“No, green. The guitar is the color of grass.”
Never had there been a time when sound, color, and feeling hadn’t been intertwined, when a dirty, rolling bass line hadn’t induced violets that suffused him with thick contentment, when the shades of certain chords sliding up to one another hadn’t produced dusty pastels that made him feel like he was cupping a tiny, golden bird. It wasn’t just music but also rumbling trains and rainstorms, occasional voices, a collective din. Colors and textures appeared in front of him, bouncing in time to the rhythm, or he’d get a flash of color in his mind, an automatic sensation of a tone, innate as breathing. The candy red of a Wurlitzer organ made him want to retch, yet it repulsed him to even consider the possibility of it being any other color. A particularly nefarious jingle for a used car dealer produced the most evil clash of greens, and there’d been one summer when he couldn’t even turn on the TV, afraid the jingle would be ready to pounce. A two-line refrain he heard from a boom box on Fordham Road re-created the lapping blues of the river in Minjiang so completely that it would haunt him for years, until he tracked down the song and listened to it until it grew thin. He would learn how to create music, matching tones to shades to feelings and translating them back to melody. The purest and most inept form of communication. He’d craft songs that conveyed exactly what he wanted to say, yet he was the only one who could understand them. The rest of the world heard only sound. His efforts would always fall flat; the gift would always be his.
Deming chased after music with a hunger that bordered on desperation. Why didn’t other people have the same need, how could Kay prefer the low, modulated voices of NPR in the car when she could as easily choose to blast the blowout world of Hendrix or the bright angles of Prince or the sunglare of Bowie (water, Deming would see when he listened to “Sound and Vision,” water water water)? When he was a grown-up with his own car, he’d never be so boring. Binge-listening to a good song was better than binge-eating a bag of Hershey’s Miniatures in the pattern of Mr. Goodbar–Milk Chocolate–Krackel–Special Dark (there had been one glorious, motherless Bronx afternoon when he and Michael had done exactly that). Music was a language of its own, and soon it would become his third language, a half-diminished seventh to a major seventh to a minor seventh as pinchy-sweet as flipping between Chinese tones. American English was loose major fifths; Fuzhounese angled sevenths and ninths.
He made up band names on his walks home, sketched out their album covers and song lyrics: The Toilet Plungers, “Floaters or Flushers.” Dumpkin & Moore, “I Shot the Food Lion.” Necromania, “Brains on a Spike.” Roland, delighted when Deming showed him the list, scribbled the fake band names onto the fronts of his notebooks, and when other kids asked about them he would feign shock and say, “You don’t know that band?” They’d shake their heads. “Hey, Daniel, you get that new Necromania album yet? I like that first track, ‘Brains on a Spike.’ ” In the middle of the hallway, around the corner from Principal Chester’s office, Roland belted out the lyrics Deming had written: Brains on a spike / Yum yum burp / Heart on a spike / Damn that hurt. Deming wanted to correct Roland. It was heart on a knife, not spike. “I heard they’re playing at the Dunkin’ Donuts next month,” Roland said aloud, to no one in particular. “Necromania! I’m getting tickets. Don’t want it to sell out.”
Cody Campbell, who played soccer with Roland, came up to Deming in Homeroom and said, “I heard about the band you’re in. Roland’s band. Necro . . . mania.”
“That’s my band, not Roland’s,” Deming said. “I started it.”
IN NOVEMBER, PETER AND Kay asked Deming what he wanted for a birthday gift. “An electric guitar,” he said. On the morning of his twelfth birthday he awoke to find an index card on his bedside table, with a note in Peter’s handwriting: It’s time to play some Hendrix.
“It’s a treasure hunt,” Peter said, clapping his hands together. “You go the place you think is being referred to on the card in order to find the next clue, and so on. The clues lead to your birthday gift.”
“It’s a Wilkinson tradition,” Kay said. “Every year on our birthdays, we make treasure hunts for one another. On my last birthday, your father set up clues that led to a restaurant near Syracuse. Now it’s your turn.”
Deming went downstairs and lifted the lid of the record player. On the turntable was another card that said What word comes after ‘surprise,’ alphabetically? He took the dictionary down from the bookshelf, flipped through pages until the next card fell out.
After being led to the linen closet, the china cabinet, and the dishwasher, he followed a clue that said Put your socks away to the hamper, and opened it to find a box wrapped in silver paper, topped with a plastic bow. It was a big box, but not big enough for a guitar.
He brought it to his bedroom. “Open it!” Peter cried.
It was a new laptop, white and glimmering. “All yours.” Kay kissed him on the cheek. “Happy birthday, Daniel.”