Strange Music

Cars pass. The clock tower sings, 8:00 PM. A bluebird startles a squirrel and flits away. Spring snow melts into the storm drain, and passing strangers look on with unease as a woman beats a bouquet of roses into the narrow slot of a public bin.

 Missy Dimitrova is, after four decades of personal prayer for it, in her middle age. Her mother likes to say that forty is when other people begin to recognize that a woman knows what she’s doing and what she wants. If only it were so.

The roses, shoving a final retaliatory thorn in her palm, disappear. Missy licks the cut and strides away, head up, making as much eye contact with these nosy strangers as possible until they’ve all taken the hint and found immense interest in the ground.

There is nothing classically wrong with Bill. By all counts, he is a kind, handsome man, the type with a travel bottle of ibuprofen clacking in his pocket and a considerable deal of shame over his long-hair phase. He crochets, and he clicks his tongue like a clock when he’s waiting for the TV to load, and he volunteers facts about himself like a pretty, brown-eyed encyclopedia. But they don’t like the same teas or the same porn, and he refuses to gossip, and he can’t load a dishwasher or read her mind. And he says all the time how he doesn’t like math, and that’s why he does publishing instead, which he says is the furthest thing—that’s not a person she can live with.

He disagrees, or disagreed. Perhaps he’s of a different mind now.

With the blood quelled, Missy tucks her hands into the pockets of her jacket, marching down the sidewalk with her phone shut off. The city of Madison is a mosaic, in one moment a neighborhood of small, vibrant houses in cerulean or lemon or violet, in the next a field of green-cracked parking lots and condemned businesses, and in the next a web of trafficked roads cutting through such a dense downtown that it seems the buildings were all there before the streets, that the asphalt crashed right through a line of them, felling them as you would trees, so that the spared adjacent storefronts might see the light of day. She wonders how many shops were lost in the invasion of the streets. How many corpses of coffeehouses and pot bars lie under her feet, how many ramen joints?

Any of which she would be happy to stumble into now. She walks that strange forest that is downtown Madison hungry, so hungry she supposes she could’ve waited to say no to Bill’s proposal until after the food had come out. The more she thinks about it, the larger the knot of irritation in her jaw. Four conversations—they’ve had four separate conversations about how she didn’t want to marry, didn’t even want to move in with anyone, including him. The last was months ago. That gap must have meant to him that he’d finally tamed the shrew.

Missy thanks God for Russia for the first time in years and slides through the front door of the pel’meni restaurant. Its layout is unusual. The register and the kitchen are here by the door, and a narrow corridor leads to the walled-off dining area and bar. She imagines that that’s exactly how the two rooms prefer it: separated by a thick wall, invisible to one another except through deliberate effort.

She was happy to exist asymptotically with Bill, but he didn’t like math, so he could never have understood.

“Professor D?”

It’s now that Missy remembers exactly how much wine she drank before leaving the restaurant. A gaggle of young adults is huddled around the bar, fisting cans of Pabst and Spotted Cow and shoveling pel’meni into their mouths, corners of their lips stained with hot sauce. One of them, she recognizes: Paul Whittiger. His hair is longer and there’s less purple under his eyes. His studded leather jacket is creased and seems a caricature of rebellion; she realizes that she had one just like it at his age, one that she got rid of when she finished undergrad, after the first year of rejected applications. Paul, though, would wear it regardless of the season. Finished with a low C, although he always came to office hours.

She nods to him and scans for a table far from the group, but Paul soldiers on. “Professor D! Guys, look, I took her calc, she’s the one that saved my fucking life last year.” His face is flat, dead serious. The other kids ooh and ahh, looking over her high bun and linen dress with stunned wonder. Every one of them is deliriously high.

“Your effort is all your own,” she says. Her eyes fail in the search for a good table; she flicks them instead to the ceiling and prays. The movement generates a beat of vertigo.

“Wait, look, I remember. Low-dee high minus high-dee low over low-low… Yeah!” A crisp high-five rings from the bar.

He’s so happy to have retained some calculus that Missy can’t help but smile, and she turns to face the kids. Paul is in the center of this group of five; surrounding him are a square-faced goth, a fairy-like hippie, a petite woman swimming in a pair of men’s overalls, and a curly-haired fellow wearing a pound of eyeliner.

“Very good,” she says. “Now—can you tell me the chain rule?”

His eyes widen for a brief moment before he recovers his composure, shakes his greasy head, and gestures at her outfit. “You’re all dressed up. Goin’ somewhere?”

No, Paul, I’m coming from a wonderful date in which a wonderful man told me he wanted us to spend our lives together, and I still don’t know how to make people understand that that doesn’t compute for me, so I told him he was an asshole and I ran away. “Coming from.”

He nods, as diligent and attentive as when he was a student. The goth leans their slender frame over the bar and taps on Paul’s shoulder with a raised eyebrow, and an idea zaps through the air from their mind to his, lighting up his face and animating his relaxed shoulders. “Oh, yeah! Look,” he says, digging through the back pocket of his skinny jeans and procuring a small stack of crumbled papers. “Ash’s aunt is doing a show tonight. You like weird music, right?”

There was one week during office hours when Paul asked her to put on music so that he could focus, and she played the Crash Test Dummies. She snorts.

“Right, so, it’s noise music. It’s awesome. We’re trying to get the place packed so Ash’s aunt can keep doin’ her thing.” He holds one of the slips out to her.

As she politely takes it and begins to piece together an excuse—I’m sorry, I have to watch my neighbor’s kids—ah, I’d love to, but I have an appointment with two more bottles of Kendall-Jackson—the cashier calls her name. She excuses herself with a thank you and a curt nod and turns to escape, and behind her, Paul calls out, “Seeya soon, Professor D!”

Sure. See you soon. On the dark walk home, Missy wraps her jacket tight and pinches the slip until the paper is soggy with sweat and finger oil. The details of the show are handwritten in smudged ink: The Rathole - basement under Dandelion Global Art Gallery - $5 - 10:00 PM. The name makes her snicker. She checks her wallet for a five, glances down at her dress. It’s more than enough time for her to get changed into something more basement appropriate. If she wanted to go, of course. If.

∿

The basement is humid and tiny, pulsing with the bumping of shoulders even before the artist has begun to set up her esoteric equipment. Between the oscillating heads of the crammed youths, Missy watches the woman reach into a case with great deliberation and pull out an electric guitar, then a metal bowl, then a plastic dish scraper. Component after bizarre component emerges from the case, and the woman sets each object on the table before her with a precise hand, as if there is a pattern to it all that Missy simply can’t see.

She’d sat on her couch over a half-empty bottle of red and a sparkling clean glass, cutting out the middleman. She’d held the TV remote in her hand, staring at the recording of the nothing show playing out before her, and hovered her thumb over the power button, listening to a laugh track roll. She’d tossed the remote onto the coffee table and changed into jeans, looking up directions to the Dandelion Global Art Gallery and slamming the front door behind her as the laugh track bubbled away.

In the hustle and bustle, there’s a distinct pat on her elbow, and Missy jumps. The boho kid from Paul’s clique stands behind her, hands up like they’ve run into a snake on a trail, eyes wide. “Yo, sorry. Paul’s over there is all.”

“Ah…okay?” There’s no music playing yet. The silent half-foot of space between them is uncomfortable, but the hippie doesn’t seem satisfied. “Thank you?”

That does the trick. They smile and float away, melting into the kaleidoscope of shoulder-to-shoulder college students and occasional jean-jacketed elders.

Missy is not especially concerned with whether Paul is over here or over there, or in the building at all. Sober though she may be by now, and as small as this space may be—barely larger than her office—it’s difficult to get her bearings here. It stinks of sweat and cigarettes, and the mixing, crashing waves of speech are more oppressive than the walls.

She pushes her way to a chain link gate and back out to the entrance, breathing tolerable air and taking in the venue. Its strangeness is not lost on her. Above her, she understands, is a gallery; but here, in this dingy basement, separated from the “pit” by only that gate, is a concrete-walled martial arts studio. A large, wooden yin-yang hangs on the wall over stacks of red and blue mats, coercing her towards the odd desire to lay them out and pick a fight—Paul’s roguish jacket is rubbing off on her, maybe. Across from the studio are the bathroom and the table where a pair of teenagers collect fares, and between, two green barn doors slid into open position to welcome in the chilly night. The studio area is double or triple the size of the pit, but she supposes that Sensei hasn’t given those permissions.

There is a curious familiarity to these kids. Before signing herself to a PhD track and devoting her life to the single interest of mathematics, Missy was the sort to try anything once. She remembers overhearing Paul recount his adventures at music festivals to his friends before lectures, and having to hush him; feeling a distance from herself, from that girl who always kept her makeup strange, her hair loud, her presence in a room undeniable. Here she is, surrounded by these people from whom she would have been indistinguishable two decades ago, standing out now as plainly as a giraffe in Moscow.

The thought crosses her mind that she may no longer belong in places like these. But it’s too late to wonder—the show begins.

A harsh, gritty tone rises from the room behind her, and each straggling attendee, a prairie dog, straightens and rushes to the pit, whether lucky enough to squeeze through the chain link threshold or resigned to stringing their fingers through it, coming up on tiptoe to see the woman’s high-set table. Missy is among the latter. She can see the top of the woman’s head, a flash of eyes, a furrowed brow. The high pitch cuts the air, squealing through her skull and pressing her face into a wince, then transforms; its tone drops and is joined in a tight chord, notes grinding with disharmony, pooling in concord and pulling apart uneasily again.

Missy blinks, but the sound has glued itself under her eyelids. She notices the people around her have theirs closed, so she shuts her eyes as well and squares her feet against sudden imbalance. Another sound, it must be the metal bowl, cries out like a mistake—but the woman insists on it, driving it louder and louder until it is replaced with silence, and then the methodical drumming of wood against wood.

The strange music rises and falls, and Missy cringes with each pulse. She paid five dollars to watch a stranger play pretend at composition. Her eyes flick open and she aims for the door, but the sight of the other listeners gives her pause.

Some eyes remain shut. Some are narrowly open, as if half-asleep, arms crossed in solitary embrace and lips open to make way for the long, silent word of awe. Each person sways from foot to foot at their own pace, possessed, with no distinct beat in the air to sway to. Missy is looking over a field of reeds, her head and theirs filled with the screaming of distant birds and train tracks and falling widowmakers, and with the faraway hum of engines.

∿

When the performance stops and Missy is stark mad to hear that it’s an intermission and not the end, she is the first out the door to the gallery’s cramped parking lot. Maybe one of these kids would work her into a rotation before she started home. It’s clear they have powerful stuff, and she wouldn’t mind some power.

She lost Paul and his friends in the crowd but watches now as they emerge from the basement, laughing among themselves and bumping shoulders.

Paul spots her and waves, and the group slides up beside her on the way to other comrades. “Professor D! Headin’ out?”

“Yes. It’s getting a bit…” How to put it? “Past my bedtime.”

“Need a ride?” Paul pulls a set of keys from a worn fanny pack looped into jeans that are too tight for much past paper.

Missy nearly balks. Through her teeth and a tight smile, she asks, “Is that a good idea?”

He cocks his head, confused. The girl laughs a sharp, hard note and says, “She thinks we’re high!” and swishes away in her huge overalls toward friends on the other side of the asphalt.

Missy watches a sting wash over the boy’s face in the knitting of his brow and the slight droop of his bottom lip, but he recovers quickly, sculpting his expression into buoyant laughter. “Nah, Professor. Sober as the day I was born.” He gasps, and his eyes unfocus. “I knew I forgot something on the slips,” he says, then, returning to the moment: “Rathole is a sober space.” Something again steals his attention and with a toothy grin, he shouts at the escaping girl that Ash’s aunt is going back inside, and that it’s time, it’s time.

Skipping back toward the basement doors, Paul turns once more. “Have a good night, Professor! Get home safe!” In tow, his friends murmur the same.

I don’t get it. Missy watches them join the other clusters of odd showgoers which file, orderly, under the gallery and out of sight. Before they disappear, she hears an echoed hiss—the long-haired boy, hunched at Paul’s shoulder—“Why do you keep talking to her?”

Paul, loud as he was in her classes. “I think she’s cool.”

She is alone in the parking lot, and a shrill pitch begins to seep from the basement, crawling up her spine and carrying the night’s chill with it. As she imagines every student she’s ever had packed into that basement, swaying under dumb hypnosis, she turns and begins the quiet walk home. Not for me to get, she thinks, not for me to get.