8 :: what the mind does ::
[posted 10/27/00]
Thomas enters the record store and heads up to the counter. There's a clerk there who he hasn't seen before, a blond girl, wearing sunglasses.
—Hi there, he says. —Is Freya around?
—No, says the girl. —She's at lunch.
—Oh, Thomas says. —I talked to her yesterday; she 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 possible, he says.
—I'll go check on that disc, she says.
Why the sunglasses? he wonders. He makes guesses; it's what the mind does.
He suspects that she may be damaged. That's why you would wear sunglasses indoors. Isn't it? One wears sunglasses to mask one's grief. But masking something conspicuously calls attention to it. The sunglasses, then, could be a sign, a warning. An announcement: I am broken. But we are all broken. He remembers his note from earlier today: we too are full of fragments.
Cute, she thinks of him, as she moves among the hold rack, reading the names. I wonder if it's true that those quiet Japanese boys are 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: the tiny heads of cartoon lions. The idea that the sight (smell? texture?) of those cotton panties could provide someone with a sexual charge strikes her as utterly alien.
She finds the word Thomas on a slip rubberbanded to a bright green case.
—Here you go. She looks at him. She imagines him torn apart. He will be, she thinks. He is.
He inspects the disc. This'll be good. He needs something new to review for his site.
—Great, he says. I'll take it.
Denise rings him up, and he looks at the posters and the LP covers that cover every available bit of wall space. He reads the names of bands: Pinebender; Isotope 217. So many bits of information, so much to try to take in. He dreams of the sound that is threaded through all of this, the sound that makes it all one thing.
::
