A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [96]
When wounds had been bandaged and order restored, Lupa kissed Bennie’s head (his trademark bushy hair now silver), and said, “I keep waiting for you to play Scotty.”
Bennie smiled up at his much younger wife. “I’ve been saving him,” he said. Then he worked his handset, untapping from the staggering sound system (which seemed to route the music straight through Alex’s pores) a baleful male vocalist accompanied by torqued, boinging slide guitar. “We released this a couple of months ago,” Bennie said. “You’ve heard of him, Scotty Hausmann? He’s doing well with the pointers.”
Alex glanced over at Rebecca, who scorned the term “pointer” and would politely but firmly correct anyone who used it to describe Cara-Ann. Luckily, his wife hadn’t heard. Now that Starfish, or kiddie handsets, were ubiquitous, any child who could point was able to download music—the youngest buyer on record being a three-month-old in Atlanta, who’d purchased a song by Nine Inch Nails called “Ga-ga.” Fifteen years of war had ended with a baby boom, and these babies had not only revived a dead industry but become the arbiters of musical success. Bands had no choice but to reinvent themselves for the preverbal; even Biggie had released yet another posthumous album whose title song was a remix of a Biggie standard, “Fuck You, Bitch,” to sound like “You’re Big, Chief!” with an accompanying picture of Biggie dandling a toddler in Native American headdress. Starfish had other features—finger drawing, GPS systems for babies just learning to walk, PicMail—but Cara-Ann had never touched one, and Rebecca and Alex had agreed that she would not until age five. They used their own handsets sparingly in front of her.
“Listen to this guy,” Bennie said. “Just listen.”
The mournful vibrato; the jangly quaver of slide guitar—to Alex it sounded dire. But this was Bennie Salazar, who’d discovered the Conduits all those years ago. “What do you hear?” Alex asked him.
Bennie shut his eyes, every part of him alive with the palpable act of listening. “He’s absolutely pure,” he said. “Untouched.”
Alex closed his own eyes. Immediately sounds thickened in his ears: choppers, church bells, a distant drill. The usual confetti of horns and sirens. The tingle of track lighting overhead, a dishwasher slop. Cara-Ann’s sleepy “No…” as Rebecca pulled on her sweater. They were about to go. Alex felt a spasm of dread, or something like it, at the thought of leaving this brunch with Bennie Salazar empty-handed.
He opened his eyes. Bennie’s were already open, his brown, tranquil gaze fixed on Alex’s face. “I think you hear what I hear, Alex,” he said. “Am I right?”
That night, when Rebecca and Cara-Ann were firmly asleep, Alex extracted himself from the porridgy warmth of their shared bed in its foam of mosquito netting and went to the living room/playroom/guest room/office. When he stood close to the middle window and looked straight up, he could see the top of the Empire State Building, lit tonight in red and gold. This wedge of view had been a selling point back when Rebecca’s parents had bought her the Garment District one-bedroom many years ago, right after the crash. Alex and Rebecca had planned to sell the apartment when she got pregnant, then learned that the squat building their own overlooked had been bought by a developer who planned to raze it and build a skyscraper that would seal off their air and light. The apartment became impossible to sell. And now, two years later, the skyscraper had at last begun to rise, a fact that filled Alex with dread and doom but also a vertiginous sweetness—every instant of warm sunlight through their three east-facing windows felt delicious, and this sliver of sparkling night, which for years he’d watched from a cushion propped against the sill, often while smoking a joint, now appeared agonizingly beautiful, a mirage.
Alex loved the