The Insomnia Jones Method
After a year and a half, the process has been winnowed to this: Linda — who has a Master’s Degree in English Lit and a dent in her nose from an old piercing — receives a request for replacement parts from somewhere within the unintelligible process clanking along below them. She logs the request and forwards the e-mail to Carl — a disabled lathe-operator who’s been moved up to the office by the VP of Operations (his uncle through marriage). Carl transcribes the e-mail into an order form that he submits to one of a handful of vendors and carbon-copies Trevor, who makes a record of the order, keeps Linda up to date with info for the floor, and provides Keith — a business school drop-out and ardent company man — with receipts and lead-times so that he can fill in the blanks of the weekly, monthly, and quarterly reports on their portion of Illinois Fabrication’s swift widget and valve business. The four of them sit facing opposite corners of a carpeted box the size of a two-car garage, with one window looking down on the factory floor and another out to the parking lot and sodded mound separating them from the freeway.
It’s about all the mediocrity that Trevor can bear. He’s twenty-five now, but straight out of high school he was traveling the world as a freelance security expert. Paid by airports and casinos on three continents to hack into their systems, contracted by the paranoid founder of an oil-rig micro-nation to sniff out high tech saboteurs, compensated in kief and disc drives full of music to keep pirates in Scandinavia anonymous. He was going to do this forever. There was nothing about life back home that he missed.
But he’s stuck once again in the town where he grew up — all his old friends missing or handicapped with wives and children. It only took a few years before his bag of tricks grew quaint and the jobs started going to younger guys with unbelievable technique. He just couldn’t keep up, or maybe he stopped trying. The money he saved lasted from the beginning of one French summer to the end of the next — by himself mostly, going to techno shows at night and spending the blind-shuttered afternoons learning how to reproduce the sounds still swimming in his hung-over head. The reckless precision of his old hustle started to seem like training for this: the perfectionism, the hermitage, the patience to push through the breaking waves until he’s made it out to sea. On exhausted mornings, music seems to be the only thing keeping him alive.
And yet, he has to get paid. The only place that would swallow his intractable resume was Illinois Fabrication, and maybe even they didn’t because this job is straight antipodal to the work he’s used to. It’s just e-mailing people. Occasionally. When he sits down at 8am, he can feel a hand on his skull and it slowly squeezes harder and harder until it’s as though his head will pop like a zit. Every day — in the nick of time — the savior of five o’clock rolls around and he’s back in the narrow scarp of after-work. Going dinner-less at his computer crafting new tracks, promoting his moniker around the Midwest, drowning himself in samples from any era, of any style. He is starting to get somewhere with all of this — a few dozen solid shows so far, a couple thousand online fans clamoring for the EP he’s promised by the end of the month — but he’s calculated that, even on four hours of sleep, there is simply not enough time to become who he wants to be. This ought to change all of that:
“Okay, guys,” he says, turning to his co-workers. It’s three o’clock on a Tuesday. Everyone is clicking their mouse buttons and staring into their monitors thinking about what TV shows will air this evening, what left-overs can be reheated for dinner. “Guys, seriously, listen . . .”
“What do you want?” Linda says with a huff. She likes to be left alone, and sometimes she feigns meanness to keep it that way.
“We’re all trying to work, Trevor,” Carl says.
“No you’re not. C’mon . . . this will only take a second. It’s the best thing ever.”
Keith, in eyeglasses he can’t afford and a purple-sheen dress-shirt, swivels and crosses his legs as though Trevor is the CEO himself.
“Carl, seriously . . . just one minute and I’ll grant you all the free time in the world.”
Carl turns, sighing like he expects terminal diagnosis. The last to move into the office, his station is wedged behind the door and so his desk is pummeled and jostled every time someone heads into the hallway or returns. He’s lost his hair and there is a crease in his forehead from the ball-cap he wears in the purgatory between work and sleep. Since failing out on the lathe from carpal tunnel, Trevor guesses Carl has gained seventy-five pounds. A photo on his desk shows him slender in white-and-teal as he receives a trophy at some shooting competition in the ’80s, his wife beaming behind him with period-piece hair.
“Son, what the hell is wrong with you?” Carl says. “Are you on drugs? I can hear your heartbeat from here.”
“Hell no, I’m just high on life, captain,” Trevor says. Linda gasps, chuckles at him. Keith blinks with the tip of his pen bleeding through the top sheet of his notepad.
“So, here’s the deal . . .” And then Trevor explains how, since his first day at Illinois Fab, he’s been designing an automated system to stand-in for their process — a piece of home-brew software that can do all of their work for them. There are variables, he admits, but they’re all predictable and he’s got voluminous notes to back up the entire Method if anyone’s interested. The only problem he sees is that it requires their cooperation: e-mails will still be sent under their names so they have to show up and be complicit, and though Trevor will maintain the program’s every idiosyncrasy, they must pay a small debt of attention. The upshot is that they’ll be free to do as they please as long as they keep up appearances.
“Why didn’t you bring this idea to Bruce?” Carl says.
Trevor tents his fingers in an executive gesture, and at this Keith gets slouchy-serious with an index finger to his lips.
“Well, Carl . . . because if Linda is ever going to have a kid, she’s going to need the benefits. Keith . . . uh . . . could very well be our boss if he keeps stacking up the attaboys from Bruce. And you, man, this is like the end of the line, right?”
Carl looks down with an expression like he’s just discovered his gut.
“I know what your instincts are telling you,” Trevor goes on. “And if Bruce finds out about this, they’ll probably keep you. But once I fill in the details, what do you think happens to our friends here?”
“What do you think happens to you?” Carl says, mousing around on his monitor for something useful to do. “I guess you’d be their golden boy after that.”
“Oh, I don’t give a shit, Carl. They’d probably want me to do things, and I’d really rather not. Think about it you guys, I can get it up and running tomorrow.”
+ + +
Trevor’s apartment is on the first floor of a squat complex with a weedy courtyard and a cluster of satellite dishes pointed up through the trees. It sits between a gas station with the lowest malt liquor prices in town and a park that neighborhood children avoid like a haunted house. He lives by himself in a two bedroom — one room just a futon and an over-topped hamper, the other outfitted like some rebel command center with Goodwill mattresses for soundproofing and a confusion of cables, speakers, and electronics. He sits talking on his cellphone in front of three large monitors, with the headphones around his neck thumping an Afrobeat sample that loops staccato every measure and a half.
“I will be there, boss,” he says to this booking guy from a club in Detroit. He writes the date September 21 — a Thursday — on his whiteboard and as they talk he adds exclamation points on either side, underlines, circles it with a different color. The bar is a favorite of the weekly alt newspapers and the hipster set, an incubation tank in which the obscure can mutate into semi-renown. His name will be on fliers stapled to utility poles and taped-up in trendy windows. Capacity is two hundred fifty, the guy says, and they want him for the closing set.
Trevor hangs up and slips back into his headphones, almost done with the EP’s final track and no way is sleep coming early tonight. When he closes his eyes he sees strobe-limned heads bobbing and hears the tiniest gap in the rough cut coming off the MacBook — something that falls millimeters short of scoring this thing he now feels. Anxiety, or anxious at least. Excitement, and the weird paranoia that comes with it. Well after midnight, a hundred sounds attempted, he adds the thrum of an Alice Coltrane piano and everything is just right.
+ + +
The next day, Trevor shows up twenty minutes early. Keith is in Microsoft Paint zooming a circle in and out, blowing on his coffee. Linda closes out of a window and turns with smiling relief to see that it is only Trevor, that Carl has not yet lumbered in.
“I thought about your thing,” she says, looking at her nails. “I don’t think it’s such a great idea.”
Trevor sits down, wrapping up his earbuds and pushing a button on his monitor.
“Why not? You’d rather shuffle e-mails around than, I don’t know, read a book, chat with your sister?”
“It’s not about what I want. . .I mean, what if they catch us?” She looks to the door. “Besides, isn’t this job easy enough already?”
“Too easy to be taken seriously,” Trevor says, slouching in his chair. “What do you think Keith? You want to keep filling in holes you just dug, or is there a better way to spend your time?”
Keith does not turn away from his computer. He adjusts his glasses and takes one sip, two sips, paints the circle on his monitor red.
“I want to do what’s best for I.F.,” he says. “And if they wanted to automate the part replacement process, they would.”
“You guys don’t seem to understand. This place is strictly a cash-for-time transaction. No one said you had to — ”
The door bangs against Carl’s desk and Carl fills the frame: “Trevor, I want to talk to you. . .outside, please.”
In the hallway, an unblemished beige sleeve that connects their office to the much larger ones dedicated to sales and accounting, Carl stands with his arms crossed over his man-tits, the baseball cap dangling from his fist.
“Let me tell you something, Trevor,” Carl starts, gesturing to the carpet below. “I used to sweat down there on that floor. Humping materials, then driving rivets, then spinning a lathe until these goddamn hands wouldn’t let me. And the only reason I’m up here is because Bruce knows he can trust me to handle anything. He knows I’ll do the work they’ve laid out for me, and that I’ll do it to the best of my abilities.”
Trevor smirks.
“It is the work they’ve laid out for you, it just doesn’t really need you.”
“Everything you say has to be some smart-ass remark, doesn’t it? If you think I’m going to lose this job over some snot-nosed kid who doesn’t know the chance he’s been given . . .well, you got another thing coming. This is my job now, and as shitty as you think it might be . . . I intend to do it.”
“Well, Dad,” Trevor says, squinting Carl’s put-on intimidation right back at him. “You’re a better man than I. Let’s get to work, I guess.”
+ + +
It takes a midnight Red Bull to discover Plan B, and then a week to ferret out the details. Trevor uses network analysis, key-loggers, and a remote desktop application to snoop through the daily activity of his co-workers. Looking for leverage. Now, at the end of a long Friday, he’s putting the finishing touches on three careful e-mails.
Linda, it turns out, uses her company computer to order Xanax and Valium from China and has the drugs shipped to the office once a month. Trevor has seen these boxes arrive, watched her pop her ‘vitamins’ and ‘ibuprofen’ throughout the day, and noted the sine wave of her mood as they slog through their eight hours and unpaid lunch. In his e-mail to her, keeping the secret strictly two-party, he offers a sympathetic ear and apologizes for doing this but, if she doesn’t get on-board, he’s going to take his findings upstairs.
Keith’s vulnerability was harder to detect. He does not wander around the internet, doesn’t visit any websites at all really — banal or nefarious. But Trevor finds that Keith regularly updates a spreadsheet on his hard-drive called ReasonableFax.xls. This file contains hundreds of lies Keith has told the office, higher-ups at Illinois Fabrication, his family, et cetera. There’s a whole manufactured life organized across nine tabs, headed with things like: Sexual Experiences, Things I own, Skill-sets, Books/Movies, Travel. And each sheet can be ordered by date, response, or the lie as told — a careful order that keeps him from contradicting himself. Some woman he met for coffee believes that Keith has been to Spain, a guy at the gym wonders whether he really bench-presses two-hundred and fifty pounds, and his parents likely tell friends that their son is on the fast-track to an executive desk at Illinois Fab. Trevor copied the entire file and e-mailed it to himself to peruse at home, an entire life documented in a long, intricate list of the things that Keith is not.
Carl’s transgressions are almost impressive. From his desk, concealed with deft mouse-clicks and a precise angle to his chair, he has logged hundreds of work-hours on a hunting website designed to allow paraplegics and the like shoot wild game. His profile suggests that he’s racked up 82 kills with a total score of 9,276. The operation is run out of this dude ranch in Nevada where they’ve terraformed areas to look like woodlands, plains, swamps, and set up a large number of webcam-enabled rifles and shotguns. They open cages of quail or pheasant just off screen and site-users blow them away as they take flight. Deer (300 points) are lured to within fifteen feet of the camera with a salt-lick, sketchy antelope (250 points) are practically dragged by their antlers. It looks like you could, at one point, shoot alligators and Carl has.
When the e-mails are just right, he hits send on all three in quick succession and then makes for the hallway. He bangs the door against Carl’s desk and then there’s one foot in the weekend and one that won’t follow and he turns to look at Keith over by the window. Keith who once told his brother he was good friends with the whiz kid at work. He watches the black e-mail materialize at the top of Keith’s screen and the cursor glide up to open it. And then Trevor is down the hallway, in the stairwell, running across the parking lot.
+ + +
By Sunday night, twenty-some thousand people have downloaded the EP. Trevor walks to the corner-store to buy some Asti Spumante and saunters back shooting the cork up into the trees, swilling it straight from the bottle. When he comes into the parking lot, haloed in bug-zapper blue by the light fixed to the building’s roof-line, Keith’s car is there and Keith sits in the driver’s seat blurry behind the fogged glass. Trevor keeps his distance, takes a sip, and then there’s the buzzkill of Keith’s dome light and he steps out.
“Need to talk to you,” he says. A car comes up the street and in the spill-over of headlights Trevor sees that he’s in regular clothes — jeans, a t-shirt — and it makes him look so normal. This guy that just wants to watch sports on the weekend, eat chicken wings, maybe see a movie with a warm hand on his thigh. He’s been crying, it looks like, maybe drinking, and he stands with his mouth half-open as though he expects some eloquence to dribble out on inertia.
“What is it?” Trevor says.
“You can’t do this. You’re going to fucking ruin me.” Keith swears like a man unaccustomed to it. He takes a few steps toward Trevor, who matches each with a move toward the street — twenty shifting feet of asphalt between them.
“Look, Keith. I don’t care what you do. I really don’t,” Trevor says and takes a swallow. “So what if you fib here and there? Everyone does.”
“But you’re trying to humiliate me. All of us maybe. . .”
“No one knows but me.”
Keith stares at him, and then looks away. Any script he had now lost.
“You don’t understand. My old man is a surgeon for christ’s sake.”
“Did he tell you that you could do anything you wanted, so long as you put your mind to it?”
Keith paces the length of his car.
“Yeah, something like that.”
“Mine did too,” Trevor says, and looks at the champagne swishing in the bottle. “Hasn’t worked out so well lately, has it?”
Keith stops, crosses his arms then puts his fists on his hips. Loses some thought he had and then slides his hands into their pockets.
“No. . .it’s not that easy, it’s too easy to just say.”
“I know, man. That’s what I’m trying to do, I’m trying to make it easy. I mean, what could they possibly pay you to compensate for time? We’re both of us too smart to be wasting away there.”
Trevor moves toward him and offers the bottle. Keith waves it off and leans on his car.
“I get that, I guess. But that doesn’t give you the right to . . .to do what you’re doing.”
Trevor leans there with him, takes a drink.
“That was all just a scare tactic.”
“What?”
“I was never going to use that against you.”
“But you violated my privacy. You. . .you. . .”
“Means and ends, man. It was a crappy thing to do, but this outrage, this anxiety you have. . .it’s nothing compared to the . . . the fucking despair I feel every time I.F. asks me to push that rock back up the hill.”
Keith takes the bottle, looks at the label, takes a swig, passes it back. They watch a woman come out onto her balcony for a smoke.
“Does the thing really work? How do we know it won’t . . . fuck up?”
“Because I know what I’m doing. Putting a monkey on the moon this ain’t. Just think, Keith, all that free time. You can polish up your resume, man you can go to an interview, I’d cover for you.”
“You’d do that?”
“Yes. Look, I know everyone thinks I’m an asshole, but my idea. . .it’s not just for me.”
“I guess I’m just worried about this blowing up in our face.”
“Dignity or security,” Trevor says, raising the bottle. “I’ve never had the luxury of both.”
+ + +
The next morning, no one talks. Rote questions about the weekend, Monday commiseration, the contest of who is most exhausted — all of these are skipped and the silence’s only flaws are the idle tapping of keys and the wooden sound of Carl gritting his teeth.
“So, I hate to pester you guys, but I thought with a little more time to think — ”
“What do you want us to say, huh, Trevor?” Carl swivels in his chair. A few papers from his desk fall to the floor.
And now everyone’s turned, pointed to the center of the room where the coffee-maker is clearing its throat. Keith looks at Linda, then away when she catches him. She glances at Carl, who’s scrutinizing Keith, and it’s as though the lights have come back on and there is now a body at their feet that must be explained.
“Well, I want to do it,” Keith says, coughing a little the way one does to cover a burp or the lump in their throat. “But we’ve got to be sure it works, and that we can, like, turn it off if something goes wrong.”
“Attaboy, Keith. I won’t let you down.”
“What if it goes haywire the first time?” Linda says. “Can’t we do a dry run or something?”
“I can’t believe you guys. Just because this jackass has got a little dirt on you. . .look what we’ve got on him,” Carl says.
“Oh, Carl, this job sucks,” Linda says, straightening in her chair. “But I’ve got to admit, I’m dying to know what he found out about you.”
“He found out that I work hard. And to him, that practically makes me a Nazi.”
Trevor laughs and Carl glares at him, a twitch runs from his shoulder to his trigger finger.
“A line’s been drawn in the sand, whether you fools know it or not. And you two are throwing in with a fucking drug addict.”
“Hey, man,” Trevor says, looking to Linda. “We’ve all got our foibles.”
“What makes you think we want to be on your side?” Keith says.
“Shut up, Keith. You’re all slackers. Goddamn slackers. Don’t think Bruce won’t hear about this.”
“Whoa, whoa,” Trevor makes a time-out sign with his hands. He shares a look with Keith and Linda burns a hole in the side of Carl’s pulsing bald skull. “Let’s put it to a vote, okay? We go my way, it’s pizza for everybody.”
+ + +
Trevor comes in the next morning to Keith and Linda huddled around her computer watching the data fly around the office on an interface he’s coded to keep tabs on the Method. Linda color commentates: “And zoom . . . Carl sends off the order to Hammond Tool & Die. 5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . 1, Trevor logs the parts request and zing it’s logged into Keith’s spanking new spreadsheet. Calculating. Cogitating. Bam, Table 1.3 in the weekly report is updated, Table 1.6 in the monthly report now up-to-date.”
As he sits down and puts on his big headphones, Keith comes over and shakes his hand, Linda makes a hooting noise with a white pill in her teeth.
For the next Carl-less half hour, Trevor posts links to his free EP on every forum he can find, e-mails promoters and booking agents as far away as Dallas and Cleveland, facebook friends a dozen DJs from Detroit with familiar names. And then the door is flung open, a fresh gouge of vehemence on the edge of Carl’s desk, and he marches in stiff-legged, silent. He’s off the hunting website, apparently, and while he slurps his coffee and slop-chews from a bag of mini-muffins, Carl puts a DVD in the tray of his computer and plays it at full volume. It’s a tawdry erotic thriller, something like what used to play on Cinemax late at night. Trevor slips into his headphones, but he can still hear the boozy-sax of the movie, another order as it dings and beeps to conclusion, Keith making this quick tchtchtchoo sound. Linda stares at him in his periphery — willing him to do something about this ogre they now must deal with, suggesting that he should have seen this coming, should have known that the balance in the office must always be bullshit.
+ + +
There have now been over sixty thousand downloads of Trevor’s EP, including several hundred from a small town in northern Japan and precisely one thousand from the city of Baku. Someone has posted it on rapidshare and seeded a torrent. Keith likes it, listens to it at the gym he says. Trevor text messages a girl he used to see, his step-brother, that guy from Guitar Center.
+ + +
The week following is an asymptotic approach to absolute free time, the attention that must be paid to requests and orders halving with every tweak and flourish to Trevor’s code. Linda proves adept at working the dials and takes to the new arrangement as if the idea were her own. When she’s not gone on two hour lunchbreaks or spaced-out reading Anna Karenina, she types up helpful guides on checking the Method for errors and what to do if someone is out sick. In the morning, she greets everyone but Carl with an effortless smile as though fresh off a quaking orgasm or delicious meal. She slips Trevor fourteen shiny Xanax, orders him a passel of Adderall and refuses payment.
After a few days of pretending to work, Keith does upgrade his resume and Trevor actually helps — standing over his shoulder as though they’d been teamed for a critical Illinois Fab project, showing Keith a few lay-out tricks that will make him look thoughtful and suave. The only reader of Keith’s spreadsheet, Trevor realizes he knows the guy as well as anyone, and comes to see a sincerity in his enormous fraud. Something endearing, trustworthy — the lies all made to mark him as someone special amongst the blur and not one in the whole matrix that conned anyone out of anything.
Trevor brings his computer from home and spends broad swaths of the day being Insomnia Jones, two or three hours at a time with his big headphones over his ears. He revamps old tracks, maps the boundaries of a new set, writes a bio for wikipedia and redesigns his webpage, crafts an artful response to a New jersey record label that voices his concerns about distribution and whether the compact disc is still relevant.
Carl, though, well Carl . . .
After a week, the laminate edge peels off his desk and the press-board underneath sawdusts to the floor. He brings in one distasteful DVD after another — today’s, running at top volume, features some Patrick Duffy-looking guy who alternately busts heads and is seduced by women in lingerie. Trevor can almost ignore all this, but Carl seems to be storing up energy — silent except farts and grunts and the sound of his open mouth slapping around the crab rangoon he’s brought in for today’s ‘snack’ — for this long intermission between movies when he claims he’s a musician too and kicks his wheelie chair around the office bleating out truncated hair metal lyrics and playing air guitar.
“Rock you like a hurra-caaaane,” he cries as his chair bumps Keith’s and spills a mostly-full diet coke across his desk.
“What the hell, Carl?”
“Sorry, were you trying to work?” Carl says, air guitar held vertical. Across the room, Linda swallows a pill and adjusts her foam earplugs, rubs her temples.
“Could you just take it easy?” Keith says.
“I’m just enjoying my free time, good buddy,” Carl says, shooting a look to Trevor who’s turned to watch all this. “Sorry for partying.”
“Carl — ” Trevor starts.
Carl waves him off and kicks his chair back across to his desk: “Shot through the heart, and you’re to blame, baby . . .”
Linda and Trevor help Keith sop up the spill with old reports, the last paper towel on the roll. Keith taking things off his desk and setting them on the floor.
“I’m sorry about this guys,” Trevor says, a soaked copy of the June report in his hands.
“Well, at least we have our dignity,” Keith says. He flicks his dripping, sticky hands over the wastebasket and adjusts his glasses with a wrist.
+ + +
Google searches for ‘Insomnia Jones’ turn up a smattering of reviews that call his release: ‘a glorious frenzy at the limits of control,’ and ‘highly danceable in a drugged-out kind of way.’ Some Brit calls it ‘chapter n+1 in the evolution of funk’ and Trevor is referred to as an ‘electro genius’ and ‘the real deal,’ even ‘the Jimi Hendrix of the sampler’ which he doubts very much but cannot help reading over again and again.
+ + +
Trevor sits in the empty office and looks at himself in the window darkened to a mirror by the gloomy morning. Insomnia Jones. Tonight is the night. A packed house, according to the internet. Hungry ears. Maybe even record label scouts in attendance. Everyone comes in a little late now — ten, fifteen, twenty minutes — and while he waits, Trevor thinks through the set he will play tonight. His fingers twitching invisible knobs, his knee bouncing the beat in his head.
Keith comes in eating an Everything bagel from a bag of them he’s brought in to share. He’s had a job offer from a Fortune 500 company in downtown Chicago.
“All I need is a solid recommendation from Bruce or someone,” he says, slathering cream cheese. He can hardly sit still. “And they want some samples of my work.”
“That’s just great,” Trevor says, picking a bagel from the dozen. “So, two more weeks?”
“Give or take,” Keith puts a foot up on his desk. An act of blasphemy a few weeks back. “Tonight’s your big thing too, right? Maybe we both have a ticket the heck out of here.”
“Maybe so. I have to head out a couple hours early. I was hoping you could cover for me . . .”
“I got ya, captain.”
By 8:30, everyone is at their desk. After three bagels, Carl scoops wads of cream cheese straight from the tub and licks it off his fingers in a glistening, oinky mess. When Linda turns from her Brothers Karamazov to glare at him, Carl winks at her and licks down into the V between his fingers — cream cheese on his chin and in his stubble, Linda’s face drawn into a kind of slow motion horror. Otherwise, Carl seems too tired for antagonism: no new DVDS, nothing to say but a crumbly muttering of what sounds like “sonsabitches” under his breath.
Everything holds until after lunch. Around two, Trevor pulls off his headphones to watch Carl sign the UPS guy’s gadget there in the doorway and bring a small package to his desk
“What’s up, Carl? What’d you get?”
“What’re you, the boss now?”
“Just curious, that’s all.”
“Well, just let me get it open,” Carl says. He hunches over the box as he tears it open, laughing to himself in hiccups. Finally, he withdraws a fresh DVD and sticks it into his computer. Once everything is cued up, Carl pushes his chair back from the desk and laces his fingers behind his head.
It’s a porno. Hardcore, Triple X pornography with the sound as high as it goes, two plasticine women teaming up on one dude, aloof and muscly. The jivey-synth music is hilarious and even Keith cracks up, but Linda seems stunned. She watches the monitor — the women quickly nude and prone — and glares at Carl who does not seem to care what’s onscreen but grins and eats pork-rinds from a mound of them on napkin in his lap.
She stands up, Dostoyevsky held trembling in her hand, and after a static moment screams: “It’s enough, Trevor. Jesus,” and stamps out of the room. She throws the door into Carl’s desk with a loud crack and they can hear her walking angry down the hallway. Carl clicks the porno closed and smiles.
“Not the video you were hoping for?”
“Oh, I don’t watch that trash,” Carl says. He tosses a pork-rind into his mouth and talks through the chew. “It was meant to be, what do you call it, educational.”
“What did we learn from that?” Keith says.
“Oh, we learned plenty. That was a little primer on what happens when you toss the rules out the window.”
Trevor tries to listen for Amanda stomping through the building — fingers-crossed that she’s passed right by Bruce’s office and hustled out to the parking lot. Through the window, her beige sedan still sitting there, now speckled with rain. The music coming from the headphones around his neck sounds very far away.
“Hey, man,” Keith says. “Weren’t you going to cut out a little early?”
“What do you think?” Trevor says. Quietly, watching crumbs fall from Carl’s mouth.
“What do you mean?”
“What do you think about this whole situation?”
“I think I’ve got a new job lined up.”
“We hope, right?”
“Yeah. Just need that reference, of course.”
Keith has opened up a spreadsheet, hard to read from here but familiar, and types in an empty cell. Carl looks like a man dimly possessed — he rolls his head about his shoulders in a series of disquieting cracks. Trevor starts packing up his headphones and laptop. A lone wallop of thunder makes him flinch.
“Good luck, tonight,” Carl clears his throat, chomps a final pork-rind. “We’ll be seeing you around town, I guess.”
+ + +
The Shelter, Trevor’s gig, is in the basement of an old meeting-hall with the architecture of a church, an odor of sweat and knock-off perfume. The place is lit in red, except for the foggy-white fluorescents that silhouette the liquor bottles, and Trevor can feel how the 4/4 will transform the room into the chambers of a beating heart. Right now, there’s maybe two dozen people scattered around, hiding out in booths, leaned against the bar chatting and buying drinks, cloistered in the crate-benched other room waiting for the club-owner’s nephew to finish his set. The kid needs to hang it up, or spend a year studying rhythm and time signatures in his basement, learning the equipment so he’ll know not to spin CD turntables like it’s 2003.
Trevor sits at one of the tall tables along the wall, underneath a broad mirror that he uses to watch the people trickle in: college kids from the suburbs, girls in chunky black eye-glasses, dudes with wispy blond mustaches or carefully disheveled beards. He drinks one whiskey on the rocks, then two — the music unadulterated Outkast and shit that bounced dance-floors five years ago.
When the nephew’s done, the sound guy comes over with his greasy hair and Coke is It! t-shirt to tell Trevor that they’ll spin Notorious B.I.G. for fifteen minutes while he sets up his gear. The sampler, his MacBook, wires, gadgets. A steam-punk desk-lamp with a tiny bulb so he can see what he’s doing. He pulls a pirated MP3 of Things Done Changed off the internet and explains to the sound-guy how to make a seamless transition. One second the crowd thinks the warm-up is running long, and the next they’re listening to a Godspeed You! dread-swell under the line “don’t ask me why I’m motherfucking stressed” looping glitchy every few seconds.
At the right time, he lets it all slip into unrepentant bass, something he brewed up in the Helsinki airport years back. Then he looks into the club to see people ambling onto the dance-floor, three girls dripping with rain who sprint from door-man to stage in their stilettos, a deluged line of partiers waiting crammed in the stairwell. Trevor cocks the microphone so he can speak into it over a spine of white-noise that he’s pitch-shifted to a drone.
“My name is Insomnia Jones,” he says. “Thank y’all for coming out. I’m gonna rock your domes.”
And that’s what he does for the next three hours. The dance-floor crowds, a shirt-less kid with nickel-sized pupils spins and spins, girls send text messages to their friends telling them to get their asses down here, a thick-armed dude bouncing in a Ben Wallace jersey points at him and then puts his hands to his face like he cannot believe what he’s hearing, The temperature in the club rises maybe ten degrees, yet there isn’t an indignant body in the house — even the bar-tender pauses to clap his hands or fling them up to the ceiling between pours. Newcomers arrive steadily, with the rain steaming off their jackets, until the place reaches capacity. Trevor sees kids he’s exhausted drop into booths to finish one last drink. A woman with take-me-home cleavage wipes the sweat from his brow with a handkerchief.
At 2:05, the house-lights come on and Trevor sees hair matted to foreheads, couples hugging together and giggling toward the door, a dozen people pointing at him with grins or slow-clapping applause. Trevor switches to a chill-out track before the sound guy cuts everything and gives him an ecstatic thumbs up.
Out in the parking lot, the rain is overrunning the gutters and a few people stand under the eaves. He loads the gear and then runs back and sells these new fans his EP on a thumb-drive stamped “I.J.” in promotional white. One of the kids says “that was the best set I’ve ever heard” and another asks when he’ll be back.
+ + +
It’s almost three o’clock when Trevor finds the freeway. The drive is normally five hours, minus one to correct for longitude, but what traffic there is moves grandma-slow. The road is what they call a ‘depressed freeway’ and in this downpour it works like a gutter pooling the run-off from the city it cuts through. Under each over-pass, there’s the harsh static muscle of axle-high water and even at forty miles an hour it’s like driving in sand — the car moves straight ahead and the steering wheel means nothing. Trevor pushes it. Forty-five, then fifty. Willing the car to hold its track with hands white-knuckled at 10 and 2, no music, excitement about the show slipping through his fingers.
Linda and Keith should be able to handle things if he’s late, but now the scenario plays out in his head and there’s so many things that could go wrong. What if Bruce inquires about a specific order? What if someone else doesn’t show up, but the system sends e-mails from their account anyway? What the hell is Carl up to?
And then the car is side-ways, slide-spinning across three empty lanes with the water under his wheels cast up in a blinding curtain. Two dilated seconds, pushing the brake pedal into the floor, wrestling the steering wheel, and then the car grinds to a stop on the puddled shoulder like a parallel parking stunt. Steam rises off his hood. Somehow he’s missed the other cars plodding along half-blind and the concrete abutment just two feet ahead of him.
His laptop, which he’d tossed in the back-seat, has bounced its way into shotgun like an unbelted child and lays splayed-open and face-down.
“Oh, shit. Not really. . .”
Trevor flips over the computer — the cerebellum of Insomnia Jones weighed down with thousands of dollars in cracked software — and the screen is beyond fucked, the lid flops around on its broken hinge. He throws the thing into the back, hears glass break, a crinkle of plastic, and then his phone vibrates on his thigh. A message Keith sent hours ago now insisting on itself. Keith who’s never dialed him up or texted before, but whose number has sat in his contacts unrecalled. Trevor doesn’t open it. He just looks at the name printed there in searing LCD until the background light blinks dark. It takes the startle of a passing semi — its freight-train horn and thundering spray — for him to realize he’s been holding his breath, to hear the dying storm’s last winds buffeting his windshield.
This story originally appeared in Midwestern Gothic.