Luster(34)

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We get in the car and don’t speak. She turns the radio to an AM channel where a sleepy voice is talking about submarine acoustics, describing in detail how sound waves carve through leagues of water and function as an eye. She lowers the windows and lets her hair down, and as we pull into a small twenty-four-hour garage, the stars are coming out. After she laces up her boots and presses three studs into the cartilage of her ear, which in descending order appear to be a heart, a fist, and a Star of David, we walk past an ammo depot and a half-lit school bus lot and cut through a shaggy line of trees, the woods truncated and swollen with rain, opening to a field with an elevated soundstage where three men emerge from underneath their hair. She offers me a cup of whiskey and downs her own with a determination that darkens her face, the crowd around us frothy and homogeneous, white men relieved by the idea that they deserve to be angry, though in their spit and lean you can see they are aware of their performance and so to close this gap of enviable trauma by god they better make it good, better get in the pit and extract some teeth.



* * *



Rebecca looks disappointed by the crowd. She turns to me and says that everyone is old. She says she doesn’t know when it happened. She offers me a drink that looks like river water and says it’s a martini. I take a sip and it does not taste great, the vermouth and gin dominated entirely by a greasy residue I now realize has come from the olives, which are stuffed with cheese. The paper cup is already giving way. She removes her ring, slides it into her pocket, and tells me not to make a big deal of it. She says not everything Means Something and in fact, a lot of things mean nothing, and technically this is the beauty of music that prioritizes brawn. And by brawn, what she means is force. What she means is speed. There is a curtain of mist around the stage. This is likely due to lighting and a few discreetly placed smoke machines, but as the lead guitarist indulges a brief aside about Helsinki’s transit system, I see the human component of the humidity, the carbon dioxide and salivary thrust, the centrifuge of salt and hair.



* * *



As the next song starts, Rebecca says that she used to attend these concerts mostly as a function of being someone’s girlfriend. She was not permitted to have an opinion so much as observe these boyfriends’ exhibitions of taste, which for the particular sect of Hyde Park thrash-lite boys that Rebecca favored, meant maintaining a steady supply of safety pins and gauze, meant Elmer’s glue and DIY tattoos with straight pins and india ink, meant conversations in porta-potties about dragons and the bourgeoisie, critiques on the augmentation of capital in the form of pierced white boys from upstate New York, railing against their parents and the banks and society, which was a word she said so much it began to sound like it was a word they made up. At fifteen Rebecca cleaned the blood out of her Docs and began to feel like she did not actually care about capitalism, like she did not care about authenticity, because at these concerts, which were about the scourge of assimilation, there was somehow still a code of dress, and the only thing that made it good was the brawn, the punch she felt inside her ears, the entropy and crystallized core of communal violence that is impossible to contain. She rakes her hair out of her face and says that Eric was a welcome aberration. A guy who called soda pop, a guy who didn’t like piercings, who listened unironically to the bedazzled canker that is disco. He seemed earnest, not like the rest of her boyfriends, who of course went on to work for the banks. I follow her gaze to the medical tent, where a man is being lowered onto a stretcher. She scoffs and orders another drink at the bar, and then we move into the crowd, where she bares her teeth and rips off her shirt. A man barrels toward us, takes the shirt, and disappears. She doesn’t seem to mind. She drags me into the mosh, removes her bra, and tosses it toward the stage. I try to honor the spirit of the thing and not pay too much attention to her breasts, which are lovely and small and slightly mismatched. These are the sort of breasts you need if you want to mosh, and as the lead guitarist circles his finger and says Grind! Rebecca pulls me in deeper, leading with her cute, unmoving breasts, and everything is crunchy and in a minor key, two walls made of arms careening toward each other, the impact a compression I feel in my uterus, a man in an AARP shirt coming right for me and pulling me down by my hair and into the hard, brown grass, where there are cigarette butts and Band-Aids and crushed Dixie cups. As I claw my way up for air, I look around and realize I’ve lost her, though during my time on the ground someone stepped on the back of my neck with one of those four-pound platform Docs and I did not completely hate it, and though the music is bad—it is bad like a deviated septum, like acid reflux, like a monkey paw—damage is incurred for a necessary indulgence, which is to take a man by the ears and get him down and stomp on his open, consenting face, this glee cut a little short when I see Rebecca is just fine, near the front of the stage with mud caked between her tits. In this moment, maybe we are on the same page. But everything is temporary, and in an hour she buys a new shirt from the merch table, and we walk silently to the car, a chill in the air that reminds me that soon it will be fall.

“I let Pradeep go,” she says once we’re on the road. “I talked to Akila. I didn’t know. I thought she just hated math.” I look under my fingernails and every single one is caked with dirt. “Can I ask—what was it that you heard? What did he say to her?”

“He said, a monkey could do this.”