I was researching internships in recording studios in New York and Los Angeles. I was ready to accept anything—coffee assistant, cable gimp—that would get me within reach of an actual paying position before one of several different credit providers took me to court. I’d set myself a deadline. If I hadn’t found a music job by a certain date, I was going to accept a cousin’s offer to set me up with an interview at the engineering company he worked for in Boston. If that didn’t work out I’d do technical support, food service, whatever.
Carter, of course, didn’t have to worry. He talked vaguely about traveling with that month’s girlfriend, a model called Mariam or Miriam. She was African and spoke with a French accent, I think her dad was the Senegalese consul in San Francisco. Carter was going to take her to the Caribbean on a sailing yacht. I wanted to spend time with him, to wring out every last drop of friendship before we went our separate ways. I was convinced that was how it would be: he’d head on into the rest of his glamorous life while at best I’d be chained to a photocopier in some suburban business park, at worst locked in a State hospital, my ass hanging out of a backless gown. I spent long hours in my bedroom, fretful to the point of tears, imagining Carter at pool parties, drinking cocktails on high-floor balconies. I mourned him as if he’d already gone.
Carter quickly got bored of my languishing. He started taking a sarcastic tone, inventing derogatory nicknames for me. I was the robot professor, the tin man. I lacked spontaneity and heart. By then he had stopped listening, not just to the old house and techno we’d once loved, but all contemporary music, anything that used digital sounds. He’d been through a hip hop phase, scouring the internet for twelve-inches by regional producers from the eighties and nineties. Now he only wanted to listen to ethnographic recordings or scratchy 45’s of doo-wop bands. The Flamingos, The Clovers, The Stereo Sound Of The !Kung Bushmen. An ever longer list of things was not real enough for him, tainted by the digital sins of modernity. “Just ones and zeroes,” he’d sneer, dismissing some recent part of the culture. “Out of touch with the human body.” If I hadn’t used his expensive drum machines and keyboards, they would have gathered dust.
One night we were sitting up late in the kitchen. I was smoking a joint to get rid of the stink of deli ham and mayonnaise as he plucked distractedly at a new toy which had arrived by courier that morning, a nineteen-twenties Gibson mandolin. He’d deleted his iTunes, he said solemnly, angling the mandolin’s body so the starburst finish caught the light.
—I know what you mean. The sample rate—
—Fuck the sample rate. It could be a million hertz, I wouldn’t care. It could be all the hertz. This bullshit about lossless. There’s always a loss, don’t you get that? There is always something missing.
He started lecturing me, a speech I’d already heard a dozen times. Technology was a trap. Modern musicians were locked in a box. Digital sound had an absolute cutoff, a sonic floor that repelled the listener and set an inhuman limit to the experience. You couldn’t go below zero, had I ever thought about that? Whatever happened to soul, to the vibration of an animal-gut string, the resonance of lacquered rosewood? Always the stark binary. Zero or one. I admit I stopped listening. He clutched the neck of the mandolin as if physically grasping the elusive quality he sought. He seemed high to me, higher than usual, scratching himself and making agitated passes at the strings, little chops and cuts. I asked him what he’d taken and he gave me a look and stalked off to the spare bedroom that we used as a studio. I heard rustling and scraping and went in to find him pulling cables out of the back of the patch bay.
—What are you doing?
—What I should have done years ago. This is all going in the trash.
—Carter, you’re wasted.
—What do you care?
He was brandishing one of the few pieces of equipment that actually belonged to me, an expensive digital delay, hefting the brushed steel case in one hand.
—Please, Carter. You’ll break it.
He pouted sarcastically, then went over to the window and threw it out. I heard it smash on the sidewalk. We were on the second floor. Someone could easily have been underneath. I noticed that my breathing had become irregular. I pointed it out to him, that someone could have been underneath. Don’t be such a pussy, he sneered. It’s just a thing.
I tried to remain calm. I’d spent all day working for tips; I’d saved for that machine; someone could have been killed, I’d been working all day, working for tips, I’d saved, someone could have been killed and—I threw myself at him, my hands scrabbling for his throat. At that moment I wanted to kill him. I wanted to scrape away his looks and charm and expose the skeleton of money underneath. People always remember Carter as an imposing figure. That’s the psychological power he possessed. Actually he was slightly built. If you saw him coming out of the shower or lying asleep in bed, he looked like a waif, a lost boy.