White Tears

by Hari Kunzru

Carter rarely talked about his family. What I knew, I had to piece together from campus gossip and the internet. He had an older brother and sister and it was easy enough to search his dad, a big Republican donor who appeared in news photographs with senators and members of the Bush clan. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Wallace family company, a behemoth with tentacles in construction, logistics and energy, had expanded since 9/11, helping America prevail in the War on Terror. Toilet blocks in Afghanistan. Airstrips and PX’s. Known these days as the Wallace Magnolia Group, they supplied earthmoving equipment, built freeways, laid pipelines. Carter’s dead aunt’s name was on a new lecture theater, which, given his near-total lack of interest in academic work, may have been the price of his admission to our not-quite-Ivy school. Carter knew what the Occupy crowd said about him, the no-blood-for-oil crowd. He told people he’d been disinherited, but that wasn’t strictly true.

  Together we went on record-buying trips to Cleveland and Detroit. He had a 1967 Ford Galaxie, Candy Apple red, which handled like a boat and drew him into conversations with admiring gas station attendants and diner patrons. We drove that ridiculous car round a circuit of thrift stores and basement record dealers, looking for sixties soul on local labels like Fortune and Hot Wax, techno twelves on Metroplex and Transmat and every other style in between. We took chances on weird private press releases that usually turned out to be lounge singers cranking out Sinatra covers or school bands doing shaky versions of seventies bubblegum hits. We found gems (a cache of mint BYG/Actuel free jazz albums still in their shrink wrap, a blue copy of the UR “Z Record”) and dropped money on turkeys, bad records with one good track, rare records that turned out to have no good tracks at all.

  MORE THAN A MONTH WENT BY before I finally played back the recording of the chess players in Washington Square. We had an old Roland Space Echo that sounded beautiful while it was working, but kept cutting out. It was a simple problem, a loose connection in the power supply. I wasn’t going to trust it to the clowns at the repair place. We (I had fallen into saying “we”) had rented a loft in Greenpoint, in a building that had once been a Catholic church. We watched TV in a room whose floor was spangled rainbow colors by old stained glass. I sat up on the roof with my soldering iron, wearing headphones and shades, the heat reflecting off the cladding, baking my shirtless back red as I retraced the meandering path I’d walked that evening, up Orchard and into Chinatown. I heard Cantopop songs and electronic jingles, fading in and out as I turned off Canal and crossed that little park behind the court buildings where all the old Chinese people go to gamble. Dominoes slapping down on tables, buskers sawing and plucking at stringed instruments with plaintive tunings. Back across Canal. Traffic noise and a cop shouting at someone. On Mott I had passed two women having an argument. At the time I couldn’t hear what it was about. Now I could. One was accusing the other of taking something from her purse; coupons, it sounded like. She’d stolen coupons her friend was saving to get groceries. One-fiddy on Huggies, shouted the victim. And a dollar off motherfucking Cheerios. They were drowned out by a fire engine, ten seconds of distortion that took me into the echo of an empty loading bay, a guy talking Spanish on his cellphone, then silence, more traffic noise as I crossed Broadway, someone’s comedy ringtone and one side of a conversation. Dude, she said she would so she gotta. You tell her. Washington Square had been full because of the heat. By the fountain there were breakdancers drumming up a crowd, yelling, applauding themselves, doing backflips to “Billie Jean.” Under the arch a young busker was ineptly singing Dylan. Then the chess game, the crowd grumbling as PJ lost to the stranger. I stopped soldering, a sudden nervousness in the pit of my stomach. When the voice came, I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t understand how I hadn’t heard it the first time, when the singer was in front of me.

  Believe I buy a graveyard of my own

  It was a pure voice, quite high, with a rasp when driven, as the singer did on “buy,” a word he made into three tones, the middle one spiking into a piercing falsetto buzz.

  Believe I bu—u—uy me a graveyard of my own

  Put my enemies all down in the ground

  Surely, in the presence of such a voice, I’d have paid attention. It would have been impossible to do anything else. But I had a clear memory of a girl skater. Sure enough there came the rumble of skateboard wheels, but no shift in orientation. I hadn’t turned to watch her. How could I remember what she looked like if I hadn’t turned round? The singer was still in front of me. After the first two lines his words were slightly muffled, as if something that absorbed sound had moved between us. What it was I couldn’t tell. But he kept on singing. How was that possible? My memory was clear. Two lines only. Maybe one line. I had been facing in the opposite direction for a few seconds. When I turned back, the tables were empty and the players gone. But this audio recording captured an entire performance, lasting several minutes. Phrases of the lyric jumped out, less muddy than the others. Put me under a man called Captain Jack. Something something down my back. And a third verse, went to the captain something something, something have mercy on something. It went on. Several verses.

  That evening, I played it for Carter. He listened casually at first, but soon adopted a prayerful posture, hunched forward, his hands cupped over the headphones as if to press the voice further into his head.

  —This, he said when it was finished. You actually heard this.

  —Some guy who just won a chess game over at the tables in Washington Square. I swear I thought he only sang a few words.

  —Jesus, man.

  We listened to it again. And a third time, and a fourth. The voice was mesmerizing. We stayed up until six in the morning, cleaning up the recording and deciphering the words. At a certain point, this stops being an aural task and becomes a visual one. You abstract the sound into shapes, start selecting, magnifying. Then it’s just a matter of smoothing curves, taking slices out, pasting other slices in. I edited out the skater. I filtered the background noise, brought up the vocal until we had a clear a cappella. Carter was enchanted. “It’s beautiful,” he kept saying. “Incredible.” He was right, but all the same as I worked I had an instinct to cover my ears, to unhear what I was hearing. Several times, I let my finger hover over the delete button, willing myself to press it.

  Believe I buy a graveyard of my own

  Believe I buy me a graveyard of my own

  Put my enemies all down in the ground

  Put me under a man they call Captain Jack

  Put me under a man they call Captain Jack

  Wrote his name all down my back

  Went to the Captain with my hat in my hand

  Went to the Captain with my hat in my hand

  Said Captain have mercy on a long time man

  Well he look at me and he spit on the ground

  He look at me and he spit on the ground

  Says I’ll have mercy when I drive you down

  Don’t get mad at me woman if I kicks in my sleep

  Don’t get mad at me woman if I kicks in my sleep

  I may dream things cause your heart to weep

  We played it one more time, then, in our very different moods, we powered down the equipment and went to bed.

  MOST GUYS LIKE US would have formed a band, but Carter was always more interested in the studio. He wasn’t a poseur or a show-off; people who say that never knew him. In the weeks after we met at college, I taught him how to use my equipment and we made some breakbeats together. He loved it and immediately began buying gear—stuff I’d been making do without, like good monitors and a copy of Pro Tools that didn’t come on an unlabeled disk bought from a Chinese guy outside a supermarket. Then he got in touch with some music students and persuaded them, by sheer charisma, to be our unpaid session men. They followed orders while we fooled around, trying to make them sound like Africa ’70 or the J.B.’s.

  It’s hard to overstate how much of a change this was for me. I was used to being alone. Suddenly I was surrounded by pe
ople, at the center of chaotic all-night recording sessions which sometimes turned into parties, as girlfriends and would-be girlfriends and other hangers-on turned up, attracted by the pheromone musk of music. One sign of things to come was Carter’s limited tolerance for computers. He hated clicking mice and tapping screens. Soon he was scouring auction sites for old equipment, anything with sliders he could push, knobs and dials he could twist. He spent a lot of money on a nineteen-eighties drum machine and a bass synthesizer, legendary pieces of equipment that most people only knew as software emulators. For a while we immersed ourselves in electro and squelchy Acid sounds, imagining ourselves kings of the block party, superstar emperors of the rave.

  Until then I’d never given much thought to the difference between the digital sounds I’d grown up with and their analog ancestors, sounds made by variations in the electrical charge flowing through actual physical circuits. Electricity is not digital. It does not come in discrete packets, but floods the air and flows through conductors and shoots from the hands of mad scientists in silent movies. If it is futuristic at all, it is a past version of the future, temperamental, unstable, half-alive. When you start to fool around with old synthesizers, building sounds by setting up waves in banks of oscillators, it’s more like a chemistry experiment than the strange Adderall obsessiveness of the digital studio. Carter and I began to consider ourselves connoisseurs of analog echo effects. We were unimpressed by the packages on the internet, so I found some schematics and together we built a primitive spring reverb, which made excellent wobbles and clangings that we used to excess on every track we made. Soon we were trying to reproduce effects we’d heard on music made at Lee Perry’s Black Ark studio in Jamaica. That year Perry was our idol, our god. He would make use of anything that came to hand. He’d buried microphones under a palm tree and pounded the earth to make a rhythm. We did the same thing, using a pine tree (this was the Northeast) with indifferent results. He once installed a sand floor in the studio and built a hollow drum riser out of wood and glass, filling it with water. This was supposed to change the sound of the drum kit. We built our own construction and part-flooded the school’s new music studio.

  We worshipped music like Perry’s but we knew we didn’t own it, a fact we tried to ignore as far as possible, masking our disabling caucasity with a sort of professorial knowledge: who played congas on the B-side, the precise definition of collie. The actual black kids at our school, of whom there were very few, seemed to us unsatisfactorily preppy or Christian or were basketball jocks doing business degrees, devirginating sorority girls and talking loudly in the commons about their personal brand. It seemed unfair. We were the ones who wanted to be at a soundclash in Kingston. We knew what John Coltrane was searching for when he overblew his tenor in the middle section of A Love Supreme. There was a Nigerian called Ade who we liked because his short dreads made him look vaguely like a Jamaican singer called Hugh Mundell, who’d been shot dead at the age of twenty-one. Ade smoked a lot of Carter’s weed while fielding questions about police brutality, but there was no getting around the fact that he wore suede loafers and a Patek Philippe watch. His old man was an oil trader in Lagos.

  Before long we would look back on our college Rasta phase with shame. Carter, who briefly owned a red-gold-and-green beanie hat, lived in fear that pictures of him wearing it would turn up on Facebook. We really did feel that our love of the music bought us something, some right to blackness, but by the time we got to New York, we’d learned not to talk about it. We didn’t want to be mistaken for the kind of suburban white boys who post pictures of themselves holding malt liquor bottles and throwing gang signs.

  In our senior year Carter and I shared an off-campus apartment. An uncertain and threatening future was visible on my horizon. I could barely pay my half of the rent, even with a job in the college development office and another making wraps and sandwiches at a local deli. My debt was big enough for me to be dreaming about it, icebergs and teetering bookcases looming in my sleep. When Carter “bounced,” I knew I would bounce too, back to my dad’s place in New Jersey. I wasn’t sure I could handle lying awake in my teenage bedroom, listening for dead people in the hallway. I’d been hoarding sleeping pills, in case I needed a quick exit.

  I was researching internships in recording studios in New York and Los Angeles. I was ready to accept anything—coffee assistant, cable gimp—that would get me within reach of an actual paying position before one of several different credit providers took me to court. I’d set myself a deadline. If I hadn’t found a music job by a certain date, I was going to accept a cousin’s offer to set me up with an interview at the engineering company he worked for in Boston. If that didn’t work out I’d do technical support, food service, whatever.

  Carter, of course, didn’t have to worry. He talked vaguely about traveling with that month’s girlfriend, a model called Mariam or Miriam. She was African and spoke with a French accent, I think her dad was the Senegalese consul in San Francisco. Carter was going to take her to the Caribbean on a sailing yacht. I wanted to spend time with him, to wring out every last drop of friendship before we went our separate ways. I was convinced that was how it would be: he’d head on into the rest of his glamorous life while at best I’d be chained to a photocopier in some suburban business park, at worst locked in a State hospital, my ass hanging out of a backless gown. I spent long hours in my bedroom, fretful to the point of tears, imagining Carter at pool parties, drinking cocktails on high-floor balconies. I mourned him as if he’d already gone.

  Carter quickly got bored of my languishing. He started taking a sarcastic tone, inventing derogatory nicknames for me. I was the robot professor, the tin man. I lacked spontaneity and heart. By then he had stopped listening, not just to the old house and techno we’d once loved, but all contemporary music, anything that used digital sounds. He’d been through a hip hop phase, scouring the internet for twelve-inches by regional producers from the eighties and nineties. Now he only wanted to listen to ethnographic recordings or scratchy 45’s of doo-wop bands. The Flamingos, The Clovers, The Stereo Sound Of The !Kung Bushmen. An ever longer list of things was not real enough for him, tainted by the digital sins of modernity. “Just ones and zeroes,” he’d sneer, dismissing some recent part of the culture. “Out of touch with the human body.” If I hadn’t used his expensive drum machines and keyboards, they would have gathered dust.

  One night we were sitting up late in the kitchen. I was smoking a joint to get rid of the stink of deli ham and mayonnaise as he plucked distractedly at a new toy which had arrived by courier that morning, a nineteen-twenties Gibson mandolin. He’d deleted his iTunes, he said solemnly, angling the mandolin’s body so the starburst finish caught the light.

  —I know what you mean. The sample rate—

  —Fuck the sample rate. It could be a million hertz, I wouldn’t care. It could be all the hertz. This bullshit about lossless. There’s always a loss, don’t you get that? There is always something missing.

  He started lecturing me, a speech I’d already heard a dozen times. Technology was a trap. Modern musicians were locked in a box. Digital sound had an absolute cutoff, a sonic floor that repelled the listener and set an inhuman limit to the experience. You couldn’t go below zero, had I ever thought about that? Whatever happened to soul, to the vibration of an animal-gut string, the resonance of lacquered rosewood? Always the stark binary. Zero or one. I admit I stopped listening. He clutched the neck of the mandolin as if physically grasping the elusive quality he sought. He seemed high to me, higher than usual, scratching himself and making agitated passes at the strings, little chops and cuts. I asked him what he’d taken and he gave me a look and stalked off to the spare bedroom that we used as a studio. I heard rustling and scraping and went in to find him pulling cables out of the back of the patch bay.

  —What are you doing?

  —What I should have done years ago. This is all going in the trash.

  —Carter, you’re wasted.
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br />   —What do you care?

  He was brandishing one of the few pieces of equipment that actually belonged to me, an expensive digital delay, hefting the brushed steel case in one hand.

  —Please, Carter. You’ll break it.

  He pouted sarcastically, then went over to the window and threw it out. I heard it smash on the sidewalk. We were on the second floor. Someone could easily have been underneath. I noticed that my breathing had become irregular. I pointed it out to him, that someone could have been underneath. Don’t be such a pussy, he sneered. It’s just a thing.

  I tried to remain calm. I’d spent all day working for tips; I’d saved for that machine; someone could have been killed, I’d been working all day, working for tips, I’d saved, someone could have been killed and—I threw myself at him, my hands scrabbling for his throat. At that moment I wanted to kill him. I wanted to scrape away his looks and charm and expose the skeleton of money underneath. People always remember Carter as an imposing figure. That’s the psychological power he possessed. Actually he was slightly built. If you saw him coming out of the shower or lying asleep in bed, he looked like a waif, a lost boy.

  The force of my attack knocked him over. His long blond locks splayed out across the couch and his eyes opened wide in an expression of anime surprise. It was as if he’d never seen me before. I watched myself choking him, kneeling on his chest. I felt as if I’d snorted ketamine and had suddenly been gifted all the time in the world, time to notice the pores in his face and the hole in his right earlobe where he’d removed a stud. I wanted to speak to him, but my mouth was dry. A crust of white powder rimmed his left nostril and I contemplated it, this scurf of whatever he’d been snorting, and I told him I’m not a violent person, though I don’t think I spoke the words out loud. Then, for a shocking instant I was looking at myself, lying there on the couch, at my own eyes wide open in an expression of surprise. I must have slackened my grip, because he twisted round and shouldered me off onto the floor. I kept hold of him, bunching fistfuls of his shirt, his hands now at my throat. As we rolled onto the carpet, I heard the crunch of the mandolin under my back.