He pulls the cassette out of its casing, clear plastic over a screen-printed insert, colored card stock filigreed with irregular slanting letters, illustrated faces, and alphanumeric sigils duplicated in metallic black ink. Flipping open the tray of the boom box, he sinks the tape inside and snaps it shut, punching play with a savory click. Sluggish echoes creak from dented speakers, growing to a loud hiss, peppered with irregular clangs of unidentified origin. A dire thud, then a blazing howl. Distortion, screams, links in a chain of unintelligible rancor; thud a heartbeat and clang the circulation running the length of veins, cells of static sibilating and cleaving into ever-smaller atoms of noise.
Turning the case over in his hands, on the inner fold of the spine he spies a couple of initials and an address: Massachusetts. Always these New England P.O. boxes stamped inside the cartridges – Maine, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire – captioned with sublinguistic runes, abbreviations, and half-words. Lexical antipathy, as if words lay beneath or beyond such painstakingly crafted vortices of isolation, stoned daydreams, and anarchies in woodblock print, silkscreen, or rubber stamp.
The tape’s literal magnetism mirrors some auric charisma emanating unseen from the cloth-draped merch tables. Amulets of...aggression? A complanate, void descriptor for those high-pitched, sterile-sounding cries, layering on top of one another bounded by the walls of the warehouse. Hypnotic, thunderous sound beckoned him those nights, when he felt his mind dropping things until more was dropped than left over, and he began racing toward this emptiness, then plunging as if into a deep pool, bottomless, shining, rippling intonations quenching his thirst, resonance bent millimeter by millimeter, reaching luminous maximum.
Culminating in phonic dullness like a dusty screen over his eardrums. Deaf and weightless under the streetlamps in the parking lot, fixed with a sense that he stood where he was most intended to be at this exact time. His sneakers floated on the moonlit pavement, organs of divination positioning him perfectly in some endless hereafter, detectably separate from his own vague awareness of kids wandering past him, filtering out of the venue, muted utterances echoing backward like distant water gabbling.
The tape runs out, snaps to a stop as he gazes out the window. Sunlight gleams on iron bars, snow drifts, dead leaves. Patterns form in the litter in the gutter. Dirt darkens the undersides of his fingernails and haloing the holes in his t-shirt is dried sweat mingled with the finest layer of firmamental ash.
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