Captive Audience. Dave Reidy
Kyle said.
“Have you heard them?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “Well, I’ve never heard them and known it was them.” Kyle smiled. “Maybe I should listen a little closer to what’s coming out your windows.”
Then Starlee looked squarely at Kyle. She tossed her cigarette on the gravel driveway, opened the screen door, and pushed past the white door with a long, purposeful stride. Before Kyle could figure out what he’d done wrong, Starlee reemerged from the house, walked to the fence, and held a CD over Kyle’s side of the property line. “You can have this,” she said.
She’d gripped the disc in the creases on the undersides of her first knuckles, and Kyle grabbed it the same way, momentarily interlacing his fingers with hers but never touching them. The bottom side of the disc shone purple and green in the sunlight. On the title side, “Neutral Milk Hotel” had been scrawled in green laundry marker above the spindle hole. “On Avery Island” was written below it in the same hand.
“Don’t be listening to anything going on in my house,” Starlee said. She stared at Kyle, as if waiting for him to acknowledge the order.
“OK,” Kyle said. He knew he could manage not to listen, but he wondered how he’d keep from hearing anything with both houses’ windows open and Starlee playing her music so loud.
Starlee went back inside her house. The screen door slapped twice against the wooden frame, and the thick white door closed behind it.
Kyle went into his parents’ bedroom, put the Neutral Milk Hotel CD into his father’s computer and clicked the on-screen play button. The songs sounded like mistakes at first—recordings that should have been thrown away and done over—but after hearing the first few tracks Kyle figured out that the fuzzy songs were supposed to sound fuzzy, and the clear songs were supposed to sound clear. Fuzzy or clear, each song seemed sad if Kyle listened to the words, so eventually he ignored them and absorbed only the music: chords strummed on a guitar that didn’t sound much better than Kyle’s own, and melodies carried by organs, horns and the raw, vibratoless voice of the singer.
The music evoked feelings of otherness in Kyle: this isn’t for me, he thought, by which he meant that he was neither as cool nor as weird as he perceived the music to be. But he kept listening, and as he listened he thought about Starlee. When the album ended, Kyle could not have told you for certain whether Starlee seemed melancholy because of her music or the music seemed melancholy because of Starlee.
Though he’d listened to twelve songs, Kyle found, in the near-silence of his parents’ bedroom, that he couldn’t shake the beat and melody of the album’s first song. He hummed some semblance of the tune and kept time slapping his thigh. Then he listened to the song again. The lyrics—about pornography and drugs and fires—scared Kyle a little. He couldn’t tell what was a joke and what was deadly serious.
Kyle googled a phrase from the lyrics, hoping he might understand them better if he could read them. The first page of search results all pointed to a song called “Song Against Sex.” Kyle didn’t recall hearing those words sung together and, though it was partly about sex, the song didn’t seem to be against sex, exactly. Kyle clicked on the second search result. “Song Against Sex” was indeed the song roaring out of his father’s computer speakers. On screen, the words were easier to comprehend and even more unsettling.
The letter F and a word Kyle had never seen before—“Bbmaj”—were written above each line of the lyrics. Kyle scrolled up to the top of the page and realized that these were the song’s chords: F and B flat major. He could hardly believe that a song this full could be made with only two chords, one of which was the only chord he could play. The page included two crude, typographic diagrams—x characters on a lattice of underlines and vertical bars—that showed how to form each of the song’s chords on a fingerboard. Kyle copied the B-flat-major diagram into a new document and printed it. Then, with “Song Against Sex” still coursing through his head, Kyle took the guitar in his hands.
For the next week and a half, Kyle spent at least a few hours a day in the den, a small, dark room at the corner of the house farthest from Starlee’s back step. First, he worked on his transition from the F chord to the B flat major right below it. Getting his fingers into the right shape from a resting position was one thing; going from F to B flat major and back again proved quite another. To play “Song Against Sex,” Kyle had to slow the song to a fitful crawl. He hardly recognized it.
When he could execute each chord change in a second or two, Kyle started singing the song as he played it. After a few days, he had the lyrics memorized. He was still singing and playing the up-tempo rocker at the pace of a country ballad, but he was playing it through without any stops and starts. And when his voice strained to reach a high note or his fingers touched strings they shouldn’t have, Kyle’s version of “Song Against Sex” captured some of the rawness of the original, and he felt something surge inside him.
After ten days, Kyle knew he had “Song Against Sex” down well enough to play along with the recording. But the family’s only CD player was in his father’s computer, within earshot—and eyeshot—of Starlee’s back step. That fact made him hesitate, but Kyle decided he’d worked too hard not to hear his guitar backed by the drums, bass, vocals, and trombone of Neutral Milk Hotel, and that, when he got down to it, he wanted Starlee to hear him play. So he sat on his parents’ bed, waiting for those guys to leave Starlee’s house and for her music to stop. The boldness of it all excited Kyle. What are you doing, man? he asked himself, smiling. There were reasons not to make such a bald attempt to impress Starlee, and Kyle was aware of them, but he convinced himself that school’s beginning—just three days away—offered a kind of clean slate. With bells and homework and rumors and football games, would Starlee even remember whether or not he’d played? Would Kyle?
Kyle wondered who had made the music that filled the air between Starlee’s house and his own today. He was pretty sure it wasn’t Neutral Milk Hotel. I’ll ask her later, Kyle thought. But then he remembered that Starlee had told him not to listen to anything going on in her house, and asking would mean admitting he’d been listening. Before Kyle could lift a phrase from the lyrics and search for it, the music stopped. A minute later, the Camaro started up and rumbled away.
Kyle sat motionless on the bed, breathing through his mouth, waiting for what would come next. He heard Starlee’s back door squeeze out of its heat-swollen frame and the screen door creak on its hinges. Her bare leg hit the concrete first and the rest of her followed. She was wearing red shorts and a gray t-shirt one size too small. She lit a cigarette, and when she’d exhaled her first deep drag, Kyle pushed himself to his feet and turned up the volume on his father’s computer speakers. Then he grabbed his guitar, sat down on the rolling desk chair, and rested the guitar on his thigh. As he moved the cursor to the play button with his right hand, he made the shape of an F chord with his left.
During the ten seconds of feedback and chatter at the beginning of the recording, Kyle took his white Fender pick in hand and held it above the sound hole. The drummer clicked off the rhythm with his sticks, and the guitarist began to play. And when the singer came in four bars later, Kyle played his own guitar, spreading a layer of clear acoustic tones above the fuzz of the recording. He stared hard at the fingerboard, making sure to hit only the strings he was supposed to this time. He wanted Starlee to hear he could play.
After verse one, Kyle wondered if she could hear him at all. He’d set the volume loud enough to get her attention, but was the recording drowning him out? What if she thought he was simply blasting her own music back at her through his father’s computer speakers? What would she make of that?
Kyle looked out the window and found Starlee leaning her shoulder against the back of her house and facing his own. Then he mangled an F and returned his eyes to the fingerboard until he was back in sync with the song. When he looked up again, Starlee was staring at the ground between their houses. Her forelock hung in front of her face, keeping Kyle from getting a look at her eyes. She wasn’t smoking anymore. She was just standing on her back step, listening.
As the final verse began, Kyle’s