Andy Abramowitz - Thank You, Goodnight

“It’s not boring to me,” Sara replied, resting her cheek in her palm. “I’ve been living with a lawyer all this time. Talk about boring.”

So I talked a bit. Sara listened with apparent interest, and stirred another half pack of sweetener into her cup.

The conversation shifted to more mundane topics, and she reminded me that we were low on coffee beans. “They have that Colombian blend you like here,” she said, glancing over at the display table that was neatly lined with brown vacuum-sealed bags.

I turned my head. “Nice. I can never find that.”

“I know. Let’s grab one.”

As I stood in line, the beans crunching together in the bag, I looked over at Sara and felt a rush of warmth. She and I really were more than roommates. We had a life together with routines that gave each of us solace. We curled up under blankets in front of movies, she invariably turning to me with some dubious theory about an actor. (“That guy’s really British. You can totally tell.”) Sometimes under the blanket my hand would slide over her thigh and we’d pause the movie and lead each other into the bedroom. Much later she’d slip out to the bathroom, her long spindly legs unsteady, needing a few steps to reacquaint themselves with the symmetry of walking. On her way back, she’d lift the shade and peer out at the night, checking to see if the snow had started to fall. She’d stand there for a moment too long and I’d wonder what she was looking at, or looking for. Then she’d dive back under the covers into my folded arm, and the next thing I knew, it would be 2:09 a.m., the hall light still on, the movie still paused.

She was nursing the last of her latte now and watching as a gathering of college boys outside the window shoved each other playfully for the benefit of girls standing in poses of affected disengagement. Sara seemed a visitor in a museum, witnessing from the safety of a glass barrier the unfolding of some evolutionarily dictated mating ritual. So this is how the humans behave, her bemused gaze seemed to say.

How many times had I felt that same isolating sense of wonder that I was now reading on her face? That aloneness in the thick of everything.

Having Sara had kept me from drifting off into the shadows, from truly disappearing into myself. Just maybe I’d done the same for her.

Everything came together on the day Jumbo wore a bandana. It appeared out of nowhere, plucked out of his arsenal of inexplicable accessories. It was black and accented with undersea-green paisley swirls that put one in an astrological frame of mind. The way it was draped over his head would have, on anyone else, connoted menace—urban gang, seventeenth-century pirate—but on him looked like a boxed Halloween costume from Walmart.

“What’s with the kerchief ?” Sonny frowned as Jumbo took a seat in the booth, rested his red Gretsch on his knee, and adjusted the large-banded headphones over his ears. He was preparing to lay down an arpeggio guitar line on “The Warmth of Disease,” a song that had awakened me in the middle of the night, demanding to be written, one that I’d managed to quietly cage with a Dictaphone and a nylon-string acoustic.

Once all the fussing over tuning and sound levels had been sorted out, Sonny leaned over the board, pressed the button that allowed communication between the control room and the isolation booth, and spoke: “Don’t think of this track as merely texture. This is going to be a part. When somebody describes this song to his friends, he’s going to say, ‘You know the one with that guitar line? Ba ba ba, ba ba ba, ba ba ba.’ You are helping to define this song.”

Warren and I were watching from the yellow couch behind Sonny. Warren kept holding his bag of dried mango in front of my face; I kept shaking him off.

“When you play this line,” Sonny continued, “I want you to picture your guitar leading the listener through the song, being there for them, something for them to trust when the singer drops out or when the drums get moody or the bass goes a little peripatetic.”

I looked at Warren and mouthed “peripatetic.” With a resolute nod, he mouthed it right back.

“Dude, I’m all over it,” Jumbo declared.

“Let’s see,” Sonny grumbled. “Ready now. Here it comes.”

Then, at the very last second before Sonny hit the record button, Jumbo magically produced a pair of cheap surf-shop sunglasses and slid them on. Warren groaned. Between the headphones, the bandana, and the plastic Ray-Ban knockoffs, the guitar player looked a little like a petty dope hustler and a little like Hulk Hogan. Sonny glanced back at us but decided there were no words. Then he pressed the button.

At first, all that came through the speakers was the pregnant click of Warren’s sticks counting off four measures in three-four time. Then the studio flooded with music. The rich tone of Jumbo’s broken chords seemed to run like syrup over the crisp hi-hat strikes and rim shots supplied by the drum track. It drifted over Mackenzie’s wandering bass and weaved the whole thing into a slow sonic freight car rolling across an open plain. Each one of us was transfixed. It was for moments like this that I put up with everything else that came with that meandering mess of humanity, that avalanche in a china shop.

When the song was finished, Sonny looked up and stated simply, “You’re done.”

Jumbo grinned with pride at what was often Sonny’s most effusive tribute. Consumed with self-congratulation, he forgot that sunglasses tended to impair one’s vision when one wore them in a dark recording studio, and standing up, he suddenly found himself tangled in a snake pit of cables. He rocked clumsily, then finally tripped and crashed into the termite-weakened, asbestos-riddled wall.

“Please, man!” Sonny yelled in anguish. “Get out of my booth!”

Lead vocals were next, so I got up.

Mack was smirking at me. “You really want to follow that act?”

I shook my head.

“Listen, Tremble, I love this song,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. So don’t blow it.”

I paused. “I’ll try not to, but just so I understand, what’s the it in that sentence?”

“The it is the noise that your throat is about to make in that little room right there. You’ll only make it for a few minutes, but it will be captured and listened to for all eternity.”

“And by eternity, you mean the next six months. A year tops.”

“So maybe not eternity, but long after we’re all dead, that’s for sure,” she said, crossing her legs and nestling herself into one of the beanbagesque sofa cushions.

“Thanks. That was kind of you.”

“What?” She giggled. “Just trying to help you maintain perspective, to appreciate the weight of the moment. But hey—no pressure.”

“Christ, Mackenzie. Whatever happened to ‘let’s just play the damn thing’?”

She smiled. “Okay. Just play the damn thing.”

I started for the recording room.

“But don’t blow it,” she called after me.

Inside the booth, I cleared my throat while sliding on the headphones and smoothing out the crumpled lyric sheet on the stand. Sonny came in to toy with the microphone boom. “You stand right there,” he ordered. “Don’t move. And don’t touch my mic.”

As I ran through a couple of takes, I could feel myself shrinking. The lyrics were the weak link in this song. The imagery was hokey, the metaphors mixed. Pouring cold bottled water down my stupid, thirty-eight-year-old throat, I tried not to notice my bandmates staring at me team-photo-like from the couch.

“Hold up a sec,” Sonny commanded from behind the sound board, detaining me in the grip of his stare. “This song, ‘The Warmth of Disease’—what’s going on here? What do you think about these words you’re singing?”