The Leavers(59)

In the future, this would strike him as delusional. But lately, he was so rarely by himself he had no time to dwell on how he’d been ghosted by his own mother, or Peter and Kay, who also hadn’t called—though he hadn’t contacted them either—or Angel.

A writer from a music blog interviewed Psychic Hearts, e-mailing Roland a Q&A that he filled out and forwarded to Daniel.

Q: Roland, you’re a veteran in the scene, having played in a number of different bands. What’s it like working with Daniel? Do you both collaborate on songwriting and production?

ROLAND FUENTES (RF): Well, Daniel and I have been friends since sixth grade, so we’ve done some embarrassing projects together (I’ll leave it to him to decide if he wants to talk more about our power punk days—LOL, straightedge 4-eva!) but the advantage of working with someone you’ve got such deep history with is that our communication onstage is practically second nature. It’s like working with family. While I’m doing the songwriting and producing for Psychic Hearts, the songs also have DW written all over them—he does these insane key changes and melodies that are out of this world, and he doesn’t even have to think about them, he sees them.

DANIEL WILKINSON (DW): Roland’s a true visionary and a born front man. Anyone who’s seen him onstage can vouch for that.

Q: The band’s latest songs are more amped, more energetic than the earlier material. Has this shift in style been a deliberate one?

RF: It’s been an organic decision to move in this newer direction. It’s what feels right for the project and it really plays to both our strengths.

Javier, who had an apartment full of cameras and video equipment, took a picture of them on his rooftop at dusk, and when the photo appeared alongside the interview, Daniel was taken aback to see that Roland was in clear focus, while he was in the shadows. Or was he being paranoid? At Tres Locos, he passed his phone to Evan to show him the interview, who agreed he did look out of focus. “They’re fucking you over,” Evan said, “and you should watch out.” That night, Daniel pulled the link up on his laptop and looked at the picture more closely. A dull, queasy feeling spread through him. He had often felt like this that first year in Ridgeborough, and with Carla Moody, whom he’d been with for a few months his freshman year at Carlough, when he would wake up in the middle of the night with her sleeping next to him and think, You’re only with her because you don’t want to be alone. Most recently, he had felt it last September, in the dorm room of a girl he’d been crushing on for weeks—this was when he was still going to classes—mouths moving together, skin buzzing from the weed they’d just smoked. He saw her eyes move a little to the left, a quick glance at the wall, and detected what he thought was her waning interest. He got up and left.

When Roland came home, he said, “You see the interview?”

Daniel looked at his friend’s hopeful smile and closed his laptop. He didn’t want to be like Evan, yelling about being fucked over. Psychic Hearts was blowing up. He and Roland were on their way to something big. “It’s great. Great picture, too.”

DANIEL SAT WITH THAD and Roland on a rectangle of stained orange carpet, listening to the tracks they had recorded to tape. Thad ran a recording studio in the basement of a three-story house in Ridgewood, where he lived with ten other roommates. Daniel read the liner notes Roland had written for the cassette and saw the sentence: All songs written by Roland Fuentes.

“Listen.” Thad rewound. “I like that.”

Roland nodded. “That glitchy sound.”

The wall, a patchwork of plywood sheets, was lined with posters for performances by sound artists and video jockeys, bicycle repair workshops, an anti-gentrification rally in a nearby park. Tall shelves were crammed with mikes and amps, drums of all sizes, cratefuls of scavenged instruments—a dented trumpet, a silver harmonica, a plastic flute. A piano sat next to a TASCAM four-track and an Apple monitor with a screensaver of salamanders morphing into monkeys. While they recorded, a drummer visiting from Berlin napped on a couch by the piano, waking up periodically to smoke. “It’s good,” he said, when Daniel suggested that a recording studio might not be the best place to sleep. “I’ve got the jet lag.”

Daniel put the liner notes down. A tangle of cables lay next to cardboard boxes full of cassettes by other Meloncholia Records bands. Later, when the only evidence of him having been in here was the Psychic Hearts demo, the cassettes would be filed away into one of these boxes, all songs written by Roland Fuentes.

“I’d like to bring in a fuller, more layered sound,” Roland was saying. “Maybe even a drummer, another guitarist.”

Thad said, “I can totally see that. Heavier, more guitar harmonies.”

Roland turned to Daniel. “What do you think?”

Daniel picked at a callus on his index finger. He stared at the posters and imagined his mother watching an experimental noise artist manipulating sounds on a laptop, a what-the-fuck expression on her face. Why was he even thinking about her?

“Cool.” He was having trouble mustering up enthusiasm to match Roland and Thad’s. Their friends read books about gentrification and food justice and spoke about the importance of community outreach and safe spaces, yet they were all college students or unpaid interns funded with credit cards paid for by their parents, and none of them had even grown up in the city. Thad’s roommate Sophie, who had turquoise dreadlocks and cooked meals from ingredients scavenged from Dumpsters, asked Daniel if he was familiar with socialist food models since he’d been born in China, and he told her was born in Manhattan. Thad had said, “It’s dope that you left school and rejected your parents’ boners for academia. It’s such a scam, college, being a professor, all of that.” Uncomfortable at hearing someone else talk smack about his parents, Daniel asked, “How’d you know they’re professors?” Thad said, “Roland told me.” Roland had told Daniel that Thad funded Meloncholia with the monthly allowance his parents gave him. “I hear your dad’s a hedge fund manager,” Daniel said. “Yeah,” Thad said, “he fucking sucks.” Daniel envied people who could take their origins for granted, who could decide to hate their parents.