Lisa Ko: The Leavers

The show was in a loft apartment on the last remaining industrial block in Lower Manhattan. Windows lined one wall, edged with late February frost, and the concrete floor was tacky with spilled drinks. Closer to where the bands played, it was as hot as July. The current act, math rockers whose set sounded like one thirty-minute-long song, dull grays and feeble angles, the singer’s head shaved bald around the sides while the hair on top sprouted up like a fistful of licorice, reminded Daniel of being stoned for days in his dorm room at SUNY Potsdam, hitting repeat on the same song until the notes separated and unraveled.

Thank God he was no longer at Potsdam. He drank vodka in his plastic cup, let the warmth spread into his belly, sandpapering his nerves until the music soaked down to his toes. When he and Roland played, the audience would be incredulous, admiring. Not like earlier, when this dude Nate had been talking about Vic Sirro and Daniel had blurted, “Oh, you mean the blue backpack guy?” and Nate had made a face like he’d noticed a stain on his pants.

Oh, you mean the blue backpack guy. Daniel mentally punched himself. Nate was so tall and skinny he had a premature hunchback, and his long, thin face was giraffe-adjacent, but even he thought Daniel was a loser. After tonight, no one would turn away from him in the middle of a conversation or look over him as if he was invisible. The band would play sold-out shows, be profiled on music blogs, his picture front and center. Roland had been telling people that this new project was his best yet, reunited with his original collaborator, with Daniel’s insane guitar. Hearing this made Daniel nervous, like they were tempting fate. All week he’d been waiting for someone to tell Roland to shut up and stop bragging. But half the room was here because they wanted to cheer Roland on, and Daniel was trying hard to absorb the excitement.

He poured himself another vodka, downed it, poured another. He wandered out to the rooftop, the city spread wide like an offering, though he knew better than to admit he was impressed by the view. Upstate, snow was everywhere, the season in deep coma. Yet in the city there was minimal snow, heat lamps on the roof and bridges in the distance lit up like X-rays, and there was music, wordless and thumping, bulbs of gold and green, and dancing, arms and legs moving in slow motion, like animals stalking their prey. There were girls with geometric tattoos up the insides of their forearms, hair bundled up like snakes, eyeliner packed on so thick it looked like it had been applied with a Sharpie. One of them had played a set earlier, creeping yowls and crashing keyboards, violin, theremin, melodica, each instrument creepier than the next. Daniel glanced at his hiking boots and moved toward the eye of the dancing, the music an underwater dream.

Years before these transplants dared to venture out of their suburban hometowns, Daniel had been a city kid who memorized the subway system by fourth grade. Yet he still felt like he didn’t belong. Post-Ridgeborough, it had never been easy for Daniel to trust himself. Not like Roland, who could give a party direction simply by showing up. When Roland asked if anyone wanted to eat at Taco Bell, which would elicit silence or even derision if anyone else suggested it, people said sure, cool. If Roland proclaimed a show boring, people agreed to bounce. Daniel was malleable, everyone and no one, a collector of moods, a careful observer of the right thing to say. He watched other people’s reactions before deciding on his own; he could be fun or serious or whatever was most strategic, whoever you wanted him to be. Sometimes it backfired, like when he’d overheard these guys talking about a band named Crudites and said, “Yeah, I’ve heard of them, nineties pop punk, right?” and one of them had said, “It’s not a real band. It’s a joke.” How quickly he’d stammered that he must have misheard. Or the other night, when he and Roland were hanging out with friends who were talking about how much they loved Bottle Rocket, Daniel had nodded along. “But you hate Wes Anderson,” Roland said later. “I’m allowed to change my mind,” Daniel said. He wondered if his annoyance at the preciousness of Wes Anderson movies was misinformed, if he had overlooked a hidden brilliance obvious to people more schooled than he was.

If only he had the right clothes, knew the right references, he would finally become the person he was meant to be. Like Roland — self-assured, with impeccable taste — but less vain. Deserving of love, blameless. But no matter how many albums he acquired or playlists he artfully compiled, the real him remained stubbornly out there like a fat cruise ship on the horizon, visible but out of reach, and whenever he got closer it drifted farther away. He was forever waiting to get past the secret entrance, and when the ropes did part he could never fully believe he was in. Another door materialized, another rope to get past, always the promise of something better.

He gripped his empty cup. He’d torn it apart, bent the rim back and forth until the plastic split in a single line. The math rockers had been playing for forty minutes. Inside, he didn’t see any familiar faces, so he got a new cup and poured one last vodka. He found Roland standing against the wall in a black blazer, dark hair buzzed close to his scalp. From the neck up Roland reminded Daniel of a nineteenth-century mobster, with his furtive features and disarming smile. In high school, both of them had been too different to receive attention from girls (or boys, whom Roland also dated these days), though Daniel liked to think it didn’t matter now. Roland was still short, compact but hard, his pointy face hawkish, his movements clipped and sharp. His manic energy no longer seemed as freakish as it had been in Ridgeborough, nor did the deep croak that had been slightly spooky on a twelve-year-old.

“We’ve got this,” Roland said. “These guys are so derivative.”

Daniel laughed, letting the room blur at its corners. How great it was to be back in the city, playing music with Roland again. They had been playing together for nearly half their lives, Daniel on guitar and vocals, Roland on vocals and beats and production and sometimes bass, shows at Carlough College house parties or the Ridgeborough Elks Lodge or in a barn out in Littletown. In high school there’d been a thankfully brief electroclash experiment, a power trio with their friend Shawn as the drummer, and an art-punk duo called Wilkinson | Fuentes, in which Daniel had tried and spectacularly failed at playing his white Squier with his teeth, Hendrix-style.

“These guys sound like they’re jerking off to their dads’ Yes albums,” he said.

“Too many derivative acts,” Roland said. “Not like that set with the theremin.”

The truth was, Psychic Hearts was derivative, a nü-disco nightmare, like Roland was trying to mix hair metal and Dracula with a thinned-out noise pop sound, jacking the title from an obscure Thurston Moore album. All that fronting and polishing only to be purposely stripped down. It was over-manufactured lo-fi, not the kind of music Daniel would choose to play, not his own music. He found Roland’s drum-machine beats predictable, the lyrics vague and murky, the eighties stylings too self-conscious. There had always been something distasteful in Roland’s stage strutting, how naturally the performance came to him, how effortlessly the crowd ate it up. But if Roland wanted to make music like this, Daniel wouldn’t let him down.

Roland had called last month and said he needed a guitarist for a new project. “Our couch is yours as long as you need it. What’s the point in being all the way up there by Canada?” Roland had moved down to the city right after high school, worked until he could afford to go to college part-time, and Daniel hadn’t seen him, had barely talked to him, in over a year. “Nobody can do music with me like you can,” Roland said, and the next day Daniel charged a one-way ticket and rode down to the city on a bus that smelled like diapers. It wasn’t as if he had any plans after getting booted from Potsdam. Like his parents said — like they’d remind him again tomorrow — he had thrown his future away.