We Are Sitting in a Room (Pt.2)

from All Happy People

The conclusion of the second All Happy People novella, hyperlinked in case you feel like music hunting. Freely readable for everyone.

New nonfiction next week, most likely my critically annotated quarterly music roundup. Then more more new fiction. Then…

Not totally sure what the measurement matrix is, but I appear to have made the bottom of the new Substack Fiction Leaderboard. Grateful for and encouraged by that. Please do keep posting about your readings here somewhere, and telling friends. And if you do like it here, please consider supporting/subscribing in any way that’s comfortable for you. Thank you all.

Prelims dispensed with. Back to Rae and her rooms. As always, including Jonas’s cover art again, because any excuse to do that…

(continued. See Pt.1 if you haven’t yet…)

In the end, I couldn’t even wait for Saturday. I was passing that door the next Thursday night, and for once there was this sweet, slow snow instead of sleet. It even stayed white for a few seconds after it hit the ground. I’d been paid a couple days before, so I’d treated myself to dumplings and garlic broccoli from the little take-out stand at the corner of Macdougal on my way down. Some enterprising, amazing coalition of people my friend Z knew had thrown up maybe twenty tents in Washington Square and also brought in a bunch of accordion players, and they were serenading the homeless in the snow in Washington Square. The city didn’t feel friendlier or easier than usual, not in any kind of lasting way. It still stank of black mold and urine, and the dark between even the streetlights that worked was still too dark. You could feel cold bubbling up through cracks in the sidewalk, as though the whole planet’s processes had reversed or were dying. The taste of my once-a-month Chinese treat was already melting off my tongue, fast as the snow, and I was still hungry. I was always hungry. I turned onto Broadway and was passing that door. Before I even knew I would do it, I was in the elevator, lurching UP.

There was one horrible moment when I thought I’d come after hours and no one was there. No lights were blazing the way they had been the previous two times. And there wasn’t any sound. Meaning, there was the street outside and pipes gasping in the walls, some kind of heating unit that sounded about as modern and trustworthy as the elevator. And sirens, of course. What I later heard Teddy call Manhattan birdsong.

The elevator found its spot and settled. I pulled the door open. There were lights but only at the far end of the room where Teddy was. At first I thought he was working. He was hunched over the counter, anyway. When he heard the cage open, he glanced at me and held up his whole hand in what, for once, was an unmistakable gesture.

Wait. Stop.

Only after a few seconds of standing right at the edge of the rug, shifting my weight back and forth as though in a crowd of jostlers at a frigid Village street corner, did I realize there was one more element in that command.

Listen.

That’s what he was doing. I stopped shifting and closed my eyes.

To this day, I’m not a hundred percent sure I heard anything other than sirens and the street and the walls. If I did, it was a sort of flapping, like a wing beating or a one-bladed fan cutting the air. But I’m really not sure that was there. Was that actual sound? That is, was it intentional sound?

Years later, Steve Roden, one of the old new age guys I really did love, developed a name for that kind of music. He called it ‘lowercase’. Made to be played inaudibly. So far in the background as almost not to be there. Why have it there at all, then, you might ask? I might, too, especially of Steve Roden, since as far as I know, that isn’t even remotely the kind of music he plays. But I’ll say this:

Those lowercase people…they never had a more open, willing pair of ears than mine on that rug at that moment. I just stood, and would have gone on standing as long as Teddy wanted, straining and concentrating and listening. Of course, to the lowercase brigade, that meant I was doing it wrong. That’s the irony of all this, of course. This whole chapter of my life. Technically, really, I was doing it all wrong.

(The smile is still on her face. In your memory, it’s always on her face. No shadows accrue over it. It doesn’t twitch or flicker. If there’s ruefulness emanating from this woman, it’s in her voice. And it’s so barely audible that it might not be there at all.)

“The pop in the runoff groove was jarring, for sure. Even from across the room, I saw Teddy jump, too. He took the record off, flicked on a couple of the overhead lights, and nodded at me. I was going to call out a question, which was actually more of a joke. What happens if a lowercase record gets scratched, and the needle skips? Or even worse, sticks in one spot? How would you ever know?

But I didn’t want to dispel the quiet. Whether it was the record itself or the noise we weren’t making while listening to it, the spell had been cast. Instead of speaking, I held up my own finger against my lips.

Then, all concentration and purpose, I stepped off the rug and down the right-side set of rows. When I reached the seventh row, I turned in. I moved to the fourth set of shelves in that row. The bottom shelf down. The twelfth record in. I didn’t let myself read the label name. I didn’t look at the picture or the sleeve or read the name of the record. I just took it straight to the counter.

And Teddy…there was plenty not to love about Teddy. I didn’t love Teddy, not the actual guy, not at any point. But as the gatekeeper/God of that particular temple, which was already a different kind of temple to me than it was to the musicians and professors and music-heads for whom it had been built, he was perfect. Right down to the way he moved, slitting open shrink wrap with a single swipe of his long-nailed fingers. He didn’t so much pull the record out of the sleeve as decant it onto the turntable.

I wish I could say that record—the first one I chose of my own accord at EMDB—was something wonderful. Something I bought and still have. But not only do I not remember the music, I never even learned what it was. I never looked at the cover. I was too busy enacting my plan.

My system.

When that record ended, I turned toward the room’s left side this time, headed for row three. First set of shelves. Second shelf. Eighth record.

By the fourth album I fetched, Teddy had figured it out. He did it, I’m pretty sure, by checking labels and catalog numbers. As I handed my latest find across the counter, he caught my gaze. I’m not sure he smiled, exactly. But he had an eyebrow up.

“Rows,” he said. “You’re doing twelve-tone rows.”

That, right there, was probably the closest I ever came to kissing him. If I had, it would have been on the cheek.

I nodded. “Next, I’m going to invert them.”

 “Sure, but there aren’t enough tones.” He gestured at the whole room, then put his elbow on the counter and his chin in his palm, as though we were pouring over a problem together. Crick and Watson. Thinking of those two gave me a whole new idea for another EMDB exploration model. I almost blurted it out, but kept it to myself.

“Now, if you used Harry Partch’s tone scale…” he murmured.

I’d heard Harry Partch’s name. I think. Maybe I’d even heard some of his music, that song cycle using words scratched into bus stops during the Depression. Is that him? I didn’t know his scale. But Teddy had already grabbed a scratch pad from beside his clipboard full of ledger sheets and started scribbling number strings.

Off we went, crisscrossing on our separate paths, using our individual systems, until we’d pulled maybe twenty albums. Enough, I thought, to last us months. I turned out to be wrong about that.

“Hmm,” Teddy said, surveying the stack. “I’ll make dinner.”

It’s funny, now, looking back. Of course it was a come-on. It was exactly the sort of come-on someone like Teddy would make: cryptic, cautions, sideways, tucked with deceptive nonchalance into what had suddenly become an actual two-way conversation about records, systems, music, and listening.

But at the time, in the moment—because of the woman I was, then, because of what I was doing with my days and the fact that I did most of it alone, because I was young, because I had been lucky enough to be by myself long enough to start to learn how to love that, for real—it didn’t feel like a come-on. It barely even felt like a plan. I was used to crazy, long-term projects using arcane materials. They were how I made my living, such as it was. They filled my brain and heart. They gave my days weight and made me feel anchored in the world, like I had somewhere to be and would have somewhere to be tomorrow. Sitting on that rug eating whatever Teddy made and listening together through a stack of random (or, now, systematically selected) albums from the EMDB shelves just felt like another one of those.

Here’s what I remember about our first listening night:

That we didn’t finish until after three a.m., so late that I was nervous about walking the seven and a half blocks home, as I damn well should have been.

That the meal Teddy made on a hot plate behind the counter consisted mostly of grains I couldn’t identify, plus carrot wheels and wobbly chunks of tofu. It tasted like soy sauce. In the moment, I think I thought I loved it.

That one of the records in that first stack was a recording of Alvin Lucier’s “I am Sitting in a Room”, which Teddy already knew. He laughed when he saw it before putting it on. “This couldn’t be much more perfect,” he said, then stood at the counter and watched my face while I confronted that piece for the first time. That man (Lucier himself?) sitting in a room—the one we were in, according to him—telling us in plain, conversational speech that he was going to keep playing a recording of himself saying that he was sitting here with us until his words dissolved into the resonance of the room. Until we were hearing the room, as if the walls and air were a bell rung by his speech. I sat on the rug tasting soy and grit residue from Teddy’s pan on my tongue and my teeth, and dissolved with the words.

Before I left, Teddy and I had already agreed on plans for the next time. We would both bring a new method for random record selection. Teddy said he’d make dinner again, which I didn’t realize would be the same dinner, every time. I said I’d bring wine, though I worried about affording that. Teddy said he didn’t drink. I said I’d bring street peanuts. That, he liked.

 What I don’t remember is Teddy coughing. He must have been; he always was, and I certainly noticed it every listening night afterward. It never annoyed me. It was just another ambient sound in the room in which we listened.

Every time I came, from then on, we traded methodologies. The rule—not that we’d discussed or agreed to it—was that we’d each have a new system for every session. Teddy would unveil what he called his “ice dice”, clear and hard and eight- or ten- or twenty-sided. I would counter with a rolled-up printout I’d made on one of the fancy new Bobst Xerox machines of a DNA coding strand for some protein or other. We experimented with various chain models, where the first or last letter in the name of one artist or album title would direct us to a row and location where we would find our next. One time, Teddy took a bag of farro, cut a tiny hole in the top, shook it out across the counter, and actually attempted to count escaped grains. We took crossword clues from the Times and mark twain measurements from old maritime maps of the East River, tallied horn honks and siren wails from the streets below or specified actions of other listener/shoppers in the room with us, translated all of that into number patterns or directional coordinates, and lit out into the stacks.

There were other people with us at EMDB sometimes. Of course there were. I even got to recognizing some. Those two NYU professors came a lot. Also a gorgeous Korean violinist with hair almost to her knees who always stepped out of the elevator in what looked to me like her performance skirt, which was long and black. She only hunted for recordings in two specific rows, way back toward the counter on the left.  There was a rail-thin Black kid in a blue leather jacket and blue-rimmed glasses with purple tinted lenses. There was the laughing, clean-shaven, puffy-eyed guy whose red or orange t-shirts looked six sizes too big for him, like prison-garb. He always turned up with a different set of loudly laughing companions.  He might or might not actually have been John Zorn. At the time—after I first started hearing that name and reading about his music and wild performances in the Voice and then everywhere—I was pretty sure he was.

I’m still pretty sure.

Did any of them notice me? If you asked those people to list the other human beings they’d haunted EMDB with, would I come up? I doubt it. Not that we had no interactions. I’d be leaning over the counter to see a die roll or laugh with Teddy over a particularly bonkers stream of liner note copy—“the trill of wires in the city’s skin in dreams God has of city’s skin,” that’s an actual line I remember, though I have no memory of the music it purportedly described—or just grab peanuts from the bag I’d brought, and I’d hear a sigh. Sometimes a slap of hands. The Korean woman never bothered with sighs or slaps. If I was in her way when she came to the counter, she’d gently hip-check me aside, saying, “This, please”, or lay a neatly folded and typed piece of paper in front of Teddy with record titles and catalog numbers on it. Once, swept entirely out of my body by the weaving bass and tumbling drums of Positive Force, I whirled on probably-John-Zorn and his beautiful, laughing brunette colleague in the prism-shaped glasses and said something really insightful like, “Oh my God, do you believe this place?”

The brunette glanced up just enough to shoot light at and around me. Probably-John-Zorn cocked his head, though. Then he started laughing. He was doing that at, not with, me. I didn’t care. I even understood, maybe. How many places did people as serious and knowledgeable about new and challenging music as they were have to go, even in New York? Who was I to be there?

A dilettante, I guess. To them, anyway. Just someone who liked it. Sometimes, I suspect even they didn’t believe people like that—people like me—actually existed.

Most nights, the finding was as much fun as the records we found. More. But every now and then…oh, wow…the sounds raining over us as we roamed that room and sipped motor oil-strength tea to wash the soy sauce down: From Scratch, from New Zealand, who played PVC pipes and tubes they whirled around their heads; Harry Partch and his made-up instruments and the racket those made; throat-singing Tuvans shattering their own voices into a thousand winking, glinting over- and undertones; the Kinothek Percussion Ensemble, whoever they were; Albert Ayler, one of the few artists whose music I already knew before I found EMDB, still wilder and scarier and freer than almost anyone blowing music with breath, before or since; one specific Carl Weingarten album that wasn’t wild at all but preternaturally serene even though it was never still, like a pond in wind, with a guy murmuring something about “getting to the other side” but mixed way down under the guitars, gliding around in the hum like a trout-shadow.

 Teddy’s cough was a constant, though it never got noticeably worse. I assumed allergies for a while, then realized that room was probably as close to hypoallergenic as any space in the East Village at the time. Finally, I asked him.

“Constant flu,” he told me, offering one of those shrugs that looked more like a wave rolling through an aquarium. He treated his infection with spice tea strong enough to clear any sinus issues I might have been having just by inhaling the fumes. 

Another night, really late, during a holiday weekend or maybe over NYU’s spring break, when a surprise late-season snow stilled the Village to the extent that it ever stilled, I asked Teddy how EMDB could possibly sell enough records to pay its rent and sustain this collection.

We were snacking on the rug by paraffin lamplight. The lamp was Teddy’s idea for after-midnight listening, although we continued to select records at random, and only a few ever fit that spectral, flickering, small-hour mood. For some reason, I can picture him so vividly at that precise moment, face over teacup, hands tight around it, hair unbound and aglow, records in his lap and his clipboard beside him. In the shadows his skin looked less blanched, that hair an even richer red. His movements blended so seamlessly with the lamplight shadows that he seemed like a shadow himself. A shadow no one was casting.

“I like this,” I remember him saying. In the moment, I thought he meant the record we were playing, whatever it was. I can’t defend my obliviousness. It’s just where my mind was. And Teddy…he was so peculiar. A singularity, a creature of that upstairs room: playmate, co-explorer, listening companion. Honestly, to me, he was more Puff the Magic Dragon than dating candidate. I never once thought of him that way. Until the last night, obviously.

“Me, too,” I remember telling him. “I love EMDB. That’s why I’m asking. I want this to last. But there can’t be enough record stores in the city or the whole country that stock this stuff, or even know most of it exists. Can there? How is this place profitable or even viable? Or do you have some kind of grant?”

As I said that, I had a single moment where I wondered if I was wrong. Maybe I was underestimating the world. What if there were secret EMDBs in upstairs rooms or basements of otherwise nondescript apartment complexes all over America, in every city and town? Why wouldn’t there be? I mean, there clearly aren’t now, there are barely even regular stores anymore; there probably weren’t then. But why couldn’t there have been?

The only reason I remember this moment, though, is Teddy’s shrug. It was the exact same one he’d given me about his constant flu, and it disconcerted me. Upset me, honestly. It rippled through him and left no trace. As if EMDB’s viability and my questions about it were irrelevant to him.

“Not my problem,” he said. “I just work here.”

“You…” I was so surprised that I looked him right in the face for a change. I don’t know why I mostly avoided doing that.

His eyes were black, the lamplight flaring in the irises, which made him look angry. Was Teddy angry, generally? I think that’s the first time I wondered, amazingly enough.

But then he laughed. He had an ugly laugh, a sort of grunting seal bark completely out of tune with the flow of his movement. “What? You thought I owned all this? Do I look like someone with that much cash?”

“Well, I mean, I’ve never seen one single other official EMDB person here.” Abruptly, I wondered why I thought that was true. “Have I?”

He told me the names of the owners. I’d heard of them. Musicians, of course. One of them avant-jazz royalty, I think, a member of the Chicago AACM, maybe. But I was so taken aback by this new revelation that I barely even heard. It was the disinterest in Teddy’s voice as much as the revelation itself that niggled me. For almost the first time since I’d first stepped out of that elevator, I felt like my whole EMDB experience had been mine alone. Un-shareable and quite possibly imaginary. Nothing to do with the real EMDB.

Do you think it’s possible that all the experiences that matter most to us—by definition, precisely because they matter to us—are ours alone? Even if there’s someone else experiencing them with you? 

Naturally, that was when Teddy asked me out. Even if he hadn’t picked that particular instant—even if we’d been mid die-roll or eating together instead—I’m not sure I would have realized that’s what he was doing. At the time, I certainly didn’t. I just felt a weight on my palms, glanced down, and saw the flyer Teddy had pressed into them. It was black and gold, badly Xeroxed, torn across the top, and still had sticky, dried strips of the glue once used to paste it to whatever scaffolding board or streetlight post Teddy had ripped it from on his way to work.

The Rothenberg Double Band was playing the Shirtwaist Factory down on Houston. The Shirtwaist was still brand new. I’d heard about it, of course. Probably-John–Zorn and the people he brought with him chattered about shows there all the time as they browsed the EMDB shelves. That laughing brunette with the prism glasses had even come in a Shirtwaist tee, once, which I remembered thinking was in seriously poor taste: a shirt from somewhere called Shirtwaist, even if that place was ostensibly paying tribute, memorializing.

I’d never been to the club, though, or even past it. As for the Double Band, Teddy and I had randomly selected their new record a few weeks before. It grooved and shuddered and chattered, made me feel like was I standing in an aviary during an earthquake. I loved it.

“We should go to this,” Teddy said.

“Obviously,” I answered. “Awesome. Although…” What I was going to say was that I liked spending the very little disposable income I had on records, things I could get repeated pleasure from rather than one-time events.  

But Teddy snatched back the flyer and folded it up. “Good.” Then he stood and walked away. When I realized he wasn’t coming back, I got up, too, waved goodbye, and headed down in the elevator and out the always open door to those eerie, not-quite-empty two a.m. streets, giving my usual wordless, automatic prayer that my luck would hold and the streets would let me pass one more time.

As it turned out, that was the night they didn’t. Possibly, what happened was nothing at all. Even now, I don’t think so, though. There were two guys, and they got behind me really fast. One came cutting across 2nd right as I turned onto St. Marks. The other was already on that corner, and he swept off the wall where he’d been lurking and into line with the new guy. Before I even realized what was happening, they were maybe ten steps behind and closing.

I have no idea what they looked like; I never turned around. I sped up. They sped up. I glanced sideways into the window of those apartments under Venus Records and almost shouted when I saw how close they were. Both of them had their hands in their pockets and their heads down like hunting dogs treeing something.

Meaning me.

I thought about continuing past my apartment, breaking into a run and making a beeline for the all-night market a few blocks up Avenue A. Then I decided—rightly? Wrongly? How does anyone in that situation ever know?—that the primary danger was the moment I was in, not the revelation of where I lived. By the time I reached my stoop, they were within grabbing distance. One was humming the theme from a tv show, I remember recognizing it even though I didn’t own a tv, but I can’t remember the tune, now, let alone which show. I held out as long as I dared, disguising the movement of my fingers around my keys in my coat pocket with a mock cough.

Then I lunged up the stairs, bobbling and nearly dropping my keys on the icy cement before jamming them into the bolt, wrenching the lock open, and tumbling inside. Whirling, shoving the door hard behind me and whipping the bolt home, I watched my followers pass. The closer of the two glanced up. The only thing I saw clearly under his furry hood was his smile.

Maybe next time.

That’s what that smile said. So clearly, the guy might as well have fucking said it.

Not that big a deal, really, in the end. Every woman I know who lived here then has at least one near-miss story. More than one woman I know has worse. The only reason I still think about that moment now is that it overrode everything else that had happened earlier. For days afterward, I thought about those two assholes every single time I stepped out of my apartment building, even in broad daylight. I didn’t forget Teddy’s invitation or anything. But the Shirtwaist show became simply another thing I was doing. A place to be. I didn’t even think of it as connected to my EMDB experiences, let alone a consequence of them.

I can’t even remember how Teddy and I arranged to meet, if we did. If there was another listening session in between somewhere, and there probably was, it was an unremarkable one. Meaning just another good one. On the night of the show, I arrived at EMDB right when I somehow knew I was supposed to, expecting to have to head Up and coax Teddy around the counter and out into New York proper.

But he was waiting in the always open doorway, just at the edge of the remaining square of watery spring sunlight on the sidewalk. He wasn’t clutching flowers or sporting a tie or anything. Nevertheless, that was the moment I finally caught on.

“Oh,” I said when I saw him, and burst out laughing. I wasn’t being mean. I wasn’t doing anything except buying time. Processing. I felt woozy and tingly, like I’d just surfaced from an anesthesia sleep.

He had his hair in a neat, tight ponytail, and his battered brown bomber jacket fit him surprisingly well. The ruff around his collar was silly, too orange and too fluffed, as if he’d just blown it dry. Possibly he had. It seemed the sort of thing Teddy might do.

I could tell he didn’t like my laughing. I didn’t either, and stopped. “Hi,” I told him. On impulse, I dipped forward and kissed him on the cheek.

That made him laugh. The weirdness passed at least for the moment. I felt the sun on my neck under my own long braid, surprisingly warm. I felt the city around us. Without another word, we set off down Broadway, riding the Saturday night surge of people flowing down-island toward their own individual temporary harbors.

He’d bought tickets already and waved them at me at some point. So I stopped without asking and got us hot dogs from a cart. I even splurged for the Koshers, for once.

“I don’t eat that,” Teddy told me when I handed him his. But he did.

That might be the last truly good thing I remember about EMDB.

Second to last.

It’s not true that Teddy started coughing halfway through his hot dog. He’d been coughing all along. It’s also not true that the coughs were any more serrated or rapidly recurring than they always were. They just felt that way out of our upstairs sanctuary, juddering against city sounds and other human beings rather than drifting above them.

Right as we got to Shirtwaist and joined the surprising half-block line outside the club’s black metal double doors, a fight broke out between a stoned, razor-thin junkie-type and a little muscly guy who knew some sort of martial art, because in seconds he had the junkie flat on the pavement and his knee in the guy’s back. At the moment Teddy got hit, he wasn’t trying anything heroic. He just doubled over to cough and caught an elbow flush in the forehead.

“Hey!” I shouted, yanking Teddy back, and finally seven or eight other people pounced and pulled the muscly guy back. The junkie lay where he’d been piledriven, one eye open and gazing at nothing specific, lips breathing bubbles of blood, which made him look bizarrely peaceful and oblivious, like a goldfish in an invisible bowl at our feet.

Teddy wasn’t bleeding. But he had a bulge, already blue, right between his eyebrows.

“It looks like a third eye,” I told him, lifting a finger to touch it.

 He ducked back, tapping the bulge with his own finger. “Hurts,” he said, and coughed.

As we passed into the club, the sleek, silver-haired ticket-taker in matching silver stilettos told us, “Two drink minimum, remember.” She sounded so cheerful and nonchalant that she might have been reminding us to wipe our feet. I think I gave a cheerful nod back even as I fumbled the loose bills in my front pants pocket. The change from the ten I’d used to buy the Koshers was all I’d brought, because it was all I had.

Does tap water count, I wanted to ask?

Teddy, it turned out, didn’t have two-drink money either. Not for those drinks. We cobbled together enough for a Coke we split, then spent the rest of our night moving around the room, dodging the waitstaff.

 The show started over two hours late, with the first unlisted opening act taking the stage just after ten. They called themselves Girder, which turned out to be a little on-the-nose, since their performance consisted of sitting at the front of Shirtwaist’s tiny, unelevated stage—meaning no one but the people standing in front could see them—with heavy, amplified bars of metal in their laps, which they bowed, beat, and at one point spat on. That was the most interesting bit, at least aurally. If you closed your eyes or were just staring at a much taller person’s back, it really did sound like rain.

The second act, which came on right after, consisted of four women playing what they called decapitated clarinets. Mostly, that group sounded like squealing and screeching. Before and between acts, the sound system blasted some sort of proto drum-and-bass, though I don’t think that genre name existed, yet. At that volume, though, through those overworked, distorting speakers, it sounded like the M, 4, 5, and 6 trains pulling simultaneously into some imaginary station directly under our feet.

Pathetically, I wound up grateful for the racket, though. At least when there was music playing, recorded or otherwise, Teddy and I didn’t have to try to talk. Without records—actually, it had more to do with being outside our EMDB treehouse, the records were only part of it—neither of us seemed able to think of a single thing to say. I’d never explained what I was doing for a living. I did try, that night, to tell him about the week I’d just had, the kid whose teachers told me he’d renamed himself Oberon and kept strutting around class “doing magic”. But even to me, outside the Bobst and my desperate, teeming Bowery schools, the story sounded less momentous than I’d decided it was, and certainly less interesting.

 Teddy, on the other hand, barely made an effort. He just kept glancing sadly at me, out of all three of his eyes.

It seems strange, now. Even if there was no spark, even if he was trying to make something happen and I was trying to avoid it, conversation shouldn’t have been difficult. I talked to strangers all day every day. Just…not in my free time, I guess. And anyway, Teddy was and also wasn’t a stranger, you know? For me, I honestly think that was the problem; it just felt like I knew more, or should have known more, than I did. I have no idea what Teddy’s problem was, maybe nothing other than shyness. I feel awful thinking about it now. I felt awful about it then, but that didn’t make me any more attracted to him.

Right as the Double Band finally took the stage, a waitress panzer division flanked us, closing from both sides. I thought we were about to get evicted, and I was almost relieved when Teddy’s eyebrows shot up, and he exploded into a cough and fumbled in an inside-zip pocket of his bomber jacket and came up with what he later told me was his “emergency twenty,” which he’d forgotten all about. He bought me a tomato juice, which is what I asked for, and himself a seltzer. So at least we got to see the show.

Even that turned out a mixed blessing. One of the bass amps kept blowing, which really agitated the sax player doubling with Rothenberg, and so the ensemble never quite locked into their improvisations. They laid a fantastic groove, though, fast and fluid and bumpy, as though they’d whisked us all out of the city down some hidden underground channel churning with whitewater. We were all, everyone, rolling and tumbling by the end. Teddy’s hip kept bumping against mine. I don’t think he meant it; I’m not even sure he noticed.

It really was a fuck of a groove.

They played maybe four tunes, probably not even twenty minutes. Then Ned Rothenberg, clearly annoyed, kicked the offending amp, grabbed a mic, and muttered, “Goddamn it, let’s get this fixed. Promise we’ll play a longer late set.”

That would have been fine, even if it meant another hour of standing around trying to talk to Teddy, except that the silver-haired ticket taker hopped onstage, stilettos flinging light, and chirped, “Separate concert, remember. If you want to see the late show, it’s another $10. Otherwise, please exit out the front, not through the alley. Thanks for coming.”

Are you kidding? I almost shouted. I don’t think I would have minded so much if I were paying instead of Teddy. But I wasn’t, and I already felt guilty and prickly and tired and sad.

“I don’t have it,” Teddy murmured beside me, barely audible, eyes not exactly down at the floor but down.

That was the closest I came to really kissing him, either because he looked cute all mournful like that or because I was going to get to go home. “It’s okay. I don’t mind. It’s been an interesting night already.”

But Shirtwaist had one last strangeness to bestow. We were zipping our coats and edging toward the front door when we caught sight of another couple, two college kids. Actually, what drew my attention is that they were so clearly another not-couple.

“Come on, stay, I just got here,” the girl was saying. A redhead like Teddy, the hair cut straight across at her neck. Her rectangular old-lady glasses should have softened her face but didn’t. There was something birdlike about her, hard and watchful. Beautiful green eyes, though. Stunning, actually. “Come onnn. They’re not accepting my Spectator press pass thing. I forgot my money. Take me to this show. I’ll pay you back.”

“I can’t,” the boy kept saying, scrunching his shoulders and bobbing back and forth. He’d been on his way out, too. At first I thought he was high. Then I thought he was just tortured. Because he hadn’t expected to run into this girl here? Because he’d hoped to? Because he wanted to stay and couldn’t?

Because he didn’t have the money either?

Teddy arrived at that thought even faster than I did. Before I could stop him or even be sure what he was doing, he had the change from his emergency twenty in his hand and was pushing it at the bird girl.

“Huh? What?” she said when she finally saw the money waving in her face. She took a step back. “Who are you?”

“Hey, back off, huh?” said the tortured boy,

What I’ll always remember is how surprised Teddy looked. I don’t know what reaction he expected. Different than the one he got, for sure.

“Here,” the tortured boy was saying, pushing a crumpled $10 bill into the bird-girl’s hand. When their fingers brushed, he twitched. The twitch is what made it all clear to me.

He’d hoped she’d be here, come too early. His last ten dollars, I suspected. He’d be walking home.

 “Pay you back Monday,” said the bird girl, disappearing into Shirtwaist without a backward glance.

 Two drink minimum, I wanted to shout after her, as a show of solidarity with the boy. But the words just would have pelted off, scattered behind her. Finding someone to buy her drinks had never been and would never be that girl’s problem.

 I don’t know why she made me so mad. I was going to say something about her to the tortured boy, tell him to get out of here fast and not look back. But when I turned, he was already gone. Without another word, Teddy and I stepped together onto Houston, then went our separate ways.

That was the last I saw of him for almost a year.

I didn’t plan it that way. I did avoid EMDB for a month or so, but honestly, I mostly just got busy. It was the end of school, time for program evaluation surveys and culminating performances I could snap photos of and wave around as data for the grant renewal process. At some point, I decided I was being silly, or else I just needed my fix of the place, and of Teddy, too. One gorgeous May Friday night, under a flurry of white leaves floating down on the Village as though shaken loose from an invisible cloud forest overhead, I swung right instead of left on Broadway and went straight to my favorite unmarked door.

The door was shut. First surprise.

It wasn’t locked, but I was already anxious as I stepped into the lobby. The EMDB sign was still there on its easel. But instead of UP, it read CLOSED.

I stood staring for a ridiculously long time. It was full dark when I stumbled back to the street again. I went and found some take-out dumplings, then returned to the lobby and sat on the floor and stared at the sign some more, as though I were camping out waiting for tickets to a show. I think I just wanted someone to explain.

I didn’t have Teddy’s phone number. I didn’t even know his last name. It had never occurred to me to ask, and he had never offered. Finally, I got up, tossed my dumpling container, and made my way home.

 For weeks afterward, I returned to that lobby on my home to check. The CLOSED sign never moved, and no additional information ever got added to it. Occasionally, I saw magazines or packages laid beside the mailboxes of the other residents of that building. I never saw a single one of those people.

 In July, I went home to visit my parents and was away the rest of the summer.  When I came back, my grant having been renewed but reduced, I poured myself into my work. Finally, in maybe November, I was back in the basement record store on Christopher Street, with a copy of that first beautiful, aching Miracle Legion EP in my hands, when one of the counter guys said, “Hey, you hear EMDB’s reopening?” I’d been in the midst of taking out money to pay. Now I stuffed it back in my purse and turned away as though I was still browsing. The guy had been talking to his bandmate/counter partner, not me.

“He’s alive?” said the woman. She’d changed over the summer, let the dye drain from her hair. She was little and blonde and wore thick, two-tone glasses and a fraying, heavy sweater too warm for the weather. Amazingly, the frumpy clothes made her look more counter-culture, a scene unto herself. She laughed.

 So did the guy. “Apparently. Who even knows what state that place is in, though? I don’t think anyone’s even been up there for months. Totally shut down.”

“Just in time, yeah?” said the woman.

I had no idea what that meant but didn’t like the tone of her voice. It sounded smug. Even more absurdly, I found myself taking the smugness personally, as if it were directed at me. I dropped the Miracle Legion record back in its bin and fled.

The next Friday, I went straight to the elevator lobby, but found the CLOSED sign where I’d left it months before. There it stayed through Thanksgiving, the winter holidays, into the new year. I gave up checking again.

One slushy February Sunday, a few hours after a fluke blizzard had dissolved into a grungy, spitting, downtown rain, I was sloshing up Broadway with my friend Z, on our way back from one of his junkets. I’d met Robert, by then—my daughter’s father—but I hadn’t yet figured out how to link up those two opposite poles of my life. Never did, actually. But there we were, soaked through and shivering, splashing along. We’d walked right by that open door before it registered. I grabbed Z’s elbow and yanked him to a stop. That was hard, always. Like heeling a St. Bernard.

“Huh?” he kept saying, touching his hand to his glasses.

“It’s open! The door’s open.”

Z looked at the door. At that moment, I don’t think I’d ever wanted anything more than to share EMDB with him. It was so much a Z place, even if that music was never going to be Z music, and he’d long since become the sort of best friend I’d last had in elementary school, if I’d ever had one. I can still see raindrops sprouting and elongating in his glasses, as if he was projecting a movie of the city we both still dreamed we might make someday, in time-lapse.

“I can’t right now, Rae. I’ve got to be uptown. What is it?”

“It’s a place I know. Come on.”

But he really couldn’t. He had press releases to write, people to meet, follow-up meetings for the save-the-parks junket from which we’d just come.

“See you soon. Have fun.” From behind that curtain of raindrops, I saw his smile flash. “Say hello to this…Robert for me.” Grinning to himself, off he went.

I went UP.

No one had fixed the elevator, that was for sure. If anything, it took even longer to jerk me the twelve or so feet to the second floor, and when it settled, it rocked in place like a rowboat against a dock. If there’d been rope, I might have been tempted to tether it.

The fluorescents were all on. The cage clattered open.

There it all was, right where it had always been, almost exactly the same as it was before. The mandala rug was gone for some reason. That was the only difference. Teddy had his back to me. He was at the counter but in front of it, hunched over. At first I thought he was writing but quickly realized he was listening. I shut my eyes and did that, too.

Honestly, even now, I don’t know if anything I heard in that next couple minutes was recorded sound—composed or somehow organized—or just sound. I heard rain ticking and spitting. Tires churning, buses honking. Two women having a screaming fight in what might have been Greek, but a ways away, not right outside.

“Oh, hey,” Teddy called, and I opened my eyes. “Wondered when you’d show.”

He’d cut his hair short and also lost weight. Faster than I remembered him moving before, and even more gracefully—not like water anymore, but a leaf on air, barely even anchored by gravity—he whirled to the other side of the counter.

“How have you been? Are you okay?” I asked, moving into the room. I saw boxes everywhere, in every row. It reminded me of being in a 24-hour supermarket at two a.m. on a Sunday morning, trying to grab cereal and milk without getting in the way of the nightshift workers huddled over their cartons with their streaming breath and gloved hands. “I heard you were sick.”

“Same sick as always. I’m sort of better.” He knelt, rummaging, and came up with a stack of records which he quickly sorted.

“Seriously sick? Teddy, you’ve been gone a long time.”

He didn’t even shrug. He wasn’t dodging or avoiding discussion. It just didn’t interest him. “Told you it was constant.”

“Like mono?”

A few seconds later, with uncharacteristic thoughtfulness, he looked up. “Definitely more like stereo.”

Startled, I laughed. I’d seen him smile before, lots of times. But I’d never once heard Teddy joke. Even as I laughed, though, the realization hit me, although it was really more of an idea. I didn’t know for sure, then, and I don’t now, and I didn’t ask.

But what I thought was, AIDS?

He’d put away the record he’d been playing when I came in, and now he laid fresh vinyl on the turntable, dripped D4 onto a brush, and cleaned it. “Actually, it was kind of a godsend,” he said, loudly enough to be heard but not turning around. “Bought us some time.”

For an absurd, narcissistic second, I thought he meant us, as in him and me, and wondered if I should turn and go right now. But whatever he meant, he sounded even less concerned about it than about the illness that had laid him up for a year.

“Time for what?” I moved forward instead of back, crossing that wide-open space where I’d spent some of the loneliest, most marvelous nights of my life.

Up close, I decided Teddy didn’t look especially wan. I didn’t see any of those telltale blotches I’d started spotting on other people I knew. He looked more lean, for sure, a little feral, like a stray cat.

“I’ve been waiting for you. I came up with a new method.” When I didn’t answer immediately, he added, “For picking what we listen to.”

I still could hardly believe he was back, or that I was there. Also, I was still freezing, getting colder by the second as the wet from outside soaked through my clothes into my skin. “I knew what you meant,” I told him.

“But you don’t know what the method is. It’s a bold one.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Our boldest method ever.”

“Big talk.”

“Just wait.”

“All right, you’re bold, it’s new, how’d you pick?”

He didn’t smile. Amazingly, when I think about it now, I don’t think I did, either.

 “I chose,” he said. He hadn’t yet lowered the needle on the record, and seemed uncertain whether to do that first or hand me the sleeve.

“Chose,” I murmured. “…What does that mean?”

Now he smiled. I took that as an opportunity to press. “Bought you time for what? Bought who time?”

He waved a hand in the air. His fingers looked stubby and white, like uncooked rice. “Oh. Her highness. The owner. And me. To…sort out some tax stuff. We’d kinda…let’s just say I put that off for a few years, you know? Not quite as fun as sorting records.” To my astonishment, he laughed. So many things, it seemed to me, should have concerned or at least occupied him then: health; finances; going to prison?? Instead, still chuckling, he bent low over the turntable to brush gently at the needle on the tone-arm. In the store speakers, the needle thumped, as though someone had just tossed a pebble at the windows.

“Now, then,” Teddy said, and lowered the arm over the grooves.

After a few seconds of crackle, a voice murmured in the speakers. It wasn’t one I recognized. The accent sounded slightly Slovakian, or at least I imagined that’s what slightly Slovakian sounded like. In the moment, what it most reminded me of was everyone in New York’s eighty year-old upstairs neighbor.

This one told us she was sitting a room. The same room we were in now.

Teddy passed the record sleeve across the counter. It was a triple-gatefold, heavy cardboard. For sleeve art, it had a glinting, artless photograph of the windows of some anonymous skyscraper. It could have been taken in any city with such a skyscraper. Meaning almost any city.

“What is this?” I said, already spellbound, listening to that creaking voice mutter that familiar chant. My favorite or at least most emblematic EMDB spell.

“Cover versions!” Teddy said, moving back around the counter to me.

I thought he was coming for a hug, and decided that wasn’t a problem. Why wouldn’t I hug him?

But this was Teddy. He just wanted to show me the liner notes.

The entire three-record set was devoted to recitations of “I Am Sitting in a Room”. Some of them were by legendary new music performers. I’m pretty sure one was Joan La Barbara, or maybe Dawn Upshaw, one of the stars of the scene. Relatively speaking, obviously. Another performer—I’m not kidding—was listed only as “The guy who came in to fix the coffee machine.” Nothing on the sleeve gave any location data. In case we wondered whether that was oversight or intention, the final sentence of the notes read, “Of course, we’re not in our room anymore. We’re in yours.”

Teddy didn’t make soy sauce mystery grains. We didn’t say much to each other. Automatically, without gesture or any sort of silent agreement, we moved to the ghostly square near the elevator, the lighter patch of floor where the mandala rug used to be, and sat. Teddy only got up to change sides of the record or change records. I didn’t get up at all. At some point on Side Four or Five, we started murmuring along. Saying the words, saying the words, saying the words, until the words blurred and dissolved. Until the room absorbed and recast them as what they’d been before they had meaning. Sound in space, nothing more. Plenty miraculous in and of itself.

In the windows, reflected light flickered. No one else came Up. Possibly, no one else in the whole island of Manhattan knew we were there. We might have been camping in woods. In a forest of records, where we could have our version of a campfire. Our sort of singalong.

Sayalong.

We were sitting in a room.

I did kiss him on the cheek at the end of Side Six. He didn’t react except to say, “See? Bold.”

“You chose,” I said.

“I did.”

He went around to the counter, took the record off, and just went back to work. Unpacking boxes. Sorting. “Your turn,” he called when I stood.

But I didn’t want to spoil it. I wasn’t sure I’d ever had so perfect a night. I wasn’t sure I ever would again.

“I’m unprepared,” I said. “Next time.”

But that was it. The last time I saw him, or ever got inside EMDB. I brought Z back the next weekend. The lobby door was still open. But UP was gone. The easel was gone. The elevator had been padlocked. Taped to it was what looked like an eviction notice. I didn’t read the whole thing. I remember a few words.

Negligence. Fraud. Failure. Investigation. Further notice. Seizure.

 It’s absurd, I know, and says horrible things about me. But all I said, and in the moment all I thought about was, “The records. Oh, God.”

All that music, made by all those wonderful, beautiful lunatics out there, sitting in their rooms, talking or singing or skronking or keening or dreaming to no one. To imaginary someones. Somehow coming up with money or partners to get the sounds they made pressed and grooved, dispatched here, as though to some centralized musical Humane Society, in the vague, fervent hope that it might, from here, get adopted, go somewhere else. Get heard before it got destroyed.

I thought of Teddy, too, eventually. I still didn’t have his number. I didn’t even know if he was in jail. I never did.

I checked back, of course. Every weekend, for another whole year, and then again after I got married, and a few more times after I had Jenna. Whenever I was anywhere nearby. I still check. Isn’t that ridiculous? I don’t even think that street door’s there anymore. It’s some other door.      

****

“Oh, shit,” Rae, says, having caught sight of her phone. “We’ve gotta…”

She’s gathering her things. Jenna has stirred, too, but mostly just to shift in her chair and watch her mom. It’s not vacancy in the younger woman’s face, you realize. More like distance. She reminds you of a building or island out in the River that you glimpse as you pass and think you’d love to visit someday, just to see what people do there.

“Jenna, You’re not helping,” Rae says, standing now, buttoning her coat.

“Nope,” says Jenna, and smiles, far away.

A stick of lip balm has spilled from Rae’s small purse or pocket. She hasn’t noticed. You bend over and pick it up and hand it across the table to her.

“Good God. How long have we been sitting here babbling at you? I’m so sorry.”

“Well,” you say. The truth is, she has been talking a long time. So why are you feeling embarrassed for sitting there listening? Like an eavesdropper. “I understand. I mean, you don’t want to just tell your own daughter to keep quiet when she gets all enthusiastic.”

It takes Rae a second to realize you’re joking. Pretending she meant Jenna. It takes you a second to realize you actually said that or even thought it. Funnier comment than your usual, you think. Or just easier. City-banter with the people who live in your city with you. You’ve heard of such things. You haven’t engaged in it much. Or heard it much, either.

She laughs.

For a second, as Jenna finally stands, too, you consider asking for Rae’s number. You’re not sure—how could you be?—but you don’t get the sense that she’s married, now. The ideas is ridiculous, though. She’s got to be twenty years older than you. Her daughter is probably nearer your age.

“See ya,” says Jenna.

“See ya,” you echo, hitting the tone perfectly, you think. We’ve been sitting in a coffee shop…

“Nice!” says Rae, as though she heard what you were thinking. As though you said it out loud. You are together just a few seconds more, them standing, you sitting. Mostly, you’re all looking at the park. Next door at the music shop, someone plays a bar or two of low-down boogie-woogie, dropping silent halfway up the riff.

“Hmm,” she says. She says it brightly, smiles quietly. There’s nothing ironic in her voice. Plenty of sadness, but not about you or this. “One of the best things about days, don’t you think?” She brushes her daughter’s beautiful hair with her fingers. “Listening for things that really might not be there?”

Then they’re off, gone, their footsteps falling into rhythm and then out of it again as they leave the shop, cross the street, and sink away into the separate Sundays they’re sharing.