White Tears

by Hari Kunzru

  —What’s the deal with Marc, I asked, cautiously.

  —Oh him. He’s another collector. Emerging artists, blah blah blah. All so he can impress his Teva-wearing tech buddies with tales of urban exploration.

  —What about him and Leonie?

  —Is she fucking him? I don’t even want to know.

  I said I was tired and I’d probably go to bed. He went to the bar and for a while I walked desultory circuits of the pool, listening to the band race through “A Night In Tunisia.” From somewhere nearby I heard the sound of a helicopter taking off. I don’t know why I chose to go back into the pool house.

  Inside, the noise of the party was muffled. The moon shone in through a high window, throwing a slanted band of light over the wall of photographs. The dead people in their swimsuits and tennis whites crossed their rackets and raised their glasses in an ironic toast to my social failure. Behind me was a row of changing cubicles. From inside one of them I began to make out the sound of breathing. A man’s breathing, ragged and deep. Then, quite distinctly, I heard the man groan and a woman’s voice telling him to shut up. It was Leonie. There was silence, and then a series of tiny, wet, noises. The man’s breathing got deeper again. I was trapped by what I was hearing, my feet glued to the ground by a sort of vile abjection. The groans increased in urgency until, with a soft exhalation, the man came.

  I hid in the darkness.

  A moment or two of scrabbling around, the clink of a belt buckle. Only when it was too late did I realize that I should have left, that it would only deepen my self-disgust to see the cubicle door swing open and Leonie come out, adjusting her cocktail dress. I attempted to compose myself, to form some emotional structure that wouldn’t collapse. Then she stepped into the shaft of light and I saw her flushed face, her disordered hair. Marc followed, buttoning his shirt. I don’t know what made him look towards me, whether I made a sound or gave some other clue. He saw me trying to bury myself in the damp beach towels hung on pegs on the wall behind me. For an instant he looked shocked. Then he broke eye contact by checking an expensive diver’s watch, its steel bracelet half-buried in his grizzled arm-hair. Excuse me, son, he said, allowing himself a half-smile. He followed Leonie back out to the party.

  WHEN WE GOT BACK TO NEW YORK, Carter asked me for the audio I’d made on my walks around the city. By that time he was claiming to friends that he didn’t even own a computer anymore, so this was surprising. He usually wanted nothing to do with my environmental recordings. I put them on a drive for him and forgot about it.

  The studio sucks up time. I wanted to lose myself, disconnect from my obsessive thoughts about Leonie. Despite Carter’s behavior at our meeting, the hip hop star was still interested in working with us, and I closed the door on the world and trawled through recordings of thirties dance bands, collecting samples for a demo. McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, Cab Calloway, The Harlem Hamfats. Days passed, taking me further away from that pool house, the shame and confusion I’d brought on myself. My plan was to do a mix that sounded like you could have heard it at the Cotton Club, all banjos and muted trumpets. I had the files for one of the hip hop star’s hits, the one about “going uptown” to “see what the dark side brings.” I was basically trying to make it sound like Duke Ellington’s “Creole Love Call,” without getting mixed up in a lot of complicated arrangements.

  Carter wasn’t interested in helping. He communicated his preferences by shrugging whenever I brought the project up. He was busy with something else, something he didn’t seem interested in discussing. I thought perhaps it was a girl. One evening I was collecting a burrito from a delivery guy at the studio door when Carter appeared behind him, wearing sneakers and white earbuds. For a minute, I thought he’d been jogging. None of this—the shoes, the headphones, physical exercise—was normal. I put the food on the counter of the kitchenette and asked him if he wanted any. I hoped he’d ask to hear the mix, which I thought was sounding good. He didn’t answer, too absorbed in whatever he was listening to.

  Eventually he gave up and held out the earbuds. I put them in and heard a mariachi band playing on the subway—nasal harmonies, a jaunty accordion, guitar. There was a change in the acoustic as the doors opened, a muffled announcer’s voice saying something about the train running express.

  —This is my file?

  —You remember where you were?

  —The C train, I think. Uptown C.

  —Oh. I guessed wrong. I thought it was the six.

  He looked disappointed.

  —You’re retracing my walks?

  —You heard something, Seth. There might be other things.

  —This is what you’ve been doing? All week?

  —Mostly.

  —There’s nothing on those recordings. I pulled out anything worthwhile.

  —So you say. You could have heard things you didn’t know you heard.

  —You understand how much work we have to do, right? We’re on deadline.

  —Let me get my laptop. I’ll prove it to you.

  We sat down and he made me listen to audio that I’d recorded somewhere in Bed-Stuy, an old homeless man shuffling up to me, asking for money. I remembered him. He’d done a sort of lolloping tap dance; he had a comic pitch: hey man hey brother make a donation to the United Negro Bacon Sandwich Fund. I heard myself laughing. Then he began to shout at me. You could tell that he was close, right up in my face, snarling pay me pay me what you owe me motherfucker.

  I remembered the man, but I had no memory of that.

  —Who was the guy?

  —I have literally zero idea.

  The beggar’s voice was changing stereo position, as if he or I had been moving around. I could hear my own breathing, labored and uneven, as if I were agitated or making a physical effort, but I wasn’t saying anything. A man was shouting at me in the street and I wasn’t responding at all.

  —You know who that was, right?

  Carter sounded as if he expected an answer.

  —Some old guy. I have no clue.

  I remembered the first part, the amusing part, the shuffling, the pitch.

  —Hey man hey brother? You don’t hear his voice?

  I knew what he meant. The very idea was frightening. But why couldn’t I remember the rest? How could my mind have erased something so intense and dramatic?

  —Carter. It wasn’t the same guy.

  —What did he look like?

  —This was an old guy, an older guy. I’m telling you it wasn’t the same person.

  But in spite of myself, I started thinking: Seth, you didn’t see his face, you can’t remember his face. There was something avaricious in Carter’s eyes. It was as if he thought I was deliberately keeping some nugget from him, a piece of valuable information.

  —So what about our Vanilla Ice tune?

  The way he changed the subject felt tactical. He was throwing me a bone.

  —Come on, Carter.

  —What? You’ve been working to meet the important deadline for MC Snowy Snow. Let’s hear it.

  —Don’t call him that. Don’t mock him while we’re working with him.

  —Fuck does it matter when I mock him? Let’s hear it.

  We sat on swivel chairs in the control room. The lyrics chugged nicely along over the big band syncopation. It worked. Carter asked why I’d kept the bass so far to the front. It sounded too modern. He wanted to hear more of the clarinet, that would be more authentic. I agreed enthusiastically with all his suggestions, pleased he was giving input. I wanted to be less worried than I was. I wanted him to be thinking about something other than a man playing chess in Washington Square.

  After we’d played the demo a couple of times, he got up from the desk and collected his things. He had stuff to do, he told me. He would see me back at the loft. When we opened the door to the street, I was surprised to find it was dark outside. That wasn’t so unusual—we often lost track of time in the studio—but just then it seemed ominous. I needed to feel rooted, to remember t
hings instead of forgetting them. We stood for a while, smoking and breathing in the humid air, until Carter’s car pulled up. As he got in, I caught sight of his expression, an external blankness that wasn’t passivity or peace or even simple tiredness. It was like a lid on a boiling pan, masking some spirit-consuming interior battle.

  I ran back inside, grabbed the bag that held my recording equipment, set the alarm and quickly wheeled out my bike. I locked the door and waited impatiently for the beeps to end. Then I cycled over the bridge into the city, to Washington Square.

  I looked for him through the evening crowds, the people milling around by the fountain and watching punk kids making chalk drawings on the flagstones. A bluegrass duo—a girl with a nose ring who played upright bass and sang, a mullet-haired guitarist—was busking under the arch. He was not watching them. On one of the benches near the dog run, a well-dressed man rocked backwards and forwards, shouting anguished obscenities to himself. I found Carter by the chess tables, talking to the hustlers. I chose not to approach him. I wanted to eavesdrop, to hear how he spoke when he thought I wasn’t there. I’d brought a small parabolic, a professionally made handheld device, much less cumbersome than my old hacked satellite dish. I hovered around, far enough away to be discreet, which was easy enough in the darkness. In this way I picked up snatches of his conversation. He was throwing twenties at people, asking if they knew a singer. A chess player who could sing.

  —I can sing. Sing anything you want. Show me the money.

  —No, this is a particular guy.

  —I told you, Imma sing for you. Want to hear me sing?

  Two informants. A third.

  —Dark skin. Maybe a gold tooth.

  —Sure I know the dude. Bring him right to you.

  They took the money. None of them came back. Carter waited, shifting from one foot to another and playing with his hair. Even from a distance you could tell he was on edge. He looked like he was trying to score drugs. This neediness worried me. I’d never seen him like that. He was someone who was careful only to want things, never to need them. To me, he looked like he was unraveling. I didn’t know what to do, who to tell. What, in fact, was there to tell? I wanted to go to him, but I didn’t dare show myself, because then he would know that I’d been spying on him. In the end, I left him there. I waited up at home, watching TV in the living area, but he didn’t come back that night.

  For the next few days, I worked on a second rough for the hip hop star. I was using one of our rarest breaks, an obscure record from a short-lived Philadelphia label that had cost Carter a pile of money back when he was still interested in the seventies. By some miracle it hadn’t been reissued, so for the moment it retained its value. I was chopping it up with a guitar sample from an equally rare Afrobeat cassette. The work was absorbing, but it wasn’t enough to keep me from my thoughts: Leonie, Washington Square, things I had forgotten, buried things that I ought to remember but couldn’t bring to mind. One night, just after I’d gone to bed, Carter called me from the studio and told me he had something I needed to hear. I was overjoyed that he was working, but also nervous. It was 4 a.m. He sounded more than usually amped up. I hauled myself out of bed and cycled over.

  The first thing he told me after he unbolted the door was that I should prepare to cry. He’d cried. He’d been crying for two hours straight. He told me just to sit and listen—I wouldn’t be the same after. He turned to the desk, and through the studio speakers came the sound of a New York street. Traffic, the sound of footsteps. My footsteps. I quickly recognized Tompkins Square in the East Village. I could hear barking from the dog run, skaters panhandling by the benches. He turned up the volume. I heard myself walk past the skaters into a sort of aural dead zone. The street noise faded, the dogs too. The only significant signal was the sound of a guitar, someone fingerpicking in a weird open tuning that made the instrument seem to wail and moan. It was mesmerizing, the performance of a musician struggling with inexpressible pain and loss. The recording was completely clear, unmarred by voices or traffic. I must have been standing directly in front of the guitarist for several minutes.

  And yet I couldn’t bring to mind his face, or even picture the scene.

  —Now, said Carter. Listen to this.

  He leaned over the desk and pushed a fader. Suddenly the chess player’s vocal was laid over the guitar.

  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

  They fit together. In fact they were perfect, as if they were two halves of a single performance.

  —What do you think of that?

  What did I think? I was terrified. I felt dizzy. My hands were cold. If before my fears had been vague and inchoate, now they were definite. This was a message. Someone or something was addressing us.

  —It’s like—I don’t know what to say. I don’t like it.

  —But it sounds real, right?

  —Yes. It sounds real.

  —So go do your magic.

  —What magic?

  —Seth at the controls.

  —No Carter.

  —What are you talking about?

  —I can’t. Not on this. I don’t want to work on this.

  —Why not?

  —What do you want me to do, anyway? Clean it up? It’s pretty clean already.

  —No! Make it dirty. Drown it in hiss. I want it to sound like a record that’s been sitting under someone’s porch for fifty years.

  He wanted me to do it and I couldn’t think of any reason to refuse, except that it scared me, and that didn’t seem good enough. I tried to tell him how I felt. I begged, but it was as if he couldn’t hear me. He kept on bullying me until finally, exhausted by his hectoring, I got to work. I played it out through a tinny little speaker salvaged from an old transistor radio, re-recorded it and buried it in crackle. By the time I’d finished, it sounded like a worn 78, the kind of recording that only exists in one poor copy, a thread on which time and memory hang.

  Carter was ecstatic. He played it again and again.

  —It’s perfect, he kept saying. It’s is the greatest thing we’ve ever done.

  Slip, drop it, and that memory lies in pieces. Smashed, unrecoverable.

  I DIDN’T KNOW Carter had put it on the internet, until he came into the control room and thrust a laptop in front of me. On the screen was a page from a file-sharing site, all penis enlargement ads and animations of girls taking off their tops.

  KG 25806 Charlie Shaw Graveyard Blues

  Type: Audio > Music

  Files: 1

  Size: 3.1 MiB (3250585 Bytes)

  Tag(s): 78rpm blues oldtime

  Uploaded: 20—- 07-01 18:32:41 EST

  By: Anan51

  Seeders: 12

  Leechers: 67

  Comments: 27

  Info Hash: 699D60E19FBA114E24798C15A588B44687559D0D

  Above it was a scan of an authentic-looking label, scuffed and faded, informing me that the song was vocal with guitar accompaniment and the disk had been “electrically recorded in the USA.” The words “Key & Gate” appeared above an image of a pair of ornamental iron gates, half-open, with a key hovering above them like a UFO.

  —What’s this?

  —Look at how many seeds.

  —Bu
t what is it?

  —It’s our tune. The chess player’s blues. I made a label and everything.

  —Right. I see that. Who’s Charlie Shaw?

  —Just a name I made up.

  —What the fuck, Carter. What are you doing?

  —It just came to me. Looks authentic, right? I posted it to a couple blues sites too. Check out the comments. They’re losing their minds.

  Sure enough, in the tiny confines of the prewar blues internet, it was like someone had dropped a bomb.

  Hidden gem!!!

  What about the b-side

  bw?

  bw?

  thanks op u rock

  WHO POSTED THIS I HAVE TO KNOW

  There were even offers to buy the record, sight unseen. One poster mentioned five thousand dollars. There were inquiries from Germany, Australia, a badly spelled one from Japan.

  —Why would you do this?

  —They believe in it. Isn’t that amazing? We made that and they believe it’s real.

  —Is this really a wise idea?

  —What do you mean? It’s the best idea! These fuckers think this music was made in 1928, but actually we made it. We made it, fools! We made that shit last week! So who’s the expert now? Who knows the tradition? We do! We own that shit!

  Carter was so exultant that I began to get a contact high. Together we looked at the feverish discussion on the comment boards. It was amazing. No one had the slightest sense that it wasn’t a genuine recording. Not only that, but it was being hailed as a masterpiece. Words like feeling, artistry, classic were being used. Several collectors were trying to get in touch with Anan51, the account Carter had used to upload the file. One message caught my attention. The guy—had to be a guy—sounded like a lunatic, wrote in all caps: