Cyan James
Jack This Car
In decibel drag racing, bass can snarl deep and percussive enough to put cracks all across a windshield and make it buckle. A windshield will set you back
$238—even Paco can’t get them any cheaper through the shop. “So be careful,” he’ll tell you. “Ration your fun.” But that sounds like advice about how to live your life, and what do they know, Paco and the rest of the life-advice-giving people? Can they tell you how to lock into a beater car going nowhere, and trigger that custom-built sound system so slam! the inner organs tremble apart in overwhelmed ecstasy? Deliquesce is an excellent word and describes most concisely what happens to the liver and kidneys during audio competitions. They melt like ice cream. Do we have more than thirty-one organs hidden away in each of us? Who knows, but that’s how it feels: thirty-one different flavors in their varying densities, collapsed and swirled together.
Boooooooommmmm. The human body was created or engineered or whatever to exist at only seventy decibels a day. A leaf-blower is one hundred decibels, a jet 130. A military dog handler’s ears absorb 110. A monster truck rally registers ninety-five. Stand on the Potomac Bridge while the Blue Angels and the B-52s go overhead during Rolling Thunder—it’ll cost you ninety-seven decibels and probably dozens of tiny, irreplaceable ear hairs, and then you’ll have an idea of what an audio competition can be like. An absolute audio tsunami let loose across the cochlea. That or maybe actual war with the bombs playing bumper cars with the earth and the shock waves shaking maracas inside the teeth.
The robotic starter says “Go,” a little pebble of a word dropped down the empty wells of the ears. It strikes the brain in its oldest, most reactive part and makes the fingers twitch. There’s no hearing the “Go,” actually, wearing two sets of earplugs under noise-canceling headphones, but there’s no mistaking the flag drop, Whoosh, and then the body is seized by the annihilating monster of vibratory sound, so powerful the waves of it rip through the tissues of the body, go! every hair strains at the end of its leash, every organ earthquakes. Every neuron a Halloween cat arched, every synapse harder hit by sound than by heroin. Euphoria so overwhelming it flings the whole self into absolute tranquility.
* * *
At night you reel the family flag down with a flashlight, give it the triangular military fold to practice respect. Uncle Ornette, who shows no sign of moving from the mother-in-law apartment out back, used to help with this. “The things he’s given for his country,” your mom says. Often. Ornette is stone-deaf from artillery fire. He was too proud to learn sign language, and he gets tired of contorting his face and waving his hands like “a lunatic It-AL-ian!” as he bellows, everything absolutely too loud, and now he blurs the edges of his words and drops letters because he’s lived in the noiseless space of his head too long and has no idea what he sounds like anymore.
What you want to know is, is it more a problem with his brain losing its grasp of how the English language sounds, or is it his tongue forgetting the muscle memory that must lie behind words? Because maybe there’s brain stimulation he could do for that, or maybe tongue gymnastics, you never know what passes for physical therapy at the VA, but he is too stubborn to check with them anymore, he doesn’t like the smell of the waiting room—“SMELLALIKE HEMORROIDS INNA THERE!”—and of course he doesn’t like the inadequacy the place makes him feel, when he knows he could blow everyone in it to pieces if only he had the Rock Island Arsenal M102 in front of him again and his crew of men bending to his will and moving those cartridges and pulling their lanyards like a symphony engineered to turn minor-key, already degraded landscapes into major obliteration zones.
“Be kind,” your mother says, but it’s you who delivers the day-old newspapers and the leftovers from dinner. Ornette moves loudly, shuffles and makes spit noises. He smells like how potatoes do when they begin to rot, and still he thinks no one notices him.
“When you can’t hear anything,” your mother says, “you feel in danger, almost as much as when you can’t see. It’s a predator and prey thing. That’s why young girls don’t like railroad overpasses and certain men do.”
Ornette likes wood now, little pieces he can whittle into ducks. “WOODDUCKS HAHAAAAA.” It’s weird, when a guy goes deaf, how he loses his grasp on laughing, too, and the noise comes out sounding like he dropped the laugh on the floor, broke it like a plate, and turned it into plate gravel.
Your mom of course tries to ban you from the audio competitions. “Surest way to get like Ornette,” she tells you. She doesn’t know what it’s like when sound becomes not heard but felt, when it is the Niagara and you are a cork. A shock, like being flung in cold water, and then each note like a porcupine quill vibrating through the body. Your body is a tuning fork. Your body is a meat patty in a microwave, all its electrons shaken with energy, the water in each cell beginning to steam. The car strains around the sound. The windshield bulges. The glass tingles. The windshield shatters, each fragment barely clinging to the one next to it.
It only happens if you engineer it right. You have to train for it, with the same discipline your mom wishes you applied to calculus or your father often said he would have preferred for you to show in football. Training means each kernel of bass explodes in the popcorn bag that is the audio kit. Training has that technical component to it, learning wiring; training is also about the discipline of saving money. You learn how to say no to beer and cigarette packs and fresh-salted fries. You deny your body everyday bumps of oxytocin because there are Orion HCCA 102 black coil series subwoofers to buy instead, and an audio engineer, your cousin’s quasi-friend, to wheedle for advice, and that huge huge reserve of adrenaline dammed in your everyday body but loosed when the flag falls. Adrenaline to the fingertips, the tongue tip, the dick tip. Everywhere.
Pounding when you pry yourself from the car, still alive, a winner.
Do you have $238?
Is this even your car?
You broke the windshield in your shitty Nova two weeks ago, didn’t even win, and now you’re thinking about the family car, the station wagon. More room in the back for gear. They should actually be proud of you, your family. Think how many lawns you have mown, how many websites you have set up. That’s pure striving turned into electric wires and custom compression tweeters. That’s, in short, an achievement.
If you win this time, the prize money is enough to replace the windshield, even buy a spare for the Nova. There’s just no other option; your friends know better than to loan their cars to you. You have to take risks; this is a world that rewards risk-taking, and even if doing the right thing will get you hurt like Uncle Ornette, you still do the right thing, even if you’ll come to occupy a planet of echoes and shadows and no one ever understands you again. Not that they understand you now.
Your sister likes the competitions; she’s the only one. But you don’t let her attend them anymore. She should be off doing other things; she’s nearly enough of an adult to have grown her own life by now. But she stays potted in the bluish grow-light glow of her cell phone, trying to put down digital roots.
Somehow you still feel responsible for her, and letting her go to any more competitions feels inadvisable, like somehow she could corrupt herself in that loud, mostly angry, somewhat exuberant land, and like you could get resentful, having a sibling steal your glory and pull on your friends’ attention with silly, harmless remarks that nonetheless display how little she has learned from you. Your friends are unsavory, and when they look at her you have to picture what could happen in back seats you don’t yet know how to navigate yourself. You don’t like feeling as though you and your friends share one big brain of fantasies and thoughts that cycle like trash plastic bobbing and tangling in the ocean, like all of you collectively passing around the same greasy old websites—so boring! The resentment is about her leeching off your life, really, and also about being forced to look out for her when you’d rather be thinking about someone else’s sister, but she is someone else’s sister, to everyone else.
These competitions are full of creeps.
They love to film girls in the shotgun seats when the bass drops and their long, flossy hair rises in long, rippling halos around them and they laugh, they laugh. Being stuck with a young adult male brain muddies this very quickly too, and you get disgusted knowing what they’re thinking and trying not to think it yourself and wanting your sister just to be able to appreciate what you do. The discipline part, the technical part.
OOooo, that’s all they want to hear from her, though. She’s called Nell, by the way, but she’s not as boring as that name implies. She used to have her own car. A Jeep, of all things. The Malibu edition, so it wasn’t hardcore like what the Marines drove, with the lifted axels and the beefed-up tires and the winch on front. Still, it was a Jeep; it was a kind of happiness. She drove it to see you at a competition once. She left it in the grassy field with all the other cars, like a horse at a hitching post, and when she discovered its smashed side window and the bare bench where her things had been, she seemed to feel betrayed that it hadn’t neighed or made any other distress noise. Pieces of glass all through the grass blades. “Watch your feet,” you told her; you could see smears of red through the slats in her sandals and couldn’t tell if it was nail polish or cuts.
Window glass doesn’t break as jagged as people think—for safety it snaps into tiny pebbles, like what you might find at the bottom of an aquarium. But you have a friend who was in a wreck that happened when he tried to race a train, then flipped over, a cyclone of windshield pieces through his face, his hair. He’d turned out fine, nerve damage and flashes in his sleep, but basically fine. A year after the accident, bits of window glass started working out of his eyes, both eyes. The doctors were afraid for his vision and worried about scar tissue. Mostly he got admiring, shuddering attention from everyone, girls and guys both, because every few months some glass that had been churning around in there would surface for him to squeeze out and hold glittering in his palm, a luxurious danger. Would you look at that.
Nell was fine, but someone had taken her crate of vintage records. She should never have been carrying them around like that, with her portable record player for beach parties and whatnot, but she had, and now they were gone. She kept running her finger along the broken edges of the Jeep’s window; she kept turning over the straw hat the thief had left in the seat; she orbited the competition with a vicious eye peeled for any suspicious blue plastic crate stashed under a tent. She peered to look under cars; she asked men to open their trunks and got away with it, and the records were still gone. You think she felt betrayed by how they would sing for someone else now, and it is a betrayal, how those grooves in vinyl play for Saddam Hussein and unsavory friend number six just the same.
It was so pitiful; she was so clearly unused to invasion and injustice. You stole her keys and drove the Jeep to the high school, where you still knew how to jimmy the shop class door and run the drill that could put rivet holes in the sheet of metal you cut to fit the frame of her passenger window. Impossible to see through but pretty hard to shatter. Looked like her Malibu had been in a fight and come out the bionic winner, metal in its grin. Watch out. She liked it until she sold it for college and the blonde who bought it had the metal removed and replaced with something transparent and tinted.
Think of the future, your mother insists, but in a tired way. Your future is unknowable, that’s the frustrating thing, and if you knew it you’d be bored, so where’s the win? You would be happy if it held a lot of noise. And perhaps, after all that, quiet. A long rich quiet, not itchy like Uncle Ornette’s, not troublesome, but more like cream. Smooth. Thick.
You wait until deepest dark, when even the nightlights are still. You go into the garage with a flashlight wearing a paper cone around it, like a dog in one of those plastic collars from the veterinarian’s, and a set of small pliers you operate with precise motions and a pad on the outer metal parts so they don’t clang when you drop them on the garage floor. You are setting everything up so you can seat the audio kit for competition day, two days away. Positioning the screws that will suspend it to guard against muffling. Setting the brackets for the wires that will connect everything. Work like that has a Frankenstein feel to it. You can imagine the car rearing into growling life around you as you stitch together its nerves of wires and run little pulses of test electricity down them. You think of the waterpower behind a dam, how that surge and current and bulk turns on so many light switches and converts so many vibrations into audible roars. Electricity gives the earth a voice, so to speak. Man, you’re tired.
You look up and there she is, a streak you thought was a spare sheet hung to dry. You have been so absorbed, you haven’t smelled anything out of the ordinary. Something must have finally moved in your periphery. Your mother, stepping into the stream of light funneled by the flashlight collar. She sets a weed bud down still smoldering. You raise an eyebrow at her, but you’re not in the light, so she can’t see your face, she just pats your hand.
But the next day, with you putting three little espressos down your throat fast like doing shots, you catch her eye, and you can tell that now the family station wagon is off-limits.
The next night is worse than all the ones before, because you, driven by the inevitability and momentum of needing to compete, have become ravenous and propulsive and unable to think things through. You are like water, mindless and merely looking for a way out of your containment. It’s so tiring having to appear like a placid lake. Maybe the water itself gets tired of it, did you ever think of that? After all, it’s always seeking a lower level, it doesn’t like being stable, and that itself creates its own chaos.
At least when you hoist the hood of Uncle Ornette’s vintage Beetle you don’t have to worry about making a noise that might accidentally warn him. The danger is higher—of course he has bought himself a shotgun, and a Magnum pistol, too, and he may forget the part of firearm safety where you make sure of your target’s identity first, because he will see only a thug in a hoodie with a socket wrench bent over the matchless thing he keeps safe in his shed. So your sense of hearing, which has been as battered as a pot under a five-year-old, has to sharpen up in compensation. The small scratching noise of leaves blown across the shed roof raises goose bumps. An acorn falling is like a grenade’s hiss. The only way you’ll know he’s coming is to hope he can no longer find the ways to keep quiet enough to sneak up on you. But the fact that he might is entirely plausible, so you muzzle the flashlight, mostly, and work in dimness and the familiar metal whispers of wrench on bracket, wire against screw, cable wound on its housing.
Although you’re somehow managing to set the audio kit up in there, you don’t have the whole plan set up in your head. You know you will have to steal keys. You hope the car, which he used to work on assiduously and has now ignored for a solid year, since his last good friend died of lung cancer, still runs. You hope it does not lack some rare part, probably hoarded in Germany, that you won’t be able to replicate or 3D print. And you tell no one. If your mother suspects, she does not stop you. For all you know she might have smoked in here, in this little capsule from the seventies, painted an eye-blistering orange.
Uncle Ornette named the thing ‘Agent Orange,’ and had that painted along both its sides in flame lettering, so the thing looks like a little beetle of the Apocalypse. Cute but also hunched, very unlike the long, sinister sleekness of the primer-painted Nova with the plastic Halloween skeletons mounted on top to create an extra layer of rattle during the competition.
At a certain point the audio components have to go in; there’s no delaying them any longer. They weigh the car down immediately. It will be strange to be generating so much of the noise from under the hood instead of from the trunk and the back seat. Of course some of the gear is posted around the interior of the Beetle, too, what will fit, but you have to improvise. You can’t risk trying it out, either, because it will lack all hints of subtlety.
During the final prep day, you almost brain a shadow in your periphery with the biggest wrench you have. You forgot it could have been your mother; you’re sure it’s a rival or Uncle Ornette or just something that will twist all your efforts into inevitable haywire. So much futility.
It’s just Nell with a new portable record player. She has decided to rebuild her collection: more blues, less pop. Probably a good thing, you tell her while she sets the needle into the record’s scratchy vein and lets a lick of thick, bloody music out.
“Shhhh!”
“He can’t hear you!”
You realize it’s not Uncle Ornette you fear but the strangeness of having your own hearing, which you’ve unknowingly been honing over the still, threatening hours, muffled under some thick, wailing pillow of sound. Predators, you realize, and their threatened prey both like the long stretches of quiet when they can untangle the little intricate noises and track them back to their sources. But you also like having Nell there, happy with the new old thing spinning on its player. She’s come to tell you she’s going to be a DJ. Midsize lounges and fancier bars, not clubs. Places that need the past and the present mixed as skillfully as their cocktails, all the syllables like heirloom carrots in winter soil, trailing whiskery roots all the way into history itself. Not even now can we replicate the precise scratch of diamond across barely solid carbon. All the pressures in the human throat cadenced into all the pressured underground liquids of the earth.
Too much time on your own under that hanging hood in the prickly silence waiting for something to happen.
What’s happened is that maybe she’s going to weave a carpet out of old voices that’s going to fly her into her future. Good for her. Also, damn her. Leaving you behind without a future of your own. Just an air thumper, a glass smasher. Not enough money in one of the only things that makes you feel good enough to merit pursuing, but you’re doing it anyway, tasting the futility, feeling the money flick between your fingers like salmon going upstream to some more important place to multiply. You’re just a bunch of rocks at the riverbed. Just a piece of glass squeezed from someone’s eye: important for a moment and then flicked away like the harmless novelty it proved to be. Not engineered to last. Destined for a tundra of whistling silence that, unlike the Arctic ice, will never crack or soften into thaw. No wonder Uncle Ornette is paranoid.
Nell puts on a record. Hendrix, Machine Gun.
Anger and gratitude mixed—what’s the name for that emotion? Nell there dancing by herself and hardly moving a toe, just swaying in the dark garage, more felt than seen, letting the voices of men now ghosts nuzzle up up up her neck. You a tinker and grateful for the company and the musical solace and afraid of breaking silence and afraid not to and full of mounting urges and needing the tsunami that wipes the brain completely with the purity of electrical impulses at 150 decibels and no one to understand that except the exquisite hairs in the cochlea waving in those heavy winds and then felled, curled, singed like moths, dead. Sound mowed out of your life like a forest clear-cut or defoliated.
Nell’s gone now, got bored. The only thing left to do is to hoist the bulk of the kit in and secure it, which doesn’t take long. Then a long wait with your head against your pillow, hearing the pulse slam again and again against goose down. Waiting for tomorrow.
In the morning you eat warrior food: jerky and an energy drink. You brush your teeth properly. You wear clean clothes on a freshly washed body, the better to conduct electricity. You check on Nell to see if she would like to come, though you don’t want to give your friends that pleasure, but she is tucked between two enormous headphones so deeply she does not hear you open her door after you knock, and so you leave her that way and go to ask your mother instead, on the theory she may be more open to experiences than you have given her credit for, but she has taken the family station wagon somewhere on her own.
Straight to the Agent then. The song is stupidly stuck in your head, nothing you’ve heard, nothing Nell would play, but suggested by the Beetle itself, “Secret Agent Man,” looped over and over in your brain as “secret Asian man,” a torture.
Uncle Ornette is in there already. A mass parked in the driver’s seat. Staring at his Magnum on the dash. Why now. He hasn’t left the house in four days, and that last time was just to get himself an armful of newspapers and to hoist his bag of banh mi sandwich wrappers and chow mein delivery cartons into the garbage, and if anyone had spotted him then, it would be clear that a year is more than enough time to turn a man into a blinking mole. Why, when he’d already lost his hearing, he would want to live blindly in his dark hovel, you don’t know, but it seems he does. Intent on absolute stability, every day the same. No day asking anything of him.
Not the same, to sit in his car with his handgun. You knock on the window. His motionlessness makes you angry at first, look at everything taken from him, look at everything you keep forgetting to remember about him, so much of a mess, and now you don’t want to startle him because he might shoot you, and maybe he’s working up the nerve to shoot himself and you’ll be the six-inchesaway witness. He seems too still; could he have already rigged himself for carbon monoxide exposure? But that would have made him very red, whereas he seems normal, a dark mass, hair grown out, whiskers crusted.
You rock the car, gentle. At least he seems to recognize you. You breathe on the glass between the two of you and try your best to write backward in the little field of condensation you create: Want. To. Go. For. A. Ride? For some reason he nods, scoots himself into the shotgun seat. Perhaps, for messing with his car, he wants to shoot you somewhere far away from home. That would have a certain tidiness, and at least he could have that after-the-kill high that’s probably better than your windshield-shatter buzz, so there’s that. You find you don’t care much. Dregs of tiredness, maybe. Bits of not-future crumbling, getting stuck in your face.
You drive straight there, might as well get it over with, and you hope Uncle Ornette won’t lose it in a crowd. Nobody gives either of you a second look. Everyone is stocking caps and hoodies and shapeless jackets and hanging pants and scuffed boots and that walleyed look of animals.
The Mole and The Agent and You.
You line up properly; you park where you are supposed to. You give yourself time for last-minute adjustments. You see the drifters across the grounds who are new and unaware of how eleven cars in succession are going to blast the morning into bits of gristle. You hear the great expectant hush above the cicada clack of all those people wrenching wires and chewing power bars and checking switches. You feel the dopamine coiling up and getting ready to strike. You work your hands in air exercises, like getting ready to play a keyboard. You look at Uncle Ornette. He’s staring at everything. You start the electric pulse; you start to rev the amplitudes.
The flag falls.
The NOISE. It moves straight through the water of the brain and body; it moves in throbbing waves. Uncle Ornette’s hair on end and alert. Uncle Ornette, smiling. The BASS. That drop into the void of so much sound it’s silence; it’s a hammock that swings you both; it’s a hand grabbing the puppet strings of your guts and making them twitch in unholy polkas. Somewhere in all that comes Uncle Ornette’s yell. The taste of testosterone on your tongue.
The windshield bends and flutters. Tiny cracks appear across it and begin to join and extend. The pistol in Uncle Ornette’s hands outstretched and level, the pistol’s shadow sharp as a mantis on the dash. The shot, swallowed in all that SOUND, but the windshield had already been breaking into its cracks and bulging outward like a slow-motion accident or a balloon too filled with helium or a heart pumped full of digitalis. One hundred and fifty-seven decibels. Glass all over you both. The SOUND still pins both of you in your seats, where you squirm like butterflies still alive around their collector’s pins. Has the shot hit anyone? You can’t tell, but people are not supposed to stand in front of the competitors anyway; not even the judges stand there, and so the lead went straight into the earth, you think, you hope. A private celebration from Uncle Ornette, maybe, or maybe a reflex of self-defense after being seized by all that sharpedged sound. The brittleness of people, the way cracks go through them during the noisy waves of time.
You look over at Uncle Ornette. Covered in glass chunks. Smile stamped into his face and left there. The long hairs he combs over the top of his head stand up and wave, caught by static electricity. You think Uncle Ornette’s smile is about to crawl away, but it only gets bigger, gets to a grin. All those vibrations and waves still drilling through Ornette, maybe the only thing he’s really felt in decades. You can’t get over his grin. He doesn’t have to say a single thing; neither of you does. You only have to let everything go straight through you.