Rust and Bone

The bank account said 37.42. Leo Petrov stared at the number on his laptop screen the way a man stares at a weather forecast that tells him rain is coming and he doesn't have an umbrella. The number had been 37.42 for eleven days. It would remain 37.42 for at least three more, because the only thing that would change it was income or expense, and his income was zero and his expenses were, at minimum, a loaf of bread and the heating bill he was already two months behind on.

He closed the laptop. The apartment was cold—he could see his breath in the morning light, which was arriving through a window that didn't seal properly and carried with it the sound of traffic from the highway and the smell of the bay, which in Buffalo in November smelled like a parking lot that had been flooded.

On the kitchen table sat his equipment: a Synclavier digital synthesizer that weighed approximately a hundred and fifty pounds and cost approximately fifteen thousand dollars in a previous life, a pair of KRK studio monitors whose cones were beginning to separate from their frames, a MIDI keyboard with three sticky keys, and a Jackson guitar whose intonation was off because he couldn't afford to have it set up.

The phone rang.

It was Marty, a producer he'd worked with in Warsaw five years ago, back when Leo's music had gotten him nominated for something in Berlin that he'd flown home from without attending because the flight was too expensive and the accommodation stipend was worthless.

"Leo. Long time."

"Marty."

"I've got something small. A demo showcase in Cleveland. Small venue, small crowd, small jury. But—"

"But what?"

"It matters to me. If someone plays well, we might be able to—look, I can't promise anything. But it's something."

"Where in Cleveland?"

"Shorewood. The Velvet Note."

Leo did the mental math. Round-trip from Buffalo: bus ticket $87. Gas if he drove his car: probably $60, assuming the car started. The car had been starting less frequently. Each time it didn't start, Leo told himself he'd fix it, and each time he didn't, and each time the car became one inch closer to being not a car but a very expensive sculpture.

"When?"

"Thursday. Three demo slots. You'd be one of them."

"Send me the details."

Marty did. Leo read them. They were reasonable. Modest, but reasonable. He thought about saying yes. He thought about saying no. He thought about the bank account, the cold apartment, the car, the 37.42, the two hundred dollars he'd need just to exist for the next week even if he did go to Cleveland, because food and laundry and the things you can't avoid cost money whether your bank account says 37.42 or 37,420.

He said yes.

He hung up. He looked at the equipment. He looked at the window. He looked at the car, which was parked in a spot he could no longer afford outside his building, and which was slowly being claimed by November.

He could not carry it all. He couldn't even carry the Synclavier by himself. It needed two people, or a dolly, or a miracle. He had none of those.

He needed a truck. Or a van.

Denny Rafferty was sitting on the curb outside a Denny's on Elmwood Avenue, eating a plate of eggs that cost 6.99 and wondering if 6.99 was too much to spend on eggs on a Tuesday. The answer, he decided, was yes, but he'd already ordered them, and the eggs were good, and regret was something you carried after, not before.

His van was parked two spaces down. A 2003 Ford Econoline with 187,000 miles on it and a passenger door that only opened from the inside, which was fine because Denny rarely had passengers. The van contained: a mattress that had seen better years, a small radio that picked up one station clearly and three stations poorly, a box of Cheetos that had expired in March, and a pair of work boots that smelled like a problem he wasn't going to solve.

He was thinking about the Child Support office, which was expecting another payment from him by the end of the month, and he was thinking about his son, who was eleven and probably forgot his voice, and he was thinking about nothing, which was what he did when he had too many thoughts and not enough money to think them properly.

A man walked up to him. The man was young—mid-thirties, maybe—wiry, with dark hair and the particular hunch of someone who has spent too many years sitting at a desk. He was wearing a coat that was too thin for November.

"Excuse me," the man said. "Do you drive?"

"I used to. Before they suspended the license."

"Can you drive now?"

Denny looked at him. "Technically, no. Practically, yes. What do you need?"

The man gestured at the building behind him. "My car is there. It's... not working. I have equipment inside—synthesizers, monitors, instruments. I need to get it from here to Cleveland."

"Cleveland? That's like what, two hours?"

"Two and a half."

"You want me to drive your—stuff—to Cleveland?"

"I want to pay you to drive it there and back."

Denny looked at the van. He looked at the man. He looked back at the van. "What kind of stuff?"

"Heavy. Maybe three hundred pounds total."

Denny's van had a rear cargo area. It had carried furniture before, boxes, a refrigerator once when a guy from his warehouse shift needed to move and Denny needed fifty bucks. Three hundred pounds in a van was nothing. Three hundred pounds was a couple of bags of concrete.

"That's not—" Denny started, and then stopped. Because the man was looking at him with the kind of desperate hope that Denny recognized. He'd seen it before—in the mirror, most days.

"How much are you offering?"

"Two hundred dollars."

Denny almost said no. Two hundred was a lot of money for a two-hour drive. But it was also not nothing. It was gas, food, and a contribution to the Child Support office, all at once.

"I need to see the stuff first," he said.

They went to the building. Leo opened the loading door. The equipment was arranged on the floor like the remains of a shipwreck: the Synclavier in its road case (scratched, dented, held together with tape and stubbornness), the KRK monitors wrapped in blankets, the MIDI keyboard in a padded case that had been padded more generously in a different era, and the guitar in a gig bag that was missing its wheels.

Denny looked at it. He looked at the van. He looked at the man.

"Rear seat comes out," he said. "I can fit this. But nothing goes on top. And nothing falls through a gap. You help me load."

Leo nodded. They loaded in silence. The Synclavier was heavier than Denny expected. They got it into the van with a grunt and a thud and a moment of shared effort that felt, briefly, like the beginning of something. But it wasn't. It was just loading a van.

"Let's go," Denny said.

They got lost in Detroit. Not dramatically—there were no dramatic moments in Detroit, only accumulated small failures. Denny turned left at a stop sign that had fallen off because the bolt had rusted through in 2008, and they ended up in a parking lot behind a building that had been a factory and then a warehouse and then a building with no function, standing in a field of broken glass and dandelions.

"Left at the light," Leo said, consulting a map on his phone.

"There was no light. The light was off."

"The light should have been on."

Denny turned the van around. It took him three tries because the van doesn't reverse well when you're thinking about something else, and Denny was thinking about whether the Child Support office would accept a partial payment or if they'd just file it away in the bin labeled "another Rafferty excuse."

They found the highway eventually. They drove. The conversation, such as it was, consisted of:

"That's a nice van." "Thanks. It's old." "Everything's old." "Everything eventually is."

In Michigan, they stopped at a gas station that had a diner attached. Denny ordered Hot Papre for both of them—a Michigan thing, like a grad salad but with meat and cheese and gravy, served on a roll that was soggy from the top and crisp from the bottom.

Leo looked at it. "What is this?"

"Food," Denny said.

Leo took a bite. His expression was, in Denny's professional opinion (he had once been a guy who could read people at a poker table for twenty dollars a hand), identical to the expression a cat makes when it accidentally licks a lemon.

"You don't like it?" Denny asked.

"It's... aggressive," Leo said.

Denny laughed. It was unexpected, even to him. It came out of him like something that had been stored and was finally being released. "That's the best description I've ever heard."

Leo almost smiled. "It's fighting my tongue."

"Good. Your tongue needs to learn some respect."

Ohio brought hail. Not the small, polite hail that falls for thirty seconds and is over. Real hail—golf-ball-sized stones of ice that came out of a sky that had been grey all morning and then turned black in the space of thirty seconds, accompanied by wind that made the van shake like a boat.

Denny pulled into the parking lot of a Walmart that had gone bankrupt in 2009 and never reopened. The building stood like a hollow tooth, its windows shattered, its parking lot a field of weeds. But its roof was intact, and the hail was real, and reality was what mattered.

They sat in the van, eating Cheetos from the box Denny kept in the glove compartment. The hail sounded like a thousand tiny fists beating on the roof.

"Why are you still driving?" Leo asked. He wasn't supposed to ask these things. He knew that. But the question arrived before his filter did.

Denny chewed. Swallowed. "What do you mean?"

"Your license is suspended. You're driving a van you probably shouldn't be driving to a city you don't live in, carrying equipment you don't own, for money you need more than you need to spend on gas. At some point, the math stops working."

Denny looked at him. Through the windshield, the hail was a curtain of white noise. "You ever not drive, Leo? Ever just sit in a room and not drive?"

"No."

"That's because you make music. When you make music, you're doing something. When you're not driving and you're not making music—" he gestured at the empty space between them "—there's nothing. And nothing is loud."

Leo didn't answer. He looked at his hands—long fingers, calluses on the fingertips from guitar strings, the hands of a musician. He thought about his bank account. 37.42. He thought about the demo in Cleveland. He thought about whether Marty really believed in him or was just being polite.

The hail stopped. The sky went from black to grey to a pale, exhausted white. They drove the rest of the way in silence.

Cleveland was a city that had tried and failed and tried again and failed again and was now trying in smaller, quieter ways. The Velvet Note was a venue that smelled of beer and old wood and people who had come to hear something and weren't sure yet whether they were going to get it.

Leo's demo slot was second out of three. He set up his Synclavier, calibrated his monitors, and played a thirty-minute set of electronic compositions that were technically proficient and emotionally distant—the kind of music that sounds like someone is trying very hard not to feel anything.

Afterward, the jury said what juries say: "You have real talent." "The production is clean." "We'd love to see where you go from here." "Keep in touch." All of these things are true and none of them mean anything.

Leo packed his equipment. Denny waited in the van. They drove home.

In Toledo, at a laundromat that was open at 9 PM on a November Thursday, Denny pulled over. "I need to do laundry," he said. It was a lie. He needed to stop. His legs had been in the same position for four hours and they were starting to feel like someone else's legs.

Leo looked at the laundromat. Through the window, he could see rows of washing machines turning slowly, their interior lights casting a warm, mechanical glow on the clothes inside. And in the corner, behind a row of folded towels, was a guitar amplifier—old, beige, coin-operated, the kind you used to find in bus stations and dive bars where you could plug in and play for twenty-five cents and nobody would care if you were good.

He walked inside. Found the amplifier. Inserted a quarter. He had exactly one quarter. It was the last one.

He plugged in the Jackson guitar. Strummed a chord. It was slightly out of tune, but the amp was loud enough to cover that.

He played.

Not a composed piece. Not a demo. Just a melody, simple and repetitive, rising and falling like breathing. It wasn't good in the way that music judges and critics measure good. It was good the way a river is good—not because it's beautiful, but because it's true.

Denny stood by a washing machine, watching the clothes turn. He did not look at his phone. He did not look away. He just stood there, in the hum of dryers and the spin of washers, listening to a man play a slightly out-of-tune guitar through a coin-operated amp in a laundromat in Toledo at nine-thirty on a Thursday night.

And he listened. All of it. Every note.

When Leo finished, he removed the quarter from the slot. "Thanks," he said.

Denny shrugged. "It was fine."

They drove back to Buffalo in the dark. Leo had twenty dollars left. Denny had 180. Neither of them said anything about it.

At Leo's building, they unloaded the equipment in silence. The Synclavier went back into its corner. The monitors went back on their stands. The guitar went back on its wall mount. The apartment would still be cold tomorrow. The bank account would still say 37.42.

At Denny's van, he opened the passenger door and sat on the curb for a minute, looking at nothing. Then he got in, started the engine (which started, miraculously, because sometimes things just work), and drove to a supermarket parking lot where he could sleep without being asked to move.

He lay on the mattress. Closed his eyes. And in his head, beneath the sound of distant traffic and the hum of the city's exhausted HVAC system, he could still hear it: a slightly out-of-tune guitar, played through a coin-operated amp, in a laundromat in Toledo, at nine-thirty on a Thursday night.

It was nothing. And it was everything.

OTMES v2 Objective Tensor Code

Source Work: Green Book (《绿皮书》)

Author Note & Copyright: