He pushes the button in, just enough force to defeat its spring-loaded resistance, opens his eyes as he hears the click.
The tape deck slides open, with machine grace, and away from the hi-fi’s flat front panel. Tyrone’s hand instinctively grabs the top ridge of the cassette, gently sliding it out, not allowing himself to exhale until he can see it’s safely free. Relief. No tangled intestine, no writhing mass of dead, flat worms. He holds the cassette up to the light, peers through its little transparent plastic window. The tape looks a little baggy around the right-hand wheel, but nothing major—he sticks the tip of his first finger into the hole, feels the spokes gripping his flesh, and with the slightest, most gentle effort winds the tape on half a turn; just enough to tighten it up so it clings to the wheel, just little enough that it’s not too taut. He can’t remember an exact figure, but he knows this cassette has snagged at least five times, each time his heart dropping and the breath forcing its way out as he slid it out of the deck and watched it leave strings of what looked like melted black tar in its wake. The last time it happened was back at his place, some radio show after-party, the flat full of randos and smoke, and they’d all crowded around him to see what was going on, trying to help but giving it too much volume, pushing and prodding and jostling as he knelt on the floor, his hands trembling with panic as he tried to untangle the mess, and it all got to be too much and he freaked and threw everyone out. Just like that, no exposition, just get the fuck out—puzzled looks, screwfaces, stoned confusion—threw them all out into the corridor so that it was just him on the stained carpet, alone in the silence with his tears and the tape, turning the wheels so gently, threading it back in, checking it for kinks.
Maybe it’s time for it to break, he tells himself. Time for his work to be lost, like so much that went before. Wipe it all, erase it. Make something fresh, something that matters. Make something new.
He slips the next record from its sleeve, slides it onto the spinning platter, gently drops the needle. Bursts of static and dust in his headphones, and then high-speed tones as he uses his finger to spin forward through the record. Finds the first beat, pulls it back, cues, lets it go.
A five-note sub-bass rolls out, distortion, skittering beats—some long-dead session drummer’s handiwork compressed into a groove, filtered, distorted, pitched up to near twice its normal speed—at once both impossibly fast and monolithically glacial in its relentlessness. Sonar blips, piano hits, bird chirps all wrapped in the infinite space of reverb, eternally echoing through waves of distorted air, filter sweeps seemingly pulling new frequencies from the silence, from the gaps between the sounds, making the sparse complex and the crowded empty. Decades of history, long lost elsewhere, but spoken on vinyl in the machine language.
The door behind them is hurled open, a voice shouts his name. At first he ignores it, lost in touching the groove.
It shouts again. He looks around. Angelo shouts at him over the relentless percussion.
“Yo, it’s broken, man.”
“Huh?”
“It’s broken. The transmitter. It’s down.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Nothing, man. Just static.”
Bags looks at him, rolls his eyes, and they sigh as one. “You want me to go?”
“Nah. You stay here. Just make sure it keeps rolling.”
Piss-stink stairwell. Squeak of kicks on laminate. Knocks on door.
Tyrone braces himself.
Shouts from behind the plywood and chipped orange paint. Bolts drawing back. The door opens an inch or two, expelling ganja-tinged air. A face he doesn’t know appears, one of Grids’s boys.
“Easy, Ty, the music’s stopped, innit.”
“Yeah, I know. It’s why I’m here.”
Blank look. Hint of shade.
“To get on the roof ?”
“Oh, seen. Come.” The door pulls back, and Tyrone follows him in.
People, maybe a dozen of them, are crowded around a low table. Grids is there. Mary, too. Faces turn to look at him, nod.
“Easy, Tyrone.”
“Yo, Tyrone.”
“Hey, Ty, the music stopped, man.”
Tyrone just nods back, points at the ceiling. “I need the keys. For the roof.”
“In the kitchen. Drawer next to the fridge.” It’s Grids’s voice, but Tyrone doesn’t see his face. “Put them back when you’re done, yeah?”
The smell in the kitchen hits him hard, stops him in his tracks. He feels his face burn, some complex mix of shock and anger, hunger and jealousy.
The fatty aroma of meat, stewed—goat or lamb. Curried with thick, sweet spices. Turmeric, cumin, chili; words he hears Grids’s boys whisper on the corners. Rice sits in a half-full pan. Clean, white, sticky. He fights the urge to jam his hand in and force it into his mouth. He can’t remember the last time he saw rice.
He knows where the spices are from—the hydroponic farms in the old buildings at the back of the Croft, the ones left over from before, the ones the old hippies used to grow their vegetables before the crash. When Grids took the Croft he put them all over to growing ganja, until he realized he could get a higher price growing herbs and spices—the things the Land Army didn’t provide through their tightly controlled rationing, the things everybody wanted. Illicit flavors, tastes, and smells.
Now less than half of the farms grow weed, most of them concentrating on spices. The people that used to live in the buildings next to them were all evicted to make room for the cramped sweatshops, where Grids’s boys watch over the women and children that endlessly clean, slice, prepare, and dry them for sale, cloths wrapped around their mouths and noses, goggles shaped from ancient landfill plastic strapped across their eyes. Tyrone and Bags snuck in there once, just to take a look, and the dust was everywhere, staining the surfaces of everything red and orange just as it stung his eyes and burned his nostrils, so much that he could barely breathe. He felt like he might die, but it was so intoxicating a poison—so vivid, so delicious—that he felt like he never wanted to leave.
The other food—the rice, that meat that isn’t rat or chicken—he knows where that comes from, too. From bribes and backdoor deals, from illegal trades and illicit privileges. From power and significance.
Rage snaps him back into action and he turns away from the food, ignoring the growl of his stomach. With the hint of tears in his eyes, some shadow sense memory of the spice sweatshops, he rummages through the drawer next to the still-working fridge until he finds the keys, and stuffs them into his hoodie pocket.
It’s cold up on the roof, the night air biting his cheeks, and he pulls his hood over his head as he makes his way between the jury-rigged solar panels. Another spoil from the Croft, dragged up here to Barton Hill by Grids’s crew. The lights always stay on in the tower. He keeps his head down as he walks, watching his feet, so as not to trip on the mess of cables that webs the panels and batteries together.
The transmitter nest is a mess of scaffolding and dead technology, aerials and faceless microwave transmitters, the short, stubby alien monoliths of cellular base stations looking out across the city, all covered in graffiti and bird shit. Once they were some vital node, a keystone of some invisible infrastructure, and as Tyrone stares at them he imagines he can hear the network traffic bustling through them, pulses and clicks, syncopated bleeps and sine-wave sub-bass, the high-pass-filtered scatter of drum breaks.