We Are Sitting in a Room (Pt.1)

from All Happy People...

Infinity Dreams, my book coming out from Cemetery Dance next month, really is a novel-in-linked-stories. It began as a set of tales revolving around a couple central characters, but I eventually realized that all the stories were actually one story unfolding in non-linear, unexpected ways. So that’s what I let it become.

By contrast, All Happy People, the linked novellas I am featuring during the first few months of this Substack, really is a set of standalone pieces orbiting a central core, and featuring characters who recur in different ways. That said, there is an arc, at least in my head, and there is an order. And the next story after “Places We Ate with Z” would be this one.

I posted a free downloadable ePUB file of this novella on my website last year as a thank you for a GoFundMe I ran for Direct Relief. That’s still here if you want it. But I got a contact asking if I could post an easily readable web version on the Substack. So…my pleasure!

Plus, this gives me another excuse to post more exquisite Jonas Yip cover art. AND— just for fun— I’m hyperlinking as much of the actual music referenced here as I could find. In case reading this makes you want to go hunting…

If you’ve read “Places”, you’ll recognize Rae, the featured character here. You’ll get a much richer sense of Rae young, and of how and when life came for her, and what she did about it.

One last note: I’ve been really gratified by the number of and response from readers so far. If you are finding consistent pleasure here, though, and if you’re able, I do ask that you consider supporting the project through one of the subscription options, and/or by letting other people know. Thanks very much. And now…

WE ARE SITTING IN A ROOM (PT.1)

Maybe you see them there mornings, Rae and her daughter, in that whole-grain bagel place with the clear zip-up tent walls. Next to the piano showroom? Way down 10th near Tompkins Square. She holds her coffee in long-fingered hands, always blows on it before she sips no matter how long she’s been sitting there. Her black-and-gray hair is never bound or bunched, but it doesn’t spill or tumble. It hangs taut on her back as though strung. Her daughter has the same hair minus the gray, but on her, you can see Rae’s brush strokes. She has Rae’s face, too, same eyes, same button Chinese nose but a little extra fullness in the cheeks. It’s the sag on the left side of her mouth, plus the way Rae does so much of the talking and dabs automatically at the table with a napkin whenever the daughter takes her own slow sips, that makes you think you know or understand something about these women. Their relationship.

She will never again be away from that daughter, you might think idly, looking up from Instagram or work email just long enough to rest your eyes. Take in the morning. How soon after her daughter was born must she have known that?

Welcome, ma’am, to the rest of your life…

You watch her blow on her coffee, sip. She’s talking low. She’s been talking the whole time. Telling a story. Does she always? You decide she does. With a surprising prickle, you realize she has noticed you even less than you have her, even on days she has had to edge past your table on the way to hers. To her, you are Tompkins Square, passing taxis, the sugar bowl lid with which her daughter is playing.

It’s the way she closes her eyes and cocks her head this morning, just for a second, that makes you lean forward. You want to hear whatever she’s hearing, too. You realize you’ve closed your eyes, also, and in the moment, you’re surprised to find yourself remembering that piece that so unnerved you in Music History Intro back in college. Years ago. Those suspended strings. That flute—cornet?—that wanders through and by.

“The Unanswered Question.” That’s the one. With a shiver only partly pleasurable, you wonder if you’ve been hearing those murky chords way down at the bottom of your hearing ever since.

For no better reason than that, you pocket your phone, close your laptop, and just up and introduce yourself. You do it casually—what other way would there be?—and it feels easier and more normal than you expect.

Rae has been telling her daughter about riots, right here in this park.

“When was that?” you ask, trying to imagine. She hasn’t offered, you haven’t asked, but here’s an extra chair, and there you are perching on it.          

“I wasn’t there. I didn’t live down here yet. But I had a friend who got arrested.”

That isn’t what you asked. She’s not really talking to you. She’s letting you listen, that’s all. That’s fine and right. You wonder how she picks which stories to tell on which day. Is the daughter even listening? The daughter watches the park, sips her coffee. It’s not vacancy in those eyes, you decide. Not at all. They dart about, take in everything. Just not the way you do. Not the way Rae does.

More like a squirrel’s eyes, or a bird’s.

“That was right around Monika Beerle time, Jenna,” Rae says, coffee at her lips but unsipped and unblown upon.

You have no idea who that is. You have no idea when you learned this woman’s name was Rae. Have you told her yours? If you have, she doesn’t use it.

The daughter stirs. Her eyes dart to her mother’s hands. A smile of sorts plays at the slack corner of her mouth. Squirrel-smile.

“That still scares me so much,” murmurs Rae. “Upsets me so much. That poor girl. Those poor people. How do you keep getting us talking about this?”

It must show, your not understanding. The woman flashes a look, or you imagine she does.

“It’s like a sick, horrid…it’s not even a joke. It’s a perversion of every single good, kind… But I want Jenna to remember. I want her to know about her neighborhood.” Rae blows on her coffee, then gestures with her chin at her daughter. Now, Jenna is definitely smiling. “Also, she loves a creep-out.”

I want to know about my neighborhood, you almost blurt. It is yours, too, now, after all. You live here, too. You fork over an ungodly percentage of your check for the privilege. Rae’s not originally from here, either, she just said so. Her bagel is whole grain, same as yours. She’s no more native East Village than you. And yet…

“So horrible,” she murmurs again.

Abruptly, you realize you do know this story. Jesus. The Butcher of Tompkins Square, the Village’s very own Sweeney Todd, who chopped up a girl and fed her to the homeless right across the street. In that park! Way back in the 1980s when such mythical creatures as the homeless could still be spotted there. Same era as Ed Koch, who said, “If you can’t afford to live here, move,” and you can’t get much more native New York than Ed Koch.

 So why are you feeling defensive? And how is it possible that you’ve never made the connection before? The Butcher of Tompkins Square and… this Tompkins Square?

The daughter and mother are holding hands. That surprises you. Who took whose?

“Want to hear about East River barges?” Rae asks her daughter.

“I like barges,” says Jenna. Her voice comes out ordinary, gentle and breathy, with just the faintest drag to it, the sound of the slack in her mouth. A voice with a club-foot, but ordinary nevertheless. “But not going on them.”

Rae squeezes her daughter’s hand. “Right. Not going on them. That’s not something we’ll try again this decade.”

She laughs. The daughter stares past her mother at the park. That was a story that just went by, you realize. The story of what happened when they got on a barge. You’ll never hear that story. Why should you want to?

People can get on barges?

“Sometimes I tell her about when her grandmother first came to this country. Her sewing, and how the women downstairs who’d already been here for decades tried to shame and scare her customers away. I tell her about teachers I had. For some reason, I remember every one of my elementary teachers. I tell her about my friend Z from college, who got ten thousand trees planted in the Bronx alone in one year.”

Next door in the music shop, someone is testing out a piano or just noodling. You hear single strands of notes, with just enough silence between them that you keep thinking whoever it is has stopped.

Unconsciously, or familiarly—is that the same thing?—the woman brushes a strand of beautiful black hair out of her daughter’s face. “I have so many more stories than I thought I did.” She says this to Jenna, not you. Jenna leans into her mother’s hand like a cat. She breaks off a piece of the scone they’ve been sharing and feeds it to her mom.

Beautiful, you are thinking, then remember Monica Beerle. It’s annoying that Rae brought that up. Troubling. It doesn’t fit in the story you were already starting to tell yourself about this morning.

“What do you want to hear today?” the woman hums. Not to you.

She’s settling back, arms folded across her trim, black coat, coffee cup near her mouth, eyes in the trees. She cocks her head again. “Wow. Jenna, listen. Is that…?” Eventually, she shakes her head. “No. They’re just playing.”

The pianist, you realize. The person dinking around next door. You listen with the woman and her daughter. The silence between notes elongates, folds into the bird-chirp and street noise, the conversations and clatter of flatware all around them.

“Although,” Rae says, “that’s probably how that piece is supposed to be played. Or at least how it was composed, don’t you think? Just sitting with one hand on the keys, leaning your forehand into your other hand, and just…moving your fingers? Seeing where your hand goes when you take off its leash…”

“’In a Landscape,’” the daughter says abruptly.

The mother glances up, clearly delighted. She nods. “’In a Landscape.’ Amazing, Jenna. It doesn’t even really sound like that, whatever that person’s playing. How’d you know that’s what I was thinking?”

“John Cage!” you pipe up, surprising yourself at least as much as the woman. It’s been twenty years, maybe more, since you’ve said or thought about that name. It’s possible you’ve never spoken it aloud before. Why would you? You wrote it on a test, once. In Music History Intro.

But the woman flashes just a little delight at you, too, now. Surprise and delight.

You all listen some more, but the person playing really has stopped. “Imagine,” the woman says. “Hearing John Cage out of nowhere over coffee with your daughter.”

“Or not hearing it.” Jenna’s grin is mischievous, a little young for that face. Completely winning. “That isn’t what they were playing.”

The mom grins back. “Snarker.” She blows, sips. “Anyway. Just because they weren’t playing it doesn’t mean we aren’t hearing it now. All three of us.” She starts to hum, so quietly that she’s barely audible. A musical phrase you could never have called up but know you know, or knew.

All three of us, she said. Meaning the two of them and you. Just hanging here together by Tompkins Square.

Then, somehow, it starts, or it had already started. The only story you are ever likely to hear this woman tell.

“Hmm,” she says. “Funny.” She begins, or continues. The way you’ll recount and remember it isn’t quite the way she said it. It’s just what you heard:

****

I was attached to the NYU library, then. The Bobst over on 4th? It was still so new. That checkerboard floor. It gleamed behind the glass when you walked up to the doors. Stepping onto it was like sliding into some Roman bath or beaming up to a space ship. No one had thrown themselves off any balconies and killed themselves on it, yet, I don’t think, although you could feel that coming. There was a lot of tension in the air. A lot of anxiety.

But still. All that glow. The film of lower Manhattan shoe-scum on top was only a few inches thick, and even that glowed, like varnish. East Village varnish. I’d just moved down from way uptown, by CCNY. I had a grant to do a literacy project with some Bowery elementary schools. I couldn’t believe it. Any of it. That I got to come to work in a building like that every day. That this city, that had so, so little money then, had trusted me with some. That I had as much reason to walk that checkerboard floor as all these brilliant NYU kids, talking so fast, dressed so ragged.

Isn’t that funny? It would never in my life have occurred to me to show up for class or even go out for coffee looking like that. My mother would have killed me. But every kid I saw seemed so unbelievably richer and smarter than me. They intimidated the hell out of me. So did my bosses, the librarians. My grant wasn’t enough to live on by itself, but it came with paid hours for me to work at the Bobst circulation desk, for probably less than minimum wage. I didn’t care. It was a whole new world. I had no home, really, just an airshaft room way down Avenue A with a Murphy bed and a sink and a shared bathroom down a hall with three-inch cockroaches for carpeting. I had friends, but they were all busy getting launched, too, and they’d scattered all over the boroughs. Sometimes I just stayed in the stacks after work reading some book or article I’d overheard someone talking about that day. I read anything and everything. About so many different things.

Then I’d walk home late through the sleet, feeling brave. I guess I was brave, a little. Actually, I was probably stupid. The city was so different. All those homeless people jostling for sleeping space on the sopping, freezing benches in Washington Square. Every block and bus stop had some shouting man or woman veering into your path or sloshing down the pavement, kicking up gray, slimy city snow. The coherent ones would confront you if you accidentally caught their eye. They’d demand to know what you were staring at or where you thought you were going, then ask, ‘Spare any change?’ Almost always those words, but everyone who spoke them had different pitches and tones. Like they were all practicing parts. Rehearsing a symphony. The City’s Symphony, circa 1985. Spare any change?

I spared some when I had some, or when I felt guilty or sad enough. Or, sure, when they scared me enough. Honestly, though, I didn’t have change or anything much to spare very often.

So I worked at the Library. I ran my little literary festivals at my assigned schools. Some of those did some good, I think. Lit up a few kids. Then I walked home. When I felt like splurging, or when I was cold, I’d get a street hotdog from a cart.

And on weekends, when I felt like going out, I went record shopping.

(“Jealous,” Jenna says through the crumbs on her lips, from way off in whatever story she has been hearing or telling. It isn’t the one you’ve heard, you sense.

“Oh, hon,” Rae answers. “You have no idea.”)

There were so many of them, first of all. My god. Every block had one. Some blocks had two. St. Marks, between Second and First? It had at least four. Maybe six. Rockit, Sounds, the Annex. Venus, I think, was that there then? Smashed. They were all different, too. Not just the records in them. The people who worked in the individual stores. The people who shopped in them. The posters on the walls and in the windows. The light. The smells, oh my God. The Annex… they had mostly jazz, Blue Note jazz, nothing obscure or out of the ordinary, but I always stopped there anyway because it smelled like hay. Hay. Always. I never could figure it out. But it gave the place this outside-the-city slowness. This snuffling, low-key…I don’t know…

If I wanted to get high, I’d go over to Bleecker Bob’s on 3rd and lean down close to the records and just inhale. I never bought music there. Too expensive. But everything they played in-store was wild. Guitars so fuzzed they sounded shellacked in bees. Singers wailing in falsetto about bees. I swear, bees were a thing in there one winter. They had bins and bins of old psych, progressive rock, stuff you’ve never heard of, no one has except eBay guys. Mandrake Memorial. Wishing Hair. God, I loved those band names. I always wished the music sounded more like those names, you know? Like I imagined music attached to those names should sound.

The records at Bleecker were crammed into the bins, bending and warping. The eBay guys would have screamed to see it. There was never enough light. I always got the feeling that half of that store’s clientele were the surviving members of Wishing Hair and the rest of those bands, and seeing their albums—their unbought, probably unplayable albums—buried in that place was some kind of badge of honor. Garage band Madame Tussauds.

For bootlegs, I’d head down to Degeneration on Houston. I didn’t buy those either. Too expensive, and they sounded awful, but again, I loved that they existed. That they were just there, buried in the city for me to find. There was one with Bob Dylan just strumming a guitar in his apartment. Not even singing. But Bob Dylan in his apartment! Age maybe 19? 20? How did that get there? The only bootleg I remember purchasing was this Roxy Music thing. It was the cover that got me more than anything else. The front had Eno in his ostrich feathers, and their singer shimmying around him with his beautiful hair rampant on his head like a lion in a coat of arms. His face had glitter all over it. God, those songs. Those crazy, lurching, swooning, careening things. Those were what I wished Wishing Hair sounded like. How does someone write something like that, or remember it after they do? Where does that kind of inspiration come from?

I still have that record. You know which one, Jenna? There’s a girl on the back, in a bathroom in some kind of falling-off-her, laminated, leopard print mini-dress, and her eyes are like…I mean they’re just light blue eyes, except they’re almost silver, like the hood of a car. There’s something about her that still spooks me. Totally fascinates me. She’s just sitting there on white tile with metallic skin and this completely expressionless mouth, and her dress is falling down. She’s not even beautiful. It’s like she’s saying, ‘You’ll never reach me…You’ll never find me… You’ll never even meet me…’

(“Why do you think she’s a funky chick?” you will remember Jenna saying. Those exact words. And then her mother correcting her:

“I’m.” Rae’s voice is wistful, her eyes in the park. You have no idea what she’s referring to or talking about, which is why you’ll remember.  Also, no matter the pronouns, what kind of sentence is that, anyway? It doesn’t even sound like English. In what circumstances would an actual person ever ask that question? But Rae just grins and asks it to the air. “Why do you think I’m a funky chick?” She goes on.)

I loved Green Room Discs up by the Strand. The whole weird grimy, glitzy vibe of that place and the neon on the walls, even though I hated musicals, then. Even the Tower on Broadway was fantastic. Amazing. Sometimes I’d spend whole Saturdays in there drifting from nook to nook, soaking up the sheer overload, the insane amount of music I felt I really was going to need to hear before I died. I’d go through the glass doors to the classical room and discover Ligeti for the first time. Float upstairs to that little World section on the mezzanine for some Balinese gamelan. That place never felt like a library—it barely even felt like New York, really, let alone the East Village, it was more of an office complex—but I treated it like one. It was just so vast. It made life feel vast.

For actual recommendations, things I did buy when I had money, I went to this place over west of Avenue of the Americas, down some little stone steps on Christopher Street. It was in the basement of an apartment building. I never knew what it was called. I’m not sure it had a name. It was about the size of my apartment, tiny tiny, maybe six handmade wooden bins nailed into the walls and some wire racks above them. There weren’t so many records in there, either, but they were handpicked. Every one. Impossible to find anywhere else, or at least, that’s how it seemed to me. The first 17 Pygmies EP. That Eyeless in Gaza pump organ record, Drumming the Beating Heart. Has there even been a record with a more perfect name for its sound? Not that anyone in New York who didn’t shop in that store ever heard it, I sometimes thought. Smugly. God. All the people who worked that counter—three guys and a woman with dyed white hair—were in a band together. Pretty good band, just jangly R.E.M.-y stuff, but sweet. I used to go see them open for people at the Peppermint Lounge or Danceteria.

I got most of the music I actually listened to from those people. Understand, that doesn’t mean I spoke to them. I’d come shivering down those steps out of the sleet, spend maybe twenty minutes flipping through every record in the place, and just listen to that gang chatter. They never spoke to me either, really, not even to ring me up. If I tried—and every now and then, I do, or I want to—I don’t think I could make myself as invisible for one second as I felt every single day during those years, all the time. Not just in that store, either; in all the stores. At the Bobst, too. I wasn’t one of that crowd, or anyone’s crowd, yet. It’s like I was haunting my places more than frequenting them. Like I wasn’t even there.

And yet I remember it being so fun. Do you think everything we love about being young comes afterward? Maybe youth isn’t just wasted on the young. Maybe you can’t even be young ‘til you’re old.

Also, why do I always remember it sleeting?

It was definitely sleeting that night. The one I want to tell you about. I think it was a Friday. Work was done, and I was saving record shopping for later in the weekend because I didn’t have anywhere else to go or be. I had no one to see. I was freezing and wet and I didn’t want to go back to my awful apartment yet. I don’t think I was sad, but going to that room would have made me sad. So I invented another project on the spot. I was going to get to know one entire block inside out, up and down. For an adventurous start, I finally actually went into Astor Place and got my hair cut there. Oh, boy. If my mom had seen me afterward, I think she would have had me beheaded rather than let me out in the world looking like that.

I made my way back to Broadway and around the corner, clinging to the scaffolding on the sides of the buildings to try to stay dry. It didn’t help. There was a wind, and it just blew the sleet sideways into everyone’s faces. Every time the lights turned green, cars churned up the muck in the road and spit it all over everyone on the sidewalk. No one swore or ducked away or reacted, really. No one was even shouting, which was rare. It was like we were all part of some mechanized downtown New York winter window display. We each had our parts to play, our tracks to run. Except maybe me, and I didn’t want to be found out. I didn’t want any real New Yorkers to notice. So I just tunneled ahead.

I wiled away an hour or so in Shakespeare and Co. I think I even bought a damaged book for a quarter out of the rack under the awning. I bought hot peanuts from a street cart because I couldn’t find the hot dog guys, for some reason, and I didn’t want to spend the money I had on McDonalds because I wanted to record shop the next day, although I did use the rest room, there. They were the only place on the street that didn’t make you buy something first, or maybe they were just too busy to notice. I went in some shoes-and-electronics store that looked teleported to that neighborhood from Canal Street. The proprietor was an old Chinese woman, and I swear she just glowered at my new haircut the whole time I was there, which wasn’t very long. I was afraid to touch anything.

I came out, and already there was almost nowhere public on my chosen block left to go, or maybe I was tired. If the flow of people hadn’t continued sweeping me the way I’d been going, and if the sleet hadn’t picked that precise moment to harden into hail, I would never even have seen that little lobby. I’d sure as hell never have gone in it.

I must have been past that door a thousand times by then, and never once noticed it. If you’d asked me to draw the block, I don’t think I would have included it. I certainly wouldn’t it have sketched it open, which seems so funny, now. That door was almost always open. Even when EMDB was closed. Even after it was gone. It’s probably open, still.

But that night, right as I was gathering myself to turn against the tide for home, a truck slogged by. A huge one. It was throwing this tsunami of street sludge two feet high. Even the Village natives reacted to that. People ducked back into one another or glanced up, glaring, as muck splattered them. I had one frozen hand in my chopped-up hair, my other crushed around my empty peanut bag, which was still just a little warm, and I got paralyzed watching the wave come. I was freezing. So wet and alone. I just started laughing. I have no idea at what. Right as the wave broke on my square of sidewalk, I dove sideways through that open door I hadn’t even realized I’d seen, and I found myself starting at a hand-lettered sign on white artist’s paper, taped to a tilting easel wedged against a blank, concrete wall.

EMDB, it said, in lettering so plain and precise it might have been lifted from the side of the Sharpie it had been inked with. Underneath those letters was a single word. Up.

Except for the easel and some metal mailboxes along the far wall, the lobby was empty. There weren’t even stairs I could see, just one of those old, clanking cage-elevators. The iron-grate door to that looked so rusted, I thought I might pull it off its hinges if I tried opening it. The words on the easel interested me, or just jiggled around in my head. I don’t know why, just one of those weird word combos. EMDB. Up. Why do you think I’m a funky chick?

But I was still about to leave. This was an apartment building, not even an office complex. What reason did I have to stay? And then— I swear, it was like the place called out to me—I heard my first EMDB sound.

It was mostly a sigh. Long and low, and cold. Like a…frozen trombone. A hibernating frozen trombone rolling over in its sleep. Whatever the sound was, it had come from Up.

Between Up and that sound—which wasn’t repeated, all I could hear after that was the street—what choice did I have, back when I was young and lonely and brave?

I went to the elevator and listened. I pulled gently on the cage door, but it didn’t even rattle, let alone open. I pulled hard. It let me in. There were only two black buttons on the blackened brass panel on the elevator wall. Neither of them had numbers or symbols of any kind. I pressed the top one. The elevator sat for maybe ten seconds, like it was considering my proposal. Finally, it shuddered, clanked, jerked, and lifted.

Those ceilings were low. The whole building was low. We couldn’t have gone up more than twelve feet. It still took about two minutes. We shuddered up the shaft, and my head slowly, slowly cleared the floor of the second story. We stuck in place for a few seconds, almost as if the elevator was letting me get a first look. Allowing my eyes to adjust to all that light. When it rattled awake again, it actually lurched a foot or so past the floor—up!, I remember thinking, and punched the bottom black button—before sinking back down. It never quite got level, but close enough.

I remember just staring into that room. Suddenly, the elevator door seemed like a safety barrier. A zoo cage I could peer through. I couldn’t even begin to make sense of what I was seeing.

It was too bright, first of all. The room was lit by blazing overhead fluorescents, which should have made the place feel like one of the public schools where I was doing my grant work, or maybe a hospital. But somehow, those lights reminded me of nothing in New York. What business did that much light have in any Village building on that block in that sleet in the city the way it was then?

In addition to bright, this space was clean. No mud streaks anywhere, no squashed roach splotches on the walls, no dust. The white linoleum floor glowed brighter than the Bobst’s checkerboard lobby. And it was Tower Records-deep; it had to have taken up half a block. Way at the back, I could see what looked like a pinewood counter. On the floor right outside the elevator lay a ratty but perfectly aligned red and black mandala throw rug.

The entire rest or the room was record shelves.

They were metal, four-tiered, taller than I was. They, too, had been perfectly aligned and spaced, jutting out perpendicular to both walls, leaving a wide walkway down the middle of the room but very little browsing area in the aisles between them. They reminded me of library stacks. They were library stacks, that’s exactly what that room felt like except for the dustlessness and light. I’d almost decided a library was what EMDB had to be. Next, I decided it was someone’s amazing apartment, and EMDB the owner’s initials. Maybe the co-owner’s, a couple’s, but then why would even a couple this amazing post their initials on an easel in the lobby of their building? That frozen trombone sounded again, even colder and more distant, like a boat horn. As though even through closed windows and from blocks away I was hearing the river. That was the moment I really thought I might be dreaming.

You’re trespassing, Rae, I remember thinking. You have no reason or right to be here. I had that thought a lot back then. Can’t remember the last time I’ve had it, now. Isn’t that funny? But in the moment, there was also nowhere in the world I wanted to be more. I pulled the cage open, stepped onto that mandala carpet into the light, and saw Teddy for the very first time.

I still don’t know how I missed him initially. He must have been crouching by that open record box in front of the pinewood bar the whole time. He had to have heard the elevator, too. But Teddy could go so still. I’ve never seen anything alive get as still as he could. Now, though, he flowed to his feet. That really is the word for it, that’s how he moved; he’d done so much Tai Chi by that point that I sometimes suspected his bones had turned to water. Obviously, I didn’t know that, then. He was tiny, shorter than I was, rail thin. He wore a threading white t-shirt with the ghost of some sort of oval design on the front that had long since succumbed to bleaching, black sweat pants, black slip-on sneakers with no socks. His hair was a red I’d never seen before. Not quite blood. The exact deep maroon, actually, of that mandala rug. He had his hand out and up, and one surprisingly long finger raised.

Meaning ‘wait;’ I wondered? Or, Stop? Or, Get out of here before I call the cops?

He didn’t actually look at me. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure he had his eyes closed. I waited for him to open them, but he didn’t. And he didn’t. At some point, without planning or meaning to, I closed my eyes, too.

And just like that, there I was, standing in that room I wasn’t even sure was public, a block above the sludgy, awful, astonishing city that wasn’t mine and also was— same as everyone else in New York, right?—listening with Teddy for the first time.

More than once, I thought I heard the trombone again, or wondered if I did. It didn’t really sound like trombone, I decided; it never had. It was too tuneless, and also…I don’t know…inflectionless. Without breath. Like whale call, kind of, but from thousands of feet below or away, and retreating. I remember a long, long pause, and right when I thought I might, maybe, have heard it one last time, I caught the start of another sound, the most familiar, comforting sound in my life right then: the tickticktick of a turntable needle sliding into a run-out groove.

When I opened my eyes, the little flowing guy was behind the bar, lifting a tone arm and dropping a record back into a sleeve. What kind of record was that, I wondered? At that distance, I couldn’t have made out anything about the sleeve even if the flowing man had held it up for me. Anyway, he didn’t. I opened my mouth to call a question, but faltered over whether to ask about the name of the record or if I was actually allowed to come in?

Then I just did it. Like a little kid sneaking into a movie theater. I darted sideways into the nearest narrow row between record shelves and just… started browsing.

There were no albums turned outward as displays. No endcaps. No band names or little signs of any kind taped to those shelves, and no dividers between sections. The records were all arranged spine-out, their edges so perfectly flush with the edge of the shelving that for a second I almost thought they might be sculpture, not real records at all. Maybe this whole room was an art installation, some kind of New School student annex or something. Given the lighting, that idea didn’t seem so absurd.

But the records were records. They were also clearly in some sort of order, though it took me most of that first, furtive hour to figure out what it was. Meanwhile, new sounds congealed around me. These were less comforting or immediately alluring than that ghost trombone. Some of them, maybe all, were electronic. They seemed to drip from the ceiling, plunk in my ears like drip from icicles. Were there actual notes involved? I couldn’t tell. Some of those sounds were notes. They seemed to pool after a while but never settle. They just...froze over, somehow, without smoothing. Every now and then, they’d shudder or shiver as though a wind had whipped through or across them. A Martian wind. On Mars. That’s pretty much where I felt like I was. Nowhere safe, nowhere I belonged. Nowhere I ever wanted to leave.

By label, I finally realized. Then, within each label, by catalog number. That was the filing system. So if you wanted to find anything in that place, you had to know not just the artist—in fact, knowing the artist would do you no good whatsoever—but the label that had recorded the specific piece or performance of the piece you were hunting, and then the number that label had assigned your disc.

And those labels! Remember, I spent my nights and weekends browsing the best, most eclectic record store blocks in the world. I had no lover. No Jenna. (You know she’s going to reach out and squeeze her daughter’s hand before she does it. And she does. But Jenna just stares across the street into Tompkins Square, as though into this past that wasn’t hers. She looks even happier to be there than it sounds like her mom was. She’s also happier to be here, you realize, though you’re not sure why or how you would know that. You find yourself leaning in, as though Rae’s voice is retreating).

I had a job, but no history at the job. No personality conflicts with colleagues, no goals other than the one I’d gotten the grant for. Only a few failures. No one sick. It seems unimaginable now, but I had so little to think about or hope for or rail against or work through.

All of which is just to say, I knew record labels. I knew tiny ones, private ones, German ones. Chilean ones. I thought I knew almost all of them there were.

I had never seen almost any of these.

A few are famous now, even if they’re gone. That is, they’re famous among the 500 or so cognoscenti who ever encountered them in the first place. New Albion. Obscure. A couple, like Hat Hut, are even still around, I think. Some of them only ever released one record (which for some reason was never number 001). But an amazing percentage of them released more. Whole shelves’ worth. And at least one copy of almost everything they made somehow wound up on EMDB’s shelves.

Saying their names now feels like a travelogue, to me. Like reciting the names of cities in countries I backpacked or hitchhiked through.

Red Infinite. Unnova. Klang. Magnetic Unwound Federation.

That whole first day, I mostly marveled. Where did these all come from? How on Earth had they found their way here, and did they go anywhere from here? Teddy, I would soon learn, could have and did answer those specific questions about any disc I held up to him. What he couldn’t tell me, a lot of the time, was what the discs sounded like. Not until we played them.

I’m not sure I even withdrew any records from their shelf spots that first visit. I didn’t dare. I was afraid of setting off an alarm or getting kicked out. But more—much more—I didn’t want to break the mood. That icy, Martian calm. It was so unlike anything else in my city or my life, then or ever.

When I finally peeked around the edge of the second or third row I had perused, I saw the counter guy moving—almost dancing—down a row on the other side of the room, records and a clipboard in hand. His slipper-sneakers made the faintest squeak on the linoleum. I didn’t exactly sneak back to the elevator, but I waited until he was gone from sight to step out fully and make my way across the open stretch of floor. I pushed the button, waited until I heard the clanking sound of the machinery lurching awake, then turned once more. I think I thought I would never be back; I was still so uncertain of whether I was invited or allowed in the first place.

But then he reappeared. Teddy, though I didn’t know his name, yet. His arms were empty except for the clipboard. For the first time, he looked right at me. One hand rippled across his face like a willow branch in a breeze. He put a single finger to his lips.

Meaning, Sssh, as in, Keep the secret? Meaning, Listen? Meaning, I won’t tell if you won’t?

Tell what?

Was he smiling?

The elevator arrived. I fled.

It took weeks to work up the courage to go back. I’m not sure I would have except that I also couldn’t get those sounds out of my head. The second set, the ones from some liquid, slow-churning pool of not-water on some planet not hospitable to life as I knew it. I had to have that record or at least know what it was.

I started turning right instead of left at Broadway on my way home every night, walking a long, freezing extra bunch of blocks just to pass that open door. It was always open. The first few times, I didn’t even let myself look in the lobby. I felt like a twelve year-old girl inventing reasons to stroll past the house of a crush I wanted to notice me. When I did steal glances at the lobby, I always found it empty. Just shadows, mailboxes on the wall, the easel, the white paper. EMDB. Up.

I finally went back on a sunny, bright Saturday morning. The street and sidewalk were still gray and slimy with slush, but the light on the buildings positively winked. It’s magical, yeah? Daylight never even really reaches street level in the winter in New York. But have you ever seen any other December sunshine look that warm?

In the lobby, I had to call for the elevator, and when I heard voices drifting down the shaft—ordinary speaking voices, people talking—I almost left again. But the elevator arrived while I debated, and the cage door peeled back easily this time, as if it knew me. Or—even better—as if I knew it. Knew exactly how hard to pull. I had to resist the urge to pin myself against the back wall so I might scope out the surroundings before entering. The elevator froze at the same not-quite-there spot it had before, grunted, lurched past the second floor just as it had the last time, and settled back. I pulled open the cage and entered.

Teddy was in back of the bar at the far end of the room, on the phone. He had his red hair wrapped in and sticking out the top of some kind of yellow bandana, which made it looked like trussed tomato plants on top of his head. That made him seem ridiculous and somehow friendlier than when I’d seen him last. On the stereo, floating overhead, was some kind of metallic, non-tonal shimmering sound that seemed to pour over and between the banks of lights like a creek full of mercury.

I made myself stroll across the rug, past the gray-haired, bespectacled guy with the Hemingway beard stabbing with his finger at the record sleeve in his hand to emphasize the point he was making to the younger bespectacled guy next to him. That guy, I realized with a jolt, I recognized. He came into the library a lot. Checked out musical scores. He had wonderfully tight, curly hair, spectacular specs too round for his face. He taught at Tisch. Malian mbira music and culture, I thought.

“Of course which cistern matters.” That, I swear, is what the older guy was saying as I passed.

Already, I was even more in love with EMDB than I had been on my first visit.

I stole a glimpse at the record sleeve they were arguing over. It had a water tower on the front, gray against a washed-out green field. I couldn’t read the album title or the group name. But one of the words was Deep.

This time, I stayed for hours. At first, I was hoping the professors would check out their selections—or buy them, or whatever one did with whatever one found here—and go, but then I was glad they were there. They provided cover. Permission, maybe. Also, they actually seemed to know some of this music. Once or twice, the younger one would blurt, “Hold on, hold on,” and dash off down some row or other. Once, he even brushed past me, his outstretched finger lightly brushing the spines of the records. He didn’t excuse himself as he squeezed by; his attention was all on the shelves. At the end of the row, he slowed, then dropped to one knee. I saw his mouth moving. Counting.

The word he said wasn’t Eureka. It might not even have been a word. But as he hurried back past me, he flung up the disc in front of his face between us. At first, I thought he was shielding himself from me for some reason, and I blushed. Only when he passed did I realize he was reading liner notes. He simply hadn’t been able to wait.

I went to the spot in the shelving where he’d been and knelt. It seemed as good a place as any to start touching, exploring. The label on that shelf was Nafas. I pulled out the disc nearest to the one I thought the professor had just removed. Catalog number NFS2147.

Right as I did it, something blurted, then squawked, loud, and I thought I really had set off an alarm. But no, Teddy had simply put on a new record. This one was mostly honking. Could have been ducks, could have been buses. I honestly had no idea. I didn’t like it. I also didn’t mind that I didn’t.

Bali Gong Gede read the record cover in my hands. It had some sort of blocky, poorly Xeroxed picture on the front, printed aslant, of red and orange carpeted temple steps strewn with flowers.

When I emerged from that row of shelves, I glanced casually toward the front of the room and saw the professors seated Indian style on the rug, records between and all around them, heads nodding, spectacles flashing. Neither of them, I’m convinced, even knew I was there. Certainly, they didn’t care. Squawking sounds still erupted periodically, as though flocks of geese had whipped through the room. Sometimes, I thought I recognized a pattern. Serial squawking, I remember thinking? Was it possible to compose twelve-tone rows with no tones?

Then I thought, Why wouldn’t it be?

I wandered the room for hours. Other people came in. Most went straight to the counter, and Teddy would pull a record off the single shelf behind him, remove a yellow Post-It from the shrink wrap, and hand it over. One guy came with a dolly. He went straight behind the counter, nodded at Teddy, and came back around wheeling two stuffed and sealed record boxes.

Eventually, I realized I was waiting for my redheaded counterman to get off the phone. He rarely seemed to be speaking, but the receiver stayed at his ear, pushing up the bandana. Occasionally, he’d drop it on its cradle or the countertop to change or flip whatever was on the turntable. Then he’d reaffix it to his shoulder as he thumbed records and scribbled on his clipboard.

When the professors got up to go, they left the albums they’d pulled—maybe fifty, in three neat stacks—on the rug without saying a word.

Rude, I thought. But the counterman didn’t seem to mind. He also gave the departing profs a version of the gesture he’d made at me the last time I was there: finger to the lips, tilting head. But this time, as a final flourish, he shot the finger straight up into the air, as though saluting, maybe. Or flipping them off. Or conducting.

I decided that was my cue even though he hadn’t paid me the slightest mind the entire time I’d been there. I made my way to the front. For something to do while he scribbled and listened to the phone receiver and ignored me, I poked around in the records he’d already sorted on the counter. Most seemed to be from a label called High Lines with a Montana mailing address. Every single one of their releases featured a cover photo of the sloping, grassy side of a mountain. Possibly the same slope of the same mountain, just in different light. Most of the artists were groups of some sort, with names that did not seem to match the photo or locale. Good Chili was one.

Furtively, I stole a glance at the top of the counterman’s clipboard, and so at last learned what the initials stood for.

Experimental Music Distribution Bureau. In the moment, I thought that also explained what the place did. In a way, I was right.

“Yep?” the counter guy finally snapped.

I flinched. Yet again, I felt caught and guilty. “I can wait ‘til you’re done.”

“Huh? Oh.” Grinning, he made one of those liquid, rolling shrugs and swept the receiver from his ear. “I’m not actually on the phone.”

Whatever he saw on my face, it made him grin wider. “Defense mechanism. Against the profs. Those two guys who just left.”

“I know who you meant.”

“Once those two trap you in a conversation, your day’s over. Your whole day. I’m Teddy, by the way. What’cha need?”

My reaction, again, seemed out of proportion to the moment. I felt like I had at the instant I opened my envelope from the city and realized I’d gotten my grant. Or the last time I’d aced a CCNY final. I wanted to leap in the air or dance. I wanted to lunge across the counter and kiss the guy on the ear right where the phone had been. I wanted never to leave this room again, except maybe to find a hot dog cart or a David’s chocolate chunk cookie to celebrate.

Eventually, I realized I probably needed to say something. “That record. The one you were playing the last time I was here.”

Even as I said that, I felt myself blush again. How could he possibly remember? What made me think he even knew he’d seen me before?

He slapped the counter with his palms. “Slava Ranko! You’re a woman of taste and refinement. I knew it.”

He was out from behind the counter so fast and so smoothly, he seemed to be skating. Was I meant to follow? Too late, I thought maybe I should have. Already, he’d vanished. I hadn’t even seen which row; I was too busy beaming. Celebrating, if I’m honest. Isn’t that ridiculous?

When he returned, he had the record with him. A black sleeve, heavier than a normal record jacket. Cheap cardboard, with what looked like a blurred print of a sketch of an Inuit mask on the front.

Why Inuit? Sloppy thinking on my part. I probably got the idea from the record’s title: Arctic Hysteria.

“Can I…” I said, lifting the album gently, turning it in my hands. I’d thought there might be explanation or at least instrumentation on the back. There was just more blackness. “Is this for sale?”

“It’s for listening to. And for freaking out neighbors. Clearing rooms of chatty professors.” As he said this, Teddy was rummaging under the desk. He disappeared momentarily, then popped up with a filled-in ledger sheet in his hands. He ran his finger down that, came to a catalog number, and tapped it. “$5.99.”

In a daze, I fumbled in my purse and pulled out six of the eleven single bills I had left in my wallet. The other five would have to sustain me until Monday when I next got paid.

“Anything else you want to hear today?” Teddy asked as he took my money. Instead of sliding my penny across the counter, he flicked it at me, as though we were in fifth grade and playing table-hockey. As if we’d known each other for years.

I turned to the room, staring at the rows and rows. It all seemed overwhelming, impossible. How could this place possibly sustain itself? To whom did it distribute, exactly? How did the people running the micro labels and producing the private-release recordings it stocked even know it existed? How had I lucked into it? How long would it take to sample every single thing in here?

“Where do you even start?” I heard myself murmur.

Teddy nodded. “That’s the challenge. Also the fun.”

I was clutching the penny in my fist like a charm. “I’ll be back,” I said.

He put that finger across his lips.

I went home, slapped Slava Ranko on the stereo, and played it nonstop forever while nursing bowls of ramen and bags of street peanuts. At some point in those next couple days, I came up with my first EMDB perusal system.

I’d decided to wait a couple weeks before going back, though. I don’t know why. It was like the place and I were dating. I didn’t want to seem too eager or easy. Although really, in EMDB’s case, I was both.

(Every time you recount Rae’s story to yourself in your head, she looks up from her empty coffee cup at precisely this moment, smile flickering as though just lit, or maybe just glimpsed, as if through the grating on the door to an iron stove. She shrugs. Yet again, what you think is how happy she seems in remembering being happy. Or remembering this specific sort of not-quite-happy. Which is different than the almost-happy you’ve decided she is now, today.

“It had me at ptththuurrrp,” she says. She makes the sound with her lips pursed, her tongue poking through. A trombone fart. Unmistakable. She laughs before you do.

The actual reason you remember this moment has nothing to do with her, of course. It’s just the one time in the whole morning where you’re nearly sure she’s talking to you, not her daughter or the park or the morning. Then she’s off again, recounting.)

(TO BE CONTINUED…)