—This was an old guy, an older guy. I’m telling you it wasn’t the same person.
But in spite of myself, I started thinking: Seth, you didn’t see his face, you can’t remember his face. There was something avaricious in Carter’s eyes. It was as if he thought I was deliberately keeping some nugget from him, a piece of valuable information.
—So what about our Vanilla Ice tune?
The way he changed the subject felt tactical. He was throwing me a bone.
—Come on, Carter.
—What? You’ve been working to meet the important deadline for MC Snowy Snow. Let’s hear it.
—Don’t call him that. Don’t mock him while we’re working with him.
—Fuck does it matter when I mock him? Let’s hear it.
We sat on swivel chairs in the control room. The lyrics chugged nicely along over the big band syncopation. It worked. Carter asked why I’d kept the bass so far to the front. It sounded too modern. He wanted to hear more of the clarinet, that would be more authentic. I agreed enthusiastically with all his suggestions, pleased he was giving input. I wanted to be less worried than I was. I wanted him to be thinking about something other than a man playing chess in Washington Square.
After we’d played the demo a couple of times, he got up from the desk and collected his things. He had stuff to do, he told me. He would see me back at the loft. When we opened the door to the street, I was surprised to find it was dark outside. That wasn’t so unusual—we often lost track of time in the studio—but just then it seemed ominous. I needed to feel rooted, to remember things instead of forgetting them. We stood for a while, smoking and breathing in the humid air, until Carter’s car pulled up. As he got in, I caught sight of his expression, an external blankness that wasn’t passivity or peace or even simple tiredness. It was like a lid on a boiling pan, masking some spirit-consuming interior battle.
I ran back inside, grabbed the bag that held my recording equipment, set the alarm and quickly wheeled out my bike. I locked the door and waited impatiently for the beeps to end. Then I cycled over the bridge into the city, to Washington Square.
I looked for him through the evening crowds, the people milling around by the fountain and watching punk kids making chalk drawings on the flagstones. A bluegrass duo—a girl with a nose ring who played upright bass and sang, a mullet-haired guitarist—was busking under the arch. He was not watching them. On one of the benches near the dog run, a well-dressed man rocked backwards and forwards, shouting anguished obscenities to himself. I found Carter by the chess tables, talking to the hustlers. I chose not to approach him. I wanted to eavesdrop, to hear how he spoke when he thought I wasn’t there. I’d brought a small parabolic, a professionally made handheld device, much less cumbersome than my old hacked satellite dish. I hovered around, far enough away to be discreet, which was easy enough in the darkness. In this way I picked up snatches of his conversation. He was throwing twenties at people, asking if they knew a singer. A chess player who could sing.
—I can sing. Sing anything you want. Show me the money.
—No, this is a particular guy.
—I told you, Imma sing for you. Want to hear me sing?
Two informants. A third.
—Dark skin. Maybe a gold tooth.
—Sure I know the dude. Bring him right to you.
They took the money. None of them came back. Carter waited, shifting from one foot to another and playing with his hair. Even from a distance you could tell he was on edge. He looked like he was trying to score drugs. This neediness worried me. I’d never seen him like that. He was someone who was careful only to want things, never to need them. To me, he looked like he was unraveling. I didn’t know what to do, who to tell. What, in fact, was there to tell? I wanted to go to him, but I didn’t dare show myself, because then he would know that I’d been spying on him. In the end, I left him there. I waited up at home, watching TV in the living area, but he didn’t come back that night.
For the next few days, I worked on a second rough for the hip hop star. I was using one of our rarest breaks, an obscure record from a short-lived Philadelphia label that had cost Carter a pile of money back when he was still interested in the seventies. By some miracle it hadn’t been reissued, so for the moment it retained its value. I was chopping it up with a guitar sample from an equally rare Afrobeat cassette. The work was absorbing, but it wasn’t enough to keep me from my thoughts: Leonie, Washington Square, things I had forgotten, buried things that I ought to remember but couldn’t bring to mind. One night, just after I’d gone to bed, Carter called me from the studio and told me he had something I needed to hear. I was overjoyed that he was working, but also nervous. It was 4 a.m. He sounded more than usually amped up. I hauled myself out of bed and cycled over.
The first thing he told me after he unbolted the door was that I should prepare to cry. He’d cried. He’d been crying for two hours straight. He told me just to sit and listen—I wouldn’t be the same after. He turned to the desk, and through the studio speakers came the sound of a New York street. Traffic, the sound of footsteps. My footsteps. I quickly recognized Tompkins Square in the East Village. I could hear barking from the dog run, skaters panhandling by the benches. He turned up the volume. I heard myself walk past the skaters into a sort of aural dead zone. The street noise faded, the dogs too. The only significant signal was the sound of a guitar, someone fingerpicking in a weird open tuning that made the instrument seem to wail and moan. It was mesmerizing, the performance of a musician struggling with inexpressible pain and loss. The recording was completely clear, unmarred by voices or traffic. I must have been standing directly in front of the guitarist for several minutes.
And yet I couldn’t bring to mind his face, or even picture the scene.