Album cover by Jaime Herrera
Trial 2 by Dean Cherry
Track 3: She had said the only words that could have affected him totally and truly
Off to the side of downtown Lantern was the skeleton of an apartment building long under construction. The lower half had some flesh – windows with glass, an almost finished feel – but Koi was uninterested in this part, his gaze always rising to the jutting bones, the vast dinosaur crane working patiently and imperceptibly against the backdrop of apocalyptic grey. Even in its unfinished state, this was the tallest building in Lantern, a tower towering over everything around it. Koi could see it when he stepped out of his stunted dwarf of an apartment building; he could see it when he sat for some Catfish King at the Galleria Mall, with its widescreen, upper-floor cafeteria window overlooking the one-way street that led up to it; he could see it no matter where he stood downtown. He did not know if the building was following him or if he was following the building.
This building was the inspiration for his first electro-punishment track, and it was also the first thing to inspire him that was not a piece of music or some bit of popular culture. He had wrestled the track out of the trio of programs that Trevor Noirchild had burnt for him: a drum machine, a synth emulator and a tracker to pull it all together. The electro-punishment track lacked the human elements of his wav experiments – samples of white noise guitars, awkward dialogue clips from anime and videogames – furthering the brutality of the pounding, misaligned beats that formed the backbone of its being. He called the track ‘Tower of Everything’, and with it changed his name from Wav Smasher to Exon Blaster.
He wondered how Ryan would react to it. He also wondered how Trevor Noirchild would react to it, for the track would not exist without him. Koi burnt the track onto a cd along with several outtakes, various reworkings of the beat that encompassed their own eight-minute-long tracks. He burnt this cd and carried it with him into the greyscale world outside his building.
The stench of a beer factory hung pungent in the sharp autumn air. Luckily Koi’s nostrils were nearly always coated with snot. It was Sunday and the buses were infrequent at best, so he decided to go for a stroll, to walk to Trevor Noirchild’s apartment uninvited for another nervous performance, for the grand unveiling of his first acts of electro-punishment.
‘Come back,’ Trevor Noirchild had said, ‘when you’ve made something.’
‘Uh, just anything? Should I make something good first?’
Trevor Noirchild had smirked.
‘Good or bad,’ he had said ambiguously.
Koi had looked to Haskell, who had been standing in front of the stereo, arms crossed, staring at the cd’s time display.
He stopped on a bridge built over the Thames. The trees along the river were soot-covered yellow wires twisted around each other, their leaves blanketing and mingling with the snow powdering the ground. The river rippled with the wind, and Canada Geese spoke the only language that could be considered Canadian, their syllables straining to be understood.
Koi held onto the rail as he looked into the river. The cd was in his hand and then it was not, and he only registered that it had slipped out of his fingers when he saw the minor splash, the startled geese and twenty minutes of walking wasted.
‘Ah, shit.’
He felt more inclined to jump in after it than to go all the way back to his apartment and burn another copy. Now he had no excuse to go to Trevor Noirchild’s apartment and see Haskell again – Haskell with her black fabric bumps, her backhanded abuse – and the sky was darkening around him, the world slipping into sleep. At least, he thought, at least he was not on the other side of Adelaide.
Something hard and fast struck him in the small of his back. He felt half-asleep and imagined that he had imagined it.
‘Watch where you’re going,’ rumbled the British thunder of an unfamiliar voice.
‘I guess I’m not imagining that,’ Koi muttered.
‘What was that?’
A hand crash-landed on his shoulder and clamped bone. Ah, shit.
‘Uh, nothing. I was just – I’m just on my way,’ Koi fumbled. His eyes were pounding and the blood had drained from his face. ‘Uh.’
He could hear two different breaths alternating and neither were his. Both of the breaths had a British accent. Jumping into the river was becoming more and more tempting, even if it meant breaking his bones and smelling like a wet baboon. He decided that the best thing to do in this situation was to apologise and walk away like nothing had happened.
‘Uh, sorry,’ he said, and then turned back in the direction of his apartment building.
He turned and faced Shop Round and Tom Sleuth, the pair from Architecture. He recognised them from their photo on Wikipedia. Shop had a shaved head and unibrow. Tom looked like he drank tea with his grandmother. Koi raised his finger to point at them but Shop karate-chopped his hand. Tom slapped his face – not his cheek, his chin, or any other specific part, but his entire face, from cheek A to cheek B, along with the nose, eyes and lips in-between. Koi’s immediate reaction was to cover his face protectively but Shop grabbed his hand before it even made it past his chest. He held it there with a white-knuckled grip while Tom reached into the pockets of Koi’s baboon-fur jacket, pulling out expired bus tickets, old concert tickets, movie stubs, account balances, various candy wrappers and – after too many other things came fluttering out of his pockets – the photograph of Dana leaning over a sink to acknowledge her own reflection.
‘Uh.’
‘What’s this, then?’ Tom asked, turning the photo to Koi’s reddened face.
‘That’s, uh, that’s . . .’
‘Funny name for a bird.’
‘It’s, uh . . .’
‘Well, what is it?’ Tom asked. ‘“That’s” or “Uh”?’
‘P’r’aps it’s both,’ Shop offered.
‘Don’t be an idiot,’ Tom said. ‘It has to be one or the other.’
‘P’r’aps it’d both if we split it in two. One ’alf’d be “That’s” and the other’d be “Uh”.’
‘Well.’
‘I say we prove the poor boy right.’
Tom nodded. He tore the photograph down the middle, splitting the real Dana and her reflection with twin lines of jagged white. Koi felt an impotent anger fall even limper inside him.
‘Time for the next gig, don’t you think?’ Tom asked Shop.
‘Wouldn’t want to be late,’ Shop agreed.
He let go of Koi, who carefully rubbed the damage from his wrist. Tom and Shop continued on their way as if nothing had happened. Then they stopped, and when they stopped the air grew still. The geese ceased speaking, and all Koi could hear was his own shuddering breath.
‘Oh, and I’d forget about making tracks if I were you,’ Tom called back casually.
Koi waited for them to walk out of eyesight, too scared to move. He sat with his back to the metal bars of the bridge’s railing once he was certain they were gone. Then he closed his eyes tight and felt tears welling up behind his eyelids. He rubbed his eyes before the tears could fully form.
He lifted the halves of the photograph, both already wet with snow. The split signature on their backs was running. How did Architecture know about his tracks? More importantly, why would they even care? He had left the cd at Trevor Noirchild’s place, but Trevor Noirchild couldn’t have sent it to them, ripped it to his computer and sent the file to them, could he? Trevor Noirchild wasn’t anybody. He was good – great – at what he did, at the tracks he made, but he wasn’t anybody. Koi did not think of him as someone who would know the great gods, the petty thugs of Architecture.
He had left the cd at Trevor Noirchild’s place. He had made the track and then brought it to Trevor Noirchild’s place, where Trevor Noirchild, Ryan and Haskell had listened to it, and then he had left the cd.
‘Come back,’ Trevor Noirchild had said, ‘when you’ve made something.’
Paranoia and hubris go hand-in-hand, don’t they?
Koi crossed the bridge, but he was not heading in the direction of his apartment building; instead he headed towards the building that had inspired him. If his life had decided to stop making sense, then he would use it as an opportunity to do something that he would never do otherwise. The plan, now, was to venture inside the building and make his way to the top, or as close to the top as he could given its incomplete state.
Both snow and leaves crunched beneath his feet. He thought about the time he had broken into an abandoned hospital with a friend of his – a self-proclaimed ‘urban explorer’ – back when they were in elementary school. At the time he had thought it amazing just how much of it had truly been abandoned: so many utensils, racks, cupboards, desks, trolleys, stretchers, drips and uniforms cast haphazardly about the hospital, as though the Triffids had come and gone. There had even been computers, monitors and other complex medical machines. Koi and his friend had smashed none of it. Instead they had stepped reverentially throughout the building as if stumbling upon some secret garden of endless decay and perpetual delight.
All of this rust-coloured nostalgia left his head once the under-construction apartment building was standing towering before him. Cement barricades bordered the main floor of the building, closing off all access; the barricades were five feet tall and Koi was only a few inches taller. He circled the building twice, hoping an entrance would manifest the second time, but there was still no way in, the barricades continuing to close it off densely and completely. The cracks between the barricades were barely thick enough to insert a pen, which Koi tried, figuring it might act as a key. At this point he tried magic words, though ‘let’, ‘me’ and ‘in’ were the extent of them. His next idea was to punch a cement barricade, which was one of the worst ideas he had ever had, and he proceeded to let out magic words of a different sort as he clutched the skinned and shattered knuckles of his hand.
In frustrated desperation he scaled the wall that had punched him. Those passing by would swear that they had seen some strange baboon or other form of monkey braving the late autumn weather to climb the only building in Lantern worth climbing. The landing kicked his ankles. On the other side were various tools strewn about, few that he could name, along with transparent plastic wrapping that covered the windows and the nearest entrance. Koi removed the plastic from the entrance and made his way into the ghostly interior of the unfinished building, leaving a few stray baboon hairs on the ground behind him.
When the door closed behind him there was a vast echo and when he stepped forward he could hear every step every step repeated ghostlike around him. He resisted the urge to call out to his own footprints, to ask if anybody was there; here he had found utter isolation, where all was bare, empty and devoid of oppression. From the walls to the floor to the ceiling there was nothing, the only detail coming from his own thoughts, and he really did feel as though he had entered some great skeleton, the bones of some forgotten god excavated out of downtown Lantern.
He climbed twenty-nine flights of stairs up this tower of solitude before abruptly running out of steps, his body more sore than body, and collapsed onto the raw, cold cement of the floor. There he lay, clearing his mind of thought, until a cool, slender hand touched the softness of his cheek. He burst into life and scuttled backwards to the safety of a wall.
What was the world to Koi? It was a place that alternately rejected and ignored him, a place where entertainment was better than the people who had made it. It was a place where he could buy and cherish an action figure based on the early concept paintings of Chewbacca and be jostled in the street by the musicians who had changed his life. It was a place where his closest friends were those he had met in high school and everyone else was the enemy until proven otherwise. It was a place where he was he and they were they and that was all there ever was and would be. It—
‘Oh sorry sorry sorry,’ said a heavily-accented voice. ‘I thought, I mean, I thought you were just a prince, or perhaps a— I didn’t know you were a noble monkey-beast, O Great Baboon. I bow humbly to you; I am your sorry servant, Vasilisa.’
‘Uh,’ said Koi said Koi said Koi, his voice reverberating in his head. ‘Uh.’
‘I am so sorry, O Great Baboon, but I am unable to understand your wonderful, regal monkey language.’
Koi tried to determine where the voice was coming from. He found it odd that it did not echo while his did.
‘It’s because I’m from another realm,’ explained the voice of Vasilisa. ‘I’m not exactly here, though I’m more real to you here than I would be if we left the Tower of Baba Jaga for someplace else.’
‘Uh.’
‘Baba Jaga,’ Vasilisa corrected politely. ‘Don’t confuse someplace else with Someplace Else, though. Someplace Else is where I’m from. Someplace else is anywhere outside the Tower.’
‘Er. Where are you?’
Koi wondered if she was the bat that ricocheted from empty room to empty room. If there was one thing he was certain of – just one thing – it was that he would prefer a nonsensical conversation with a talking bat to the realisation that he was crazy.
‘Sorry,’ Vasilisa said after a slight pause, one long enough for Koi to feel that he had been left alone. ‘I forgot that you can’t see me until I light up my skull.’
Two glowing orbs suddenly appeared in front of Koi’s face, giving him more of a start than Vasilisa’s gentle touch had. When Koi peeked trembling through his fingers, he saw that an ivory skull had appeared around the orbs, the orbs having been its molten eyes. Holding the skull were lovely lady fingers with the most pure and transparent fingernails. He looked from the skull to the skin of Vasilisa’s face, and she was the most beautiful girl that he had ever witnessed in person, her skin smooth without being digitally-manipulated, real without being flawed.
‘Uh.’
‘What happened to your English?’
‘Uh. I’m, uh, I’m not a monkey.’
Vasilisa looked at him uncertainly.
‘But what can you be, if not a monkey?’
‘I’m, er, Koi. Exon Blaster. I’m a human. Uh.’
‘Oh – Koi. I should have thought as much. Baba Jaga told me to expect you.’
‘Er, who’s Baba Yaga?’
‘We’re standing in her.’
Koi made a vain attempt at rubbing reality back into his temples; no matter how hard he rubbed, however, Vasilisa was still there, looking at him, and her skull was still looking at him too. He found it impossible to escape from both pairs of eyes.
‘Uh, okay.’
‘See, in Someplace Else I was sent here by Baba Jaga using a special spell. Baba Jaga exists in two different places at once: here, as this tower, and Someplace Else, as an old witch. In Someplace Else she ate me up in one gulp while I clutched the magic skull, so that I would be sent here, because this is her stomach, and the magic skull is my way back. I’ve been waiting here for a while now – since the tower was first being built, actually. And I’ve been waiting here for you, Koi, O False Baboon.’
‘Uh, okay. Why?’
‘To tell you three things. These are things that Baba Jaga needs you to know. Are you ready?’
‘Uh.’
‘Thing the first: Trevor Noirchild is going to end the life of his sister and then his own.’
‘Haskell?’
‘Thing the second: Ryan has been stealing his ideas from a writer named Josh Tierney.’
‘Uh.’
‘Thing the third: you are going to become famous whether you want to or not.’
‘Huh. Do I, uh, do I get any wishes or anything?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
Koi felt his eyes pound in their sockets as he tried to digest this information. It was too much to believe in too little time. He felt that, if anything, he should stand up. He wanted to face Vasilisa on equal standing. Vasilisa with her burning skull and her daunting beauty. Koi had nothing but awkwardness and his baboon-fur jacket.
‘Uh, listen – Ryan is a friend of mine, and . . . Ryan wouldn’t steal ideas. He gets, uh, he gets his ideas from me. He’s working on a Nerd Wave novel that’s based on me. And, uh . . . How could Trevor Noirchild kill Haskell? That doesn’t make any sense. Uh.’
‘You’re going to be famous, Koi. You’ll be just like the prince of Someplace Else!’
Koi felt his brain slip unwanted into his body.
‘But that doesn’t make any sense. Trevor Noirchild . . . Uh. Trevor Noirchild isn’t . . .’
‘I’m sorry, Koi, but I’m afraid I can’t tell you any more. I honestly don’t know anything other than what I’ve just told you. Baba Jaga would, but she’s not the most sociable person, even amongst other witches. Still, if you can come to Someplace Else someday, she might be able to tell you a thing or two. You have to have a pure heart in order to ask her any questions, though. I also imagine she’d try to eat you. She tends to do that.’
Koi gawked at her.
‘I have to go now, Koi. Baba Jaga’s cabin must be a total mess without me. It was nice meeting you, even if you’re not really a baboon, and I hope everything I’ve told you will be able to help you in some small way. So long!’
‘No—’
Vasilisa blew into the back of her skull and vanished. All that remained of her was an uncertain memory. Koi explored every room on the floor but was unable to find her, though he did find the bat, which was lying lifeless in a corner. Not even a footprint had been left behind.
Koi returned to his wall and sat back down. According to a girl who may or may not have been real, Trevor Noirchild was going to kill Haskell, Ryan was stealing his ideas from somebody else and he – Koi – was going to be famous. He was going to be famous. All of this was according to Vasilisa, which was a name he had never heard of before and a name he could not have made up on his own.
‘Fuck,’ he said he said he said he
Koi's Story Continues In Track 4: A Sudden Loud Knocking
Track 0: Uh
Track 1: The Nerd Wave
Track 2: Playing Koi
Track 3: She had said the only words that could have affected him totally and truly
Track 4: A Sudden Loud Knocking
Track 5: A Two-Man Play to Be Performed on a City Bus
Track 6: Now It's Summer
Track 7: Study of a Drawing by Bobby Myers
Track 8: Loose Change
Track 9: Foam
Track 10: The First Person
Track 11: Please Be True
Track 12: Title Track