not sure how he would have been able to locate a woman he's never met.

It's tricky enough under the present circumstances. He's milling about keeping his eyes open for a hat with a cartoon penguin on it. Oh, look for my fabulous Badtz-Maru hat, which has served as my faithful companion all winter, she wrote in response to his last e-mail. Do you know who Badtz-Maru is? If not, refer to the attached image.

He's looking. Every hat he sees jumps out from the surrounding visual noise. After seeing a few wrong hats, his expectations of finding her begin to thin. He begins to suspect that he's been the victim of a prank; somebody stumbled upon his website and detected his loneliness and thought it would be funny to toy with him. Oddly, he feels somewhat relieved by the possibility. Disappointment, at least, would be something that he knows how to deal with. Everything else is a huge unknown.

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

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

—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 near the walls. 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 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 crazy-quilt 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.