Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2019

Copyright © Nell Zink 2019

Cover design by Jack Smythe

Nell Zink asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008323486

Ebook Edition © August 2019 ISBN: 9780008323509

Version: 2019-08-16

Dedication

For Justin Taylor’s cat, Emma

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter I.

Chapter II.

Chapter III.

Chapter IV.

Chapter V.

Chapter VI.

Chapter VII.

Chapter VIII.

Chapter IX.

Chapter X.

Chapter XI.

Chapter XII.

Chapter XIII.

Chapter XIV.

Chapter XV.

Chapter XVI.

Chapter XVII.

Chapter XVIII.

Chapter XIX.

Chapter XX.

Chapter XXI.

Chapter XXII.

Chapter XXIII.

Chapter XXIV.

Chapter XXV.

Chapter XXVI.

Chapter XXVII.

Chapter XXVIII.

Chapter XXIX.

Chapter XXX.

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Nell Zink

About the Publisher

I.

Unknown to all, and for as long as he lived, Joe Harris was a case of high-functioning Williams syndrome. He displayed the typical broad mouth, stellate irises, spatial ineptitude, gregarious extroversion, storytelling habit, heart defect, and musical gift. To the day he died, he had no more wrinkles on him than an action figure. He was never tested, because he lacked the general intellectual disability that was the syndrome’s defining feature. However, his capacity to irritate others was near infinite. He spoke his mind, trusting everyone he saw.

For example, once when he was walking through Washington Square with his friend Pam, an elderly man of the kind who might be forty approached them and asked them to hold his asthma inhaler for just one second. Pam rolled her eyes and walked on, but Joe held out his hand, into which the inhaler was promptly placed in a forceful way that made it fall to the ground in two pieces. The man declared that replacing the broken inhaler would cost Joe fifteen dollars.

Joe replied, “I don’t have fifteen bucks on me. But you could come with me to work! Most days I make more than that. Yesterday I made a lot more. You know what else I made? About a million paper napkins folded in half! After my shift I can give you all the money you need. My work is about a mile away. I can give you free pie, if we have pie that’s stale. I’m going there now.” He touched the man’s arm. Shouting that bowl-headed faggots should leave him alone, the man ran away. Joe picked up the inhaler and yelled, “You forgot your thing!”

HIS FATHER WAS A PROFESSOR OF AMERICAN HISTORY AT COLUMBIA. HIS MOTHER HAD been a forever-young party girl in permanent overdrive who could drink all night, sing any song and fake the piano accompaniment, and talk to anybody about anything. In 1976 she died, running uphill and laughing, in the middle of a departmental picnic at Wave Hill. The students mimed heartbreak while her husband mimed CPR. Joe held her hand and said, “Bye-bye, Mommy!” He was only eight.

At her funeral in the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, he clapped his hands through the syncopated bits of the doxology and lifted his voice meaningfully on “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.” Professor Harris immediately understood that the Holy Family had been redefined to resemble his own. The child schmoozed his way through the reception, telling stories about the funnest times with Mom. Adults patted his head and made meaningful eye contact among themselves. Joe, in their view, was not precocious. They had firm ideas on what to do with him, most of them involving boarding school on another continent. They were concerned about his dad’s capacity to attract another wife.

Professor Harris changed nothing, on the theory that Joe, whom he loved, would be hurt less if nothing changed.

JOE WAS WAVED THROUGH PUBLIC SCHOOL AS THE SON OF A PROFESSOR. EVEN BEFORE graduation, he took up waiting tables at the Abyssinian Coffee Shop on Fourteenth Street. It was a small, old-fashioned diner with a cashier up front and a short-order cook in the back. He didn’t have to memorize anything except codes like “S” for scrambled eggs and “P” for pancakes. The specials were eternally fixed combinations, and he never handled money except to put tips in his pockets. Most customers gave him a dollar for lunch or breakfast, a quarter for coffee, and two dollars for dinner. They were gracious because he looked fourteen. They thought he was saving money for college. The manager liked him because he was good for business, always rhapsodizing about fries and soda in a way that made them sound exponentially more wonderful than chips and tap water, plus he never stole.

With tips in his pockets, he felt rich. It was his good fortune to be a sucker in a time when the Village was not rich in expensive things. Dealers and hookers caromed off his chatty ways. He was afraid of loud noises and fast-moving objects. He never took the subway or crossed a street against the light. His instinct for self-preservation didn’t extend to people, but he respected vehicles—and the dangerous subset of people who were loud and fast-moving—so much that on the whole he was safer walking around New York than a normal person would have been.

He started playing ukulele soon after his mother died. As a teenager he switched to electric bass because it also had four strings and was good enough for Paul McCartney. For his sixteenth birthday, his father took him to Forty-Eighth Street, where he picked out a lemon-yellow Music Man StingRay. At home he played unamplified, accompanying records and the radio. On days when he didn’t hear a new song he liked, he wrote one. He wasn’t egotistical about it. He didn’t care who wrote the songs as long as they were there. He sang his favorites in public, with hand motions, louder than he could really sing, his voice ringing and rasping, the sound effortful, conveying obstacles overcome, the drama of stardom, the artist as agonist, in part as a side effect of singing outdoors against ambient racket and traffic.

When he turned twenty-one, he got access to his trust fund. That is, his father was able to tap it for his expenses and moved him from their rent-controlled duplex in the West Village to a two-bedroom in a nondescript building on Nineteenth between Fifth and Sixth. They shared a cleaning lady who doubled as a spy, assuring Professor Harris that Joe regularly ate real food and changed his clothes. With his own place, he could finally invest in a bass amp. Pam helped him parse the classifieds and bulletin board flyers. She located an appropriate Ampeg combo a short walk away in Hell’s Kitchen. He fiddled with the tone knob on the Music Man, looked up at the seller, and yelled over the noise, “Fuck me sideways! I never knew this knob did anything!”

PAMELA BAILEY WAS BORN THE YEAR AFTER JOE, IN 1969. SHE GREW UP AN ONLY CHILD in northwestern Washington, D.C., between the National Zoo and the National Cathedral.

Her mother, Ginger, was a homemaker, active in their church—that is, the cathedral—and the friends of the local branch library. She had practiced what she called “Irish birth control” by marrying after she finished college and not before. She didn’t approve of the Irish generally, but acknowledged a preference for lace-curtain Irish over shanty Irish such as the Kennedys. Pam’s father, Edgar, was a career civil servant at the Defense Logistics Agency in Anacostia. Adolescent Pam suspected him of having committed atrocities in Vietnam. He had been partially responsible for supplying American forces there with cinder blocks. To her credit, he had materially enabled the invasion of Grenada by coordinating the movement of spare tires.

Ginger and Edgar were white Anglo-Saxon Protestants of the post-Calvinist variety. They didn’t believe in predestination, but they behaved as if it were revealed truth. Every deviation from the straight and narrow was presumed a fatal wrong turn on the one road to salvation. An oft-cited maxim was “Spare the rod, spoil the child,” albeit with a certain irony, since as belt spankers they never used an actual rod. With similar irony, they would say, “Children should be seen and not heard.” Of course they expected Pam to be able to hold up her end of a dinner-table conversation. Maybe they should have had an extra child to practice on.

She went to public school and never had much homework. She liked to play with boys. At age nine she discovered Dungeons and Dragons. At twelve, she made up an outer-space-themed role-playing game that earned her $2,000 when her father licensed it to Atari in her name. But puberty was unkind to her. Her reddish hair made pimples and freckles stand out. Her friends went from talking swords and sorcery to planning careers in the U.S. Army Rangers, where they would acquire aluminum crossbows that kill silently. Her awakening critical faculties showed her a world of strictures where she had expected freedoms. The 1970s had suggested that in maturity she would enjoy communal solidarity and LSD. The 1980s coalesced from a haze of competition and AIDS. Between her childhood and her adolescence lay a generation gap.

She resolved to become a retro hippie earth mother. She began with a feminine school-sponsored extracurricular activity, modern dance. The teacher who ran it spent her time correcting papers. Her pupils stood outside the crash-bar doors of the gym, sharing cigarettes. Nothing was taught. At the year-end performance, Pam wore a black bodysuit and tights and crawled onstage to the sound of Leo Kottke playing “Eight Miles High” on a twelve-string. She was supposed to stare at the floor, but she peeked up to see whether her parents were moved. They were reading paperbacks.

At age thirteen she discovered a higher-stakes role-playing game. Her character: drunken punk in a crumbling, segregated, crack-saturated city.

She embarked on adventures at bars downtown. Bouncers let her into hardcore punk shows for free. She had a faceless West Virginia driver’s license that said she was nineteen, so their asses were covered in case of a raid, and that’s all they cared about. Grown men with jobs and money bought her drinks until the harsh light of last call or the restroom revealed that she was too young even for cocaine. To kill time until the Metro started running, she left clubs in the company of boys who said they had drugs. She would smoke crystal meth or crack with them and deploy the energy boost in walking home.

Mostly she was meeting boys she couldn’t stand, seeing bands she didn’t like. She was so tired all the time that if she didn’t like the band that was onstage, she could put her head down on a table and sleep.

The band she loved was called Minor Threat. They laid claim to the “straight edge,” foreswearing all substances and casual sex. Before going out to trade petting for a rush, she would draw Xs on the backs of her hands with black marker to signify her belonging to the straight-edge movement. She was well-read enough to know that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. She had seen what the striving for integrity had done to her father and mother. Dependence on a job supplying the troops had turned them into warmongering fascists, and hearing them say “I love you” made her sick. In contrast, Minor Threat’s integrity thrilled her, and she would have given anything to hear their singer, Ian MacKaye, say “I love you.” But she stood face-to-face with him only once, and she offered him sex. For self-evident reasons, she thought it was the most valuable thing she possessed. When he ignored her, she realized her mistake. Sex is not scarce. Girls with sex are like the stars of the sky.

By teaching her to value originality, the punk movement led her to the realm of art. How she longed to try hard and eventually to be known for making something the likes of which had never existed!

The summer before tenth grade she founded a band of her own, the Slinkies. Since practicing in a garage would have required asking someone’s parents to move the car, they used their bedrooms. Rehearsal was a quiet affair, if not in the opinion of their families.

At the Slinkies’ first and final gig, on a Sunday afternoon at the Jewish Community Center in Bethesda, they plugged into the previous band’s equipment. None of them knew what a monitor was for. Pam couldn’t hear her guitar after the drums came in, so she turned up its volume knob. It still didn’t play audibly, so she cranked her amplifier. She sang as loud as she could and couldn’t hear that either. The bassist crouched by her amp, trying to hear herself, and it must have been feeding back like a motherfucker, but nobody onstage could make out what she was playing, not even her. Into the clattering tornado of sound, Pam chanted her doggerel about sabotage in the voice of a tone-deaf auctioneer. The room emptied fast, except for two boys in black dusters who stayed through all three songs and said the Slinkies were a dead ringer for late-period Germs. That was not what she wanted to hear. The Germs’ singer, Darby Crash, had killed himself in 1980, so by implication their sound was not avant-garde.

GINGER AND EDGAR WERE DIGNIFIED PEOPLE, NOT EASILY INDUCED TO YELL. BUT WHEN she would stumble in at five thirty in the morning on a weekday, having misplaced her skirt, her father couldn’t help but intuit that she would be skipping school, and it made him crazy. Her mother yelled at her, starting when her father went to work and ending when she left for school. At times when no one else was yelling, she missed it, so she yelled instead. For two years, there were no conversations in the household that didn’t involve yelling.

Her father developed an unfortunate habit of threatening to throw her out. Her mother would remonstrate, and he would relent. To make the mixed message complete, she would imply that her defense of her daughter betrayed excess motherly love, because in truth she deserved to be thrown out. The threat didn’t seem harsh to either parent. Neither of them meant it seriously, though they expected her to move out when she reached eighteen. WASP culture had arisen in the poverty of desolate feudal places. Intergenerational solidarity had been impracticable in Anglo-Saxony, where brides required dowries and younger sons wandered off to settle distant territories like so many beavers. Pam’s grandparents, who were alive when she was little, lived in Florida and Arizona. The Florida ones gave her ten dollars every Christmas to spend as she chose. The Arizona ones had an Airstream travel trailer with a bumper sticker that read, WE’RE SPENDING OUR CHILDREN’S INHERITANCE.

She didn’t apply to colleges. Instead she told her parents, in her junior year of high school, that she was going to New York to train as an artist.

She didn’t say what medium, just “artist.” She asked for her Atari money from when she was twelve. It had been earning stagflation-style interest and was, she calculated, sufficient to establish her in an apartment in Manhattan. The money was held in her name as Series EE Savings Bonds. Her parents, being no stupider than their daughter, kept the bonds in a safe-deposit box and wouldn’t say which bank. They said the money was earmarked for her education. There was disagreement as to the true nature of education. The yelling in the house attained exceptional duration and pitch.

The upshot was that in September 1986, as her senior year was officially starting, Pam marched down to the Greyhound station—on foot, because she had only the seventy dollars she’d earned by selling her father’s audio receiver and VCR to a pawn shop—and boarded a bus to Port Authority.

From her seat on the smelly bus, the sight of the towers of Manhattan from the cloverleaf above the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel was the most exciting event of her life, definitely including all her experiences of sex, music, nature, and drugs combined.

She emerged to the sidewalk at Forty-First Street and Eighth Avenue. Street wisdom acquired in downtown D.C. told her it was not a place she needed to be spending time. She saw whores with recently hit faces. She walked east. To a mind unschooled in construction techniques, the city seemed carved from the living rock. Sheer cliff faces surrounded her on every side. Cave dwellings teemed with fairies, rogues, and barbarians, as on a D&D adventure. She quickened her pace. At Times Square she turned southward down Broadway. The whoredom transitioned to hustlers and dealers. She reached Fourth Street with a thrill. She saw some men playing handball. She had never seen handball being played.

She stopped to watch them. No one stopped to watch her. She was a leggy stranger in black jeans and a men’s V-neck undershirt, with a backpack and sleepover bag, seventeen years old, lost, female, and invisible. She was exactly where she wanted to be.

NOT LONG AFTER HER ARRIVAL, SHE STARTED WORKING FOR A COMPUTER CONSULTING firm called RIACD. Everything about it was mismanaged, from the wordplay in the name, which was not an acronym and was properly pronounced as “react” only by foreigners, to the one-man marketing division. The address, far downtown on John Street in the financial district, lent the company pecuniary cachet along with crooked drop ceilings and gurgling toilets.

A possible exception to the general mismanagement was its thirty-year lease, signed in 1985. RIACD’s founder, Yuval Perez, was a draft evader who had turned eighteen just before Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Owing landlords money didn’t scare him. He didn’t take contracts seriously as threats.

Only mismanagement could make a consultancy hire a dropout with radiation head to learn C from a Usenet tutorial, so Pam didn’t fault it. (Radiation head was the world’s easiest, and also worst, punk hairdo. Using scissors, the wearer cut his or her own hair really short, and the patchiness made him or her look like a cancer patient.) They met in a bar, where Yuval gave her an aptitude test and hired her to start the next day. The test involved imagining a set of ninety-nine pegs numbered left to right, one to ninety-nine, in a hundred holes also numbered left to right, with the right-hand hole empty. You were supposed to say how you’d move the sequence one slot to the right, reversing the order. A typical programmer’s first move was to posit additional holes.

Pam had been raised on short rations. She never assumed additional anything. Thrift was a cardinal virtue in the business in those days. Computers were slow, with definite limits. Programs had no graphics or menus. Stinginess was called “elegance.” In aesthetic terms it resembled the elegance of cutting your hair instead of washing it and wearing the same boots every day with no socks. Ultimate elegance was realized when all the programs in a mainframe lived naked and barefoot, sharing a single overcoat.

Her first project after the C tutorial was an auto-execute system for the American Stock Exchange. She wrote it in a day, and it compiled the first time. It ran on SCO Xenix on a 286 in a pipe room in their basement. The traders liked it enough to call her back to install anonymity—not security; the Morris worm hadn’t happened yet. They wanted fantasy usernames, so as to lend deniability to stupid auto-execute positions.

Immediately, and for all time, she got cocky. Routinely, she neglected input validation, memorably writing an interface that crashed if a user entered an accented character. On one too many occasions, she left a client’s system without turning off the debugging fire hose. Yet Yuval considered her a key asset. More conscientious consultants with better social skills regularly put them to use over long lunches, during which they argued that Merrill Lynch or Prudential might economize by employing them directly. Because of Pam’s outbursts, meltdowns, and mistakes—universally regarded as aspects of her femininity—there was never a danger that a client would hire her away.

She was one of two women at RIACD. New colleagues often had trouble making eye contact with her in the one-on-one encounters they liked to bring about by blocking her way to the ladies’ room, while others exposed her to the crass insults that passed for flirtation in Queens. Yet their respect for the RIACD receptionist, an angel-faced Yemenite in oversized tops and long skirts, no older than Pam, was deep and unfeigned. Pam deduced that in the fantasy universe of a Mediterranean American man’s virgin/whore complex, it was best to come down on the side of the virgins. She told new colleagues she was gay. Sexists in those days were familiar with the work of Howard Stern. His sadomasochistic radio talk show invested the unapproachable lesbian with powerful taboos.

It didn’t cost her any dates, because she never met a suit she wanted to date. Sex was part of the leisure-time world where she made art. In her mind art was ideally commercial, feeding and housing its creator. She loved coding’s austere beauty, but she didn’t regard it as an art. It was too restrained. It made the suits too happy. It was how she made money. An artist needed money in great abundance. Without it, she would bounce off Manhattan like a bird off a plate-glass window.

IN 1989, WHEN SHE MET JOE, HER ART PROJECT WAS A BAND CALLED THE DIAPHRAGMS. Even the name embarrassed her. She thought it sounded early eighties. Simon, the singer and bass player, claimed that his masculinity made it ironic. He was a grad student from Yorkshire on a fellowship to study opera practice at NYU. He possessed a bulky, sticky gray keyboard that incorporated an analog drum machine. She played a Gibson SG guitar. The band was supposed to be a No Wave power duo. Everybody except Simon knew it was shitty Casio-core.

Of course the Diaphragms had played CBGB. Anybody could play there once. All it took was signing up for audition night. Their gig was at seven o’clock on a Wednesday. Their twenty dearest friends ordered beer by the pitcher, but the manager still said their set needed work. When Pam asked him what aspects in particular, he shrugged and said, “Your set. The songs. How you play them. The arrangements. You know. Everything.”

They rehearsed every weekend in a space in Hell’s Kitchen. It charged a reduced rate of ten dollars per hour between eight A.M. and noon on Sundays. They arrived at eight, because rehearsing their set took forever. The songs were hard to memorize or tell apart. She had slept with Simon eight times and heard him refer to her in public as his “ex” on at least ten occasions. To compound her embarrassment, he was still her roommate. They lived in an overpriced doorman building on Bleecker near the folk clubs and Italian bakeries, in the eastern part of the West Village known to gentrifiers farther east as “Little Jersey.” A flimsy drywall partition divided what had once been a one-bedroom apartment into a one-and-a-half. Simon had the half bedroom. It was too cheap. He would never, ever move out voluntarily. She was out of town a lot for work, and every time she got back, she could tell he’d been sleeping in her bed. They were not friends. She hated him. They were both on the lease.

JOE ADDRESSED HER HAIR ISSUES FIRST THING WHEN THEY MET. “YOU’RE GREAT-LOOKING, except for your hair!” he said. “I love your body. It’s so elongated. You have an incredible-looking mouth. Your eyebrows are moody, like you have a romantic soul. You should wear liquid eyeliner and have long hair all the way down to your butt!”

This was after he’d known her for not even ten seconds, or five. He’d tapped her on the shoulder while she was standing in line for fifty-cent coffee from a cart.

“That would take forever,” Pam said. “Hair grows, like, an inch every three months.”

“I don’t do math,” Joe said.

“Me neither, but if we call it a foot every three years, and it’s three feet from my head to my butt, we’re looking at nine years.”

“Nine years!” He patted his own hair thoughtfully. It was mousy brown and wavy, cut in an inverted bowl shape. “How old do you think my hair is?”

“You are quite the mutant,” she said, making so as to leave. She had ordered but neither paid for nor gotten her coffee. Before she could abandon him, Joe took hold of her arm.

She was in a mood to put up with it. She was at a cart on lower Broadway, buying weak coffee at four P.M., because she had been escorted out of Merrill Lynch for calling this one dickhead “fuckwad” in the presence of his subordinates. He had responded that he’d have her fired from RIACD. Immediately she had called Yuval, who observed that the term “fuckwad” is considered denigrating by members of certain ethnic groups, as in all of them everywhere, and she had yelled into Merrill Lynch’s house phone that if he ever invested a dime in marketing RIACD’s platform-independent programming language (her side project for slow days in the office), none of them would have to deal with dickheads like this fuckwad ever again. Then she had felt a strong hand gripping her arm. That had been half an hour ago.

Joe’s touch was a pleasant contrast. He was beaming as though he’d been looking for her all his life and finally found her, but in a somewhat disinterested manner, as though she were not the woman of his dreams but something less essential, like the perfect grapefruit. He appeared to be contemplating her.

“You shouldn’t be touching me,” she said. “You dig?”

He let go of her arm and took a step backward. To her dismay, he started chanting. “Yo! Mutant MC, keep off the lady, hot like coffee, she got the beauty—”

“Don’t be a goober,” she said, giving the coffee man a quick fifty cents and moving away from the cart with the hot liquid that would arm her against Joe. “Stop the rapping. Never rap. Or, should you feel compelled to rap against your own better judgment, don’t try to sound black.”

“But that’s what rap sounds like.” Saddened, he looked down at the sidewalk.

She almost felt guilty. She said, “I didn’t mean it that way. Rap if you want. Just not where anybody can hear you.”

“I’m actually a singer,” Joe said. “You want to hear a song? I write one almost every day.”

“Sure,” she said.

They walked north together, and he sang his tune du jour, loudly, with hand motions.

BEING AROUND JOE WAS RELAXING FOR PAM. THEY COULD TALK AND TALK, AND NOTHING she said ever offended him. Nobody picked on her once they saw him, and nobody could pick on him for long. If she got nervous walking without him, she would stop off and buy a cup of coffee. Hot coffee in a guy’s face will stop him deader than a bullet, long enough for a skinny girl in jump boots to get away.

II.

Daniel Svoboda lived in a state of persistent ecstasy. He had no lease. His rent was a hundred a week in cash.

He was an eighties hipster. But that can be forgiven, because he was the child of born-again Christian dairy-farm workers from Racine, Wisconsin.

The eighties hipster bore no resemblance to the bearded and effeminate cottage industrialist who came to prominence as the “hipster” in the new century. He wasn’t a fifties hipster either. He knew nothing of heroin or the willful appropriation of black culture. He was a by-product of the brief, shining moment in American history when the working class went to liberal arts college for free. Having spent four years at the foot of the ivory tower, picking up crumbs of obsolete theory, he descended to face once again the world of open-wheel motorsports and Jell-O salads from whence he sprang. Eyes schooled on Raphael and Mapplethorpe zoomed in on Holly Hobbie–themed needlepoint projects and xeroxed Polaroids of do-it-yourself gender reassignment surgery. Reflexively they sought the sublime beauty and violence they had learned from Foucault and Bataille to see as their birthright, and they were not disappointed.

An eighties hipster couldn’t gentrify a neighborhood. He wasn’t gentry. His presence drove rents down. His apartments were overpopulated and dirty. Landlords were lucky if he paid rent. He wasn’t about to seize vacant lots for community gardens or demand better public schools. All he wanted was to avoid retiring from the same plant as his dad.

The eighties hipster was post-sensitive. Having risen from poverty to intimate acquaintanceship with political rectitude (for collegiate women, it was the era of lesbian feminism), he knew what sensitivity was. He internalized it. He put a fine point on it. His speech acts reflected his awareness that its possession made him part of a vanishingly small minority. He drew attention to everyday prejudice and injustice through overemphasis. Witness his habitual attention to the crimes of Hitler and Stalin or the ill-fated band name “Rapeman,” borrowed from a hero of Japanese comic books.

The eighties hipster practiced outward conformity in his dress and bearing. The mod, the glam rocker, the rockabilly, the punk, even the prep risked and defied the wrath of the homophobe, but the eighties hipster could get served a beer in the Ozarks.

The eighties hipster was the short-lived cap of spume on the dirty wave of working-class higher education, and it is right to mourn him, even if he did devote too much time to the search for authentic snuff videos and photos of nude Khoisan women.

ON A NOVEMBER SATURDAY IN 1990, PAM WENT OVER TO JOE’S PLACE TO LISTEN TO records. It was raining in sheets that whipped around the corners of buildings and blowing so hard that women in heels were taking men’s arms to cross the street. Cars were plowing bow waves through puddles of scum.

Joe had a visitor. As he was letting her in the apartment door, a man emerged from the bedroom with a square sheet of black plastic in his hand and said, “Hey, man, you have the Sassy Sonic Youth flexi!”

“I subscribed to that magazine the second I heard of it,” Joe said.

“It’s not long for this world,” Pam said, hanging up her coat. “What’s the demographic supposed to be—thirteen-year-old girls who fuck? Advertisers really go for that.”

“Nice to meet you,” the stranger said, stepping forward and holding out his hand. “Daniel Svoboda.”

“Pam Diaphragm,” she said. “Sassy is the dying gasp of straight mainstream pedophilia.”

“I read it for the political coverage,” Daniel said, satirizing the readers of Playboy.

“I first heard of it from a bald guy who does in-flight programming at Eastern,” Pam said. “So can we listen to this flexi?”

“I’m a Sonic Youth completist,” Joe said, taking the single from Daniel and arranging it on the turntable. “The only record I don’t have is the Forced Exposure subscribers-only single ‘I Killed Christgau with My Big Fucking Dick.’”

“That’s not a real record,” Daniel said. “Byron Coley made that up.”

Byron Coley was the editor of Forced Exposure and Robert Christgau was the chief music critic of the Village Voice, as Daniel did not feel called upon to explain to Pam. Nor did he find it necessary to tell her, one condescending beat later, that the record existed after all.

She found herself attracted to him. He had not asked her real name. His sophistication and knowledge seemed to resemble her own. She commenced phrasing a friendly remark. She put the brakes on. They say that you truly know a man only after you’ve seen him with his male friends, but this friend was Joe, who might not count. Furthermore, it had been demonstrated in empirical trials that a woman gravitates to the sexiest man in the room. Here, again, Joe was setting the bar low. She said instead, “It’s Christgau who’s a big fucking dick.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Daniel replied. “But you can’t grade music on a bell curve. Mediocrity is not the norm. Most records either rock or they suck.”

“I’m kind of over grades myself. Did you just get out of college?”

“Yeah. You should see my awesome transcript and GREs. That’s how I qualified to work as a proofreader.”

“I’m a programmer, but I never finished high school.”

“Silence, lovebirds,” Joe said, dropping the needle. “Prepare to rock.”

DANIEL LIVED IN AN ILLEGAL APARTMENT WHOSE EXISTENCE HE HAD DEDUCED THROUGH spatial reasoning. It was located above a shop on the edge of Chinatown, on Chrystie Street near Hester, facing a fenced-in, filthy park. Betwixt a dripping air conditioner and a sidewalk black with grime, Video Hit sold hot coffee, durian fruit, fermented tofu, one-hundred-film subscriptions to the latest Hong Kong action movies on VHS, lemon-scented animal crackers pressed from microscopic dust, fortune cat figurines, and introductions to local women whose photos blanketed the wall above the cash register.

It was his first inviolable space. Growing up, he had shared an upstairs room with two brothers. The three were close in age. One was a wrestler who wanted to be a doctor. The other was an adopted Somali epileptic with one leg. He couldn’t stand up to the wrestler, and with the Somali, he wasn’t allowed to try.

Technically it was a loft: high-ceilinged, unfinished storage above a retail space. It was accessible only through the store, which closed for five hours nightly via the lowering of an impenetrable steel gate to which he had no key. If he stayed out past one o’clock, he was sentenced to stay out past six. He was young. He dealt with it. The floor above his was connected to a jewelry factory next door through a hole in the intervening firewall. He heard footsteps in the factory at all hours of the day and night. Victor and Margie, his landlords, had tried putting inventory in the loft, but the floor sagged, and they didn’t want to clutter up their shop with a pillar. For storage they used the basement, accessible through a trapdoor in the sidewalk.

They were immigrants from Hong Kong. When he suggested they let him move in, they saw the offer as money for nothing. They didn’t want to rent to Chinese who would overpopulate the place. Daniel’s meek demeanor suggested to them that he wouldn’t cause trouble.

He’d been to rent parties in Soho, where a “loft” was a white-lacquered, vast-windowed domain of cleanliness and prosperity in a historic building framed in cast iron. His building was salmon brick, with wooden beams black from dry rot. You could drive a butter knife into his doorframe and turn it around. He guessed the structure was 150 years old.

His stairway was steep, and the door to it was narrow enough to be mistaken for a closet. On one occasion, soon after he moved in, a workman set down a new cooler and trapped him upstairs. It took serious yelling and pounding before Victor shifted it enough for him to go to work. He bought himself a fire safety ladder with hooks for the windowsill. When he was at home, he padlocked his door from the inside.

He assumed—romanticizing things a bit—that his trap-like secret lair had been set up for illicit activities and abandoned after a raid. From his first glimpse, he had taken away vague impressions of battered furniture and dusty slips of paper, which he looked forward to examining closely. By the time he moved in, the place had been swept and every portable object was gone, including the linoleum.

He installed a sink and a hot plate. He showered with a handheld, standing in a galvanized tub. He dumped the wash water down the toilet, which could always use a good hard drenching. On the street side, he observed blackout rules, with shades drawn during the day and opaque curtains at night. His rear windows opened on a small and sometimes sunny courtyard, miraculously free of garbage, cool and fresh, with no poisonous dry cleaners, no restaurants blowing rancid exhaust, and no living creatures but rats and pigeons. They squeaked and made coo-cooing sounds, but didn’t otherwise interfere with his life.

HE WORKED NIGHTS, PROOFREADING DOCUMENTS FOR A BIG LAW OFFICE IN MIDTOWN. The job required an eye for detail. He had trained his visual perspicuity for four years at taxpayer expense while acquiring a B.A. in art history from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He knew there was such a thing as a job in his major, but unless he counted the college faculty, he’d never met anybody who had one. His superfluous college career could be traced to—or blamed on—a sexy substitute teacher who rambled on about art and revolution for two days in eleventh grade when their regular world history teacher had the flu. He never forgot her. At any moment, he could have improvised a touching essay about how he was first inspired by Mrs. Ellis to believe in a power higher than Jesus Christ.

But eleventh grade was too late to adopt the praxis of art and create a portfolio adequate to gain admission to some kind of secular humanist academy. He could play an instrument—the clarinet—but stiltedly, due to a lack of instruction and role models, and it had never seemed potentially useful to him for purposes of art music, which he naively understood to include progressive rock. He gave it up when he got to college, because he loathed spending his free time at parades and football games. Also he feared it was giving him buckteeth. He wasn’t vain, but—here, again, inspired by Mrs. Ellis—he sensed that he should hang on to what little beauty he had.

His good physical features were, in order of scarcity in the general population: broad shoulders and narrow hips; an attractive mouth (full lips, straight teeth, odorless); thick curly hair (dark brown). Not-so-good features: moderate acne scarring; incipient jowls; hairy feet; hairy back; hairy face (he had to shave all the way up to his eyes). Ambiguous feature: five feet eleven inches tall, a towering and uncomfortable giant among Asian immigrants and their furnishings, inconspicuous by the standards of Midtown or the financial district.

He never got his dream job at his favorite record store in Madison, but he regularly met musicians through his shifts at a Subway sandwich shop. By neglecting his studies, he was able to soldier his way upward through the hierarchy of the university radio station until he had a two-hour show on Monday mornings, shocking people awake with the Residents and Halo of Flies.

He had come to New York with $800 in savings expressly dedicated to the release of the seven-inch single that would put Daniel Svoboda on the map. Not as a musician. He wanted to found a record label.

By dint of his radio experience and strategic mail-ordering from ads in Forced Exposure and Maximum Rocknroll, he knew his single didn’t have to be so great musically. What it needed was reverb on the vocals, chorus on the guitar, and compression on everything else. The sound would be “warm” and “punchy.” The au courant midwestern sound was grunge with vocals lowered by an octave. The band posters showed nitrogen funny cars shooting flames. What he had in mind was something different: breathy female vocals over propulsive guitar drones, like My Bloody Valentine, only faster. The key element was the breathless woman-girl-child singer—a delicate, tight-throated slip of a thing, aspirating her lines like Jane Birkin on “Je t’aime … moi non plus” but buried under a mass of guitar noise. In terms of artistic lineage, she was somewhere between Goethe’s Mignon and André Breton’s Nadia. He was eager to know whether Pam could sing.

AT HIS SUGGESTION, PAM AND JOE MET HIM AT NOON ON A SATURDAY IN FRONT OF THE Music Palace, a large cinema on Bowery. It was getting close to Christmas. The streets were full of shoppers looking for bargains on the latest Chinese-manufactured goods, such as dish towels and those little plastic rakes and buckets kids take to the beach in summer. They bought a six of Michelob at the grocery store next door and hid it in Pam’s backpack. The theater was almost empty. A few men were sleeping toward the back and milling around the bathrooms behind the screen, recent Asian arrivals with nowhere else to go.

The double feature paired an action movie set in Mexico with a kung fu fantasy about medieval China. It ran all day and night. The action movie had already started, so they didn’t get to talking until the intermission. Pam, hoping to arouse Daniel’s curiosity, said how much she was dreading practice.

He said, “What kind of practice?”

Joe said, “She’s in this hard-sucking power duo that has no songs.”

“Like I always say, if you gotta suck, suck loud,” Pam said. “The Diaphragms have rehearsal space, a drum machine, and no pride. I’d make a speech tomorrow at practice and say it’s all over, but the bass player happens to be my roommate.”

“Ooh,” Daniel said.

“It’s hellish. And the worst part is we really do suck. I use so much distortion that all I have to do is look at the guitar and it feeds back. I loop it through a delay and play along with myself. Does it sound dumb yet?”

“Potentially. Can you play bar chords?”

“Are you asking can I play guitar? Yeah, sure. I can even sing. But there’s something about this band. I don’t want it to be good. I want it to suck, so Simon’s band will suck. It’s the most self-destructive thing I’ve ever done, and that’s saying a lot. I need to quit.”

Daniel hesitated. “I don’t want to be in a band,” he ventured, not sure he would be believed. “I truly don’t. You could say I’m more the camp-follower type. I like a certain kind of music, and I want to get people listening to it. I had a radio show in college. I want to start a label.”

“What kind of stuff?”

Joe interrupted them, saying, “Let’s have a band! We’ll call it Marmalade Sky. It’s me on bass, Pam on guitar, and you on keyboards. We all sing. We have three-part harmonies. We practice at your house. I write the songs. Prepare to rock!”

Daniel said, “You’re barking up the wrong tree, man. I can’t play keyboards. Maybe I could fake drums.”

“There’s too much drums in songs all the time,” Joe said. “You play keyboards.”

“I’m in,” Pam said. “Next stop Marmalade Sky.”

“So what’s my label called?” Daniel asked Joe.

“Lion’s Den, because of Daniel in the lion’s den.”

“That sounds like reggae, when ‘Marmalade Sky’ sounds like bad British psychedelia.”

“Together they fit how we’re going to sound, which is free dub-rock fusion.”

“He could be right,” Pam said. “He did without an amp for so long, he’s the Charlie Haden of punk rock. I mean, relatively speaking.”

“Pam’s the worst lead guitar player in the universe,” Joe said. “Her fingers move like it’s freezing out and she lost her mittens. But in Marmalade Sky, she plays massive power chords she knows how to play, and I play the tunes.”

“I play like I’m wearing the mittens,” she corrected him. “It’s the evil influence of Simon. He wants everything to sound like it’s been dragged through candied heroin.”

“He’s your roommate and in your band?” Daniel asked. “You must be close friends.”

“We’re extremely intimate.” She rolled her eyes.

“It sounds to me like you should cut him off and never look back. I mean, as a disinterested third party.”

“I didn’t mean to imply that he’s on drugs. There are more things at the bottom of the barrel than drugs.”

“Can you please play keyboards?” Joe asked Daniel.

“You truly don’t want to hear me try.”

“You have to,” he insisted. “We can’t have a band unless we’re all in it!”

“I want to put out the band on my label, not play in it.”

“It will be absolutely no fun being rock stars and getting laid and everything like that if you aren’t in the band. You have to play something!”

“It’s better money,” Pam pointed out. “A manager gets twenty percent, but as a band member you’d get a third.”

“Twenty off the top plus a third puts me at forty-seven percent,” Daniel said.

“And we make it all back from record sales and touring!” Joe said.

“I have a day job already,” Pam said.

“Me too,” Joe said. “I mean touring in the city.”

“What I have is more like a night job,” Daniel said. “But fine, let’s talk about how I’m going to hang it up because I’m raking it in with art for art’s sake.”

“We’re going to be rolling in it,” Joe said, as though reminding him of an established fact, “because I’m writing the songs.”

Daniel and Pam exchanged a look that said the band would fail no matter what, if only because Joe was writing the songs. There was a shared bemused affection for him in the look already. “You’re going to be the next Neil Diamond,” Daniel said.

“Hasil Adkins,” Pam said.

“Roy Orbison!” Joe said.

WHEN THE KUNG FU MOVIE WAS OVER, THEY GOT TAKE-OUT PIZZAS AND WALKED TO Daniel’s place to eat and listen to records. The first track he put on was “Suspect Device” by Stiff Little Fingers. Joe danced, throwing his arms up to jerk his body from side to side. Daniel put on Hüsker Dü’s “Real World,” Gang of Four’s “Love Like Anthrax,” and Mission of Burma’s “Forget,” until Joe said he was tired of dancing. He volunteered to sing a song he had written earlier in the day. Daniel and Pam exchanged the look again. Joe took a deep breath, clapped his hands to indicate a rumba, and sang, with so many North-African-style adornments that every syllable was stretched into three or four:

This world is small

I see you all

Killing my head

With how you bled

And now you’re dead

Dead, dead, dead

He stretched the final “dead” into about ten syllables.

Pam said, “Joe, man! Are you emotionally troubled? Is there something I don’t know?”

“Seriously, I think the melody’s okay,” Daniel said. He went to the rear corner of the room, under one of the windows to the courtyard, and returned with a warped flea-market classical guitar, wrongly strung with steel instead of nylon. It wasn’t tuned. He gave it to Pam and said, “Here, play it on guitar.”

Twenty minutes later, they had an intro, verse, and guitar riff. Daniel drummed gently with spoons on a book. Pam sang the song, and Joe sang the bass line. Finally he said, “That was the A part of the song. Now comes the B part.”

The lyrics to the B part were about skateboarders. Daniel said, “Wait. Is this the chorus or the bridge? Does this have something to do with the A part?”

Joe said firmly, “It’s about skateboarders. They’re dead. There was gravel at the corner of Fifth and Fifteenth, and they were hanging on to the bumper of a cab, and poof !”

THE NEXT MORNING, PAM TOLD SIMON THAT SHE WAS GOING TO THE PRACTICE SPACE without him because she could afford it on her own. Ten dollars an hour isn’t much for a programmer. She said she was done with the Diaphragms. The band had never worked. She had a new project that might work. To forestall any hopes on his side, she said he wasn’t welcome in the new project.

The whole routine made her nervous. She stood by the door, guitar on her back and effects bag in her hand, making this insulting speech as if expecting immediate capitulation, knowing better than to expect it.

Simon said, “That’s my practice space, not yours. I already advertised for a new guitar player.”

“So why aren’t you going there now?”

“I don’t have one yet. But I will.”

She set her things down and said, “Simon, I know our love was beautiful, but we need to break up.”

“I’m not moving out. I can’t even afford to practice by myself. You’re the one who just said ten dollars isn’t a lot of money. You move out. You can afford a place of your own. Just go.” He turned sulkily toward the cereal box on the table and sprinkled a few more squares of Chex into his slowly warming milk.

DANIEL DIDN’T WANT TO REHEARSE ON SUNDAY MORNINGS. HE DIDN’T SEE ANY REASON to get up early, cross town, and pay money to do something they could do in his home if they didn’t get carried away with the volume. Over miso soup on Saint Mark’s Place—his first date with Pam—he said, “Why spend money when we can just turn down?”

“Tube amps don’t work like that,” she said. “They need to warm up to sound right, and they need to sound right to warm up. There’s no headphone jack.”

“Why don’t you get a transistor amp, so you can practice at home?”

“No way,” she said. “I’ve been down that road. We rehearse under realistic conditions.” She sketched her experience with the Slinkies, saying it was time to move forward, at least into the eighties, now that it was 1990. There was nothing embarrassing about being behind. The sixties had hit pop culture around 1972, just as punk was taking off. “You ever see Birth of the Beatles?” she added. “We need to work like busy bees to get to the tippy top.”

“Darby Crash died the day before John Lennon.”

“Todd is God,” she said. “But yeah, maybe Darby’s what put Chapman over the edge.”

Daniel suppressed a smile. He had nothing against John Lennon, and no sympathy for the man who shot him, but knowing that Todd Rundgren had composed “Rock and Roll Pussy” about Lennon, that Lennon had responded with an open letter to “Sodd Runtlestuntle” in Melody Maker, and that Mark David Chapman had cared enough to take the affair to its logical conclusion while wearing a promotional T-shirt for Todd’s latest album—it was a kind of knowledge he didn’t expect a woman to have, much less care enough to say something post-sensitive about. He was starting to get a serious crush on her. He personally had first heard of John Lennon the day he died. His family was more into Up with People.

LATE WEDNESDAY NIGHT, PAM WAS AMONG THE FIRST TO BUY THE VILLAGE VOICE AND turn to the real estate classifieds. She strode to a streetlamp to read. What she saw made her guts clench. Since her last move, her budgeted residential zone had shifted far away from Manhattan, past Brooklyn Heights. The studios she could afford were in places like Greenpoint and Astoria. Even Park Slope had apparently turned into a bourgeois hell of first-time homebuyers bent on pretending their stucco townhomes were brownstones on the Upper East Side.

She regarded Brooklyn as a cultural wasteland. A summertime stroll up Flatbush with the devoted Brooklyn fan Joe hadn’t changed her mind. In a shop window she’d seen a dead branch spray-painted gold in a silver-painted vase for eighty dollars. She had attended an art opening in Williamsburg once, down near the water, and it still stuck with her as though it might recur as a final image of vacuity before she died. She had narrowly missed the era when Alphabet City was controlled by Latino crime syndicates and inhabited by the living dead—honest-to-goodness cannibals—but Williamsburg was creepier, because there was nobody around. No buildings standing open with dim-eyed figures guarding holes leading to cellars; just walls and chain-link on all sides, and she and Joe the only pedestrians for miles. Cannibals could have eaten them right there on the street, without taking the trouble to drag them inside a building. When they got to the opening, it turned out to be site-specific installations made of found objects. None of the so-called artists could afford supplies or a studio. It was literal arte povera. Then she sliced open the top of her right ear on a splinter of broken mirror some wannabe had hung from the ceiling with twine.

She read the ads for lower Manhattan again. Her hands and feet turned cold from the adrenaline, as if she’d been caught in a trap. To all appearances she was not leaving her lease on Bleecker Street. If Simon wasn’t either, she would have to put up with him.

III.

Operation Desert Shield marched inexorably toward war. The USA was ranging its armaments against Saddam Hussein and preparing to lay waste to his country. Pam often wished aloud that the Selective Service System would draft Simon into the battle for Kuwait.

Daniel had talked about the draft so much that she didn’t realize there was no draft. He was in touch with the American Friends Service Committee, on Joe’s behalf as well as his own, preparing for them to become conscientious objectors. He even took Joe to a Quaker meeting, but only once.

There was officially a recession on. Corporate executives were moaning that double-digit annual profit growth was a thing of the past. Even RIACD’s Wall Street clients were strapped for cash. They had installed networked PCs before firing the staff the PCs would make redundant. Two years earlier, when Pam parachuted into an office, she could be sure of seeing secretaries in motion, walking briskly in and out of their supervisors’ offices, running files from room to room, controlling the speed of Dictaphone tapes with foot pedals, typing letters on IBM Selectrics. Now those same secretaries sat at bare desks half asleep, while their bosses answered correspondence privately on Lotus cc:mail. Occasionally one would stand up to take a print job off the printer in the printer room. At a big reinsurer, Pam saw a woman typing a chapter from the Book of Ezekiel. She learned that the company’s desktop publishing pool had resolved, as a devotional exercise, to enter God’s Word into WordPerfect documents. Not because anybody needed a printout; they all had the book at home. It was a means of communion with the Divine. It could not end well.

The winter settled in like a poisonous fog around the redundant American people. The war ramped up. Yellow ribbons appeared. The streets were dark at four o’clock. The wind whistled and rattled the signage. Pam and her coworkers sat idle in the conference room, watching a lot of TV.

In mid-January 1991, things got interesting. A CNN correspondent was trapped in Baghdad. He described his fear in great detail, conveying a sense that war was ultra-scary. The battlefields looked like barbecue grills—not arrangements of discrete wrecks and craters, but greasy charcoal melted to the pavement. America the Beautiful was taking no prisoners.

Pam went to visit Daniel after work and found him downstairs in the store, huddled up in his coat, watching CBS with Victor. He pointed at the TV and said, “They’re landing Scuds on Tel Aviv. It’s Armageddon.”

Daniel was not remotely Jewish, and he didn’t know any Israelis, but he had been raised in the kind of Christian household that promotes respect for the defense capabilities of Israel and belief in the apocalyptic consequences of putting its back against the wall. Not that Israel couldn’t defend itself. Plucky little Israel had fended off repeated Arab invasions, and not through the power of prayer. It had fought valiantly and developed—with French assistance, though Daniel couldn’t imagine why that was—a nuclear deterrent. Those who aided the enemies of Israel died. That’s what they did.

For example, the British engineer who decided to help Saddam build a cannon big enough to put two tons into orbit. He just up and died of gunshot wounds in Brussels.

The respect was possibly overgenerous and the eschatological expectations overblown, but it was hard for Daniel to imagine Tel Aviv taking a Scud missile lying down. To make sure Pam knew what he meant, he added, “This is World War Three!”

“Are they with nerve gas?”

“They don’t know yet. Nobody wants to be first to take off the gas mask and find out. But it can’t be nerve gas, right? Israel would so totally nuke Baghdad. They want to draw Israel into the war, but they don’t want to die. If Israel sends even one plane into Iraqi airspace, it could draw the whole Arab world into the war.”

“What do you think, Victor?” she asked.

“Americans supply Israel with many things. Israel won’t interfere in our war.”

“I think Israel goes its own way,” Daniel said. “They play off all sides against each other. They get less American support than you think.”

“Israel and Iraq are nothing,” Victor said. “If they nuke each other, it’s not World War Three. It’s jackals fighting over a desert.”

“Whoa,” Pam said, unused to hearing anything that could possibly have been construed as anti-Semitic.

“Any war that goes nuclear is World War Three,” Daniel said. “And nuclear war involving Israel is Armageddon, any way you cut it up. So this is potential nuclear Armageddon. Babylon the great is fallen—is fallen … for all the nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication!” He shouted the last bit because it was part of a Tragic Mulatto song.

“Let’s wait first and see whether they use nerve gas,” Pam said.

Victor offered to open a bottle of vodka to celebrate the coming American win. Daniel’s response was to proclaim, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” Victor reached under the counter, and Pam expressed admiration at his stocking bootleg vodka, which counted as agreement to help them drink.

They watched TV until eleven o’clock. Pam said she was too drunk to go straight home on foot. She went upstairs with Daniel to have some herbal tea.

There they had sex for the first time. His doubts, hesitations, and regrets were as nothing in the face of the coming apocalypse. She felt none of the above. She wished she’d had the idea of sleeping with him long before.

SEX CAME AND WENT IN PAM’S LIFE. SHE HAD PICKED UP ENOUGH OF THE TAIL END OF seventies culture to call it “love.” She never had sex unless she was “in love.” She could fall in love in the space of fifteen minutes. She had offered many appealing strangers tender kisses, some of which became hand jobs in short order, while others quickly progressed to “making love.”

As a result, all her boyfriends had been approximately as charming as Simon. She fell in love as a prelude to sex. Then she had ethical qualms about unloading people in the morning, because she was in love. Her ideal of sex was intimate and gentle, and she kept having it with strangers.

She knew all about bad sex. Not rough sex; she would have called that “assault.” She knew that gay men pick up rough trade at the risk of being beaten to death, that submissive men role-play excuses for penetration, and that straight women take both behaviors to extremes. She understood herself to be a hedonist. She never sought out unpleasant consequences. They just kept happening.

Sex for Daniel was the opposite—consistently too much fun. His earliest sexual experiences had involved fondling the genitals of Christian schoolgirls he never once kissed. He’d even gotten a blow job from one of them once, and he wouldn’t have kissed her for a million dollars after that. Her feelings were hurt, but what could he do? How were his sexual preferences his fault?

In college he’d gotten a crush on an eccentric and lonely black women’s-studies major who slept around but never had intercourse with anyone. She never said why not, and she never touched him, so he never felt he had standing to find out. At times he thought they were two virgins, born to be together, and at other times he thought she was recovering from a rape trauma and subsequent promiscuous phase; he never asked. In her senior year she came out as lesbian, and he felt he’d missed his one chance. He had two years of college left to go, and nobody he knew of liked him that way.

At an art opening the fall of junior year, he met a Thai woman on an exchange program to the veterinary school. They corresponded for months. That was sexually rewarding (not). He’d never known Buddhists were so strict about premarital sex.

His senior year, he hooked up with a scraggly-haired anthropologist. She had sour armpits and annoying mannerisms such as picking her nose and relating everything to cybernetics, but she said she liked to get fucked. Once, early in their liaison, she diverted his member into her anus with her hand, and he didn’t immediately notice. When he did, she explained that she had vaginal discomfort from a yeast infection. He suspected that she felt no sexual pleasure, of any kind, ever, and that it was a matter of indifference to her how he did what.

On one occasion, he was unfaithful to her with a pretty townie he met at a heavy metal show. When they were done, the townie said, “Did you know I’m fifteen?” He was terrified. She promised to keep quiet for a hundred dollars. But his friends at Subway knew that she was nineteen and an amateur, so it was okay.

In short, his previous experiences of sex had less than nothing to do with love. Pam opened a new chapter in his life. Where the other consummated affairs seemed to have emerged from the sewers of his mind like roaches swarming out of a toilet, Pam descended from above, bringing all he held most dear: beauty, art, music, cyberpunk, the Lower East Side. Kissing her was the most important thing.

Band practice was interesting after that. Joe sang his songs while playing counterpoint melodies on the bass. Pam looked straight down at her left hand, and Daniel focused on the brushes with which he played warped floor tom and broken snare. Every so often, the couple raised their eyes and nodded almost imperceptibly in greeting.

IN HIS FUNCTION AS MANAGER AND LABEL EXECUTIVE, DANIEL BOUGHT THE SELF-HELP manual Book Your Own Fucking Life. It was a punk rock venue guide to the USA and Canada, produced by an anarchist collective in Minneapolis. He observed that meaningful implementation of the book was predicated on possession of a vehicle. He was financially committed to Marmalade Sky to the tune of the $800 the first single was going to cost him. There was nothing in his plans about thousands of dollars for transportation. The thought of trying to store a van in lower Manhattan made his insides droop. Whether or not the street sweeping machines came, you had to move your car every day. Official car theft rates were kept low by the inconvenience of reporting crimes, but a car parked on the street still had annual insurance premiums roughly equal to its value. A worthless car could be relied on to stay put if you removed some vital part such as the alternator every night and took it upstairs.

He broached the necessity of renting a van some weekend to play Trenton or Philly, traditional springboards for ambitious and creative bands that had trouble cracking the mercantile culture of NYC rock.

Pam said, “What’s next, Passaic? This city not big enough for you?”

Joe elucidated his view that New York City was the industry’s one and only mecca. Bands from other places dreamed all their lives of playing there, paying serious money—like fifty bucks—for the privilege of presenting short sets in exploitative clubs such as Downtown Beirut. Marmalade Sky, an endemic growth, could play New York any time it wanted, by setting up out on the sidewalk or next to the fountain in Washington Square. He had seen a rig with a Peavey and a car battery. They could play wearing fun costumes. He had seen a girl dressed as broccoli.

“No, no, no,” Daniel said. “I’m not busking for quarters! I have a job!”

He noted inwardly that Marmalade Sky’s need for a label and a manager was not urgent, and possibly not even real. The band itself might not be real. He felt it might be helpful to know relevant people who could confirm the band’s reality. If, say, he were on speaking terms with someone who booked clubs or a music journalist—he didn’t know how or where to start, but he did have the idea. He resolved to acquire a kick drum and hi-hat cymbals.

He wasn’t thinking straight. Pam worked days, and he worked nights. On weekdays they saw each other in the evenings, when she got home from RIACD and he hadn’t left yet—generally from about seven to ten—which was enough time to cook or get takeout, fool around, get cleaned up, and go home to sleep and uptown to work, respectively. On weekends they went to shows. He was losing sleep.

When he finally asked her, Pam proffered her habitual disinterested analysis. Of all the factors in their success, she said, there was only one under his control: the debut single, which he should urgently bring to fruition. After it came out, other bands would hound him with demo tapes. For the sake of buttering up a label owner, they would offer Marmalade Sky choice opening gigs.

He replied, “I have the money to put out a single, but no band to put on it. Maybe you can tell me when Marmalade Sky is going to start being non-heinous.”

“Put up a flyer at Kim’s,” she said. “Or an ad in the Voice. Find some band that has a decent cassette and offer them a seven-inch. Or record Joe as a solo project and let him sell it to his three hundred best friends.”

A STRANGE PHENOMENON HAD TAKEN HOLD OF PAM’S CHECKING ACCOUNT SINCE SHE had met Daniel. It was growing. While single, she had not skimped on cover charges, restaurant meals, instruments, electronics, or liquor by the drink, and whenever she couldn’t find her wallet—a regular occurrence—she had bought a new one to fill with new cash. Since meeting him, she had been spending money rather than hemorrhaging it, and she was saving hundreds of dollars a month.

But she didn’t offer to contribute money to Lion’s Den. It was his label, not hers. She had enough business experience to know that it wasn’t a business. It was an art project. Investing in it would contravene the project goal, which was to be Daniel’s art. He wanted autonomy more than he wanted success. He wanted to design record covers, compose press releases, and gain a reputation—among the handful of people who mattered to him—as a man of wit and taste. It had nothing to do with turning $800 into $2,000 in the fullness of time and paying her back.

She didn’t try to explain herself. It was hard to explain. As an art form, rock’s medium was commercial success. The tippy top was its guiding light. Having a band was about being a rock star, a fantasy of ultimate autonomy in which you got paid megabucks to be your worst self.

Meanwhile she was slogging away as a programmer, and he was sitting up all night setting Latin abbreviations in italics. Marmalade Sky might be art for art’s sake, but if it didn’t offer them at least a chance of rock stardom, it wasn’t worth doing.

DANIEL TURNED HER SUGGESTION OVER AND OVER IN HIS MIND. JOE COULD PLAY MORE instruments, and play them better, than all three of them put together. He had no shortage of material. The missing element was the multitrack studio to produce the master tape.

He thought briefly of buying microphones and a four-track and learning to use them—or, more realistically, letting Pam figure them out—but the equipment would cost almost as much as pressing the single, and he’d still have to rent a soundproofed room, free of garbage trucks, car stereos, car alarms, and honking, to record it in, and hire a real producer to oversee the recording and mix it down. Inadvertent technical errors might commit to vinyl the excruciating sound of tape hiss or sixty-cycle hum, making the single too lame to distribute.

He said to himself, “Fuck it,” as people often do when deciding to spend money they don’t have. Joe instantly agreed to record a seven-inch with two three-minute songs in a single afternoon. Daniel booked a studio with an engineer in Hoboken, about three months into the future, and paid a deposit of $200.

PAM’S PERIOD WAS LATE. SHE DIDN’T WANT TO TELL ANYONE JUST HOW LATE. SHE AND Daniel had had unsafe sex more than once. It didn’t feel like it counted, because it was such a small fraction of the total sex they’d had. Okay, she admitted to herself: five weeks late. If her period skipped another week, it would be an open-and-shut case. She would need an abortion.

She knew that if she told Daniel, he’d offer to pay, and there would go Lion’s Den records. She had plenty of money. The only way to get an abortion and keep the single was to tell Daniel nothing. He was already in over his head, buying studio time for a friend when he could have pressed a clean master provided for free by strangers. In any case it might already be too late for a black-market poison-pill-style abortion with smuggled RU-486. It would make her sick all weekend, cramping and bleeding until she swore off sex for life, but at least she wouldn’t have to make time for a clinic. She needed to hurry. She’d have to explain being sick to Daniel. Food poisoning, maybe? She would have to come up with what she ate and where. She didn’t feel like rushing into being sick. Besides, the pregnancy might resolve itself unobtrusively. If she skipped the poison pill and stuck to old-fashioned abortion clinics, she had months left until the third trimester.

All she needed was to keep the information away from Daniel until she got organized and found out where they do second-trimester abortions.

She was a programmer and a punk, versed in the mortification of the flesh, accustomed to treating her body as a sink and a tool. She was young and inexperienced, not in tune with her own biology and nature. She was not thinking straight. She was not thinking at all to speak of. In the corner of D.C. where she grew up, abortions came from Mom. You told your mom you’d been stupid, and she made the relevant appointments. You handed off the thinking to someone else, like a user, not a programmer. Pam didn’t make the appointments.

Right around week ten, she grabbed herself by the scruff of the neck, set herself on her feet, and confronted Daniel. She said, “Daniel, I do not feel good.”

“Is something wrong?”

“I’m pregnant.”

“From me? Hey, I don’t know what you get up to after I go to work! Maybe you turn tricks under the viaduct.”

“It has your eyes.”

“When did you find out?”

“I haven’t found out yet. I keep putting it off. I need to get on the stick and do something about it.”

“Do you not want a baby?” Seeing her shake her head, he asked, “Is it because of the Art Strike?”

“A baby is not creative work!”

“Are you sure you don’t want a baby ever in your life? Most people want one sooner or later. Like me. I always assumed I’d have kids someday.”

“What are you saying?”

“I know we never talked about it, but right now I’m thinking, ‘If not now, when?’ You’d be a total bottom-shelf mother.” (“Bottom-shelf” was positive, since in midwestern refrigerators the top shelf was where you put the cheap beer for guests to notice when they were making themselves at home.)

“And ‘If not me, then whom?’” Pam said.

“Random unwed parenting is standard practice back where I come from! We Christians welcome every new Christian soul.”

“It’s standard everywhere,” she said, “but not for me. And the reason we never talked about it is that we’ve been dating for maybe four months.”

“Obviously,” he said firmly, “abortion makes sense on paper. But I don’t live my life on paper. I would have been happy to know you were pregnant with my child the first time I saw you.”

“You’re just weird,” she said.

“If we have a kid now, we can be out of the woods at forty. I implore you!” He clasped his hands together pleadingly. “Besides, scheduling an abortion is work, but if you just let it ride, you don’t have to do anything. Which I guess is what you’ve been doing. How far along are you?”

“That’s so not true! There’s prenatal care. I have to get sonograms and do Lamaze and La Leche League and turn into my mom. You’re going to love that. Not to mention giving birth and the next eighteen years.”

“It’ll be easy. We’re young and healthy.”

“I should get a pregnancy test,” she said. “Maybe it’s just ovarian cancer.”

THE DISTANCE SHE HAD PUT BETWEEN HERSELF AND HER PARENTS KEPT HER FROM indulging the notion that her child would inherit her traits. It would be its own person, transporting nothing of her into the future. It would be raised differently from the way she had been raised, in a different world. Yet already it seemed to embody personal weaknesses she thought she had learned to repress.

Nausea and latent disquiet, for instance. While still the size of a pushpin, Flora reopened Pam’s eyes to the horror of existence. The Cold War had ended. The peace dividend was pouring in. All the thermonuclear warheads were still there. All, what, ten thousand of them? Twenty thousand? In any case, enough to cook every animal on Earth and leave the survivors licking their eyeballs off their maggoty faces.

Nuclear deterrence was a variant of predestination. Whatever happened to you was your fault, if you hadn’t deterred it. It was life as an endless stud poker game in which folding equaled death. Any day now, life could become The Day of the Triffids, if the Triffids had been defense policy wonks and not evil plants from space. The Triffids in turn reminded her of The Genocides, a novella by Tom Disch in which alien farmers sow the unfortunate Earth with giant sugarcane. Millennia might pass before that happened, but by having a baby, she would be involving herself directly in the tragedy. It was no consolation to recall the survivors’ stubborn capacity for joy or their relief at the conclusion of the harvest. As a willingly pregnant woman, she would at once be placing a long-shot bet that life on Earth would be idyllic forever and condemning a stranger to have its heart broken by her death.

She even worried about the coming Asian century, which she imagined as resembling Karel Čapek’s War with the Newts. Western imperialism was still going strong. It would take fifty years to decline—and there stood the baby, all grown up, undernourished, lopsided from twelve-hour days in the sweatshop, enslaved by happy-go-lucky taskmasters who decorated its dormitory in red and gold. The red tide of slave labor was all around her in Chinatown. She just had to open her eyes to let it engulf her.

She was not getting any work done. She called Video Hit from her office and made Margie wake Daniel so she could say, “There’s no way I’m having this baby. I’m sorry. It’s over.”

“All right. That’s a shame.” After a moment of dead air, he added, “Now I’m sad.”

It crossed her mind that killing Daniel’s baby might not be the most efficient method of removing heartbreak from the world. She said, “In fact, I haven’t made up my mind yet.”

“I wish you were here,” he said. “I’m going crazy. I’ve been thinking about names. What do you think of ‘Irene’? It means ‘peace.’”

“Too nasal for New York. Plus I might not even be pregnant.”

WHEN THEY WERE DONE TALKING, SHE WENT DOWNSTAIRS TO A DRUGSTORE ON JOHN Street. She had put off buying a pregnancy test. After all that time without her period, she wouldn’t have believed a negative result, and a positive result wouldn’t have told her anything she didn’t know, so the parsimonious solution was to skip the test. It was positive.

She didn’t call Daniel. Instead she walked into Yuval’s office, closed the door, and told him that effective immediately she would be disappointing her clients at the insurance companies in Omaha. Flying pregnant was out of the question, due to cosmic gamma rays. When the baby came, she would go on vacation for at least two weeks.

Yuval said, “Mazal tov!” It was not the Ashkenazi one-word MA-zel-tov that means “Congratulations,” but the Sephardic two-word ma-ZAL TOV that means “Good luck with that.”

THAT NIGHT SHE WAITED UNTIL DANIEL WAS JUST ABOUT TO LEAVE FOR WORK TO TELL him. Lying back on his bed, in the shade of the narrow section of wall between his two bright rear windows, she said, “We’re going to have a baby.”

He said, “I feel this is a good time to confess that I love you.”

IN THE MORNING, HE CALLED JOE TO SAY HE COULDN’T AFFORD TO RECORD ANY SONGS, because he would be needing every cent he had to finance his baby. He would lose the $200 deposit on the recording studio, but that was better than paying the balance.

Joe said, “I guess she didn’t tell her parents yet.”

“How do you know?”

“Because you’re worried about money!”

“What do you mean?”

“They’re so rich, they live in a house with a yard and trees!”

As a native of Wisconsin, Daniel didn’t consider a yard and trees proof of affluence. But that night in bed, resting up before work, he did go so far as to ask Pam to explain Joe’s insinuation. He had always assumed she came from a working-class background similar to his own, if only because she hadn’t finished high school. The news about her pregnancy had prompted him to subordinate his artistic ego to the expense of raising a child. Now he wasn’t so sure. Was it conceivable that fatherhood might improve his finances instead of bankrupting him?

She said her dad was a career civil servant with a desk job who planned to retire at sixty. At that point he would commence a second career as a “double dipper,” exploiting his contacts as a defense consultant while drawing half of his former salary. He wasn’t rich, far from it. He made a little under a hundred thousand. In Washington that meant he could have a decent house in a safe part of town, with a wife who didn’t work, living like it was the sixties. He also had—she said this was the problematic part, for her—a clean conscience, though she knew, or could guess, what he’d been involved in during the Vietnam War. She hadn’t talked to him since she left home and had hardly talked to him before that; he was a distant, authoritarian father.

“I know you can do math,” Daniel said. “Do you have any idea what a normal person would have to save to retire on fifty thousand dollars a year for life?”

“They’re not rich. They’re, like, slow-drip rich. They’re middle class.”

“You parents have zero worries!”

“Oh, no. I gave them plenty of wrinkles and gray hair.” It sounded like a boast, so she added, “Or maybe it was napalming old people and kids that gave Dad wrinkles and gray hair. I don’t know and I don’t care.”

“What’s your mom like?”

“I don’t know. The last time I saw her, she was a stingy, controlling bitch.”

“When was that?”

“Nineteen eighty-six.”

“So call her and find out.”

“Call yours first.”

“There’s no danger mine will offer us money. More like secondhand baby clothes from the church basement. Mom will start crocheting a layette set and be done by the time it’s ten months old.”

“Racine’s a safe distance. You can tell them. Though I guess they might want us to be married.”

“I’ll lie. If there’s one thing evangelical Christianity teaches you how to do, it’s lie.”

“You can lie? I can’t say I noticed.”

“It’s not a skill I get much use out of anymore. Christians unearth the innate lying talent of little kids and hone it like a razor. Like when they ask you to raise your hand in youth group if you’ve ever touched yourself, and then raise your hand if you’ve ever touched a girl.”

“So does everybody pick door number two?”

“Hell, no! You’d be getting some girl in trouble. The point is to make you feel guilty and trapped. That’s all. It makes you bond with the other Christians, because you’re all telling the same lies together all the time and everybody knows it. It’s like your platoon did a war crime, so now you’re blood brothers.”

“Did you raise your hand?”

“One time I did raise my hand and say I touched myself, and they acted like I’d come out of the closet. I guess it’s the same thing. My hand touched dick.”

“Can’t have that,” Pam said, touching his dick.

THE INITIAL PLAN WAS FOR HER SOMEHOW TO GET RID OF SIMON, SO THAT SHE AND Daniel and the baby could share the one-and-a-half-bedroom apartment in the doorman building. The size was perfect. They might never have to move again. Daniel’s share would be double his current rent, but that would still leave it in manageable territory.

It was such an elegant solution that Pam presumed Simon would instantly see their side of the question and vanish from her life, if he had any utilitarian model of ethics whatsoever. He refused to budge. He liked his half-bedroom, which allowed him to live in a fancy apartment in an enviable location without paying Manhattan-style rent. Little Jersey wasn’t chichi; it wasn’t Soho or Tribeca; he couldn’t brag that he lived there. It was more of a drinking theme park with shoe stores. But at least it wasn’t a bridge-and-tunnel neighborhood where finding an affordable apartment required reading knowledge of Greek or Polish.

He said he’d be happy to look for a new roommate. With that location, so close to the bars, he could basically run auditions and keep interviewing until he found somebody who’d fuck him. The new roommate was guaranteed, he assured Pam, to be a better fuck than her, because she had never been anything special—too cerebral. He advised her to grow some hair, because it’s sensual for men when women have some hair to grab on to.

He got what he was aiming for. She left in high distress. She couldn’t imagine spending another night under one roof with him. In effect, she evicted herself.

THEY RENTED A U-HAUL TO DO THE MOVE A FEW DAYS LATER. SIMON HELPED CARRY HER dresser and platform bed from the elevator to the truck. He was unwilling to laze around like a pasha in front of Daniel. Daniel in turn noticed Simon’s discomfiture when he packed up Pam’s microwave. “You’re going to miss this,” he prophesied.

“I’ll make sure the new roommate has one,” Simon said.

“Never share an apartment with one person,” she told Daniel as he drove. “Always live in a group situation where the total is an odd number, so you can have majority rule.”

“That’s a discouraging thing to say to somebody you’re about to move in with,” he said. She reminded him that she was two people.

They got married. Of course they got married. The possibility lay there, inducing vertigo, until they did it to get it over with—Daniel for reasons that were primarily romantic, and Pam because marriage made her an ex-Bailey. So they got married, a minor bureaucratic procedure in city hall, downtown, with no special outfits and no party.

Joe waited for them outside the building with a bouquet of wilting rosebuds he had bought at a newsstand and warm champagne that got all over his pants when he opened it. He sang a new song to their happiness, sucked the foam from the bottle, and passed it to Pam. Daniel said, “The bride never drinks at a shotgun wedding,” and drank most of it himself.

IV.

Kill, kill, kill,” Pam breathed. Daniel thought she was referring in her delirium to Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, but she was attempting a Unix shutdown of the birthing process. Sometimes you have to send the “kill” command a good number of times.

It didn’t work. She kept giving birth.

He didn’t leave the room right away. But he had his limits, and one of them was how much pain he could watch her suffer. He tried to stay and even took part in the conversation about attaching a suction cup to the baby’s head. Then he felt dizzy and left to sit down in the lobby. A nurse came out to tell him it was over.

He called his parents collect. They congratulated him sincerely. But as much as they treasured the birth of a new soul predestined for heaven or hell, they couldn’t see it as a special occasion. It was routine, in the circles in which they moved, to welcome babies. They’d been wondering where his babies were since around the time he turned twenty. Flora was their ninth grandchild. They promised to send a check for fifty dollars. They invited him to come home sometime and bring his wife and daughter.

PAM DIDN’T CALL HER PARENTS. SHE DIDN’T WANT TO HEAR HER MOTHER’S OPINION ON anything—not on Daniel, not on her decision-making skills, not on her choice of hospital.

She’d picked one with a low rate of cesarean sections, and she was regretting it. She’d gotten a touch of fever right toward the end, and her ob-gyn suggested she let them induce labor. She ended up with one giant cramp that went on for seven hours until they hauled the baby out with the VE. It looked as though its birth had involved being thrown from a passing truck, the same figurative truck that had run over her pelvis. Its head was blue from the ears up, crowned with a puffy skin yarmulke for which the technical term was “chignon.”

Looking at the baby filled her soul with the fear of death. Within a week she believed that without Daniel, it would not have lived. Without him, she’d be lying facedown drunk on the bed, headphones blasting Black Sabbath. He kept it warm, dry, and loved and brought it to her to feed.

After two weeks, to her astonishment, she bounced back. The trauma faded. She regained her appetite. She saw that the baby was cuter than she’d remembered. It looked to her less like a scrap of meat torn from her insides and more like a warm, dry, fluffy little human.

She asked Daniel to take a look at her vagina and see whether it too was recognizable as human. She was afraid to use a hand mirror, because it felt like it was in shreds. He said, “Babe, it’s literally identical. Nothing’s changed.”

She looked at it herself and found that he was right. She cherished the hope that she might one day be herself again.

SHE STAYED HOME FROM RIACD TO RECOVER. BABY FLORA KEPT GETTING CUTER AND cuter. Joe came over to inspect her and declared her the cutest baby who ever lived, explicitly praising her purple-and-green head.

She was in fact a cute baby, after the swelling went down. She had Daniel’s tan skin, quite striking with Pam’s blue eyes.

He didn’t get time off from the law firm for having fathered a child. He didn’t even get a cigar or a pat on the back, since he had nothing to gain by telling them about it. Pam had better health insurance, and he felt that he looked to outsiders like an irresponsible character and nothing more: nine months from slum-dwelling loser to slum-dwelling loser dad.

She cared for the baby at the odd times when it wanted to be cared for, slept during the strange hours it saw fit to sleep, sat patiently through the eerie work routine of the rented breast pump, and let him pick up the slack. He was happy when holding Flora and a bottle, happiest when carrying her around the neighborhood hidden in a sling tied to his chest, and seriously indispensable when it came to cleaning, laundry, and shopping.

The medium-term plan was for her to work days while he went on working nights, so that someone was always with Flora. Six weeks after giving birth, she pumped three bottles full of milk and stumbled off to RIACD. Promptly the baby-maintenance scheme collapsed, and not because Daniel wasn’t up to the task. Without napping during the day, Pam couldn’t sleep enough to work. Maybe there are jobs you can do in your sleep, but fixing manual garbage collection in an undocumented big ball of mud isn’t one of them. She went back to work on a Wednesday, and by the following Wednesday it was clear that something had to change. She didn’t want to be the consultant who passes for a profit center because he has so many billable hours, at least until his clients bail.

Thursday morning she called in sick, pumped extra, put in earplugs, and asked Daniel not to wake her until she woke up on her own.

That happened around noon. When the vision came, she opened her eyes and determined that he was next to her in bed, with Flora sprawled naked on his bare chest. She nudged him out of a doze and said, “Daniel. I found a solution.”

“Pray tell.”

“You get a day job, and we hire a babysitter.”

He sat upright, clutching Flora close, and said, “No, no, no.”

“Why not?”

“I am not letting some migrant worker take it out on my daughter how much she misses her kids. We don’t have anyplace to put a Dutch au pair, as much as I’d enjoy hosting one, and we can’t afford a qualified babysitter. We’d have to put her in day care, and there’s no way on God’s earth. Forget it.”

“I meant Joe.”

“Joe,” Daniel said. “Isn’t he, I don’t know, not the most literate—”

“I know she’s your daughter and everything, but she’s also a newborn. She can communicate on his level until she’s at least six.”

“What makes you think he’d do it?”

“He has some okay shifts, but he averages, like, five dollars an hour. We offer him seven, and bingo.”

“No way,” Daniel said. “He trusts everybody. If somebody came up to him on the street and asked if they could hold her, he’d just hand her over.”

“People will think he’s the dad. If I were going to fence a baby, or even liberate it for my own use, would I go after the dad? Anyway, you just invented that crime, because I’ve never heard of it—playground-based baby trafficking. Come on. People around here keep an eye out for each other. You know what they say. It takes a village to raise a child.”

“It takes a parent to raise a child. It takes a village to raise a stray cat. Joe is too trusting to be responsible for anybody.”

“Look who’s talking, the man who wants to hire a stranger! At least he’s a known quantity. And he’ll say yes, because he worships her.”

In the evening they went to see him, bearing Chinese takeout. He didn’t hesitate. Chief among the people he trusted was himself. If someone had offered him a job running the trading desk at Goldman Sachs, he would have taken that too.

He got so excited about his new opportunity that they had to remind him of the existence of the coffee shop. He said he was sure no one there would mind if he missed some shifts, and whenever he was done babysitting, he could pick up where he left off. For all they knew, he was right.

He did have a short attention span, but as Pam said, that might be an advantage. Babies have ways of getting themselves noticed. Joe’s attention span might equip him with unusual patience, by keeping him from noticing that it was the same shriek over and over.

SHE CALLED IN SICK AGAIN ON FRIDAY, AND HE CAME OVER FOR A TRIAL RUN, ARRIVING at nine in the morning. She grabbed a bottle of breast milk from the fridge and warmed it up in the microwave. After she had arranged him feeding Flora, she lay down on the couch for a nap. She didn’t want to disturb Daniel, who was asleep on the bed, having gotten home from work at seven.

Four hours later, she woke up. Joe was holding Flora and a fresh bottle, still sitting at the kitchen table. He said, “I changed her diaper.”

“I’m sorry. I forgot to show you how.”

“No problem. It’s easy, compared to regular underpants. There’s no front and back!”

Nodding affirmatively, she rushed to the bathroom, because she was having this phase where the desire to pee and peeing were sort of the same thing. Through the door, she could hear him singing a blues song to Flora:

Drink another bottle, it’s almost two o’clock

I said drink another bottle, baby, it’s almost two o’clock

You been drinking all this morning and I’ll never let you stop

On the kitchen table, squirming on her back

I said baby’s on the kitchen table, squirming on her back

I’m going to take her little pants off and show her where it’s at

Daniel turned over in bed and said, “Your song is deeply disturbing.”

“The last line needs work,” Joe said. “In blues songs ‘back’ always rhymes with ‘heart attack.’ Maybe ‘wipe her dirty crack.’”

“I think with regard to our professional relationship there should be an ironclad rule,” Daniel said. “No songs about my daughter.”

THEIR ONE CONCESSION TO JOE’S ECCENTRICITIES WAS THE PURCHASE OF A BABY carrier. Pam called strollers “traffic testers,” because of the way caregivers in New York shoved them into the street to stop the cars. They had been transporting Flora in a ten-foot-long carrying cloth that circled the torso multiple times, with an X in back and another X in front, finishing with a knot you had to tie behind your own back. Joe’s attempt to put it on might have worked as a vaudeville routine. For him they invested in a BabyBjörn. They didn’t say it aloud, but they were both ever so slightly concerned that he might forget Flora somewhere if she weren’t firmly attached to his body.

Daniel quit his night job, transitioned to Pam’s health insurance, and signed on with a temp agency in the financial district. The hours would be unpredictable, but the pay was higher than for full-time work—eighteen dollars an hour. Within a week, he had an assignment that would last a year, sitting in for an administrative assistant on maternity leave at an employee benefits consulting firm way downtown, in windy maritime Manhattan, close to Battery Park.

His new colleagues expected almost nothing from him. They seemed thrilled that he knew how to alphabetize. They came to him for help printing spreadsheets.

After work he usually took the handoff, since Pam worked later. In the morning, he headed downtown while she waited for Joe.

The familial stress level declined to near zero. Flora continued to set new benchmarks for infant cuteness. By the time she was six months old, Pam, Daniel, and Joe were in agreement that for her to get any cuter would violate natural law. Her hair had come in wavy and almost black. Her eyes were dark blue. Her face was chubby as a peach.

LIKE DANIEL, JOE TOOK HER ON LONG WALKS STRAPPED TO HIS CHEST. HE HIT ALL THE record stores at least once a week. His former coworkers at the coffee shop fawned like grandparents.

One afternoon he came home and put her on the changing table just as his beeper went off in the pocket of his coat. He left her to go to the coatrack. He was feeling around for the pager’s hard surface in a tangle of candy wrappers when he heard a thump. She was lying on the floor on her side, making a high-pitched groaning noise.

He ran downstairs to call Pam, who had called his beeper. He said, “While I was getting the beeper, Flora fell on the floor! I think she hurt herself!”

“Where are you?”

“Downstairs.”

“Go back up and get her. Hail a cab to the emergency room at New York Downtown right away. I’ll meet you there. Okay?”

“Her arm looked weird.”

“Push her sideways into a box so you don’t have to change her position. Pad it with blankets. I’ll see you at Downtown Hospital. Okay?”

She didn’t call Daniel because she had a bad feeling about what he might say. He confirmed her fears that evening when he arrived home to see Flora’s elbow wrapped in blue bandaging. It was sprained. Joe had thought it was broken because he didn’t really do shapes. Daniel said they couldn’t go on letting a retard care for their child. He stopped himself and added, “He’s not retarded. Of course not. I just mean—”

“What did he do differently from anybody else?” Pam demanded to know. “Do you really think there’s any babysitter in the world that wouldn’t have happened to? She rolled over. There’s a first time for everything. And he was flawless. He charmed his way into pediatric orthopedic surgery before I could even get down there. She was fixed before I even caught up with them. She’s fine!”

“She has a monster bandage,” Daniel said. “What if she’d been bleeding?”

“What do we have to do, hire a registered nurse? I know Joe couldn’t splint a broken arm to save his life, and the box he put her in was way too big. But he knew something was wrong, and he got her to the hospital. That’s one of the reasons to live in Manhattan. It’s never far to the best medical care in the world.”

“He put her in a box?”

“I told him to. I don’t know. When an animal’s hurt, the most important thing is to get them to the vet without moving their spine, so you slide them onto something stiff like cardboard.”

“Oh, my God,” Daniel said. “She could have had a spinal injury, and you told him to pick her up and put her in a box!”

“Well, he couldn’t just leave her there and call an ambulance. That would take forever.”

“She might have been—I can’t even say it—”

“What?” Pam protested. She knew what he was getting at. Her throat seized up. “I didn’t think of that,” she said. “I can’t even think about it if I try.” It was true. No amount of effort could make her imagine Flora with a broken neck or back. It seemed like a sin, and tempting a lifetime’s bad luck, to think about it, much less say it.

“We’re getting rid of that table,” Daniel said. “We don’t need her airborne. There are no changing tables in nature.” She whimpered in her crib, and he picked her up. “Baby Flora, the floor baby. Born to be in contact with the earth.”

HE RESERVED THE HOBOKEN STUDIO AGAIN, THIS TIME FOR A FULL DAY, INCLUDING grudging supervision from a grouchy engineer, and recorded two Joe Harris tracks: an original entitled “Hold the Key” and a cover of “American Woman” by the Guess Who.

“Hold the Key” was taken straight from life. “Hold the key, kill the light, lock the door, lock it twice, and go down …” It had originated as a mnemonic device for leaving his own apartment, but in Daniel’s opinion it could become a stoner anthem. He imagined crowds at festivals singing it, swaying, holding hands.

Joe said “American Woman” was easy to play and fun to sing, and he wasn’t wrong. No one, hearing that recording, could have denied that he could warble like Mariah Carey and wail like Bono. Only the oddness of his ambitions marked him as an indie eccentric rather than a mainstream poseur.

Daniel didn’t waste money on a printed sleeve for the seven-inch, knowing it was the glued-on label that mattered. He used xeroxed clip art and a free vector graphics program (CorelDraw) to make the Lion’s Den logo. It showed a stylized lioness holding a large flower, something like a zinnia, in its crossed forelegs, with “Lion’s Den” in sixties-style art nouveau script. He put the preponderance of his investment into sound quality, paying double for heavy vinyl mastered at forty-five revolutions per minute to be shipped from England. He ordered one thousand of the singles, an insanely optimistic number, but Joe had committed to playing as many shows as it took to unload them, even if it took him the rest of his life. Daniel estimated twenty years.

JOE WAS IN THE LOFT ON CHRYSTIE STREET WITH FLORA WHEN THE UPS MAN ARRIVED with the fourteen stunningly heavy boxes. Victor helped him carry them up the stairs. Joe put one on the stereo, cranked it, and danced. It was immediately clear to him what he needed to do. He fed and changed Flora, strapped her to his chest, tucked twenty-five singles into his messenger bag, and marched off to the Abyssinian Coffee Shop.

He bestowed singles on all those who currently had shifts and stacked five more by the register for the remaining employees to pick up. With one exception, a pothead prep cook whose shift was ending, the staff added their gifts to the stack, from which two customers removed six singles before a homeless hoarder absconded with the rest.

His next stop was Tower Records. He asked to speak to a manager and explained that he was Joe Harris, seeking distribution for his new single, out now on Lion’s Den. He introduced Flora, turning and lifting a corner of her blanket to show the manager her sleeping face. He talked too much and too loudly. He continued talking after the manager turned away. He was allowed to leave two singles. He left the store against traffic, through the entrance, turning around to wave goodbye.

He headed westward toward NYU’s radio station. Failing to get past the security guard, he was told to try the U.S. Mail. At select bars and nightclubs, he pressed the single on whoever answered the door—in one case, a custodian holding a mop.

SHORTLY AFTER HE LEFT TOWER RECORDS, A JUNIOR EMPLOYEE WHO HAD WITNESSED the proceedings asked the manager if she could please, please have the singles before he threw them away. He said of course not; he would never throw them away, much less give them to her. They were the property of Tower Records, to be listened to in due time by the staff member responsible for selecting indie records for distribution.

She knew how many supplicants he had—dozens every day. She said, “At least let me listen to it. You have to!” She clasped her hands and bounced to indicate pleading.

“Fine,” he said, holding out both seven-inches. “Take them.”

“I don’t want to keep them,” she said. “I want us to distribute it, if it’s any good. I want to hear it!”

“Why?”

“Because that guy was so cute, like an angel. Did you see his eyes? They were like stars!”

“Take them,” the manager said, disgusted.

She put one in her messenger bag and brought one to the frat boy working the customer service desk.

Forty-five minutes later, after his ironic Anita Baker compilation tape was done playing, the store filled with a fresh and compelling sound. Joe had recorded all the A side’s instrumental tracks on bass. Open strings played the part of Neil Young and Crazy Horse bass. High fretting was Phil Lesh meets the Congos bass. Fuzzy bass, courtesy of Pam’s distortion pedal, stepped in after the bridge to play a solo. All the tracks were doubled, because he liked playing them so much. The sound was low fidelity, but the tune rocked like a cradle rocking, like someone casually pitching a melody from hand to hand, and he sang in a tormented voice about something it was hard not to take for loneliness. The chorus was a three-part harmonic cadence on the repeated word “down,” careful and precise as a madrigal.

Annoyed by the challenge to his preconceptions, the customer service frat boy flipped it to hear the B side. Massive riffage blasted from the store’s speakers while the same voice cried out, “American woman!” The vocals were lower in the mix than on “Hold the Key” and conveyed a note of pain definitely lacking in the original. It sounded as if the American woman really had the singer cornered this time. It was less a succession of throwaway insults than a cry for help. The bass recalled live Yes or King Crimson, with the kind of distortion that peels paint off distant walls.

“I’m in love,” the stock girl said. “Do you think that was his baby?”

“It definitely wasn’t his single,” the frat boy replied. “That guy was a retard. That’s who the breeders are. Not smart people. That’s why we’re devolving.”

DANIEL BOUGHT FACTSHEET FIVE, THE FANZINE THAT CATALOGED FANZINES, AND PAGED through it, noting down the names and addresses of likely sounding targets. First he sent promo singles to riot grrrly magazines such as Bust and Chickfactor. (Post-punk women had exchanged duct tape on their nipples for heels and cocktail dresses without compromising their ironic focus on objectification by the male gaze and the appropriation of epithets intended to belittle and demean them.) Likewise he mailed promos to painfully masculine publications such as Thicker and the Probe. He tried for attention from mass-market monthlies with nationwide distribution (Spin, Alternative Press) and tabloid weeklies (Village Voice, City Paper), which got five singles each, instead of one, on account of their big staffs.

He truly didn’t expect any competent reviewers to approve the single by this means, but it was all he had. Music being a matter of taste, and the urge to help a struggling artist rare, he counted on wasting hundreds of dollars in postage alone in return, if he got lucky, for three or four inattentive reviews.

After about two months, he had his first responses: amiable paragraphs in modest publications—five-by-eight xeroxed, stapled, folded fanzines with circulations in the hundreds—all of which said that the single was “gorgeous.” That was the adjective du jour. In the age of grunge, anything that didn’t sound like a riding lawnmower was gorgeous. Several of the reviews arrived with demo cassettes from the reviewers’ bands. The one he liked best sounded like lawnmowers ridden by nymphets playing banjos, but he didn’t have the money to put out another single. Every time a review arrived, he cut it out with scissors and pasted it to the letter-sized sheet of paper he called the “press kit.”

JOE LACKED THE ROCK STAR’S STANDARD NEUROSES. HE FELT NO BASELESS CONVICTION that he was a genius. He had never needed illusions to feel good about himself, and his illusions had never been exposed. Unencumbered by the guilty suspicion that he was secretly a no-talent impostor, he had zero inhibitions about telling the world. Soon hundreds of people with no interest in music and less inclination to buy seven-inch singles were quite pointlessly aware that he had one out. The mail carriers knew it, as did the transvestite from Essex Street with the Yorkies, the girl who made the egg creams on First Avenue, the schizophrenic who sat on the discarded end table next to the BMT entrance on Houston, et cetera.

He liked magazines and he liked helping Daniel, so whenever he came near it, he stopped into See Hear, a large alternative newsstand in the East Village that specialized in music fanzines. He leafed through every magazine—dozens of new issues each week—checking each one under H and J to make sure they didn’t miss a review of his work. So it was he who found the notice in Forced Exposure.

Joe Harris. “Hold the Key” b/w “American Woman” 7" (Lion’s Den). Ruins meets Badfinger in a jar of Gerber’s. Mark my words: You don’t need to hear this, and whoever mic’d the drums on it should die facedown in a pile of dog shit with an AIDS-infected needle up his ass.

It was the first time he had seen a review before Daniel did. He wasn’t sure what to think. It was troubling enough that he didn’t even point to it and say, “Look! Forced Exposure reviewed my record!” to the cashier when he paid for it. He paid and left, walking with studied briskness toward Chrystie Street, repeating key phrases such as “facedown in a pile of dog shit” to himself with his first-ever inklings of self-doubt.

Daniel didn’t mind being awakened from a Saturday afternoon nap (Pam was out clothes shopping) to read it. A review in Forced Exposure was exciting to him.

“Admittedly hard to parse,” he said, “but definitely positive. Ruins is good.” Ruins was a Japanese improvising bass and percussion duo widely regarded in avant-garde circles as ultimate rock gods. “Badfinger means British invasion without the invasion. They’re saying it’s not bluesy.”

“And Gerber’s?” Joe protested. “That’s baby food!”

“They’re saying you can’t play guitar.”

“But I don’t play guitar, or drums either!”

“They’re making a funny about the drums.” Daniel turned to the front of the magazine and glanced through the features. “Oh, look. Here’s a sex scene between you and Thurston Moore.”

“A what?”

Daniel was too busy laughing to answer right away. “It’s a fake Sonic Youth tour diary. He loses his virginity to you in the ladies’ room at Wetlands. Definitely do not read this. They’re not trying to pluck you from obscurity, like they do with crappy Swedish speed metal. It’s like they think you’re already famous.”

Joe perused the tour diary entry. “‘The probing, darting fist of it-boy Joe Harris,’” he read aloud. “I’m the ‘it-boy’!”

“You’re the it-boy,” Daniel said. “High five.”

He clipped the one-paragraph review and added it to the press kit, unobtrusively, at the bottom, with his official media relations glue stick.

V.

Daniel had assumed that Joe’s first gigs would be open-mic nights at anti-folk clubs on Ludlow, squaring off against stoned women in fringed vests. But given the excellent publicity, he felt emboldened to try booking him into a rock club. It could happen. Most new artists had cassette demos and no press. Joe had a seven-inch forty-five and something approaching sanctification from Forced Exposure.

The first step was audition night at CBGB, as much as Pam dreaded the idea of ever seeing the place again. Her first reaction was an uncharacteristically whiny “Do I have to go?” She offered to stay home with Flora. When Daniel said he would buy her sunglasses and a floppy hat, she realized that she was being needlessly vain. No one would connect a backbencher holding a baby in Joe’s entourage with the pitiful diva of the Diaphragms.

Since CBGB bought a weekly ad in the Village Voice to list the auditioning bands, Joe’s name appeared in the paper. Dozens of people in New York City were regular readers of both the Voice and Forced Exposure.

“Dozens” doesn’t sound like a lot, but the farther you got from New York, the more attention was paid to media, which, after all, serve to “mediate” between the individual and lived experience. Indie rock fans who couldn’t afford basic cable were more likely to have heard of Slint than Nirvana.

As a result, the show wasn’t entirely empty. The girl who had made off with Joe’s singles from Tower Records—ensuring that Tower would never become his distributor—was there, accompanied by the friend on whom she’d pressed her spare single. They wore vintage flower-print housecoats over turtlenecks and thick wool tights and were drinking beer. When Joe took the stage, they yelled, “Hold the key! Hold the key!” Flora lay in Pam’s arms, earplugs deep in her ears, swaying with the beat. Joe played through two amps—his own new bass rig and Pam’s Marshall—with a Whirlwind splitter to divide the signal. The effects loop on the bass amp ran through her MXR distortion. The guitar amp, with the reverb turned way up and the treble way down, was fed through her Foxx fuzz-wah. Joe’s voice and the grinding of his valiant Hartke cabinet’s indestructible aluminum speaker cones cut through the haze of feedback echoing from the tortured Marshall, and he sang all his finest nonsense as though his soul were on fire. Instead of “American Woman,” he closed with “Roll with the Changes” by REO Speedwagon.

When he was done, the manager’s comment to Daniel was “Bookable. Get him a band.”

Meanwhile, the girl from Tower approached Pam and said, “Your baby is so cute, I can’t stand it!”

“Thanks,” Pam said.

“Do you know Joe Harris? It looked to us like maybe you know him.”

“We’re friends.”

“He’s so talented. Does he—does he—” Her friend elbowed her, and she rephrased her question. “Are you his wife?”

“I don’t think he’s ever had a girlfriend in his life,” Pam said. Seeing their disappointment, she added, “He’s not gay. Just shy.” She smiled at the absurdity of what she’d just said. Girls were shy of Joe, shying away soon after he opened his mouth to speak. Elevation onto the stage of CBGB, with well-rehearsed lyrics to sing at high volume, must have enhanced his sex appeal.

His new number one fan took the smile as reassurance. She giggled, not even trying to hide her relief, while her friend squealed at her, “I told you that wasn’t his baby!”

“I should introduce you,” Pam said. “He’s coming over now.”

The girls drew away to regroup. Joe hugged Pam, spoke with her briefly, and turned to stare at them both. They ran out of the club.

TO DANIEL’S SURPRISE, MAXWELL’S BOOKED JOE. HE WOULD HAVE BEEN LESS SURPRISED if he had seen the single up on the wall at Pier Platters, priced at twelve dollars, classed as a limited-edition rarity because he still hadn’t found a distributor.

Maxwell’s was a club at the far end of Hoboken, a full nautical mile away from the PATH train to Manhattan, specializing in new and obscure acts. Some were obscure without being new—Daniel had seen Sun Ra there not long before his death—but most were both. The club invited Joe to open for a band that was opening for a band that was opening for a band that was opening for the Honeymoon Killers.

Joe asked Pam to sit in on guitar. Drums could stay optional if he made the bass loud enough, but someone had to fill the chinks in his crushing wall of sound, or so he said. The debate went back and forth until her final stern refusal. She wasn’t feeling very rock and roll—she weighed six pounds more than before she got pregnant—but her main reason was Joe’s sound. On the single it was refreshingly open and airy, more like an arbor than a wall. A million indie rock bands (or what seemed like a million to her, meaning several, all from the Pacific Northwest) featured guitars screaming high over bellowing male voices. Only Joe saved that Fender Jaguar role for himself. His vocals soared over the percussive rumbling like Grace Slick’s on “White Rabbit.” If it took some electronics to make it work live, so be it.

That was her view, and Daniel more or less agreed, though he would have liked to see her onstage with Joe. She was female and women were trendy. But he wasn’t about to force it. As she said, guitar didn’t fit with what Joe was doing. The sound of the single seemed to them an accident of fate, but it was an accident they liked. In the silence of his brain, Daniel called it “bliss-core.” He didn’t plan to put that in a press release, though. A new set of accidents could change it at any moment.

THE SOUND CHECK AT MAXWELL’S WENT FINE, WITH THE USUAL EXCEPTIONS FOR strangers being irritated by Joe. He was delighted and excited by everyone and everything. He forgot to plug in his bass and sang half a song a cappella, proving once and for all that he didn’t think the instrumentation much mattered. When Daniel yelled, “Plug in!” he found the end of the cable, shoved it into his bass, and finished the song in a storm of arpeggios. He looked ebullient about being so much louder than before. The soundman said he was meshuga, but he didn’t seem to mean it in a bad way.

The hall wasn’t full for his set, but there were people in attendance. Pam and Daniel could see that many were the proper kind—indie rock fans, as indicated by their pocket tees in dark colors, unbuttoned plaid flannel shirts worn as jackets, and vintage PF Flyers or comparable footwear. Also present were two men of a dubious sort. “Major label scouts,” Pam hissed. They were dressed in sport coats and talked to each other in loud voices throughout Joe’s opening number. She heard one of them call his music “rad,” as if “rad” were current slang.

Carrying Flora, she went to stand in front of them. Every time they moved, she moved. When they eyed the rear of the club, plainly considering sitting down on the big PA speakers stored there, she went to those same speakers to change Flora’s diaper. Seeing the diaper from the inside, the scouts decamped to the bar.

A less streetwise musician might not have chased major label scouts away from Joe. But indie rock had arisen from desperate necessity, to offer artists an alternative to exploitation. The recording industry had once paid musicians flat fees. The contemporary way to stiff them while cultivating an appearance of generosity was to charge publicity against their royalties. Every video, tour bus, and hotel room came straight out of the artist’s pocket. Long before peer-to-peer file sharing and online streaming, a star could have big hits and be broke.

As Joe was starting his last song, Pam saw the cute girl from CBGB. She was alone, rushed and hectic, still wearing her coat. She had arrived when his set was nearly done. Pam could see the disappointment in her face. She strolled over. The girl noticed her with relief. She mimed looking at her watch and turned up her hands helplessly. She knew she was late. When the song was over, and she was done clapping and whooping and yelling “Encore!” and “Hold the key!” she turned to Pam and said, “I had to find someone to cover the shift after mine. That’s why I’m late.”

“What’s your name?”

“Eloise.”

“No way.”

The girl closed her eyes in deep embarrassment and clenched her fists, and Pam realized belatedly that she was shy. Eloise fled toward the stage, where Joe was launching into his encore, “Splash 1” by the 13th Floor Elevators. He saw her and stared at her. He sang the entire song looking into her eyes.

The rock repertoire includes several songs an informed person might call romantic, such as “God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys, but few can compete with “Splash,” the work of a mystic at the height of his powers. Soon after its composition, those powers defeated Roky Erickson, and he turned his genius to the service of the devil and the Martian voice in his head, but in “Splash” he was as yet untainted.

It was too much for Eloise. When Joe had finished emoting, she had to be alone. She ceased from clapping and hid in the bathroom to fix her face. The ladies’ room at Maxwell’s was a single. Because the mirror occupied the same space as the toilet bowl, a person could miss an entire set waiting in line. There she stood at the mirror and found herself wanting. She looked in vain for the neon splashing from her eyes.

Pam gave up looking for her and joined the queue. When Eloise finally came out, wincing at the sight of her, Pam hesitated briefly. She wanted to introduce her to Joe. She thought it might be of significant positive import for Joe’s future. But she had to pee, so she stayed in line. By the time she emerged, Eloise was gone.

IN THE TAXI GOING HOME, SHE SAID TO JOE, “THAT CUTE GIRL INTRODUCED HERSELF TO me. Her name is Eloise. I think she likes you.”

“I’m the original bitch magnet,” Joe said.

“What cute girl?” Daniel asked.

“The Joe Harris fan club. She came in for the last two songs and stared at him in a trance, like she’s from that tract Hippies, Hindus and Rock & Roll. Short brown hair, flowered dress?”

“Earth to Pam,” Daniel said. “‘Cute’ means sexy, not frumpy.”

“Frumpy and dumpy,” Joe said. “When a guy says ‘cute,’ he means a model. Like you.”

“I am not a model!”

“You’re skinny and you have clothes like a model.”

“Joe, I swear to you, man, she’s Trixie and you’re Speed Racer. She’s your one true love.”

“I wouldn’t fuck her for practice!”

“Who taught you to talk like that?”

“He’s quoting me,” Daniel said. “I was being ironic.”

“What the fuck, Daniel! Why pick on Eloise?”

“She’s the scenester babe I always thought I would end up with. She’s my bête noire, man.”

“I want to be your bête noire man,” Joe sang, to the tune of “Whole Lotta Love.”

THE FAMILY WENT TO RACINE FOR CHRISTMAS. PAM GAINED WEIGHT AND UNDERSTOOD why Daniel was so tall. They stayed at a motel because there wasn’t room in the house for five families of giants, but they ate with his parents. Every meal was like the miracle of the loaves and the fishes. Pie pans were in constant rotation. Meat from the deep freeze in the basement was thawing continuously on every countertop.

At first there was no conflict or even especial curiosity about her. No one had time to listen to anything she said. They sized her up and decided that she required a succession of big, bland meals. They lauded the chubbiness of Flora. Daniel talked with his relatives about people and places she had never heard of. It was hard to keep track, even after he explained. Only one topic addressed her directly. At the midday meal on Christmas Eve, Daniel’s much older sister Debra advanced the theory that Princess Stéphanie of Monaco had a haircut similar to hers.

That evening, she begged to be excused from going to church.

“Are you sick?” Daniel’s mother asked.

Stupidly, she didn’t say yes. She said instead that she wasn’t a Christian, and technically neither was Flora, because she hadn’t been christened, so if nobody minded they would just go on back to the motel and rest up.

A doctrinal dispute erupted that shocked even Daniel. He had managed to put out of his mind how seriously his family took religion. They thought Pam’s notion of infant baptism was sacrilege and that her ungrateful soul was bound for hell. Soon nine adults were tag-teaming her to yell about Jesus, drunk on Baileys and a blueberry dessert wine they pretended was festive rather than alcoholic. Flora was crying and they didn’t care, because all the children were crying.

No non-Christian person had ever been invited to their home before. Even Daniel had originally appeared uninvited, so to speak. Nobody ever asked him what he believed, and he usually knew better than to talk about it. On this occasion, the role model provided by Pam herself—a person whose openness with her parents had produced a rupture she clearly felt was preferable to living a lie, or at least preferable to going to church—prompted him to come to her defense with solidarity. He said, “I don’t believe in God or Jesus either, but it doesn’t matter!”

FOR PRESENTS, HE HAD BOUGHT EVERYONE IN HIS FAMILY SOME INDIVIDUALIZED ITEM of exotic Asian strangeness from Chinatown, a figurine or odd snack. He and Pam were due to receive many socks and fruitcakes, and Flora was getting hand-knit baby booties.

On Christmas morning, he took the Asian presents to his parents’ front porch and tried to negotiate. It became clear that alone, without Pam and Flora—without evidence that he had his disobedient wife well in hand—he would not be welcomed, and that they would credit no personal profession of his faith. He would have to attend church with them and set an example by coming forward to be saved.

His heart sank because he knew he would never do it. Seeing that he was expected to be a patriarch, to rule over Pam, alienated him as nothing ever had before.

Flora didn’t care about missing Christmas. She wasn’t even two yet, nor entirely clear on which of those strangers had been Grandma and Grandpa.

Their return flight was postponed by thirty hours due to typical Wisconsin winter weather. The likelihood that they would return for a second holiday season in Racine diminished to a vanishing smallness.

JOE’S NEXT SHOW WAS BY INVITATION OF SIMON, WHO HAD STUMBLED INTO ENVIABLE gigs reviewing classic rock LPs for the new website Amazon and heavy metal for the magazine Thrasher. Dumb luck and connections had lent him the aura of success, and some indie rock band was trying to siphon it off by getting him to book opening acts for their CD release party at a storefront on Stanton Street called House of Candles.

The band members had their own label, the way Joe had Lion’s Den, so they had no label-mates to pack the bill with. They were from Albany, so they had no fan base in tow except their girlfriends. They were paying rent for the venue, so they wanted bands with social circles, but not party bands that would steal the show.

Being something of an asshole, Simon invited bands that would help cement his professional position as a critic. He added Joe as an afterthought, to make sure Pam knew he could have booked Marmalade Sky and didn’t. He told the indie rock band that Joe was an outsider singer-songwriter with a loyal following, which was true.

She stayed home with Flora. Joe was promised no share of the door but granted permission to sell merchandise. Simon encouraged him to skip the sound check, because he couldn’t have cared less how he sounded. Thus Joe and Daniel didn’t head over until eight o’clock, as the first band was starting. Daniel carried twenty-eight singles in a box labeled “$3.”

Daniel set it down on a table in the back and looked around for Eloise. But she never showed that night, because there had been no publicity for anyone but the headliners. He stayed near the merchandise to make sure no one stole it.

Joe sat in the front row, bass on his lap, playing along quietly with the opening act, billed as Broad Spectrum. It consisted of a woman singer, a scared-looking boy playing tenor recorder, a sequencer that wasn’t working right, and a keyboard player holding a tambourine. The keyboardist was responsible for the sequencer. She kept jabbing at it, shaking the tambourine at random, and alternating between two chords on the keyboard with her left hand. You could hear that she was right-handed. The woodwind looked frustrated, trying for low notes and getting overtones. The singer’s dance moves kept taking her away from the microphone. Her voice could be heard when she stood still for the chorus, but it remained incomprehensible, because she cupped the mic with both hands, looking very earnest and sexy while it was practically inside her mouth and kept feeding back. The group performed as though they not only hadn’t rehearsed, but had won the gig in a raffle, earlier in the day, before they founded the band.

After their first number subsided, the singer nudged the keyboardist aside and fiddled with the sequencer. The setup began to play “Sussudio” by Phil Collins. She returned to the mic, glared at Joe for singing along, and said, “It’s a borrowed keyboard. Give us a minute.” Three minutes later, the band continued its set with four-finger organ, tambourine duties devolving on the singer. The woodwind took a rest. The singer’s yawping teetered on the edge of feedback until Simon, the soundman, rendered the mic inaudible. The whole thing was pathetic, and when it was done, everybody clapped for a long time.

Daniel thought, The name kind of fits, assuming they meant “broad” as in “woman” and the autism “spectrum.” Also, in his opinion, their conceptual project didn’t stand a chance against the art of music. Joe had craft, not a concept. He could hear himself play—he could really listen—and when he wasn’t sounding good, he took steps to fix it.

He played three numbers, rocking out to his own conception of beauty, alone and weird. The applause was cursory, because there was no one in the audience but members and friends of Broad Spectrum. He sat back down in his seat in the front. An older but not repulsive man in standard-issue indie rock garb (Black Watch plaid shirt, Cubs cap) sat down next to him, introduced himself as Eric, handed over a business card, and said, “Call me if you’re interested.” Joe scampered to the rear, breathlessly waving the card, to tell Daniel he’d been scouted by Matador.

Matador was an important indie record label, Joe’s favorite in all of New York next to 4AD. It turned out that Broad Spectrum was made up of people who had office jobs there.

Daniel had come to feel gloomy about distributing the single. If Joe got a contract with Matador, his work was done. The remaining singles would sell themselves. He said, “That’s awesome!”

He knew that Matador was doing some kind of dance with Atlantic—an unequal partnership or a not quite acquisition—the idea being that collaboration would offer artists all the advantages of a major label with none of the degradation. What the reality was, he didn’t know, but the company itself was respectable: it possessed bourgeois realness; it had offices in Manhattan and fine and noble founders, and it distributed its wares to the farthest corners of the earth. As for signing with Matador, there was little Joe could have possibly done that was more likely to get him fair treatment and decent money.

Daniel sold two singles that evening and gave away five to people who said they were reviewers for magazines whose existence he doubted, strengthening his resolve to nudge Joe from the indie rock gift economy into the big time. He offered to call Eric for him the next day.

WITHIN A WEEK JOE AND SOME GUY NAMED RANDY HAD SIGNED A MEMORANDUM OF understanding drawn up in ballpoint pen on a steno pad at a beer bar on Sixth Avenue. Joe signed it in the presence of Daniel—not in an official capacity; his role as Joe’s label executive and manager was a combination hobby and joke—who saw nothing to criticize. Somebody somewhere had skipped Joe right over Matador and signed him to Atlantic, with an advance of $80,000 for a single LP. He might take home only $10,000 after taxes, recording, and publicity, yet spending even $10,000 was likely to be fun for him. On some level it was money for nothing, since he would be making music anyway. With a major label contract, he could make it in a fancy studio with professional engineers.

When the finalized contract arrived in the mail—eighteen pages of legalese—Daniel belatedly suggested getting a lawyer. Joe said no, because he trusted Eric and Randy. Daniel suggested involving Professor Harris. Again, Joe said no.

He wasn’t anybody’s ward. He was impulsive and vulnerable. His own weaknesses told him, directly, that he didn’t need protection.

It wasn’t paradoxical. It was tautological, like all the most daunting and bewildering things in life. Things are the way they are: unthinkable. Trying to understand can feel like a struggle, but the conflict is internal to each of us, ending in surrender each night when we close our eyes.

Looking through the countersigned contract months later and seeing points he maybe should have argued over, Daniel couldn’t say for sure whether Joe had gotten a raw deal. Maybe other fledgling artists were being treated better; he didn’t know. In absolute terms, it was a gift. Joe had gone straight from babysitter to rock star, while there was nothing in the contract that would oblige him to give up babysitting.

RANDY WANTED TO MAKE AN ANTI-FOLK RECORD WITH ROCK DRUMMING À LA BECK OR major-label Butthole Surfers. He claimed that Joe’s vision of bubblegum dub was an audience-free joint that wouldn’t even fly in Brazil. That’s how he phrased it, thinking Joe would get bewildered and surrender. Joe did not. It seldom impressed him that things are the way they are.

“The bass on Doggystyle makes my vision go blurry!” he insisted to an elevator full of random label employees after his third chaotic five-minute meeting with Randy. “That’s what I want! Deep music for deaf people!” He told Daniel, who was waiting for him in the lobby with Flora to go to lunch, that Atlantic was going to turn his lovely demos into crashy-bangy alternative rock.

“It worked for Suzanne Vega,” Daniel pointed out. “They add kick drum and hi-hat to some folkie vocal thing, and there you are. That’s how CBS made a number one hit out of ‘Sound of Silence.’”

“That’s the main substance of my lament!” Joe said. “With too many drums, you can’t hear the music. I don’t need drums. I have my rhythm in the music where it belongs!”

“That’s good. Try that on Randy. Say what you just said to me.”

“You do it! He doesn’t listen to me.”

DANIEL, IN HIS FUNCTION AS PRETEND MANAGER, CALLED RANDY THE NEXT DAY. IT wasn’t a productive conversation. Joe had presented an irresolvable impasse as mere friction. Randy informed him that Joe was all set to make a record that the label would never release. Subsequently he would be free to go on making records for them at his own expense forever, until he happened to make one they liked.

Daniel replied, “That’s a no-good deal, and you’re a piece of shit.”

“Am I now,” Randy said.

“If you pile roadblocks on the creativity of Joe Harris, that’s exactly what you are. An ignorant, self-defeating piece of shit.”

“I didn’t say he can’t record any album he wants,” Randy pointed out. “I just said we won’t release it.”

“Fuck you, ass-wipe,” Daniel said, marveling at his own inarticulacy.

Randy referred him to a senior executive producer, a blond surfer-snowboarder of fifty who called himself Daktari.

DANIEL WENT WITH JOE AND FLORA THE FOLLOWING WEEK TO SEE DAKTARI, WHO TOLD them he’d be adding a rhythm track whether they liked it or not, and that from what he’d heard people saying around the office, Music for Deaf People would be an excellent working title.

Daktari was handsome and regularly spent time in France. Many years before, someone in Paris had told him it was a mark of breeding to insult people to their faces without breaking eye contact.

His skills were wasted on Joe, who replied in gratitude that he had resolved to call his opening track “Daktari.” He started writing it right there. Tapping his foot, he sang, “Daktaree-ee-ee, is Randy’s boss so maybe he can te-ell me, if we need drums on this so give the bass to me, I’ll show you drums are not the sole reason to be.”

“A percussion jam is a big crowd-pleaser,” Daktari interrupted. “Don’t you want to be bigger than Jesus?”

Switching back to normal conversation, Joe said, “Lots of Aretha Franklin songs don’t have drums!”

“Afraid of the neighbors? We can find you rehearsal space.”

“It’s not the noise,” Daniel interposed. “He has this inability.”

“You mean disability?” Daktari looked closely at Joe’s body. A flicker of horror crossed his beauteous mien at the idea that the label might have signed a disabled person.

“Inability,” Daniel said. “He can’t really listen to loud noises that sound like explosions all the time.”

“Because of what, war trauma?”

“He’s unable. It’s like when you say you’re unable to come to the phone or unable to forgive somebody. On the one hand, it’s an admission of weakness, because you’re saying you’re at the mercy of forces beyond your control, but to other people it sounds arrogant, since those forces might be you.” Flora was pushing a six-inch beanbag hippopotamus up his pants leg, and he leaned down to pet her head, the way he always did when speaking an eternal truth he hoped would accompany her on her way.

“In other words, it resembles my inability to put out a hit record with no percussion,” Daktari countered.

“I didn’t say ‘no percussion,’” Joe said. “I love congas and bongos. Can we get a studio with congas and bongos?”

“Our studios have pro arrangers and session musicians and every goddamned instrument in the book,” Daktari said. “Bring me hit tunes, and I’ll record them any way you want.”

RIDING HOME ON THE BUS, DANIEL LOUDLY MOURNED THEIR FAILURE TO SIGN WITH AN independent label. He was tortured by the illogic of their discussion with Daktari, who had bested him in negotiations without negotiating or even paying him any attention. Instead of gaining the label’s assent to songs without drums, he had committed Joe to earning congas and bongos with all-new material.

They stood for a long time talking about it at the playground. Daniel set Flora down on the ground. Indoors she was a floor baby, but outdoors she was a baby rooting for acorns in mud. Sandboxes were rare in New York, considered dangerous because of pet feces. There was never an evening when she didn’t need a bath.

“I screwed up,” Daniel said, turning over a succession of fallen leaves with his foot. He saw a shard of broken glass and picked it up so he could throw it in the trash. “We should have signed with Matador.”

“That guy likes hit songs,” Joe said. “So I’ll write hit songs. He’s going to love my new songs. Everything’s completely fine, so stop worrying.”

“My feeling was that he hated us. I mean all of us, even Flora.” He looked down. She had placed a cigarette filter in a bottle cap so that her hippo could eat it off a dish. When the hippo failed to react, she mimed eating the filter herself. “That’s a no-no!” he said. “Don’t eat litter!” She put it back. With her help, the hippo extended its prolapsed pink mouth like an amoeba over the bottle cap and its contents. “Hippos hate cigarette butts,” he said, picking it up so he could throw it away. “Even though they’re rich in minerals and fiber. They prefer grass. Why don’t you offer him some grass from your open hand?”

“Where’s any grass?” she said. “I don’t see grass.”

“I see dandelions,” Joe said. “That’s hippos’ favorite food. They call it hippo-pot.”

“I see hippo-pot!” she said. She stood and approached a solitary dandelion that was standing by a fence. With the hippo clamped under one arm, she did her best to rip it out of the ground.

“That was pedagogically questionable,” Daniel commented.

“You’re so nugatory all the time!”

“I hope you mean ‘negative all the time.’”

“Even about Daktari. He hates indie rock music because he works for a major label. It makes total sense.”

“So why the fuck did he sign an indie rock artist like you?”

“Because he’s a prescient guy. He can tell I’m going to bring him big hits!”

VI.

Joe’s first girlfriend was the former singer of the defunct band Broad Spectrum, a slim, dark-haired classical archaeology major named Bethany. She was interning at Matador that summer because it was too hot in Asia Minor to go on digs. She wore hundred-dollar Laura Ashley dresses with Doc Martens, the look Eloise’s housecoats and Hush Puppies were supposed to suggest. Her features were delicate. Her teeth looked like Chiclets. She shared a two-bedroom summer sublet in the West Village with an absentee figure-skating instructor. She styled herself a “geek girl” because she wore glasses. In her spare time, she followed New Dance. She had read somewhere that attending dance performances can qualify a person to be a dance critic. Her father, a banking executive, occasionally met her for lunch at Delmonico’s, where he assured her that dance was another arrow in her quiver.

She volunteered to sing harmonies on Joe’s record. It surprised her when he said no. She thought his trusting ways would make him a pushover. Instead they made him assume she wouldn’t mind rejection. She didn’t let on how mad she was, because she didn’t want to lose him. She believed that his surreal sense of humor made him a hard person to know.

Her relationship specialty was evenings out. She liked plays and recitals. He didn’t care who paid. She led him to art museums and to restaurants with arty food. For several weeks that fall, they were regulars at American Ballet Theatre. She tapped his new American Express card for culture and comfort. In her own mind, she was educating him, so it seemed to her like a fair exchange.

Joe worked diligently on his songwriting, as usual. He mastered his demos on sixty-minute cassettes. Every time a tape filled up, he delivered it to Daktari’s secretary. There was general consensus around the office that he was going to end up owing the label a lot of money. No one there believed in him but Bethany, who did it on principle because they were dating.

PAM HATED HER WITH GREAT BITTERNESS. SHE SAW HER AS A MOOCH AND A LEECH WHO was using Joe as an auxiliary dad, one of those upper-class women who aspire to be children all their lives. As an excuse for poor eyesight, the “geek girl” tagline bugged her big time. But what bothered her most was how Bethany’s girlfriendly blandishments stained Joe’s pure soul with egotism. All his innocent self-regard and faith in his innate value metamorphosed into campy self-adoration in the light of her approval. She heightened his pleasure in life when he was already living a joyful dream. She reinforced playful impulses that didn’t need any encouragement. His behavior in her presence careened right past joie de vivre into something resembling hysteria. He called her “the orgasm factory” to her face, and she followed him around like a duckling. She constantly displayed to onlookers that she was with Joe—of all people—and this, Pam simply did not understand. How could some hot-looking, jet-setting, dance-theater-watching rich bitch be possessive about Joe? Had she reencountered him after the House of Candles show feeding hot dogs to squirrels, instead of walking the halls of Atlantic with a contract in his hand, would she have gone near him? (Hot dogs that spent too many hours in the slimy waters of the Abyssinian Coffee Shop burst and became unsalable, and then they were Joe’s.) Any child of six could have told you she was a deluded social climber who’d boarded the wrong train. Why couldn’t he see through it?

Stupid question, she knew. He trusted everyone, even bitches. His former life hadn’t been long on the bitches. For a poignant half second, she wished she had kissed him, or even gone to bed with him, so that no star-fucker bitch could have been his first.

WHEN FLORA WAS THREE, DANIEL TOOK HER TO THE TRIENNIAL SVOBODA FAMILY reunion. She came back raving about tricycles and wagons, wearing a tiny gold-plated cross on a chain around her neck. He was no longer an accredited family member, but the Svobodas seemed to feel there was hope for her. He let her wear the cross until they got home. Then he said it was too valuable to wear every day, took it off her, and threw it in the trash. A week later, she asked for the cross again. When she couldn’t have it, she cried.

A week after that, her hippo ate dog shit and had to be put out of its misery. She saw a crucifix in the window of a Santeria store and asked Joe to buy it. It was as though she couldn’t get Jesus out of her mind and wanted him for her new stuffed animal.

Fortunately it was a cash-only store. The crucifix had been blessed by a voodoo priest and was very expensive. Joe couldn’t help her out on the spot, but he told Daniel about her wish.

“If she needs a shirtless guy with a beard, we can get her a G.I. Joe,” he replied.

“We’ll make our own cross, and she can put him on it with rubber bands.”

“If it’s a cross she wants, we can—no. There’s no way I’m making her a toy cross! What’s next? A toy cat-o’-nine-tails, so she can self-flagellate?”

“Jesus is weird,” Joe remarked.

“You can say that again!”

“Why is he on the cross?”

Daniel raised his eyes to heaven. “Oh, man, Joe. Well, historically, he wasn’t always on the cross. I think for something like twelve centuries, he was the risen Christ, fully dressed. Then there was Gothic art and, like, the black plague or something, so they switched to showing him on the cross. You know he died on the cross, right?”

“Why?”

“The weight of his own body, I guess. Makes it hard to breathe when you’re hanging by your arms.”

“But he’s so skinny!”

“Not in real life! He was always eating out with rich tax collectors, and he could make food appear by magic and turn water into wine, so he was a total land whale. That’s why he died so fast, like hours before the skinny dudes they crucified at the same time. The Romans didn’t even have to break his legs.”

“That is so gross,” Joe said.

“And he’s scared shitless up there, screaming out, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ But you know who God was, who could have helped him the whole time? His dad!”

“My dad would not do that.”

“My dad would.”

THE REVERBERATING CHRISTIANITY DEBACLE AGGRAVATED PAM’S SENSE THAT HER daughter was growing up without her. Every moment she spent at the office was a moment when some stranger and/or family member of ill will and worse intentions could plant a fateful wrong idea in Flora’s head.

Joe tried to console her by recording selected playtime. It didn’t help. The cassettes merely made audible how he kept Flora in stitches. He was giving her a solid grounding in verbal wit, preschool style. Her parents’ role was to drop by nightly and impose dour worries about nutrition and rest.

After the fourth and final taping session, Pam’s path forward became clear. One dialogue passage was as follows:

JOE: Never rub your nub where people can see.

FLORA: But I want to!

JOE: [singing] Got to rub my nub in the club, rub my nub in the club, got to rub my nub in the club—now dub—see my nub nub nub nub nub nub nub nub in the club club club club club club club, it’s like a sub sub sub sub sub sub sub—

FLORA: Don’t make fun of me!

JOE: Then stop rubbing your nub and do the dance! [singing] Rub my nub in the club, chugalug in the pub, rub-a-dub in the tub … [etc.]

FLORA: [clapping along] Rub my nub I rub my nub I rub my nub I rub my nub I rub my nub [etc.]

Flora’s improvisation of a contrapuntal rhythmic chant made her seem extraordinarily musically accomplished for her age. At the same time, Pam experienced a heretofore unsuspected and overpowering need to raise her child herself. Flora was getting old for a babysitter. She wasn’t a baby anymore. Her psyche needed to be molded in Pam’s image, or Daniel’s at least. Otherwise, what was the point?

“I need to cut down on my hours,” Pam said to Yuval the next morning as they stood drinking coffee in the office kitchenette. “My kid doesn’t even know my name. She calls me ‘Mom.’”

“So you want to spend time with Flora.”

“Yes. The problem is maternity leave is unpaid, and it’s a little late.”

He sneered, wrinkling his nose. “Who told you that? Your union rep?”

“Very funny!”

“You’re the funny one here, talking about part-time work when I bill for you by the day. Clients are always telling me how many hours you work most days, or should I say minutes?”

“Express yourself clearly, Yuval.”

“That maybe it’s almost better if you limit time offsite? Like, dress up like you’re in marketing, run intense interviews about client needs, drip your famous honey sweetness on them, estimate billable days with some generosity to me, and deliver on time? Stay home. Work as you need. Flextime.”

“I’d do that.”

“But only two years. Maternity leave. In two years is performance review. I’ll be counting your billable days.”

She called Daniel at his temp job with the good news. He said, “Your boss has a Messiah complex.”

DANIEL THOUGHT THE SONG WAS GREAT AND LACKED ONLY ONE LINE TO BE PERFECT: “IF my right hand should offend you, cut it off.”

With Pam at the controls of a four-track and the vocal stylings of Flora and Daniel, Joe recorded a bass-and-foot-tapping demo of “Rub My Nub.” The interplay between the four/four repetitions of “rub my nub I” and the syncopation of “cut it off, cut it off” was strikingly infectious. When Daktari heard it over the phone the next day, he said, “Ç’est ça, mon ami!”

Joe’s reasonable response was “Sad monogamy?”

He was summoned to a studio in Chelsea to rerecord vocals and two bass parts. It took two days. Without consulting him, Daktari then laid the recording over a big-beat synth percussion track. He hired a contrabassist to shadow the bass and singers to imitate Flora, ran the results through a compressor with multiple bowls of reverb (reverb was measured in units of the kind bud), and cranked up the presence until the song could work as a ringtone on a Nokia.

The album Sad Monogamy (that was the working title; in the end it was released as Coronation) came together quickly, because Joe wrote a song almost every day. Daktari didn’t care too much about the other tracks. He didn’t even ask for changes in “Rub My Nub,” except for the title, which became “Chugalug.”

THE STILLS AND RUSHES FROM THE FIRST DAY OF FILMING THE “CHUGALUG” VIDEO astounded Daniel. Watching the shoot on monitors was even more disturbing.

He was a show business novice. His experience of comparing images with reality had been acquired firsthand. For example, he saw himself as an okay-looking guy who was not photogenic. In pictures he looked like a small-eyed, hairy potato. Smiling widened his strong jaw into something photographs invariably depicted as a moon face, right on the edge of pug. By contrast, he thought of Joe as not an okay-looking guy. He wondered how major-label-style publicity was supposed to work with a star like that. He imagined they would pose him far away, with contour makeup under dramatic lighting, or maybe on a beach, facing out to sea. Joe was short, five feet seven and a half at the outside with shoes on. He had a cute enough butt and square little shoulders, and if you issued him a smallish guitar—well, Dylan and Springsteen were little guys, right? Those were Daniel’s not uncharitable thoughts on the subject of Joe’s image. He was trying to be realistic.

On screen, Joe became a rock god. His Muppet mouth became a twenty-tooth smile. His small head became enormous eyes; his girlish chin, an asset at last. His mousy bowl cut required only one sweep of the oiled brush to darken to a mass of chestnut waves under the lights. His short stature and neck made him fit neatly in the frame. His size made cheap props, such as the foam-and-cardboard wingback chairs the director had bought from IKEA (to be returned for credit the next day), look vast and luxurious. The effect of the camera on his skin was strangest of it all. Joe in real life had a yellowish cast. He was anemic-looking, sallow, not olive; not a beautiful look. On screen he looked vibrant, yet blotless—smooth as the piece of paper the cameraman held up to get a white balance score. Reduced to two dimensions, with a script to follow, he became someone else who was also himself. The transformation wasn’t instantaneous, because the two Joes were incommensurate and incompatible. It was like some strange proof of the existence of a parallel universe looming behind our own. Daniel could look up at the soundstage and see the frowns on the dancers straining to evoke eroticism in the presence of the goofiest man alive (they’d met him; he’d introduced himself and talked to them all before the shoot), lower his gaze to the monitors where similar women were writhing in a miasma of lust they felt for a handsome singer who was coolly delivering obscenities, look up again to see Joe gesticulating while the resentful troupers sweated their workout, look back down, look up again, see stars, see human beings, until his brain abandoned the effort of trying to reconcile them. The video was like a centrifuge, separating the world into a visual component that drained into the monitors propped on the floor and a bodily component that became more unsightly with every turn of the machinery.

The women did the dance, not Joe. The director said it was great to be able to surround a singer with built fly girls who could move instead of models. He told Daniel to be happy, because Joe was going to get film offers.

THE VIDEO WENT INTO ROTATION ON MTV AND VH1. STRANGERS NOW RECOGNIZED JOE in record stores, if the staff clued them in. They called him “Joe Harris” rather than “mongo collector scum.” He had been more notorious than popular.

Maybe he would have stayed notorious, never becoming popular, if he’d been easier to recognize. But his social skills and conversational arts couldn’t discredit him in the eyes of the world. The disconnect between image and reality was total. Occasionally he was taken for someone who resembled Joe Harris, but only when something startled him into silence.

There was one recurring situation where he would be recognized and draw a crowd: if the song was played in his hearing. He would sing along and do the dance, no matter where he was—at home listening to the radio, walking past a bar where it was on the jukebox, shopping in a grocery store where an easy-listening version was streaming over the paging system. It made him oh-so-happy to hear it.

His mainstream career took off with an appearance on a morning talk show. Atlantic’s publicist had negotiated a one-minute promotional segment. Prior radio interviews had established that a minute could be a long time. Thus there was debate as to how to handle him, until a production intern’s boyfriend provided a timely eyewitness account of a performance in the dairy section of C-Town. The host of the show shook hands, said hi, and let the track roll. Seemingly a man of few words, Joe sang and did the dance. The camera zoomed to his face as the vision mixer cut to the shocked reactions of the host and other guests.

After that, many talk shows invited him on, but not to talk. The song gave rise to a vulgar and widely satirized dance craze. No wedding was complete without it. It was the go-to anthem of drunken groomsmen. The album sold and sold and sold, and the single reached number four on the Billboard Hot 100. Joe in his lewdness was compared with Elvis Presley.

As with Elvis, it was a lewdness only the unmediated had seen. The buzz around his first concert tour was accordingly significant.

Daniel began to wish he’d asked for a songwriting credit for his coda.

CURRENTLY BETWEEN JOBS, ELOISE STROLLED THE LOWER EAST SIDE IN SEARCH OF JOE. She looked out for Pam, Daniel, and Flora as well. But all of them were busier than they’d ever been. She didn’t know where they lived. Joe was walking and shopping less, swamped with work and free promo CDs. He never again played a small club, having gotten signed before he could even occupy a feature slot at CBGB. The label was rationing his presence in preparation for a big-budget tour.

She watched cable in case his video came on. She bought magazines like People and Vogue so she could read short Q&As and capsule reviews. The scourge of commerce had driven the wedge of fame between them. She thought it was only natural, because he was a rock star and she was a speck.

VII.

Pam went to a party at Daktari’s apartment with Joe and Bethany, while Daniel stayed home with Flora. The party was full of industry bigwigs, TV journalists, and stars. Daktari introduced Joe as the next big thing. Joe flitted from new acquaintance to new acquaintance, lingering over the females like Pepé Le Pew. It was painful for Pam to watch. He was no longer profiting from the most basic social corrective—the boycott, when women walk away. By the end of the night, he was single. She wished it could have been because he saw some flaw in Bethany. But he couldn’t see flaws in women who were much, much worse.

Around two in the morning, he kissed Bethany goodbye and told Pam to say hi to Daniel and Flora so he could go on fondling a creature in a white puffy coat with the hood up. She looked to Pam like a sofa standing upright, upholstered in shiny nylon over down batting. Why did she need a warm coat indoors? Was she a junkie? Pam’s thoughts were dire. She developed a sudden new appreciation of Bethany. Anything was better than this. Sofa Girl had a pinched face and horrible orange lipstick. Under the coat, she was tiny. Maybe she didn’t have enough body fat to maintain 98.6 without a coat? Even as Joe was feeling her up, she was screeching and waving a cigarette around. She reminded Pam of Edie Sedgwick, the famous vapid cocotte from Warhol’s Factory.

Pam fled the party downhearted, but not alone. At the corner of Thompson and Spring, Bethany touched her arm and said, “Hey, Pam. Let’s share a cab.”

“I’m walking,” she said. “I need air.” She crossed the street, but Bethany followed her.

“Did you see that girl?” Bethany asked.

“The anorexic dressed as a grub?”

“She’s this bogus model who’s been fired from, like, everywhere. She’s on every drug in the book. She’s horrible, awful, like, God! Why her?”

“Shut up, shut up. Just shut up,” Pam muttered, as though to herself. She had a bad feeling. Bethany was more keyed up than she’d ever seen her.

“She’s going to fuck him right at the party,” Bethany went on. “How does Daktari even know her? She’s not a music person. She’s fashion!”

“You’re an archaeologist,” Pam pointed out.

“But I’m into music and dance. And she—you know what she’s known for?”

“Bestiality shows in Tijuana?” Pam increased her pace, trying to walk too fast for Bethany to keep up.

Bethany didn’t break into a run, but her heels pounded the sidewalk with a hastening, hollow pinging sound. From twenty feet behind Pam she called out, “Fucking backstage at fashion week!”

Pam turned to face her and said, “If you think it’s all her fault, why don’t you get back up in there and defend him?”

“Defend him? He’s the one making out with a tramp. I have to leave him.”

“Well, defend her!”

Bethany’s irate sadness gave way to incomprehension.

“He’s an aggressor,” Pam said. “You are duty bound as a feminist to go back in there and stop her ass from getting nailed by a stud she can’t handle.”

She snorted and scoffed. “Stud.”

“I’m going back,” Pam said.

She stalked past Bethany, angling across Thompson toward Daktari’s door. There she tried the doorbell.

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