by Lamar Giles
“This my home,” she said. “I ain’t leaving it, Paris.”
“Grandma.” I fought not to get loud, not to talk rude to her … I wanted her to get it. “You don’t have to take anything from them anymore, and we don’t have to live here anymore. I already got a place rented. My new manager helped.”
“A manager? What manager? How she help?” She crossed her arms and wouldn’t look me in the eye. “Lord, child, I don’t trust all this you into now. It’s coming too fast. Your mama was into that fast life. Running with that good-time crowd, always in them clubs and bars—”
“Stop it, Grandma.” I’d heard this too many times.
“—some fine, slick man got to whispering in her ear, talking about fame, promising dinners, and trips to—”
“We already been over this!” I snapped at her. Maybe for the first time ever. Mama and my MIA father, who promised to take her places and meet important people. I’m not her. “There’s nothing wrong with fast as long as it’s legal.”
She switched tactics. “You ain’t even going to school no more. What? Why you looking like that? I wasn’t supposed to know? They calling every day.”
“They’re confused. I got a tutor that work with me at the studio.” A lie. Paula and I talked about getting a tutor. It was probably gonna happen. We just hadn’t gotten around to it yet. “Will you at least come look at the new place? It’s on the first floor so you’re not gonna hurt your knees going up steps no more. There’s two bathrooms, so we don’t have to share. I won’t even be there half the time, so you can turn up Wheel of Fortune as loud as you want.”
“Where you gonna be half the time if it ain’t at home?”
“Spinning. Producing. More work’s coming in. Paula says I might even do my own album eventually. She says I’m that good.”
Her head was shaking before I got the last word out. “People told your mama things, Paris. You see how it worked for her. Now you repeating her mistakes.”
That’s when I lost it. “People didn’t give my mother cancer! Are you crazy?”
Grandma blinked slowly. Once, twice. I wasn’t backing down.
She said, “You’re so good at what you do that it got you talking to me—me—like that? You always been stubborn, but you ain’t never been disrespectful. So tell me again about what’s good in this world of yours.”
My vision pulsed with frustration. A heavy fist fell on the front door. “Stop banging like you the cops!” I yelled because as furious as I was, I couldn’t bring myself to yell at Grandma.
Shameik shouted back, “We’re here to move your stuff.”
Grandma crossed her arms, kept rocking. I went for the door.
“Yo,” Shameik said upon first sight of me. “You okay?”
Over his shoulder a couple of his cousins loafed. One on his phone, the other ogling some chick sashaying up the sidewalk.
“I’m fine. Forget the move. I ain’t taking anything from here.”
“I brought my peeps and my uncle’s truck.”
“Then take them back, stupid! I’ll call you later.” His cousins became alert, a couple of “we cool?” expressions sprouted. I slammed the door.
“If you mean to leave, you should go on. I won’t be coming,” Grandma said. “I love you, that ain’t gonna ever change. It don’t seem like you adjusting well to these things you keep claiming so good. When you speak to me, it’s with this new attitude. That boy out there seem nice and really like you, you treating him like nothing. I ain’t raise you to run over people. What’s going on with you? You don’t even talk to Kya no more, she’s been like family since y’all started walking.”
Seriously? What’s Kya got to do with this? My concerns are different from hers and her grades and what college she gonna run or whatever.
Paula warned me some people scared of a come-up. They’d fight to stay mediocre and get mad at me for wanting more. I believed her but didn’t believe it’d come from my own blood.
Grandma had more stuff to say, but I was on my phone, doing better things with my time.
ME
This is DJ ParSec. Change of plans. I am free this afternoon after all.
WINSTON MIXX MAG
Excellent. I’m still good for today. I’d love to get a preliminary chat in about the piece. We are really excited about the innovative things you’re doing with your music.
ME
Nice to know someone gets what this is all about. Where do you wanna meet?
Magazine dude sent a location, and I immediately requested a Lyft. “I’m going. I got stuff to do.”
“No.”
“Huh?”
She stared me down. “I didn’t like any of this, and I let it go on too long. Get to your room, tell this manager woman you’re finished. I don’t care what kind of money is in it. ‘For what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?’ ”
She’d hit me over the head with everything else. I guess the Bible was inevitable. Enough. “Good thing I’m not a man. I’m out.”
She sprang up, faster than I’d seen her move in forever. Grabbed me by the arm. “You wanna act grown, I’m gon’ treat you like you grown. If you walk out, don’t come back when it goes bad.”
“You told my mama that too, didn’t you? But I’m the one repeating mistakes? Bye, Grandma.”
In the threshold, the bright light of the day—of my future—beamed, casting a long shadow into that dank, old, stifling prison cell of a town house. “A famous music magazine wants to do an article about me. I’ll send you a copy when it’s done. I’m assuming the address will still be the same. Later.”
I left, determined to never spend another night in that house. Felt good about it too. I wasn’t even going to miss that roach trap. That’s what I told myself.
Sometimes I believed it.
“The library sure is crowded,” Fuse said from the driver’s seat, her voice too loud and stilted, her hand gestures elaborate. “We’ll be lucky to find a table. Don’t you think, Kya?”
Unbelievable. Whatever talents she had, acting wasn’t among them. Stop being extra, I mouthed before starting my lines. “I tried to get us a study room, but they’re all booked. We’ll have to do our research on the main floor.”
“You know how librarians are.” She pressed her index finger to her lips and ejected spittle as she made the Shhhhh! noise. “No talking.”
That’s not your line, Fuse! Our silence was supposed to be implied. “Yeah, I guess so. Let’s go.”
In the SoundChek app, I selected the “Quiet Office” mix I created, the closest thing to a “Crowded Library” I could come up with on short notice. The sounds of the occasional cough, rustling papers, a cell phone ringtone going off, then being immediately silenced, all played in randomized patterns that came through the Bluetooth speaker I’d confiscated from my locker last week. I placed our phones and the speaker in Fuse’s glove box to, hopefully, convince any Dark Nation listeners that we were too boring to worry about today.
We exited her car as quickly and quietly as we could to make the quarter-mile walk from the public library parking lot to the apartment building identified on the stationery I stole. We didn’t speak until we crossed the street to the next block, a safe distance from our co-opted devices.
“Were you trying to win an Oscar back there?” I was grumpy.
“You said act natural.”
“If SoundChek doesn’t work and the Dark Nation figures we’re dumping our phones, there’s no telling what they’ll do.”
“Why you say it like that?” She exaggerated the emphasis. “SoundChek! Like you’re yelling Voltron!”
“It’s my audio management app.”
“Like one of those noise machines people put on when they want to relax. My mom has one by her bed that plays nature sounds. She likes listening to squirrel coughs or whatever when she dozes.”
“No, I mean it’s mine. It’s an app I built with the Smart Ones.”
“The w
ho?”
“The boys from school who died in the car accident earlier this year. They were … friends.”
“I—I didn’t know them.”
“Most of the student body didn’t either.” I walked on, feeling suddenly deserted because Fuse had come to a halt.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“You had a bunch of your friends die in a car accident a few months ago, then ParSec?”
This wasn’t the conversation I’d planned on having today. Any day. An invisible fist crushed my heart, yet I lived and talked. “We should hurry.”
She caught up, less vibrant but just as talkative. “Were they ParSec’s friends too?”
“She didn’t know them. Didn’t know they died.” Another sharp pain in my chest, guilt that time. We never got to have that conversation. Not actually. “Can we talk about something else?”
Her head bobbed. “Sure. Absolutely. Tell me more about,” she bellowed, “SoundChek …”
“It’s an idea that Paris kind of inspired. You know how she’d sample stuff off old records and use them in her beats?”
“Okay …”
“It occurred to me that there might be sounds in real life you wanted to sample, like a school bell. We all got audio recorders on our phone, but it’s not the best quality if you’re not using some sort of mic attachment. So if you went to record the school bell, and a bunch of people were talking, the playback not only sounded distorted, you probably got more ambient noise—the conversations, the laughs—than anything else. SoundChek fixes that.”
“ParSec never mentioned it.”
I bristled. “We weren’t talking much when it launched.”
The crosswalk changed, and we strolled to the next block. It felt weird saying all this stuff aloud. Like joke bait. If some random dude popped out of the trash can on the corner yelling, “Nerd!” I’d feel like I’d asked for it.
Fuse sort of skipped next to me. “Why’d you stop talking?”
“You want to hear more?”
“Heck yeah. That’s some intriguing stuff! You built like—what’s the bowl thing with the holes you put spaghetti noodles in when you want to drain the water?”
“A colander.”
“Right. You built a sound colander.”
That was … actually an impressive analogy. “So when you record stuff to a digital file, it’s ones and zeroes. And serious musicians will tell you there’s a mathematical element to music, and music is sound. So Jim, our math whiz, worked up an algorithm that rearranged the ones and zeroes in a recording, to the point where you could separate and enhance noises the app recorded. Once separated, you can sort noises into silos, and mix them back together any way you wanted. SoundChek.”
“That’s crazy! You sounding like Bill Gates or something. How are you not rich?”
I shrugged. “It makes some money off ads. That’s how I float my credit card. But it’s not super polished. New bugs pop up all the time, and it’s just me fixing them. I don’t even know why I bother.”
I wish my phone wasn’t compromised so I could note that question: Why bother?
Unlike my other unanswerable questions, meant for my long-gone friends, Fuse answered right away. “Psh. Same reason we in these streets playing Clue IRL! You care about what you and your people did together.”
Maybe there was something to that. I had other concerns right now though. “The Dark Nation are the only people I’m worried about at the moment.”
“I’m not.” Blustery, with her shoulders hunched, like a small woodland creature making themselves look bigger for an approaching bear, Fuse bounced a few steps ahead of me, spun on her heels to walk backward, so we were face-to-face. “That van stuff and listening in on your conversation with Detective Barker, maybe that’s all the Dark Nation has. Two tricks. I’m not trying to spend a lot of time shook over them. I have total faith in your SoundChek plan.”
We turned the corner, almost there. I said, “I’ve been thinking, we need leverage. We crack this thing, give Winston his exposé, and they can be as mad as they want, but we’ll be too visible to mess with. They care about their anonymity, and the best way for them to stay anonymous is not messing with us once we’re in the spotlight. Something happens to us, then it makes us more credible, and them more vulnerable. If they think we’re a liability too soon …”
Even if it was a slim possibility, I didn’t want to discuss what their third trick might be.
Fuse said, “I’m cool. I’ll try to be less of a method actor next time.”
“I don’t think that’s how method acting works.”
Hopefully we were going in the right direction. I looked up the address on the school computers but felt naked without my phone navigation as a double check.
Fuse pointed, her voice light, in awe. “Is that it?”
A new chrome-and-glass tower rose head of us. The tallest building in the vicinity. “I don’t see anything else even close to having fourteen floors, so it must be.”
We drew closer, and the building got taller. That’s how it felt anyway. At its entrance, above a quartet of glass doors leading into a white marble lobby, were six letters spaced evenly above the entryway: SAVANT.
“The building has a name,” Fuse said. “Talk about swaggy.”
“It also has a doorman.” A half-circle desk, also white, provided a workstation for a guard dressed primly in a navy-blue blazer with a V-neck sweater and collared shirt beneath it. “What are we going to do if he stops us?”
Fuse said, “Give me that card key thingy right now.”
I did.
“Follow me, laugh like I’m saying something kinda funny, but not really. Don’t slow down, and never look at the doorman. Got it?”
She shoved through those glass doors before I was ready. I chased, fought the urge to acknowledge the man behind the desk, though I felt him staring us down.
Fuse said, “There are no good stores here. I so miss Manhattan.”
Remembering her instructions, I chuckled uncomfortably. The uncomfortable part wasn’t an act.
We passed the desk, stood between four elevators. Fuse hesitated but a second, examining the card. There was a slot above the up button with glowing blue arrows indicating insertion was possible and/or required. Fuse slid the card in.
The arrows flared red. Denied.
“I haven’t seen a decent pair of shoes yet,” she said, though her eyes said something different. Something panicky.
Stepping up, I removed the card, rotated it so the mag strip inserted on the right side of the slot instead of the left. “Have you ever heard of online shopping?”
The arrows glowed green, and the call button lit on its own. A moment later, an elevator dinged open. We stepped in.
Sailing to the fourteenth floor, Fuse said, “Oscar who?”
“You’ve really grown as an actress.”
The Savant’s fourteenth floor was as lush as the building lobby. No marble, but thick cream carpet with the slightly plastic smell of newness that gave beneath my feet like firm dough. Brushed bronze sconces lit the corridor every dozen or so feet, and I heard my mom’s voice low, at the back of my skull, admiring the art deco aesthetic. The hallway split into a T shape, and placards indicated the general location of this floor’s apartments. 14-D was to the right.
We didn’t speak. I didn’t want to speak. This felt like sneaking into a church after hours. Or a tomb.
Kya slid the copper key into the dead bolt. It turned easily and the door swung inward, wafting us in a sickly scent of decay.
“Oh God,” I said, hesitant. That scene from a thousand cop shows flashed before my eyes, the moment of discovering a human corpse, puffy and gray.
Kya winced but didn’t linger. She tugged her shirt collar up over her mouth and nose. “Come on.”
I followed. Instinctively knew what I smelled wasn’t rotted human. Mostly because I’d smelled it before.
Kya angled for the kitchen, visible immediately in th
e open floor plan, stepped on the pedal at the base of a stainless steel trash bin, and popped the lid. She flinched away from the resulting, noxious cloud. “Chicken wrapper and old broccoli. God.”
She yanked the drawstrings of the Hefty bag, tying them into a swift knot, “Get the balcony door.”
Crossing the apartment, noting the new, sparse furnishings and stacks of cardboard boxes next to the couch, I worked the latch on the sliding door and unsealed the place. The view was gorge! I could see everything from my car parked two and a half blocks away to the peaks of oceanfront hotels on Atlantic Avenue. A high, cool breeze swirled through, freshening the funk immediately. Kya leaned by me, dropped the rotten garbage outside, then shut us in. “I think it’s safe to say we’re the first ones here in a while.”
“What is here, though?” Since my gag reflex settled, I took it all in. Calm. Slow. Even in this barely lived-in space, I felt ParSec’s essence. The leather couch still rich with conditioner, the matching love seat still coiled in its delivery shrink-wrap. A flat-screen TV set atop heavy, unpacked boxes with living room scrawled in Sharpie on the side. The TV’s mounting kit unopened and leaning against the wall it would’ve likely occupied. Next to that, framed posters from her favorite movies. Her classics: House Party, The Five Heartbeats. Newness: Beyond the Lights, A Wrinkle in Time.
Music and fantasies. So her.
And neither what it’s cracked up to be, her phantom whispered in my ear.
Kya hovered over the movie posters, flipping through the frames. “I watched every one of these with her.”
“Same. You kind of had to, right?” ParSec kept a TV on in the background while she worked. One of these favorites in constant rotation. “If you were with her, you did what she dictated.”
Kya didn’t disagree.
Suddenly it wasn’t nostalgia in the air anymore. We weren’t here to reminisce.
Kya said, “Now what?”
“Now we turn the secret apartment upside down. I take the back, you look out here? Maybe we start with these boxes?”
We began going through our dead friend’s stuff, looking for an important thing with no definitive name, shape, or size.
