Album cover by Oliver Hull
Don't Forget To Hold Reset by chaosmachine
Track 8: Loose Change
Koi returned to his apartment building to find a perfect square of ash and soot in its place. Sootprints marred the sidewalk, and police tape had been torn and dragged across the square in lines reminiscent of Japanese calligraphy. Koi eyed the mess as details continued to form: along with toilet seats and metal sinks, sticks of yellowed white jutted out of the charred soil, bits of neighbours never met growing out of the ground. Koi briefly considered the possibility that he had been gone for so long that he had forgotten which building was his, but his apartment building had been the only one in the area, and the houses on either side of the black were the same houses that had been on either side of his building.
So everything was gone – all of his electro-punishment, ambience, glitch-hop and experimental wav tracks. If the girl with dandruff in her head had been there, she would have explained that it was because he had chosen not to advance the narrative of his life’s story. But she was not, and all he had was this thought of her telling him what he already knew. He decided to not even bother sifting through the black sands of his former life. Instead he looked forward.
Beyond the empty square were a few singed bushes and trees, and beyond those sat his father’s house. He would have to crash there for a few nights while he sorted out his situation. The only problem with that would be dealing with his stepmother, who would find a way to gloat, as if his leaving home somehow tied directly to his apartment building burning down.
When he went to his father’s house, he was forced to look this woman in the eye and say ‘Uh, I need a place to stay.’
‘No.’
‘Actually, I do. Is my father home? Er.’
‘I’ll check.’
Apparently she had to close the door on him to do so. As the door was being closed, Koi peered past his stepmother’s heft to spy his father reclining in a chair in the living room, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and holding a remote control. After a few moments of muffled shouting, the door reopened, this time with the father gazing down fondly upon the son.
‘I hear you need a place to stay.’
Koi nodded.
‘My, uh, apartment burnt down.’
‘Hm. Maybe we should take a look at that.’
Koi followed his father around to the back of the house. From there his father contemplated the empty space just beyond his backyard.
‘I didn’t see anything on the news.’
Koi knew his father only watched the news when it cut into his Survivor marathons, but didn’t bother bringing it up. All that mattered to Koi was being guaranteed a place to stay, and knowing there was nothing his stepmother would be able to do about it.
Stepping into his old room was like stepping into a time machine, ripples of nostalgia returning him to his teenage years. He was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen again, coming home from school after yet another shy and gangly day. Only he had never actually considered himself shy, simply incapable of interacting with the majority of people he came across, which went for then, now and later.
His standee of the alien baby from Alien: Resurrection gave him its pleading look as he set about determining just how much of his room had remained the same. From what he could tell, it was all of it: his Star Trek comforter, his hand-painted models of Marvel villains and obscure Star Wars vehicles, the portrait of himself that Ryan had drawn one day in David’s basement. Of course, he was missing a lot of important things, such as his videogame consoles and his many hard drives. At least his first custom computer tower was still idling beneath his old wooden desk. So he could continue making tracks while everyone thought he was dead, while he was holed up in his old room, as long as he managed to find the proper programs to torrent, along with the proper keys to unlock those programs.
He sat at his desk and fired up his computer. Now that it was summer, and now that he was being offered a chance to live another life, he would have to make up for lost time.
His computer said ‘Who is the user?’ followed by, without pausing, ‘Koi.’
‘Oh, you remember me.’
As Windows 2000 loaded, as Koi’s desktop image of a Japanese girl cosplaying Anna Karina in Band of Outsiders appeared onscreen, Koi relived several days, hours, minutes and seconds from his teenage years. He recalled his teenage self alternatingly woken up by his father and then his stepmother – soft and then shrill, warm and then cold. He recalled waking up despite being tired and getting up despite being too weak. Phantasy Star Online had been one of the reasons for that, but he knew he had only himself to blame. Four hours of sleep a night.
‘Good morning, Koi.’
Koi emerged from his room smaller, more awkward and with a single pimple on his forehead. His father set down his coffee mug for morning inspection.
‘You need to keep better care of your face. I suggest scrubbing harder.’
Every morning Koi’s father brought up something Koi was apparently doing wrong. This had been what helped turn Koi into the great neurotic being he was, though that is not to say he wasn’t neurotic from birth. His father simply – and unintentionally – helped nurture the various aspects that would prevent Koi from gaining a girlfriend until the age of twenty-four, the various aspects that would prevent him from enjoying the world on any level other than an interior one.
‘I’m only, uh, visiting my past. The zit’ll go away when I’m back in the future.’
His stepmother rolled her eyes and mouthed something to Koi’s father.
Koi sat at the kitchen table, dipped a slice of toast into his orange juice and then took a bite. He proceeded to open his mouth and the mushy, orange-y, acidic toast fell out of his mouth and slopped onto his plate.
‘Fucking nasty,’ he said.
‘You will not use that language at my table, Koi,’ his stepmother snapped.
‘I’ll, er, try not to do anything I wouldn’t do as a teenager.’
His stepmother gave him a crooked stare.
‘Well, except make tracks – even though I’m travelling through time, I have to keep my priorities straight. But, uh, don’t worry; I won’t aim to assassinate Hitler and accidentally kill Winston Churchill instead. I’ll mind my own business.’
‘I don’t think you’re making any sense, son,’ his father told him. ‘Is there something you’re not telling us?’
Koi shook his head.
‘Just a lot of stuff you don’t want to hear.’
As his family quietly finished breakfast, Koi grabbed the entertainment section of the morning paper and unfolded it, the bottom half brushing against his legs. He wanted to see which movies were playing in theatres, in case there were any good ones he had overlooked at the time.
‘“Still in Movement”,’ he muttered to himself. ‘“Everything Shakes”.’
He refolded the section and sat it atop the newspaper’s front page. Why did he have to travel back to a time when only crap was playing? If it had been the original Still in Movement, the one that was a ghost story about a missing house, he would’ve been happy. Instead it was the one that was the first known attempt at a Nerd Wave film, a film so bad it even managed to fail at being nerdy. And Everything Shakes was one of the worst science fiction films he had ever seen, which was no surprise considering it was from the director of that crap film Still in Movement, a director who had apparently only managed to become successful by being prolific.
Koi slouched in his chair, feeling robbed.
‘Better finish your breakfast, Koi,’ his father said. ‘You don’t want to be late.’
Koi was about to cross the street to his school when a meaty hand stopped him. He turned nervously to determine the hand’s owner, the hand’s owner turning out to be Gene, a stocky fellow with chemically-blonde hair and piercing blue eyes. Gene was known to Koi as one of Don’s best friends, which was about the extent of his knowledge of Gene. For whatever reason, Gene thought Koi hated him, and Gene brought this up every time they met, while Koi always brought up the fact that he did not actually hate him. In fact, Koi liked Gene a great deal, which Gene apparently found impossible to accept.
Gene was wearing a white t-shirt he had apparently written on with black marker. Whatever had been written had been written very badly, and having mixed with his sweat, the writing had gone totally illegible. Koi wondered what profound phrase had forever been lost to the swamp of Gene’s shirt.
‘Hey, Koi,’ Gene said in his nasal, insinuating voice.
‘Uh, hey.’
‘I see you’ve fallen asleep at your computer and think you’re travelling back in time.’
Koi paused and then nodded. It was good to know this nightmare was a dream. He was also now interested in composing a few tracks while he was dreaming, as Nuptial Squid and Nedward Nightingale had done for some of their most well-respected albums. He could create an entire collection of dream tracks and give them to his favourite dreamers.
He focused again on Gene, who had been rambling on about Chemical Valley. He noticed that Gene was holding a snakeskin briefcase and asked him about it.
‘I have in here, my friend,’ Gene said, halting his sentence as he clicked open the briefcase. He held the briefcase open in front of him, its contents being displayed to Koi like fine wares. ‘I have in here a VCR and a VHS copy of Loose Change.’
Koi saw that it was so.
‘What’s Loose Change?’
‘It’s a Bill Murray movie. I found it at a yard sale for a loonie. Can you believe that?’
‘That’s, uh, pretty cool,’ Koi said, his sincerity lighting up Gene’s eyes.
‘Want to watch it?’
Koi nodded. The bell rang. The milk-stained sun fell into the ocean and, via this beautiful segue possible only in dreams and poetry, Koi and Gene found themselves in the basement of David’s house, or rather the basement of David’s family’s house. David had been a prominent member of Koi’s high school clique, a group that had included Don, Poe and Morris. Koi liked to think that David had died saving their lives. In reality David had ceased being cool: instead of watching downloaded foreign films on an old, discoloured tv, he had become increasingly fascinated by fantasy films from the Eighties; instead of sitting around and discussing Ryan’s unrealised projects, he had begun playing with swords and aikido; instead of hanging out with his high school friends, he had hung out with wiccan hippies who, for the most part, were unwashed girls with dreadlocks. For Koi, the worst thing David had ever done was move out of his family’s basement, which signified the end of the clique.
Gene hooked up the VCR to the tv and pushed in the tape. The group sat with their legs folded beneath them; Gene to Koi’s right, the ghost of David to his left.
‘I haven’t seen this but I think my brother has seen this,’ the ghost of David said. ‘I think he has a copy upstairs but I don’t know.’
‘I, uh, forgot about previews.’
‘Are you kidding?’
‘Previews are on dvds too.’
‘Oh, yeah. I guess I’m too used to Ryan’s, uh, Criterions. And I download any other movies I watch.’
‘I apologise on behalf of my tape.’
The movie was about a man who had been given the power to freeze time and move freely within it. The man found that he had a choice, which was to either live eternally in a state of limbo or grow old and perish. He could swap out of these states at any time, however, allowing him to experience the best of both worlds: in the land of frozen time, he could strip strangers naked, position them how he wished, steal their money and spend one hundred years (his estimation) admiring his handiwork; he could then return to the flow of time for basic human interaction. If he continued returning to the flow of time, however, all those seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years would add up, and he would eventually grow old. His choice became that of eternal loneliness and being loved.
‘What do you choose, Koi?’ asked Gene.
‘Uh.’
‘Yeah, I’ve seen this movie before,’ said the ghost of David. ‘I’ve definitely seen this before.’
‘I, uh, don’t know. I guess—’
Snrfl. Mmf.
‘Huh?’
Koi awoke groggily to the sound of knuckles on glass. The K key had somehow stuck to his cheek and fell off when he turned his head towards his window.
Haskell was knocking on the window and grinning. She gazed up at Koi with mischief in her eyes. He went over to her, looked down at her and then opened his window.
‘Dream up, Koi,’ she told him. ‘You’re waking.’
He gave her an outstretched arm to latch onto and she secured herself firmly to it. He pulled her into his room through the window and she landed on the floor, not like a cat but something more awkward – like a human, he supposed. She was wearing a grey sweater that was also a jacket and its zipper was black; the mouth of the jacket was open and these black teeth guarded the thin black shirt underneath. Koi looked at the black teeth and said he was groggy, that he had been sleeping and didn’t know if this was still a dream.
Haskell kissed him on the cheek and called him stupid. Koi somehow said ‘uh’ when he shushed her.
‘My, uh, parents are sleeping.’
A blank look.
‘You’re like twenty-one, aren’t you?’
‘Twenty-three or twenty-four.’
Haskell thought about this for a moment and then turned her attention to his computer. The monitor was on and on the screen Haskell could view a tracker layered with a thousand tracks.
‘You can have a girl over,’ she said.
‘You came in through my window.’
‘Shh.’
She flopped down on his bed and removed her jacket. The expression on her face said that this was perfectly normal. Koi stood nervously by his window and did not know what to do. This dream was a dream he had had as a teenager, a teenage dream taking place in his home when he thought he was dreaming.
‘Why wake up?’ Haskell asked. She sat carefully cross-legged on his bed, her jacket in a haphazard spiral beside her like an abandoned skin. ‘If you think you’re dreaming. Huh?’
‘Well . . .’
‘“Well”? “Well” what? “Well, uh”.’
‘Uh . . .’
‘How about shut up? Come over here.’
Koi took the required steps towards her. Haskell grabbed him by the back pockets of his khakis and pulled him closer. His fly was undone and Haskell could see the hem of his shirt through it. She tugged it through as Koi tried to back away.
‘What are you doing, Koi?’
He gave her a frightened look.
‘You’re not dreaming. I came to tell you that Taylor got you a gig. You’ll be playing atop the rubble at the Whack. You’re going to be playing live in front of a live audience.’
The colour drained from Koi’s face.
‘You’re going to be famous, Koi.’
And he saw that she was proud. Even if she did not outright admit it, there was a spark in her eyes that was impossible to fake, and Koi saw that the spark was him. She had come to his bedroom in the night and taken off her jacket and told him. His parents were sleeping as they had slept when he was a child and teenager and they continued to sleep while he figured out whether or not he was an adult. And here was this dream and it was holding him and he was blushing because this was his dream. She was going to die in the morning or the day after or maybe a week later. But all dreams are woken up from and everyone dies when they die. So—
‘Come here,’ she said.
Koi's Story Continues In Track 9: Foam
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