[islands of seals]

(draft)

2010-12-07T16:00:00.000-08:00

Phoenix, Arizona || May 10, 1994

C H A P T E R O N E

By sunset Nicholas’s vision had been reduced to garish ribbons of color. He thought that as one sense dimmed the others should grow stronger, but perhaps that took time. For now the steering wheel wormed incandescent beneath his fingertips, the air tasted of a thousand dead cigarettes, his head was a tangle of ghost murmurings and faraway alarm bells.

As he drove, memories of the day played like an old newsreel fed backwards through the projector, color-stained and wobbly and sequenced in reverse. Most immediately he recalled leading Socks down the mountain. He passed a few hikers, some who paused to talk to the dog. Most looked through Nicholas like he wasn’t there.

Before that he stood still on the mountain for a time. Hours, maybe. He was watching the airport and his eyes watered and burned.

Nicholas liked his particular place on the mountain. The trail bent sharply once and quickly again, angling past a throne of red sandstone, a quirk of erosion that left a waist-high bench of rock joined to the sheer cliff wall behind. Of course, he was hardly first to discover the site: MIKEY CLASS OF '87 had been here, as had CINDY LOVES JAY, and METALLICA RULES and JOHNNY SUCKS DICK and FUCK YOU SUE, too. Nicholas had sketched ideas for his own tag, but with little enthusiasm for the results.

Today he set only his backpack on the throne, abdicating in favor of a small outcropping of rock on the opposite edge of the trail. The perch was a precarious one, especially with Socks by his side, but the reward was a dizzying view of the city over the rust-colored rocks, the cactus and the creosote that blanketed the mountain.

The airport lay at his feet, to the southeast. Nicholas couldn’t help the way his heart fluttered with every jet that took to the sky, sank with each landing. Maybe he hated the airport, the futility of recapture endlessly following escape. But then, why keep returning here? Maybe he needed a place to think. It could be something important was on his mind, all that time spent staring at the planes, but it was long gone now. All that remained was a memory of that obnoxious kid, the one who approached Nicholas earlier that afternoon, back when his body faced away from the airport, to the west, towards the sun.

“Hey mister.”

“Hey mister.”

“Hey mister.”

The kid called and called and Nicholas ignored him as long as possible. A solar eclipse was due this afternoon and it beckoned to Nicholas and he was here to see. The eclipse was once and it was now and he faced it head-on, everything, the sun livid and the moon stone dead and the sky enormous and hot and flat like a mirror, perfect everywhere but the horizon, where its clean slate blue cracked into a cloudy piss yellow. The sky was eternal and its ruin was the triumph of the modern Western city, the combined passions of a million drivers in a million cars poured across a million miles of asphalt. If the drivers, the noiseless pilots of these humble death machines, were to pause a moment to look up, they might see Nicholas, looming on the mountain like a gaunt teenaged Cristo Redentor overlooking the city. The drivers wouldn’t stop though, not ever. The cars plunged on and on into the filthy horizon and the sun remained high above, for now shedding little of its terrible brilliance. Nicholas imagined he saw the sun ringed by a thick black halo, though it was hard to say whether the cause was the eclipse or the strain on his eyesight.

“Hey mister. Whatcha doin’?”

The kid was tugging at his sleeve now. Nicholas responded without looking.

“Teaching Socks here a trick.”

“What kinda trick?”

“Seeing eye dog.”

“He don’t look like a seeing eye dog to me.” The boy reached down to pet Socks, who tilted his head happily. “You call him Socks? Like the president’s cat?”

Nicholas, blinking hard, looked at the boy for the first time. The kid’s face was an irritating pink smear. “Huh?”

“The president’s cat is named Socks.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“Hey mister. How come you were staring at the sun?”

“I’m watching the eclipse.”

“My dad says don’t look at the sun, even when there’s an eclipse. You never heard that, mister?”

“What’s with calling me mister? I’m eighteen. Barely.”

“I bet your eyes hurt.”

Nicholas sighed. He pulled his sunglasses and a stick of gum from his shirt pocket.

“Look kid, why don’t you get the fu–I mean, leave me alone. Go bug someone else.”

The boy petted Socks once more, then scampered around the bend in the trail and out of sight. Nicholas was left alone to study the airport, to hike back down the mountain, to find his car and drive it home with his eyesight newly compromised.

He was behind the wheel now and he was actually driving, but his scarred vision gave his surroundings a dreamlike quality. He drove the car and he thought of a dream he once had of airplanes. He saw himself as a kid, alone, kicking a ball aimlessly around his backyard. Suddenly he heard a roaring overhead, and looked up to see two jumbo jets collide in midair, producing a fireball to rival the noonday sun in size and intensity. Though the walls of his yard stood high, he somehow knew the neighbors all saw. Yet no one screamed, no one moved. People just watched.

The explosion realistically should have left no survivors, but this was a dream: men and women floated down slowly, held aloft by invisible parachutes. As the people drifted closer, Nicholas saw they had no faces, and they fell headfirst, tumbling softly onto the featureless planes of skin where their eyes and noses and mouths should have been. Some bodies landed in the gravel, some in the palo verde trees, some in the swimming pool; yet they caused no splash, raised no dust, whispered no sound.

Socks barked from the passenger seat and Nicholas returned his attention to the present. He was using tiny suburban roads rather than major avenues, to avoid the traffic and to get away with driving half-blind. What’s to see? A yellow sign warning him to WATCH FOR CHILDREN when there weren’t any. Quiet homes, manicured lawns, silvery cars at rest in long arced driveways. There were men in each doorway – overfed men, groaning and scratching like bears, bathed in the flickering backlight of living room TV sets. It was trash night in the suburbs, and the men rolled heavy containers to the curb with the lumbering, arrhythmic gait of the undead. And Nicholas was nearly home.

Death Letter (revised)

2010-08-12T15:07:00.000-07:00

Wednesday morning before work, I felt a twinge of anxiety as I opened the mail. A letter should have come already confirming direct deposit of my paycheck. A day late shouldn’t have caused much concern, but it had arrived every other Monday as far as I could remember. The money wasn’t much, sure – enough to pay the bills, keep the cat fed, get drunk when I wanted. But its absence unnerved me.

I spent all day yesterday fretting about the missing deposit, then drank enough after work to chase it from my mind. A Humphrey Bogart film was on when I came home from the bar, but I fell asleep and missed the ending. It worked its way into my dreams, though. I was climbing a lonely hill at night, and had a raincoat pulled tightly around me. It was windy and the clouds sailed past the moon at an insane speed. I wore loose dress shoes with poor traction, and I would periodically slide back a few steps and have to scramble to my feet. When I finally reached the top I came to a bus stop beside a deserted street, where dead leaves and plastic bags whirled past rusted cars. The weathered remnants of handbills for last month’s carnival were pasted to the reverse of the bus stop’s glass partition; the mirror image of a torn clown, its pointy-hatted head pinned in the jaws of a tiger, grinned obscenely at me. A payphone stood nearby, and though it didn’t ring I held the receiver to my ear. I could hear Bogie over the line, telling someone a good love scene involved him slicing grapefruit, dopey and half-asleep. I can’t recall how I reacted to hearing this, but when I woke the film was over and static filled the screen.

I flipped past a few envelopes destined for the junk pile – get this credit card, save that creature, elect some city councilperson – and found a letter from my job. This one felt unusual: my address and theirs were typed directly on the envelope rather than visible through a glassine window, and it weighed next to nothing.

The letter inside was terse:

Dear sir,

We regret to hear of your untimely passing. Effective immediately, all deposits to your account are hereby suspended.

Sincerely,

I held the letter towards the kitchen ceiling light, as if a change in angle would reveal new truths. The paper felt suspiciously thin, but the company’s logo was faintly embossed about two-thirds of the way down the page – a seal of authenticity, I supposed. But I didn’t feel dead. I pressed my thumb into each finger on one hand, then the other. Five fingers per hand, all with feeling. I cleared my throat, coughed; the sound was staged, hollow, but at least I had made it. I had seen enough bad comedy films to know better than to run face first into the bathroom door, but I did run my hand down its surface. Decaying paint was peeling off firm plywood – I scraped a few flakes loose with my thumbnail. So I couldn’t pass through solid matter, anyway.

I imagined human resources could sort this out, but all of a sudden I didn’t feel like going to work. I lit a burner to put a kettle on for tea, and waved my hand into the flame, which if anything hurt more intensely than I expected. Apparently I could outwit the walls but not the stove.

As I rinsed my sore fingers, I contemplated the existence of the letter. Why bother informing me I’m dead? If my job intended to reach a close relation I had none, and I lived alone, except for my cat. I half-suspected Baxter could read, but he in any case lacked the manual dexterity necessary to open an envelope. I hadn’t seen him this morning, but I didn’t seek him out. I felt confident cats could see ghosts, so a conversation with Baxter wouldn’t prove anything.

I sat staring out the window, nursing my tea for the better part of an hour. I wasn’t really thinking, just allowing my eyes to wander over the rooftops of shorter buildings in the neighborhood, watching weak sunlight reflect off miserable old patches of snow. It felt liberating to hear the clock strike nine. I hadn’t called in sick in years, and couldn’t remember the last time I was home when others weren’t.

At nine-thirty I reread the letter but discovered nothing new. I wandered downstairs to check the mailboxes, searching for my name; it was there below my mail slot, just the same as all the other residents. I leaned against the wall, not necessarily reassured, and noticed a lingerie catalog sticking out of box 3B. I wiggled it gently until it came loose and began thumbing through it. I didn’t feel particularly moved by the images, but I couldn’t say that meant much. One model was pretty enough, with a vaguely exotic face, generous curves, actual hips. The others looked unbalanced: stick frames, massive tits. And the airbrushing was out of control – the blemishes, the wrinkles and the stretch marks had been predictably erased, but so had the nipples, the pubic hair and the labia, the tiny islands in a sea of skin that could send nations to war. Or something. I dropped the catalog on the floor and went back upstairs.

An alien feeling settled over me as I reentered my apartment, as though I had chanced upon a meticulous recreation of my living room in a foreign museum. I turned around slowly – with the bathroom door open I could see almost the entire space from where I stood. I could sense a labored authenticity in the most trivial details: the ten-and-two o’ clock arrangement of teacup handle and sugar spoon on a saucer I left on the kitchen counter, the accumulation of dust on the books and records lining the shelves, the patterns of wear on the floorboards. I wanted to sit down but seemed unable to comprehend the utility of the sofa; the fabric bristled under my hand the way the skin of a frightened creature in some exotic petting zoo might.

The clock radio was playing softly in my bedroom, though I couldn’t remember turning it on. A voice as flat as newly minted paper money announced that today was the anniversary of the death of jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan. It seems his wife shot the poor bastard following an argument outside a club where his band was relaxing between sets. A curiously mid-tempo number followed the story; it was neither an upbeat celebration of the trumpeter’s life nor a mournful reflection on death. Just a song.

Baxter emerged from behind the bed, brushed across my legs. “I am here,” I told him, louder than intended. He looked at me funny, then wandered off to the kitchen and stuck his face in his food. “I am here,” I said again, softly this time.

My cell phone rang. I almost didn’t answer, thinking it was my job investigating today’s absence. But they thought I was dead, didn’t they? I picked up after six rings.

“Hey.”

“Jane?”

“Yeah.”

“What time is it there?”

“We’re in the same time zone, mister. What’s with asking me that, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” I mumbled.

“So how are you? You busy?”

“No. I’m not at work.”

“You sick?”

“No.”

“Then what’s the matter?”

“Jane. I think I might be dead.”

“How so?” She answered calmly.

“It’s my job. They sent me this letter canceling my paychecks. It said I was dead.”

“But you’re talking to me.”

“I know it’s absurd, but it sounds plausible. How do I know I’m living?”

“Does your heart beat? Are you breathing?”

“Ghosts breathe.”

“I wonder. You can’t talk to someone at your job?”

“What for?”

She was silent. Through the wall I could hear the muffled sound of radiator pipes banging in my neighbor’s apartment. It sounded like chains clanking on a jailhouse floor.

“I wish you were here, Jane. Since you left the city I can’t seem to figure anything out.”

“So go to the office.” Her calm sounded forced now. “Let someone there figure it out for you.”

“I don’t mean just the letter. It’s–”

“I know. But you have to start somewhere. There must be someone at work who can explain the error.”

“But who goes to the office to prove they’re alive?”

There was a long silence as we considered this. When she finally spoke it was to ask if I’d been outside today.

“I went down to the mailbox, but I suppose I haven’t properly left the building, no.”

“Do. Walk around, interact with people. Call me later.”

She hung up. I grabbed the barest necessities – coat, keys, wallet – and, after a moment’s hesitation, folded the death letter into my pocket.

The streets were quiet for a weekday. The few people I saw hurried one place after another, eyes down, shoulders hunched against the wind. I tried wishing it were summer, but it was impossible; I couldn’t remember how it was to feel the sun.

I trudged down familiar avenues for hours, never once considering where I was going. I stopped once for coffee and a sandwich, but the guy serving me moved so swiftly, so mechanically, that I felt less than certain I was present at the meal. I felt warmed by the coffee, but couldn’t taste the sandwich. I wasn’t hungry when I ordered it and I wasn’t full after I finished it. I felt like a cigarette afterwards – probably the strongest sensation I had felt all day, and the strangest. I’ve never been a smoker, but a slow, satisfying post-meal cigarette, the kind Humphrey Bogart might have in the movies, sounded like just the thing. The feeling lasted only as long as an empty plate was in front of me; by the time I left the café and walked past a market I desired nothing.

Soon I reached the park. It was dusk and the light was pathetic; the stripped branches of the trees bent forward like talons, low and sharp. A fog enveloped the east end of the park, and as I moved towards it I could hear voices, murmured conversations. I stood closer; the words grew louder but I couldn’t understand a thing. The sound was like the tower of Babel, a confusion of tongues. And yet for a moment I distinctly heard the voice of my grandfather: as an old man suffering from dementia he told stories of his youth during Prohibition, of moving cases of bootleg liquor on the Philadelphia trolleys. “Bring me my gangster hat,” he once insisted in a state of confusion, and this is precisely what I heard in the fog: “Bring me my gangster hat.”

The murmuring resumed. I stood still for a time, facing the fog. I listened but didn’t recognize another word. My hands were in my pockets and I felt along the folded edges of the letter with my fingertips. I thought about my grandfather, about the fog; I wondered what it would be like to take another step forward and maybe disappear forever.

I was still thinking long after the fog pulled away from me, receding like the remnants of a wave, leaving behind damp, clammy ground. I was alone and I was cold and I had nowhere to go, nothing to do. No – I corrected myself – Baxter needed me to feed him. And Jane asked me to call her back. That was at least something.

I turned around, away from the fog, and started walking home.

Coconuts

2010-06-17T07:00:00.000-07:00

TODAY

Colin X woke up alone on the beach. The tide was rising, and the ocean lapped at his shoes and socks. He checked his watch. Not that he was especially interested in the time – it was 11:30 – but he wanted to compare the skin underneath with the sunburn on his wrist. He had no idea why he had a suit on, but he was grateful for the protection; somehow he had even thought to cover his face with his blazer. Only his hands, salmon pink and starting to blister, concerned him.

A pair of sunglasses peeked out tentatively from his jacket pocket. The frames were bent and one lens was cracked, but they would do. He ran his fingers through his hair, returning sand to the ground. Taking inventory of his body as he stood, Colin found everything in more or less working order. His head was ringing – and his hands stung, obviously – but he could walk just fine.

He checked his pants pockets and found them nearly empty. No keys, no money, no identification, no lint; just a nameless phone number written on a cocktail napkin. He considered calling it then and there, but alas – no cellphone.

The sun, angry and green through his tinted lenses, taunted him from the apex of the sky. For a moment he was sure it hissed at him, the sound of a vast fiery cobra poised to strike. He needed shelter, but saw only sloping dunes covered in thin reeds. “Well, then,” Colin said to nobody. He loosened his tie, turned his body parallel to the sea, and began walking.

An hour passed before the scenery changed: the reeds grew dense, the dunes moved farther from the shore, the odd hermit crab scuttled by. Around the bend he saw a small cluster of cottages, raised upon stilts to withstand the temperament of the sea. The surf did look rougher here, crashing aggressively against the remains of a pier. A gravel road led away from the hamlet, cutting through the dunes, but no cars were parked alongside it. The curtains were drawn in every window, and the balconies facing the sea were empty; yet the cottages were in good condition, suggesting a place vacated for the season rather than abandoned. But why close a seaside village in summer?

Circling the buildings, Colin found an elderly couple sitting on the front porch of one of the smaller cottages facing the road. The air was stifling away from the sea, but the couple rocked contentedly in their chairs, reading worn paperbacks and sipping iced tea.

“Uh, hello.” Colin spoke from the foot of the porch stairs.

“What can I do for you, son?” The lady responded; the man glanced down briefly, adjusted his glasses, and resumed reading. “You look a little lost.”

“Yes ma’am. Frankly, I have no idea where I am.”

“Seems that’s the only way anyone ends up here these days. Believe it or not, this was once a popular vacation spot.”

“What happened?”

“It’s funny you should ask. I was just telling Burt – this here’s my husband Burt, and I’m Mabel – ‘Burt’, I said, ‘you know the trouble with this town?’”

Burt shut his book. “Mabel, can’t you see the poor man’s exhausted?” Turning to Colin, he added, “Where did you come from?”

“I don’t know the name of the place. It’s about an hour’s walk that way.” Colin gestured down the beach with his right hand.

“South? There’s nothing south of here, not for a long ways.”

“That’s true. I woke up by the ocean. I can’t remember how I got there.”

Mabel clucked her tongue. “Well, come on up and take a rest. Burt, get this man a glass of water, and aloe for his hands. They must be frightfully sore.”

Colin climbed the stairs as Burt disappeared into the cottage. “Much obliged, ma’am.”

“Call me Mabel. And you are?”

“Colin. And I would like to hear more about this place.”

“Well, we started summering here during our courtship, not long after Burt came back from Korea. Must’ve been the mid-fifties. Used to be you had to plan ahead to get one of these seaside cottages any time between Memorial Day and Labor Day. You’d see kids, teenagers, young couples, old folks. Vendors sold trinkets and food. Someone would always bring fireworks on the Fourth, and we’d have a big communal picnic.

Burt and I did our share of traveling over the years – Europe, Mexico, Brazil – but we always liked it best right here. When we retired fifteen years ago, we decided to live here year-round – or nearly, I should say. The wind gets a bit nasty come December, so we spend the winter in Tucson with the grandkids.”

“When did the place empty out?”

“Things have been slowing down for years now. Some say times are tough, that maybe nobody can afford to vacation, but times are always tough. I tell Burt it’s a lack of civic pride – people get caught up in their tv and their internet and they stop caring about what’s around them.”

“But the buildings seem well-kept.”

“Oh, people come occasionally, and Burt and I make the maintenance rounds now and then. Nobody locks their doors here – never have – so if we see something that needs fixing –”

“We fix it.” Burt had returned with a glass of water and a container of aloe. Colin started gulping the water eagerly, only to cough and sputter. “Better take it easy there. The sun’s done a number on you today.”

He finished the rest slowly. Mabel helped him with the aloe, as his hands were too raw to pry the lid open.

“You need a place to rest a while, Colin? We have a spare bedroom.”

“I’d appreciate that, Mabel. Any chance I could use your phone?”

“You betcha. There’s one next to your bed.”

Burt showed Colin to his room, and left to refill the water glass. Colin dialed the number in his pocket – the call went straight to voicemail without ringing.

“Hey, you’ve reached Colin. Leave a message.”

Burt came back with the water as he hung up. Colin took only a few sips before setting the glass down next to the phone.

“Any idea what happened to you today?” Colin shook his head, and Burt gave a strange smile. “Is it a lady? Seems to be the root of every problem, if you ask me. Don’t tell Mabel I said that.”

“A lady?” Colin repeated. “You know, I can’t say for sure.”

“Well, you rest now. We’re on the porch if you need anything.”

Burt closed the curtains and left the room. Colin laid on top of the comforter, listening to the waves beat uneven rhythms against the shore. Eventually he faded into a troubled sleep, and dreamed of a mouth full of sand.

-----

YESTERDAY

The hotel bar was on the fourth floor. Colin sat beneath an umbrella on a balcony that afforded an impressive view of the sea. Less impressive was the view around him: sun-dazed tourists tippling piña coladas, wearing Bermuda shorts and flip-flops. Colin, by contrast, sat stiffly in a three-piece suit, pale as the devil, drinking a white Russian. Seagulls chattered listlessly, floating down from the sky like the balloons and paper streamers of some misplaced New Year's celebration. People drifted by, the sun sank slowly, the wind carried the scent of the sea; Colin alone sat motionless.

“Need another?”

He looked up, expecting a waitress, but instead saw a striking blonde in a cocktail dress. He felt instantly gladdened – she looked like the only other person in the bar who received the right invitation to the wrong party. She was tall, maybe taller than Colin in her heels, broad-shouldered but appealingly curvy. Her lips were full, her lashes were long, and she knew how to put on makeup. A knockout.

“White Russian. Thanks.”

He watched her hips wiggle as she walked away, then returned his attention to the seagulls. Some were squabbling now, fighting for possession of a few discarded scraps of hot dog bun. Blood appeared to be dripping from one gull’s beak, but it was probably ketchup.

The woman brought two matching tumblers. She slid into the chair across from him, stretching one leg over the other languidly, seductively. Twilight was approaching, but Colin sweated nervously; he imagined he could see physical waves of heat in the air, pulsing towards him like slow blasts from a raygun, making his brain liquid.

“Cheers.” They clinked glasses, drank. Her eyes were intense so he studied her wrist. Something was tattooed there in an Elizabethan script, but it was hard to read thanks to the bangles sliding by. Eventually he settled on “Some Weird Sin.”

“Iggy Pop?” he asked, gesturing at the tattoo.

“Things get too straight, I can't bear it / I feel stuck, stuck on a pin.” Her singing was throatier than expected, but not at all bad. “You a fan?”

“Mm-hmm. The Idiot especially. His ‘China Girl’ is perfect.”

“You’ve won my heart already.” Her smile could strike a man dead. “I’m Janice.”

“Colin.”

“So, Colin….” She swirled ice around her drink, took her time in continuing her thought. “What brings you here?”

“I – I hardly know, just at present. If I came here to forget something, it seems I’ve overdone it. My watch is accurate, and I use two alarms to wake up each morning, but since I’ve been here I’ve become detached from time, or immune to it. No, that’s not quite right – I’m perpetually aware of the time, to the minute. It’s the days and weeks, the months and years, that baffle me.” He trailed off, sipped his drink. “I’m sorry, it’s a tedious response to a simple question.”

“It’s alright.”

“I do what I want: eat, drink, swim, read, go back to sleep. It’s liberating and it’s terrifying. I can’t tell if I’m experiencing a pleasant escape or the slow unmooring of my personality.”

“What are you reading?”

“Huh?”

“I said, what are you reading? If these generalities are so frightening, let’s talk specifics. A few minutes ago we were talking Iggy Pop – even you, with your shaky grasp of time, ought to remember that.”

“You’re right. I apologize–”

“No need. Just name some books.”

“All I have in my room is One Hundred Years of Solitude, but I’ve been borrowing from the shelves in the hotel lounge. I assume it’s things other travelers leave behind. Harry Potter, Catch-22, Roots, Jane Eyre. John Grisham, Margaret Atwood. There’s a travel guide to the Scottish Isles for some reason. Biographies of Abe Lincoln, Walt Disney, the woman who invented Kevlar. Probably three different Erma Bombecks. A children’s book about hippos. The Bible.”

“You’ve read them all?”

“Not the whole Bible.”

“Huh.” Janice waved to a barmaid, ordered two more White Russians. Colin took an enormous gulp of his – staying caught up might prove difficult. Then again, he had done most of the talking.

“So what about you – what brings you here?”

“Me? I’m a performer. Singing, dancing. Cabaret-style. Mostly hotel bars around here, though I do private parties now and then.”

“Is Janice a stage name?”

She smiled wickedly. “I’ll answer that once we know each other better, Colin.”

“So will you be performing tonight?”

“Heavens, no. With the amount of preparation I go through – makeup, hair, costume, vocal warmups – you wouldn’t find me drinking at this hour if I were. Plus, I prefer to play classier joints.”

As she said this, a balding man brushed by their table wearing a t-shirt barely long enough to conceal his Speedo bathing suit, plus socks and sneakers. “I see what you mean.”

They talked until their drinks arrived, then they drank.

All at once the entire balcony fell into an awed silence as a full moon, bold and ominous, emerged over the sea. It seemed fearfully close – its cratered surface in sharp focus, its sway over the tides a palpable force. Minutes passed before anyone dared to look away. When they finally did, Colin whispered “to the moon” and touched his glass to Janice’s, even though both drinks were half-empty.

Colin felt good. Maybe not drunk, but getting there. And happy; it was nice to be reminded of what it felt like to feel anything. “I’m glad you found me tonight, Janice.” She smiled, blushed. “And I have to go to the bathroom.”

He stumbled across the bar, shoved through the swinging door into the men’s room, and walked into a stall. As he unzipped he felt something bump his shoulder; he turned and saw Janice standing there.

“But this is the men’s room,” he said lamely.

“Shhh. Open your mind.” With deft movements she withdrew a compact from her purse, and a small vial. She closed the toilet seat lid and hunched herself over it. Colin remembered that he still needed to pee, but it could wait.

She rolled a dollar bill into a straw and offered it to him. “Halcion and cocaine, crushed together,” she explained. “Shuts down the mind and keeps the body going. If you’re going to be with me tonight, you’ll need it.”

“Well, then,” Colin said to Janice. She handed him the dollar and he leaned over the mirror.

-----

TOMORROW

“COLIN SLOW THE FUCK DOWN.”

He was behind the wheel of a silver luxury sedan. At present the car was traveling sixty miles per hour – which, Colin had to admit, was a bit excessive given his current location in the spiral entrance ramp of a parking garage. Janice sat next to him, screaming. He tapped the brakes.

The car handled itself beautifully in crisis. The tires screeched but remained responsive as Colin guided it with his left hand to a safe stop, just inches from the wall. His right hand shot out reactively to push Janice back into her seat. Her breasts felt unnaturally firm as they collided with his arm, almost like coconut halves. He explored them curiously – probably for longer than the situation called for – but she didn’t seem aware of it.

“Why. The. Fuck.” Janice was hyperventilating. Colin moved his hand to her back in an attempt to calm her, but she smacked it away, which hurt like hell. A container of aloe rested between the seats – Colin applied a thick layer to his sunburn.

“I’m – I’m sorry, Janice. Lately I don’t have much control over my actions.”

“So you’ve said.” She managed three words in one breath – a sign of improvement.

Colin started driving again, this time absurdly slow, as if to atone for his earlier transgressions. He guided the sedan neatly into a parking space across from an opening in the wall that provided a view of whatever it was the garage belonged to.

He rubbed Janice’s arm. “You okay?”

She nodded. He left the car and walked over to the opening in the wall. They were at the airport – an incongruously small airport, given the relatively massive scale of the parking garage. Colin could only see one terminal, and at the moment no planes were departing or arriving.

It occurred to him he might be late for a flight, thus justifying his driving somewhat. He hurriedly checked his pants pockets, relieved to find them full: keys, wallet, cellphone, lint. In the left pocket of his jacket was a folded note with his name on it; in the right pocket were two plane tickets. Three hours until takeoff – so much for justification.

He read the note:

Dear Colin,
It was lovely having you as our guest. If you're ever in the area again, don’t hesitate to look us up. And please, please take good care of yourself – no more wasted nights on the beach.
Your friends,
Mabel and Burt

Janice approached while he was reading; she placed her hand on the small of his back. “What’s that?”

“A reminder.” Colin smiled, took Janice’s hand, and led her back to the car to collect their bags.

Fiction Writing 1, Homework 5

2010-05-24T13:41:00.000-07:00

“Robert.”

She squeezed his bicep. He squirmed loose, reshelved the book he had been holding.

“Robert! How are you?”

“I’m doing fine, Vera.” He paused. “You’re looking well.”

“It’s lovely to see you.” She touched the same place on his arm. “Simply lovely. How long has–”

“Three years. Almost.”

“Three years. That long? You still live around here?”

“Not the same apartment. The new one’s tiny, but it’s cheaper. But the same neighborhood, yes.”

“I can’t get over how it’s changed. Do you still like it?”

“I like it fine, Vera.”

“Is Johnny’s place still open?”

“It is.”

“Oh, do tell him hello. You know, Max and I bought a great big place uptown, near the park. I suppose that was two years ago now.”

He watched over her left shoulder. Two children, each maybe six years old, caught his eye. One sat quietly, absorbed in a copy of Frog and Toad Are Friends. The other had made three separate trips to the drinking fountain in the last two minutes.

“You don’t like when I talk about Max, do you Robert?”

“He’s your husband.”

“You don’t like him, do you?”

“What’s not to like? People like Max. He bought you a big place near the park.”

“I work, Robert. We bought it together.”

“Sure.”

“How about you? Still seeing the same girl?”

“No. That ended.”

“Seeing anyone, then?”

“I’m awfully busy, Vera.”

“You always were. What is it these days?”

He checked his watch. “Look, Vera, it’s been really great–”

“Listen, I have news. I’m not supposed to tell yet, but I’ll bust if I don’t. Robert, I’m pregnant.”

For these last two syllables – preg-nant – her voice shifted to a stage whisper, loud enough to be heard three aisles away.

“You – you what?”

“I know! Can you believe it? Max wants a boy so badly, but” – she exhaled – “I’m on cloud nine either way.”

“You’re pregnant.” He stared, and she nodded. “But when I wanted kids –”

“Oh come now, Robert. You never really meant that.”

“I did!”

He wailed so loud someone actually shushed him, causing him to mutter, “It’s a bookstore, not a goddamn library.”

“Robert–”

“You know I did, Vera. I always wanted kids. You never did.”

“But could you imagine? Us with kids?”

“If you couldn’t imagine it, why did you marry me?”

“You musn’t ask me things like that, Robert.” She put her hand on her belly. “I don’t know how to answer right now. I really, really don’t.”

Neither spoke for some time.

“Well.” He glanced towards his watch. “Again, I should be going.”

“Take care of yourself, Robert.”

He brushed her upper arm, mimicking her earlier gestures. Walking past her, he grabbed a book at random, and charged it to his debit card without checking what it was.

As he exited the bookstore, she took a seat on a bench at the end of the aisle. Two children, each maybe six years old, caught her eye. One sat quietly, absorbed in a copy of Frog and Toad Are Friends. The other wiped his mouth as he turned away from the drinking fountain.

Death Letter

2010-05-09T23:54:00.000-07:00

Wednesday morning before work I felt a twinge of anxiety as I opened the mail. A letter should have come already confirming direct deposit of my paycheck. A day late shouldn’t have caused much concern, but it had arrived every other Monday as far as I could remember. The money wasn’t much, sure – enough to cover expenses, keep the cat fed, eat out once or twice a week, get drunk when I wanted. But I needed to know it was there.

I had meant to call the bank yesterday but never got around to it, and I was tired when I got home from the bar last night and tossed the mail unopened onto the kitchen table. There was a pretty good film on starring Humphrey Bogart as an unlikable fellow accused of killing some lady, but I missed the beginning and fell asleep on the couch before it ended. It worked its way into my dreams, though. I was climbing a lonely hill at night, and had a raincoat pulled tightly around me. It was windy and the clouds sailed past the moon at an insane speed. I wore loose dress shoes with poor traction, and I would periodically slide back a few steps and have to scramble to my feet. When I finally reached the top I came to a bus stop beside a deserted street, where dead leaves and plastic bags whirled past rusted cars. The weathered remnants of handbills for last month’s carnival were pasted to the reverse of the bus stop’s glass partition; the mirror image of a torn clown, its pointy-hatted head pinned in the jaws of a tiger, grinned obscenely at me. A payphone stood nearby, and though it didn’t ring I held the receiver to my ear. I could hear Bogie over the line, telling someone a good love scene involved him slicing grapefruit, dopey and half-asleep. I can’t recall how I reacted to hearing this, but when I woke the film was over and Lee J. Cobb was arguing with someone offscreen.

I flipped past a few envelopes destined for the junk pile – get this credit card, save that creature, elect some city councilperson – and found a letter from my job. This one felt unusual: my address and theirs were typed on the outside of the envelope rather than visible through a glassine window, and it weighed next to nothing.

The letter inside was terse:

Dear sir,

We regret to hear of your untimely passing. Effective immediately, all deposits to your account are hereby suspended.

Sincerely,

I held the letter towards the kitchen ceiling light, as if a change in angle would reveal new truths. The paper felt cheap, but the company’s logo was faintly embossed about two-thirds of the way down the page – a seal of authenticity, I supposed. But I didn’t feel dead. I pressed my thumb into each finger on one hand, then the other. Five fingers per hand, all with feeling. I cleared my throat, coughed; the sound was staged, hollow, but at least I had made it. I had seen enough bad comedy films to know better than to run face first into the bathroom door, but I did run my hand down its surface. Decaying paint was peeling off firm plywood – I scraped a few flakes off with my thumbnail. So I couldn’t pass through solid matter, anyway.

I imagined human resources could sort this out, but all of a sudden I didn’t feel like going to work. I lit a burner to put a kettle on for tea, and waved my hand into the flame, which if anything hurt more intensely than I expected. Apparently I could outwit the walls but not the stove.

Why, I wondered while holding my fingers under running water, would my job bother informing me I was dead? If they intended to reach a close relation I had none, and I lived alone, except for my cat. I actually half-suspected Baxter could read, but he in any case lacked the manual dexterity necessary to open an envelope. I hadn’t seen him this morning, but I didn’t seek him out. I felt confident cats could see ghosts, so a conversation with Baxter wouldn’t prove anything.

I sat staring out the window, nursing my tea for the better part of an hour. I wasn’t really thinking, just allowing my eyes to wander over the rooftops of shorter buildings in the neighborhood, watching weak sunlight reflect off miserable old patches of snow. It felt liberating to hear the clock strike nine – I hadn’t called in sick in years, and couldn’t remember the last time I was home when others weren’t.

At nine-thirty I reread the letter but discovered nothing new. Though I held the mail I wondered absently if the post office thought I was dead. I went downstairs to check the boxes and found my name below my mail slot, just the same as all the other residents. I leaned against the wall, not necessarily reassured, and noticed a lingerie catalog sticking out of box 3B. I wiggled it gently until it came loose and began thumbing through it. I didn’t feel particularly moved by the images, but I couldn’t say that meant much. One model was pretty enough, with a vaguely exotic face, generous curves, actual hips. The others looked unbalanced: stick frames, massive tits. And the airbrushing was out of control – the blemishes, the wrinkles and the stretch marks had been predictably erased, but so had the nipples, the pubic hair and the labia, the tiny islands in a sea of skin that could send nations to war. Or something. I dropped the catalogue on the floor and went back upstairs.

Though I had left my apartment just minutes before, an alien feeling came over me now, as though I had chanced upon a meticulous recreation of my living room in a foreign museum. I turned around slowly – with the bathroom door open I could see almost the entire space from where I stood. I could sense a labored authenticity in the most trivial details: the ten-and-two o’ clock arrangement of teacup handle and sugar spoon on a saucer left behind on the kitchen counter, the accumulation of dust on the books and records lining the shelves, the patterns of wear on the floorboards. I wanted to sit down but seemed unable to comprehend the utility of the sofa; the fabric bristled under my hand the way the skin of a frightened creature in some exotic petting zoo might.

The clock radio was playing quietly in my bedroom, though I couldn’t remember turning it on. A voice as flat as newly minted paper money announced that today was the anniversary of the death of a certain jazz trumpeter. It seems his wife shot the poor bastard following an argument outside a club where his band was relaxing between sets. A curiously mid-tempo number followed the story; it was neither an upbeat celebration of the trumpeter’s life nor a mournful reflection on death. Just a song.

Baxter emerged from behind the bed, brushed across my legs. “I am here,” I told him, louder than intended. He looked at me funny, then wandered off to the kitchen and stuck his face in his food. “I am here,” I said again, softly this time.

The phone rang. I almost didn’t answer, thinking it was my job investigating today’s absence. But they thought I was dead, didn’t they? I picked up after six rings.

“Hey.” This was a voice I hadn’t heard in some time. Jane and I were longtime friends, almost-lovers, occasionally at each other’s throats. She split for Michigan years ago when things got too weird between us.

“What time is it there?”

“We’re in the same time zone, mister. What’s with asking me that, anyway? Not happy to hear from me?”

Ordinarily I wouldn’t have known the answer. I needed Jane, but talking to her always made things hard for me. I assumed she felt the same. “You don’t know how glad I am.”

“Yeah?”

“Jane…I think I might be dead.”

“How so?” She answered calmly.

“It’s my job. They sent me this letter canceling my paychecks. It said I was dead.”

“But you’re talking to me.”

“I know it’s absurd, but it sounds plausible. How do I know I’m living?”

“Does your heart beat? Are you breathing?”

“Ghosts breathe.”

“I wonder. You can’t talk to someone at your job?”

“Who am I to stand against a tangled bureaucracy? I can just hear them ordering me from one department to the next, insisting their computers don’t make errors.”

“You could try.” Her tone was one I knew well – she was losing patience with me. “How many people work in your office, anyway? Fifty? It’s not like you’re taking on the government.”

“But who goes to the office to prove they’re alive?”

There was a long silence as we considered this. When she finally spoke it was to ask if I’d been outside today.

“I went down to the mailbox, but I suppose I haven’t properly left the building, no.”

“Do. Walk around, interact with people. Call me later.”

She hung up. I grabbed the barest necessities – coat, keys, wallet – and, after a moment’s hesitation, folded the death letter into my pocket.

The streets were relatively empty for a weekday. I saw no one I knew, and nobody paid me any attention. People bought their groceries, walked their dogs, hailed their taxis, hurried one place after another. I hate winter in the city because everyone moves like they have somewhere to be. In summertime the parks swarm with people killing time, usually in entertaining ways. On the other hand, I told myself, winter’s probably not a bad time for a ghost. A chill shot through my body as I had this thought, but it left as quickly as it came.

I trudged down familiar avenues for hours, never once considering where I was going. I stopped once for coffee and a sandwich, but the guy serving me moved so swiftly, so mechanically, that I felt less than certain I was present at the meal. The coffee warmed me, but I couldn’t taste the sandwich. I wasn’t hungry when I ordered it and I wasn’t full after I finished it. I wanted a cigarette afterwards – probably the strongest sensation I had all day, and the strangest. I’ve never been a smoker, but a slow, satisfying post-meal cigarette, the kind Humphrey Bogart might have in the movies, sounded like just the thing. The craving lasted only as long as an empty plate was in front of me; by the time I left the café and walked past a market I desired nothing.

Soon I reached the park. It was dusk and the light was pathetic; the stripped branches of the trees bent forward like talons, low and sharp. A fog enveloped the east end of the park, and as I moved towards it I could hear voices, murmured conversations. I stood closer; the words grew louder but I couldn’t understand a thing. The sound was like the tower of Babel, a confusion of tongues. And yet for a moment I distinctly heard the voice of my grandfather: as an old man suffering from dementia he told stories of his youth during Prohibition, of moving cases of bootleg liquor on the Philadelphia trolleys. “Bring me my gangster hat,” he once insisted in a state of confusion, and this is precisely what I heard in the fog: “Bring me my gangster hat.”

The murmuring resumed. I stood still for a time, facing the fog. I listened but didn’t recognize another word. My hands were in my pockets and I felt along the folded edges of the letter with my fingertips. I thought about my grandfather, about the fog; I thought I could take another step forward and maybe disappear forever.

I thought about it, but in the end I didn’t. Baxter needed me, and I owed Jane a phone call. I turned around, away from the fog, and started walking home.

Fiction Writing 1, Homework 2

2010-04-30T20:21:00.000-07:00

“If you’re gonna write, you’re gonna need adventure,” says Mister Smartass for like the seventh time. I tell him to keep his fuckin’ eyes on the road. Besides, he picked me up hitchhiking, ain’t that adventure enough?

“Nope. You gotta live, man. Taste the rainbow. You get a story worth tellin’, you look my friend Lewis up. Works in publishing out in L.A.”

He pushes a Doors tape in and I study the cassette case. I figure I got twelve minutes ‘til “Light My Fire” comes on. Song drives me fuckin’ bananas. “Drop me off in the next town.”

He does with seconds to spare; I can hear that godawful organ intro as he peels away. It’s sunset now and I duck into some shitkicker bar for a beer and a sandwich, and as it arrives a comedy show starts, of all things. This guy Freddy Something gets introduced and he seriously takes the stage in a Groucho Marx getup and I can tell there’s gonna be trouble. Sure enough his lousy act gets him booed, then threatened; one drunken fool launches a bottle at him and nobody does shit about it, though it draws laughs as it explodes behind him. I form a sort of vaudeville hook with my hand, pull Freddy off the stage before someone kills him.

“Thanks, friend,” he says. “What’s your story?”

“Thumbin’ rides. Headed to Los Angeles,” I say, though truthfully I hadn’t considered where I was going.

“I got a Studebaker.”

“Yeah?” I look at him funny, but he’s serious. “You probably could use a career change anyhow.”

“You got that right.”

So we drive. Things are quiet on the interstate, but the first time we stop for gas we get into a wreck with a truck driven by a wiry fellow with a huge mop of curly hair, so black it’s almost blue, wearing these crazy mismatched patterns. Calls himself The Weirdo. We like him.

Both cars are fucked so we trade ‘em in for a station wagon. There’s three of us so we drive in shifts, one person asleep in the back, and we ride until The Weirdo gets hungry and makes us stop at this county fair. I meet Missy, a proper country girl; I buy her ice cream and she ends up heading West with us. She’s curvy – Freddy calls her porky under his breath, so I punch him. Just hard enough.

We’re gassing up again in Eastern California when I get jumped outside the station bathroom. “Been chasin’ you for days,” this dude wheezes, all beady-eyed and drunkenly. He’s got a knife, and I don’t see Missy or The Weirdo or Freddy anywhere. Just as my attacker lunges, a dog emerges from nowhere and bites his leg, snarls, chases him off. He acts all sweet with me and seems stray so we put him in the wagon.

In the end it turns out there is a Lewis in publishing; I tell him this story and he digs it. There’s a rainbow hanging over the bookstore parking lot during my book signing, and as I consider tasting it I get to hoping Mister Smartass will come tearing through the embarrassingly large “Meet The Author!” banner. I think he’d like my new friends.

Fiction Writing 1, Homework 1

2010-04-25T15:26:00.000-07:00

My neck hurt.

I blinked hard in the discordant light, a combination of the awful florescence illuminating the train and, through the windows, the first syrupy fingers of dawn streaking an ashen sky. I was seated on a powder-blue bench in one of the shiny new subway cars, with its mechanized station announcements and scrolling LED signs all politely informing me it was now 5:11 a.m., that the next stop would be Neptune Avenue. Coney Island? I blinked again, harder.

The car was predictably deserted at this odd hour. I saw a pretty girl, maybe nineteen, in an unzipped hoodie exposing an iron-on “Lady Picasso” t-shirt epigram; a one-legged Dominican man, apparently asleep, four plastic grocery bags tied shut in a neat circle around his lone shoe; a thin man and a fat woman, crammed into a corner seat; and a cop. The latter waddled through the car, the nightstick at his hip sculling heavily through the air. His eyes lingered uncomfortably long as he passed the pretty girl, then turned his head towards me.

“Mornin’ sir. You been drinkin’?”

“Have I been drinking?”

I wasn’t sure why he was asking, but I don’t think he heard me respond. He nodded vaguely towards the couple in the corner, moved through the sliding doors separating cars, disappeared.

I eyed the couple a moment. They wore matching wedding bands of a tacky gold - the man fidgeted with his periodically. His oversized suit, wove from a nondescript brown linen, made him appear ludicrously narrow. His face was sweaty, pockmarked, actively unhandsome; his mustache, like him, was twitchy and willow-thin and crooked in posture. His wife, on the other hand, was heavy, but not inelegantly so. Her dress was close in color to his suit, but it clung to the folds of her skin gracefully. Her facial features were petite relative to her mass; she could have been beautiful, but something in the slenderness of her lips, the wrinkles on her brow, the severity of her ponytail signaled danger. Her husband angled his lean frame crazily to avoid touching her, sweeping his eyes desperately across ads promising impotence cures, laser fibroid removal, hasty divorces. Her stare, meanwhile, bore into his sunken cheek like a dentist’s drill.

The man leapt to his feet as the train pulled into the Surf Avenue station, only to tumble comically into his wife’s lap as the engine braked. She responded first with a two-handed shove to the small of his back, then by swinging her purse into his kneecap as she stood up. He assumed a look of contrition, humbly allowed her to pass him, and then stomped on the heel of her shoe as she exited the car. I never heard a sound from either partner, but I could see their silent war of jostling and tugging, slapping and jabbing, continue as they crossed the station platform. I craned my still-aching neck, watched until they disappeared from sight.

The next stop, Stillwell Avenue, was the end of the line. Lady Picasso split the second the doors opened; the Dominican slept on. I thought about riding back home, but changed my mind and left the train. I don’t know what it’s about, Coney Island at dawn, but I felt like an egg sandwich.

in progress

2010-02-15T15:00:00.000-08:00

“I really don’t know where I am.”

Catherine moved her eyes a bit but stayed still. I was too tired to explain but what I meant was this scene couldn’t belong to anybody, to any particular time. We sat in a yellowing diner where the waitresses wore mint uniforms and clacked mint gum and ducked beneath a slotted aluminum overhang out back, next to the dumpster, to smoke menthols on their break. There was nothing of interest on the table between us – a dirty glass ashtray, two coffee cups encompassed by spent cream containers, stacked together and jammed full of empty sugar packets, and Catherine’s hands, clasped tightly. A dull rain fell towards the window but made no sound. Light jazz, possibly George Benson, seemed faintly discernible, but I may have assumed it was there. Few customers were here, all seated alone, and for the last hour nobody had come in or out. I felt alone, too – Catherine’s eyes were matte, unrecognizable. It mattered little if I could name this place; she was long gone.

I signaled the waitress for more coffee. I didn’t really want any, and Catherine’s cup was nearly full, but it was something to do.

Cream, sugar, sugar; more waste. My hands were jittery and I splashed hot liquid on my wrist as I pulled the cup towards my lips. “One last drive.”

“No.” Her eyes shifted again, flickered a moment towards mine. “Where would we go?”

I imagined launching the car through the diner’s plate glass window, shattering the painted-on lettering advertising “The Great Steak Escape.” I’d perform a perfect somersault while being thrown from the car, dust the glass from my jacket, and share a good laugh with all present – Catherine, the other diners, the wait staff, even the cigar-smoking owner of the place who, in his red suspenders clinging to his round belly, reminds me of a carnie. “Happens more often than you’d guess,” he’d say, slapping me on the back. “I’ll get the vacuum.”

“Nowhere, I suppose,” I mumbled. “The sea maybe.” I couldn’t sell chopsticks to a Chinaman.

“What sea. Typical you, spitting out an idea with no clue how to follow up on it. Your head is the only sea around here, a muddy sea full of vague dreams and stalled projects. Yesterday you’re a writer, today an artist, tomorrow a musician. Where are the poems, the paintings, the songs? All I see is a mind adrift, an aging man sitting on lovely hands.”

She was staring now, which was considerably more uncomfortable than when she was avoiding my eyes. “You have nothing to say. You called me here with nothing on your mind. You are going nowhere. And you are not bringing me with you.”

She stood. I hated sitting while Catherine loomed over me. At five-ten she was three inches shorter than me, but I slouched and she stood upright, stiffer than a wax replica of the Queen Mother. People thought she was taller than me, smarter than me, better than me. All I had was the sense of humor, the dark eyes, the aura of creativity – though it’s true I produced little work, and destroyed half of what I finished before anyone saw it. I didn’t know why she was still here, still staring. She was pretty much right about everything.

I studied the carpet between my feet and hers. This proved unwise, as I found it inexplicably captivating. Despite the fraying of years I recognized blue triangles, and flecks of what must have once been yellow ochre, but what of the color field they were set against? Green? Orange? I settled on the memory of a junkyard in autumn, the patina of rusted steel. Was that a commercially available shade of fabric dye? Rusted steel?

Catherine was speaking:

“…but you won’t, will you? I bet you don’t even know what day the appointment is.”

I shrugged. To my surprise she sat back down; I heard her purse slide the length of her sleeve and strike the booth cushion. An inquiry caught in my throat as I lifted my head – her gaze was fixed upwards, lost in the mottled plaster ceiling tiles, a surface probably as nauseatingly complex as the rug that escaped my attention only moments before. I imagined the parallel planes exchanging opposite perspectives on the same tired stories: one groaning under the heels of overburdened waitresses, suffering the indignation of coffee spills, condiment stains, the belligerent vomit of late-night drunks; the other ruing its cancerous skin, the melanoma inflicted by the secondhand smoke and the heat of the stoves, and the inevitable sagging beneath the weight of the elements, the sun and the rain and the snow that heap their cyclical abuse on the roof above. With their own troubles to think of, how could they stand to witness drama after boring drama, the repetitive unraveling of lives like ours?

I decided, firmly but unhelpfully, that I identified more with the floor than the ceiling.

-----

Rain: our first kiss was on the hottest night of the summer, seven years ago, under a sky pissing warm slivers of glass. That was the night I hadn’t been able to figure out the name of the bar I was sitting in. It was on an unfamiliar street, downstairs below a karate studio, and I was there because it was Friday and because I was lonely and I was avoiding everyone I’d ever met. The bar had no air conditioning, just a lean row of windows turned opaque with grime, and it suited me fine. A ceiling fan turned indolently, the jukebox followed Merle Haggard with Kool and the Gang’s “Summer Madness”, and the bottle I held sweated sympathetically along with me. The lamps were dim and the room was uncrowded and I felt comfortably ignored. The bartender, clad in long sleeves and an undershirt despite the heat, spoke little, his eyes locked on a silent, grainy telecast of a Cubs-Mets doubleheader.

I was four or five beers into the night, my head emptied and my tongue pleasantly thick, when the rain started. The sound came unannounced – it was humid and then rain hammered down with no in-between, no crack of thunder. Though the room grew no cooler, a shiver swept across the bar as every head turned reactively towards the noise to stare dumbly at the closed door. My vision swung in a wobbly arc as I spun my barstool back towards my beer, then made a dizzying reversal towards the sight of – of her – unfolding like a switchblade from a cramped corner booth. She was a blasted-out monochrome, her paper-white shirt and skin offset by black jeansbootsbruiseseyelinerhair – the latter dyed messily, a spiky asymmetrical bob. She was lithe and she was handsome and she had a tense, almost bruxist edge to her walk: smallish chest forward, elbows back, fingers twitching, and – I blinked hard as a finger emerged through the boozy haze and tapped coarsely on the back of my brain – she was moving towards me.

“You play?”

Articulate as ever, I think I blurted out “Huh?” before realizing there was in fact a pool table in the bar, hidden beneath a cluster of milk crates jammed chaotically with file folders. She skipped away, leaving me to gather my wits as she charmed the bartender into clearing the game surface. I watched the ballgame a bit, hoping the Mets might turn a triple play while the bartender had his back turned like in The Odd Couple, but all I got was a visit to the mound to discuss strategy, a pop foul to third, a visit to the mound to switch relievers, ads for pain relievers, beers, cars.

She came back, handed me a cue; she smiled as she introduced herself as Catherine and I forgot my name, though I think my mouth managed without my brain’s help. It seemed healthy to let her win, which of course meant I demolished her in the first game. I’m normally no good with geometry, but somehow every drunken attempt I made at a near-miss ended up adding deadly spin to my shot. The second game was closer, but she scratched on the eight ball and I accidentally finished up two games.

“Nice shootin’. Looks like I owe you a beer.”

“Thanks.” I paused, smiled sheepishly. “Negra Modelo.”

“Lime?”

“Yeah.”

songs of the decade, 2000-2009

2010-01-07T21:45:00.000-08:00

50. Sleater-Kinney, “Entertain”, 2005

49. The Pipettes, “Your Kisses Are Wasted On Me”, 2006

I wonder: how common were identity crises prior to the advent of the moving image? The Picture Of Dorian Gray, written just prior to the dawn of film, certainly presents the line separating image and experience as a blurred one. But our present decade of living vicariously through so-called reality television has to be a new apex in the confusion between the real and “the real” – a topic dissected nicely by Sleater-Kinney in “Entertain”, a song that oddly but somehow appropriately shares the kickoff spot on this list with a music promoter’s gimmick. Sleater-Kinney uses 2005’s The Woods to bow out on top, undisputed holders of the Baddest Motherfuckers In Rock crown ten years running. “Entertain” finds them pissing from their royal balcony onto the heads of garage-rock pretenders like The Strokes - a physically tricky task for three women, but if anyone can do it it’s them - while simultaneously disparaging the easy manipulation of truth, the confused offerings of fiction and reality on television.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the three photogenic, nattily dressed lady vocalists of The Pipettes are pretty much the indie-pop answer to the Spice Girls, a manufactured British girl band with an identical formula of one great single, one good one, and a ton of filler. In this case, the taunting, Phil Spectorish “Your Kisses” mirrors “Wannabe” as the great, “Pull Shapes” replaces “I’m Giving You Everything” as the merely good, and the rest of We Are The Pipettes is hardly worth bothering with. The Pipettes are at least destined to avoid the reality-show fate of the talentless, increasingly mantislike Victoria Beckham, regrettably most famous Spice Girl since their breakup. Judging from the few intriguing tracks posted on her MySpace page, Former Pipette Rose Elinor Dougall actually seems worth keeping an eye on - pun semi-intended, since she’s a total fox, but she also turns out to be a promising songwriter.

48 Shaggy, “It Wasn’t Me”, 2000

So let’s see if I fully understand the scenario: a man’s lover uses her extra key to enter his house. She discovers the man and the girl next door making like crazed bonobos – buck naked, if you can picture it, on the bathroom floor – with the girl next door screaming wildly and tearing flesh from the man’s shoulder. Rather than interrupt, the lover follows the lurid scene as it moves from shower to counter to sofa, taking her eyes off her man only long enough to grab a camera to document the incident. When confronted, the man repeatedly denies taking part in said scenario despite abundant evidence to the contrary – a shamelessness which, in broader terms, proves enormously relevant as political and social strategy, as pointed out by no less than Salman Rushdie in an April 2001 essay in The Guardian. The song’s conclusion, when the man apologizes for the pain he’s caused, is therefore alarmingly off base. Clearly the more unsettling the scene, the more brazen the falsehood, the more aroused his superfreaky lover gets; apologies are such a turnoff. Like Rushdie says: deny, deny, deny.

47 Junior Senior, “Move Your Feet”, 2003

Junior Senior will most likely be remembered as a one-hit wonder, and in this case that’s a good thing. Their 2003 debut, D-D-Don’t Don’t Stop the Beat, is musical Fun Dip, from the blindingly variegated packaging to the tooth-rotting sugar content to the forehead-slapping stupidity of the overall product. Digesting the whole can only lead to a stomachache, but a taste is bliss: “Move Your Feet” is an infectiously fun ditty that finds the Danish duo stuttering over a percolating synth line that could have been lifted from a Sugarhill Records b-side. The negligible lyric, about dancing bringing the world together or something, serves merely as a device to propel the party forward. Which is hardly a complaint – Humpty Hump once insisted “Let’s get stupid!” in an irresistible party-starter of his own, and every now and then that’s the right idea.

46 Easy Star All Stars featuring Toots and the Maytals, “Let Down”, 2006

My low expectations for the Easy Star All Stars’ Jamaican reinvention of Radiohead’s landmark Ok Computer were, I think, understandable: tribute albums are usually terrible, and the album title Radiodread suggests Tower Records cutout bin material. However, this particular tribute ain’t half bad, with “Let Down” for its part sounding surprisingly natural as a reggae tune. Aiding the song’s credibility is a performance by one of the finest voices in reggae history: Toots Hibbert’s enthusiastic take transforms Thom Yorke’s meek, suspicious commuter into a raving sidewalk preacher. It’s an odd approach to the lyrics, but Hibbert holds passersby in his sway – it’s possible we’re watching his exuberant mouth rather than hearing his panicked words, but count me among the converted.

45 The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, “A Teenager In Love”, 2009

There is an inherent danger in comparing a band to The Smiths – anyone remember Gene? Exactly – and for the most part it’s inappropriate here as well. It’s not that The Smiths haven’t launched countless bands, but it’s damned near impossible to be influenced by Morrissey and not sound like a fool. Johnny Marr is another story: not only is his sound everywhere, but the original article is everywhere too, lending his services to Pet Shop Boys, Pretenders, The The, Modest Mouse, and The Cribs. While the guitar outro on “A Teenager In Love” may not actually be Johnny Marr, Pains Of Being Pure At Heart singer/guitarist Kip Berman might as well have donned Marr’s trademark hat made out of his own hair in the recording studio, so lovingly does he recreate the Smiths jangle. As for the rest of the song, it describes a squandered addict life in predictable terms, with one crucial twist: no distinction is made in the chorus between Christ and heroin as time-wasters. The teenaged protagonist apparently needs to kick ‘em both to truly start living. Neat.

44 Cut Chemist, “Storm”, 2006

Many DJs seem to have trouble scratching tastefully. It can be fun to watch in person, but when was the last time you found yourself reaching for a Kid Koala record? And done improperly, it’s a surefire way to halt the momentum of a good dance party. “Peter Piper” should be required listening before every DJ set: the homage to Jam Master Jay is effusive for a reason (well, dozens of reasons, but his impeccable taste is one. R.I.P.) On “Storm”, Cut Chemist uses scratching less as a parlor trick than a device to enhance the hugeness of the beat. Guest vocalists Edan and Mr. Lif provide dope enough rhymes, but one imagines they showed up primarily to help Chemist break into Afrika Bambaataa’s house to steal his soundsystem, load it onto a little red Radio Flyer wagon, and haul it down the avenues of the Bronx on full blast. Every scratch represents a bump in the road, a wobble of the wagon; by the finish it’s almost hard to believe this impromptu street parade managed to last a full three minutes.

43 Estelle featuring Kanye West, “American Boy”, 2008

Has there ever been a megastar duller than Kanye West? His meticulous galaxy-swirl haircut was the lone interesting aspect of his infamous Taylor Swift interruption; mostly it seemed the inevitable manifestation of a hyperinflated ego, though it did have the regrettable consequence of spawning a deluge of funny-for-about-five-seconds “Ima let you finish” jokes. It’s difficult to understand how a man who makes such underwhelming recordings, a man whose glassy-eyed, Nintendo-consumed mumbling in his Dave Chapelle’s Block Party interview seem indicative of an overall lack of brainpower and charm, got in a position to be so egotistical in the first place. At least his typically lackluster rap doesn’t particularly detract from “American Boy”, though an [INSERT RAP HERE] sign might have sufficed, especially as his rhymes have little to do with the song (Part one: this jam is hot! Part two: Kanye wears expensive clothes!) Which is too bad, since Estelle gives a refreshingly wide-eyed performance on a disco burner tailor-made for 2008 – with Bush’s exit finally looming, it’s time for foreigners to feel okay about America again. Her spirited backing vocals, meanwhile, do just enough to keep the listener from disengaging while Kanye holds the mic. Good luck convincing Kanye that Estelle’s the true star, though – he probably thinks “American Boy” is about him, doesn’t he?

42 Bat For Lashes, “Daniel”, 2009

Fifteen years ago, a former cast member of Nickelodeon’s You Can’t Do That On Television burst onto the pop charts with a caustic track regarding an unfaithful lover; contained within the lyrics was a deeply disturbing reference to performing fellatio on Full House star Dave Coulier. Comparatively speaking, Natasha Khan’s admission that this track was inspired by her girlhood crush on The Karate Kid’s Daniel LaRusso is downright adorable. Even so, “Daniel” paints a lyrical picture far more romantic than Ralph Macchio should rightfully inspire; songs tend to lose credibility for overusing the word “heart”, but it feels less generic here, descriptive of a facet of the cosmology illustrated on the Two Suns album cover. The heart of Khan’s Bat For Lashes project is the axis of a universe apparently consisting of thorny desert plants, votive candles, crowns made of stars, and argyle armbands. This metaphysical cosmos asserts itself a bit too heavily on the album’s more sluggish tracks, but “Daniel” is breezy and direct, produced appropriately like a hit single from the soundtrack to some mid-eighties teenage romance.

41 Ladytron, “Tomorrow/Versus”, 2008

I’m cheating a bit here – these two tracks aren’t presented as one song, but they sound awfully good together. In years previous I thought of Ladytron as little more than dilettantes - four bored models who all look roughly alike, smirking at their knowingly stupid band name, dabbling in music only a bit more melodic than electroclash. In fact, I stumbled on the MySpace launch of the richly textured Velocifero semi-accidentally on a particularly miserable night at work; by sunup I had heard it five straight times. I’m always delighted when a good album closes with its best song, and Velocifero turns the trick twice. The ethereal “Tomorrow” apparently witnesses a suicide attempt by carbon monoxide poisoning, but the vantage point is detached and hazy, as indifferent as that of Mersault in The Stranger. “Versus” could be a sister song to New Order’s “Your Silent Face”; though the former is as lush as the latter is brittle, both utilize pretty lyrics that are not particularly substantial, and both are powered by a lovely, repetitive synth refrain. Perhaps dawn is the ideal time to conclude listening to Velocifero, as a rosy future seems ready to chase away the dull, artificial glare of Ladytron’s past.

40 R. Kelly, “Trapped In The Closet (Parts 1-12)”, 2005

As a film, as an artwork of sheer audacity, as a cultural event, “Trapped In The Closet” is the masterpiece of the decade, the only obvious statement of genius found here. Minus the video, the song alone is a bit of a chore to listen to, though not a valueless one. In the grandiose scheme of things, it’s the little touches that matter: the monotonous beat, like rainwater leaking into a bucket; the echo emphasizing the shocking cliffhanger at each chapter’s end (“the man is a midget… midget… midget… midget….”); and oh lordy, that hamfisted attempt at Bridget’s Southern accent. If you doubt Kelly’s genius, consider his improvement of a nineteenth-century Russian literary aphorism. Anton Chekhov famously insisted that a gun introduced in the first act should be fired by the third; in Kelly’s hiphopera, any midget discovered in a cabinet in the ninth chapter must be declared babydaddy by chapter eleven. And lucky Bridget – the song’s Wikipedia entry helpfully explains that the midget is called Big Man because he’s “‘blessed,’ in reference to the fact that he’s ‘well-endowed,’ or has a large penis.” (Bold text indicates hyperlink to the ever-popular penis article. Go ahead, read it. I’ll wait.)

39 Robyn, “Konichiwa Bitches”, 2005

Writing at the dawn of a new millennium provides one luxury: anything can be called the fill-in-the-blank of the millennium without exaggeration. Chinese Democracy, for example – disappointment of the millennium! It’s easily overdone, so I’ll abandon it after this entry, but “Konichiwa Bitches” is absolutely the song title of the millennium. Naming your tune after a GZA signoff on Chapelle Show is a stroke of brilliance, provided the song is demented enough to merit the title. And it is: Robyn spits absurd boasts over a chiming beat, including the baffling “one left, one right is how I organize ‘em / you know I fill my cups, no need to supersize ‘em.” Breasts? Organized? Should Robyn’s pop stardom fade, will we find her hawking Breast Organizers – must-have mammary filing system of the millennium! – on Swedish HSN?

38 Electric Six, “Danger! High Voltage”, 2003

37 White Stripes, “Fell In Love With A Girl”, 2001

If the highly plausible rumor is true that Jack White sings backing vocals on “Danger! High Voltage!”, then here we have a pair of songs from early this decade that feature the peripatetic White, both sounding hopelessly retro. In fact, including the classic-rockish “Seven Nation Army”, I failed to recognize any of White’s best singles as new songs when I first heard them. “Fell In Love” sounds like a lost gem from the late-seventies LA punk scene, some unjustly forgotten contemporary of X. “Danger”, meanwhile, suggests something I might have danced to at Tucson’s Fine Line goth club, sequenced happily alongside Nitzer Ebb. “Fell In Love” is as tight as “Danger” is sloppy; the former relies on little more than punk power chords, simple rhymes, and Meg White’s cavegirl drumming, while the latter is punctuated by wonderfully ridiculous saxophone, a chorus full of traded yelps, and of course the decade’s finest non-sequitur lyric, “Fire in the disco! Fire in the Taco Bell!” (which preceded Das Racist’s bemused visit to the combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell by a full six years.) I’d call it a tie, but “Fell In Love” wins the tiebreaker on account of Michel Gondry’s wondrous Lego block animation, easily one of the ten finest videos in MTV history. And while I was overall considerably less than impressed by the garage rock revival earlier this decade, here’s a call for more retro sounds from Jack White – tracks like the unbearably cloying “We’re Going To Be Friends” may sound more current, but that doesn’t make them better.

36 St. Vincent, “Actor Out Of Work”, 2009

There must be something to the theory that at any given moment, people are seized by nostalgia for the pop culture of roughly twenty years prior. How else to explain that it took this long for someone to craft a killer single influenced by PJ Harvey’s first three records?

35 Raekwon, “House Of Flying Daggers”, 2009

I admit I have yet to read The Tao Of Wu, so the logic behind certain elements of “House Of Flying Daggers” is a bit of a mystery. How is the decision made to credit the song to just Raekwon, despite equal time delegated to four of the Clan’s finest MCs? What connects Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, Pt II to the original, besides both being marvelous efforts from Raekwon? Whatever the logic, the song is classic Wu - the herd-of-stomping-gorillas rhythm is actually a J Dilla contribution, but it matches any of RZA’s finest creations. Inspectah Deck drops a classic opening couplet (“I pop off like a mobster boss / angel hair with the lobster sauce”) and crushing boasts follow in verses from Raekwon, Ghostface Killah, and Method Man. GZA rides shotgun, warning off all followers over a pounding “Wu! Wu!” chant suggesting the Wu-chariot is carried by a passel of deranged Oompa-Loompas. The message is clear: it’s been sixteen years since the Wu-Tang Clan arrived from Shaolin, and Dirty is gone, but still ya best protect ya neck.

34 Santogold, “LES Artistes”, 2008

The glittering vomit adorning Santogold’s debut record kindly signals a warning about the messy contents within. Anyone who purchased Santogold on the strength of the sparklingly poppy leadoff track “LES Artistes” was likely bewildered by the the lame punkish guitar and shockingly bad singing on “You’ll Find A Way”, and by the hyperactive skipping from irritating MIA ripoffs to half-formed dub-inflected turds that follows. But oh, that “LES Artistes”: a pop jewel dripping with attitude and startlingly out of time, Santogold could be describing Madonna’s struggle to survive in early-eighties New York just as fluidly as it recalls her own tumultuous coming of age. Here’s hoping Santogold’s future brings more radiant pop and fewer gaudy upheavals.

33 Grizzly Bear, “Knife”, 2006

Contrary to prevailing critical opinion, I’m not convinced that Grizzly Bear’s much-hyped 2009 effort Veckatimest was a step forward for the band. I suppose the production is clearer, the instrumentation sharper, the vocal layering more laborious, but the overanllnpfbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn ...huh? Erm, sorry, I seem to have fallen asleep with my face on the keyboard. Ahem. 2006’s Yellow House, on the other hand, exudes an unassuming creepiness, mirrored perfectly by the album cover photograph: there’s maybe not much activity on the surface, but who’s to say these stairs don’t lead to Gacy’s crawlspace? “Knife” correspondingly could be a song about backstabbing in the figurative or literal sense; the cascading cats-through-the-wringer backing vocals seem to point to the latter. This wordless yowling persists a good minute beyond the chorus, then fades abruptly into the minimalist piano score accompanying the flickering of some macabre silent film.

32 Vivian Girls, “Where Do You Run To?”, 2008

The snarling backlash against the wave of hype accompanying Vivian Girls’ debut was unnecessarily harsh, and probably not a little sexist. Snarky responses to overrated media darlings are probably human nature – cough, cough, Vampire Weekend – but the level of vitriol aimed at Vivian Girls seems almost irrationally high. True, anyone who’s seen them live can attest that they’re more or less incapable of singing and playing their instruments at the same time, though onstage qualifications were pretty much lowered inches from the floor by the Sex Pistols what, three decades ago? The Girls rightly protest in interviews that much of the criticism leveled against them mentions their looks, something that likely wouldn’t happen to a comparable all-male group selling sound over image. And even if Vivian Girls are a less than unqualified success as a band, their dark and driving self-titled debut is lightning in a filthy bottle, as ten sludgy, haunting tracks rush by in little more than twenty minutes. The finest song is nearly the longest: though the lyrics are a mere six lines, “Where Do You Run To?” employs ascending, off-kilter harmonies to keep listeners enthralled for three-and-a-quarter minutes – marathon-length by Vivian Girls standards.

31 Titus Andronicus, “Titus Andronicus”, 2008

“Titus Andronicus” could be a nihilist update to “Baba O’Riley”: the setting shifts from mystic farmlands to blighted suburbs, fear of a boring death replaces antsiness, the urgency has increased – no space for solos – and the band is better. (That should be read as a knock at the monolithically overrated Who, not gushing praise for the occasionally great but sophomorically literary Titus Andronicus record.) But both songs sound similarly anthemic, are aimed at the same restless kids. Singer Patrick Stickles might be referencing “Baba” when he growls “Pretty melodies don’t fall out of the air for me / I’ve got to steal them from somewhere.” Titus the song is rousing as intended, but there is one catch with its high placement: I’m working under the assumption Titus the band writes with a cloaked sense of humor. The actual delivery of debut record The Airing Of Grievances is fiery and throat-shreddingly sincere, but the title is purportedly a reference to the Festivus episode of Seinfeld. And the severely over-the-top rhyme “no more indie rock/just a ticking clock” is a joke, right? Lightening the mood a bit before the ferocious “Your life is over!” chant brings the song to a heavy finish, yes? ’Cause it’s funny.

30 Midlake, “Roscoe”, 2006

Grammarians decry the impact texting and instant messaging is having to the detriment of the English language; while I mostly agree, has there ever been a more gloriously convenient abbreviation than WTF? Consider the elements that comprise this bizarrely gorgeous song by Midlake, a bunch of forgettable-looking white dudes from Denton, Texas. Why was 2006 the right time to ape the dentist office-appropriate guitar sounds of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams”, the lilting harmonies of America’s “Sister Golden Hair”? Why do most of their lyrics read like they were lifted from Walden? Why would someone apparently obsessed with reclaiming nature, with extolling the invigorating benefits of manual labor, want to be born in 1891 of all years? And above all, how is “Roscoe” a more productive name? See what I mean: WTF?

29 Missy Elliott, “Get Ur Freak On”, 2001

Timbaland’s star sure has faded over the years - not only is his phoned-in performance on “Come Around” the lone misstep on M.I.A.’s Kala, but he also teamed up with Chris Cornell (!?) on Scream, one of the flat-out worst ideas in this or any other decade. It’s a strain to remember his role as tastemaker - I mean, “Sexyback” is aight and all, but it ain’t shit compared to that weird-ass baby gurgle filling gaps in the palpitating beat on Aaliyah’s “Are You That Somebody?” And oh yeah, “Get Ur Freak On” - it’s telling that no credible remix exists for such a massive hit; what could you do with it? Timbaland wisely lays low on this one, giving listeners a blessed reprieve from his subpar rapping and allowing ample space for Elliott’s vocal gymnastics, a performance which as ever places her light years ahead of her peers. There’s actually not much to the production - a six-note bhangra pattern, the odd raygun blast from a synthesizer, vocal samples from a few Rosetta Stone tapes, the occasional pause for emphasis - but it’s precisely enough.

28 Gnarls Barkley, “Crazy”, 2006

Countless songs have been written on the crazy/insane theme; most are bad. The few good ones include the head-shaking, self-admonishing “Crazy” by Patsy Cline; the THC-induced paranoia of Cypress Hill’s “Insane In The Brain”; the definitive tale of parents who just don’t understand that is Suicidal Tendencies’ “Institutionalized”; and roughly the entire catalog of Mr. Batshit Loonybird himself, Ozzy Osbourne. Joining their ranks is this unexpected hit from Gnarls Barkley’s St. Elsewhere, an album where Danger Mouse’s tactfully restrained cut-and-paste spaghetti Westerns counterbalance Cee-Lo Green’s examinations of suicides, split personalities, monsters, necrophilia, and even obsessive-compulsive disorders (“Feng Shui”). Does that make him crazy? Probably not; Green presents lunacy as a question of perspective, that disconnection from societal norms can be misread as insanity. Crazy good song, though.

27 LCD Soundsystem, “On Repeat”, 2005

With this list finally complete, I can’t help but be struck by the dominance of songs from 2005-2009. I don’t reckon fifty songs is a large enough sample to prove it, but I do think music was generally more fun in the latter half of the decade, something that LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy probably played a role in but receives entirely too much credit for in certain quarters (which, conversely, causes him to receive more than his share of flak from others.) Inarguably the most common - and valid - complaint with Pitchfork’s 500 songs of the decade was the release of the list in August; was nothing great supposed to be released in the decade’s final season? But otherwise the most contentious choice was LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends” at #2 - it’s a fine song, but it seems plenty unlikely that stuck-needle piano intro will warm our hearts for generations to come, doesn’t it?

Anyway, while the claim that Murphy is responsible for “eroding indie’s senseless aversion to dance music” is overstated, he undoubtedly has a knack for creating nerdy disco epics that are, more often than not, a joy to dance to. Take your pick - I’ve personally always been enamored with “On Repeat”, which slowly builds a huge wall of post-punk disco out of an unassuming little two-note bassline. I’m not sure what to make of the abstracted rant about rich kids taking to the street, but I’ll gladly take it over debut single “Losing My Edge”, an exhausting pisstake at the sameness of elitist indie-cred namechecking that gets a little less funny with each listen.

26 Pulp, “Sunrise”, 2001

By the time of Pulp’s farewell effort, 2001’s We Love Life, their American critical and commercial reception was at its chilliest – their label initially didn’t bother distributing it stateside. Which was unfortunate on a number of levels – the band behind the epochal Different Class deserved better treatment, and there was suddenly no need to tour the US behind what proved to be one hell of a record. The hungover mood lingers from 1998’s This Is Hardcore, but the sound is surprisingly acoustic, the outlook less despairing, and the songwriting more consistent than the heavily frontloaded Hardcore. Jarvis Cocker’s wry humor is in fine form as always, particularly on the coda of “Bad Cover Version.” And the epic “Sunrise”, riding a guitar and choir outro at turns dark and angelic, hearkens back thematically to the early-a.m. comedown that brought Different Class to a close, albeit from the perspective of a man facing forty. Not a bad final entry in a discography that looks even better in light of Cocker’s unexpectedly lauded solo career. The words are still humorous these days, but delirious cameo in Fantastic Mr. Fox aside, the songs kinda suck.

25 TV on the Radio, “Dreams”, 2004

With all due respect to David Andrew Sitek’s crunching guitars, to Kyp Malone’s near-successful attempt to sing his backing vocals in a register only dogs can hear, “Dreams” owes its success to singer Tunde Adebimpe, one of the most notable talents to emerge from Brooklyn’s bustling music scene this decade. His ability to flat-out sing, to craft erudite lyrics that could be effectively aimed at an ex-lover, a politician, or an enemy at full potency, achieves full transcendence during the wordplay at the song’s ecstatic peak, four minutes in:

“Warfaring terrapin
Unconfined undesigned
Undersigned bantering
Bartering bellowing
Barracking blundering
Pillaging plundering
Living and lavishing
Hammerings harrowing
Flourishing flattening
Levelling reveling
Wrecking and ravaging
Savoring savaging

You've got me worried and wondering.”

The band would grow better, and then worse, after ditching the drum machine and expanding to a five-piece lineup: better on 2006’s dense, expansive Return to Cookie Mountain, worse on 2008’s vastly overrated Dear Science. But “Dreams” is thus far the shining jewel of TV on the Radio’s rich young catalog.

24 Lykke Li, “Breaking It Up”, 2008

How many Lykke Lis does it take to get to the center of a problem affair? Three, apparently – regular Lykke, honey-voiced even as her lover is left to twist in the wind; megaphone Lykke, punctuating key moments with a menacing, PJ Harveyish growl; and funhouse Lykke, sounding like a flock of taunting schoolchildren during the chorus. Given the potential threat in the line “if you’re crossing the street, I might be there”, coupled with the arctic glower she wears in the Christian Haag-filmed rehearsal found online, one might think twice before courting the three of her. But like a winged paper fish attacking a young girl’s face on the glass of a photocopier – or so I understand from the sleeve of the 45 – the song’s intense performance and spare handclap-and-warbling-space-flute arrangement combine to make one surreal, naggingly essential single.

23 Panda Bear, “Bros”, 2007

“Bros” is both nothing less than a gorgeous soundscape, and nothing more. On paper, the words weaken the song considerably; they could be a direct transcription of two dudes shooting the shit at Burning Man. As reverby instrument, they share equal space in the mix with dozens of acoustic loops that interact like guests at a good party – arriving, brightening the room, never overstaying their welcome. The length borders on indulgent, but Panda Bear uses the full twelve minutes to stretch out and construct this resplendent gathering; the five-minute version in the “Bros” video falls comparatively flat.

22 Outkast, “Hey Ya!”, 2003

“Hey Ya!” is easily the catchiest song of the last ten years, but this proved equal parts blessing and curse. Is there anyone who wasn’t deathly sick of shakin’ it like a Polaroid picture mere months after the song’s release? This ubiquity inflated Andre 3000’s stardom while relegating Big Boi to an Andrew Ridgeley-like background figure – odd, considering the not insignificant success of Big Boi’s concurrent single “The Way You Move”, and moreover undeserved, given my all-time favorite weirdo Outkast lyric was his (“The way she moved reminded me of a brown stallion horse with skates on”, from Aquemini’s inimitable “Spottieottiedopalicious”.) And that was the most unfortunate effect of “Hey Ya!” mania, cementing the rift between the two halves of rap’s most consistently astonishing duo. That said, the song still feels fresh in one context: the still-hilarious synching to A Charlie Brown Christmas is more effective than the somewhat unnerving testament to Andre 3000’s ego in the “Hey Ya!” video, which essentially resurrects the clip for Nirvana’s “In Bloom” minus the self-deprecating humor. The joyous Peanuts dance perfectly illustrates the song’s key line – “Y’all don’t hear me.” Andre 3000’s lyrics are devastatingly pessimistic, but given that irresistible beat, can you blame anyone less sensitive than Charlie Brown for just wanting to dance?

21 Imani, “Mind Control”, 2007

Quick – name a radder chorus than “Mind control has got my head, AAHHH!” Keep in mind that the song in question is a punk-as-fuck 47 seconds, and performed by an adorable ten-year old Brooklynite dressed in gold and sporting a side ponytail, whose music “sounds like COOKIES” (according to her MySpace page.) Uh-huh, I thought not.

20 Lily Allen, “Smile”, 2006

Cocaine’s a hell of a drug; if her bragging is to be taken at face value, a two-year white pony ride is to blame for turning our dear Lily Allen from the sweetly foul-mouthed twenty year old cooing clever putdowns over wobbly ska samples on 2006’s delightful Alright, Still into the dull-witted party monster spewing venom considerably less than clever – “fuck you very much” – over tired electronica on 2009’s dreadful It’s Not Me, It’s You. Until she dries out a bit, “Smile” is necessarily viewed with a warped sense of distance and a disproportionate weight of nostalgia. However it’s heard, though, it’s pretty stellar – Allen’s singing is a measured balance of strength and vulnerability, as if she’s singing to rebuild her own confidence as much as demolish her unfaithful lover’s.

19 Franz Ferdinand, “Take Me Out”, 2004

The shocking thing about “Take Me Out” is less the downshift in tempos a minute into the song than that the band resists any return to the rollicking beginning. Neither section feels entirely comfortable to dance to, though it did light up its share of dance floors in 2004. But “Take Me Out” seems intended to, and does, feel jarring - especially as the lyrics could be convincingly addressed to either a coquettish lover or an assassin. I think I had the weird notion rock and roll was dead back then – in retrospect Interpol, The Strokes, and their peers, content to lazily mine the past rather than create something new, didn’t kill the genre but merely took it on an unfortunate detour. In turn, pinning my hopes on Franz Ferdinand to save rock was misguided – none of their other songs are even half this good. But listening to “Take Me Out” still feels pretty invigorating.

18 Feist, “One Evening”, 2005

Know how, in that peaceful, easy, seventies sorta way, “How Deep Is Your Love?” is the greatest love song ever? Take that sound, make it a touch sexier, swap lyrical themes with “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?”, spend about twenty minutes filming a cheesy and overly literal video, and you have “One Evening”. Feist actually covers the Bee Gees on the single’s flipside, but while her wounded, mellifluous voice is an ideal enough fit for the lite disco of “Inside and Out”, the results are a tad predictable (and flipping the lyrics to match the singer’s gender is so twentieth century.) “One Evening” might be better heard on a mixtape for a gentle summer evening, right between “Sail On” and “Everybody Loves The Sunshine”, while sharing a stick of tea with that special someone.

17 Enon, “Rubber Car”, 2000

“Rubber Car” was described by The All Music Guide as “seventies falsetto soul as it might have sounded if it was recorded in a machine shop,” and I’m not going to try to compete with that. I do, however, appreciate that title, which can be misheard as “Rubber Cock” just as easily as “RoboCop.” Enon was probably the decade’s most solidly B-plus band, producing four good albums but no great ones. But “Rubber Car”, the leadoff track on their 2000 debut Believo!, finds them at their squiggly best.

16 Phoenix, “1901”, 2009

The element that pushes this song through the stratosphere, that rockets it to its place atop 2009’s song rankings – not the toughest task, as this year proved far kinder to albums than singles, but still – is the bionic, ascending keyboard sound that accents the back half of each chorus, reminiscent of Kool and the Gang’s “Summer Madness”. This may be the lone surprise Phoenix offers through the duration of Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, an effortless exercise in pop-rock mastery that everyone seems to like but is hard to properly love. I have no interest in what they’re singing about – a nineteen-minute workout on an elliptical trainer? – but like an acid casualty encountering Freedom Rock on a friend’s stereo, I can’t help but yell “Turn it up!” every time “1901” comes on the radio, a reaction far too few songs inspire.

15. Jay-Z, “Takeover”, 2001

14. Nas, “Made You Look”, 2002

The online debate between Jay-Z’s devastating Nas putdown “Takeover” versus the response song “Ether” feels like a throwback to high school. One student makes a clever mockery of another; the latter, at a loss for words, says “Fag!”, and the crowd snickers and slaps him on the back. The witlessly gay-slurring “Ether” is no match for “Takeover”, a song both lyrically incisive and musically unexpected: the Doors’ “Five To One” is hardly an obvious beat source, and it’s a pretty crappy song – Jim Morrison’s vocals were debauched enough normally, but here he bellows like a hobo on day three of a Mad Dog bender. “Takeover” manipulates the sample to make Morrison sound even more unhinged, and meshes it with allusions to “Fame”, an artifact of David Bowie and John Lennon’s wasted mid-seventies years. The emergence of Jay-Z’s crystalline battle rhymes from the seasick revelry behind him lends them incredible weight, and the infamous finishing couplet slams the door shut behind him.

However – once Nas had “Ether” out of his system, he rebounded with his strongest effort since the archetypal Illmatic, 2002’s God’s Son. It’s a largely introspective album, recorded in the wake of his mother’s death, but leadoff single “Made You Look” vociferously announces his proper return to form. The echoing beat is built off what is, to the song’s credit, one of the less obvious samples of Incredible Bongo Band’s “Apache”, a touchstone for hip-hop DJs since the late seventies. The wordplay is clever, funny at times but never bogged down in direct conflict with any particular MC; Nas is reclaiming his place above the fray as a rap legend and, to quote Pitchfork’s glowing review of God’s Son, “effectively taking a bat to his ‘one hot album every ten year average.’”

So the initial battle wasn’t much of a contest, with Jay-Z clobbering his opponent by first round KO, but it inspired Nas to resuscitate his career and even up the war. Who ultimately came out on top? Hard to say - Nas married Kelis, Jay-Z married Beyonce, and I wouldn’t exactly push either of ’em out of bed, y’know?

13 The Kills, “Last Day Of Magic”, 2008

It’s true 2008 was a particularly enjoyable year in music, but the lack of spotlight on The Kills’ fabulous Midnight Boom was curious even amidst stiff competition. The fault could have been with guitarist Jamie Hince – dating Kate Moss is aesthetically understandable, but superficially links him to consummate rock poseur Pete Doherty, and “Hotel” is arguably the lousiest nickname in entertainment. Maybe the blame belongs to singer Allison Mossheart, a talented and alluring woman whose stage persona is regrettably full of dated rockstar pretentions and slinky moves copped directly from Steven Tyler. Or are people just not respecting the drum machine? Confusing their band name with the dismal yet inexplicably popular Killers? It helps little that the video for “Last Day Of Magic” is horrendously shot and lamely glorifies sexual violence. Whatever the reason, this song shouldn’t be overlooked: the performance by the two sometimes-lovers in The Kills is deliciously tense, the hedonism-weary vibe is captured more convincingly than most songs on the subject, and the ridiculous “tornado/hurricane-oh” rhyme is delivered with a sly, sultry wink. As a bonus aside, the lyrics were subject to my favorite misinterpretation of the decade: song-meanings.net, a source for what can be levelheaded discussion of lyrical content, originally had one of the closing lines listed as “My little cup of cane roar.” Another user corrected this to “My little co-cocaine, oh,” as “cane roar is not an actual thing.” I’ve challenged a poet friend of mine to construct a poem titled “Cane Roar Is Not An Actual Thing” – I admit the muse may not respond to stiff challenges as such, but I can hope.

12 Rihanna, “S.O.S.”, 2006

The tendency towards loud that has plagued music production over the past decade-plus has been largely detrimental; it’s refreshing to turn back to old vinyl recordings to how music sounded before dynamic range compression went haywire, when there was still a pronounced difference between the quiet and not-so-quiet parts of a song. “S.O.S.” provides a modern exception to the rule: the opening beats explode in the listener’s ears and happily pummel away, as if the solution to the compression conundrum is to structure a song entirely free of quiet moments. “S.O.S.” boldly samples Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love”, the definitive sound of the eighties (which is not the same as the definitive song of the eighties, which it isn’t, but when people say “eighties music” this is usually the sound they have in mind.) It’s hard to build something new from such an instantly recognizable foundation, but “S.O.S.” doesn’t stray from the challenge – the lyrics periodically confront the original source. But the beat is updated for the digital age – meaning louder, louder, louder – and the song is heavier, more dramatic, better. Rihanna as fashion icon may not be able to match Marc Almond, but she’s no slouch, and there simply wasn’t a more fun song to dance to this decade.

11 Asobi Seksu, “Thursday”, 2006

“Obsessions,” Haruki Murakami has said, “can help people survive intense loneliness.” Asobi Seksu’s “Thursday” suggests the song a ghost from a Murakami novel might leave behind her, thanks to Yuki Chikudate’s pining lyric, her thin voice drowning under waves of reverb. The song is best experienced a bit obsessively – on first listen, it blends into the sonically even Citrus, but further examinations reveal new layers, new surprises. After reaching an unexpected pinnacle during the second verse thanks to James Hanna’s heavenly guitar squalls, the band coasts prettily to a dense, lyrically indecipherable finish. Not since the gauzy early nineties recordings of bands such as Lush and Galaxie 500 has a rock band insisted upon - and ultimately rewarded - an intenseness of focus from the listener the way the lovely and fragile “Thursday” does.

10 Wolf Parade, “Shine A Light”, 2005

Do you believe in miracles? The remainder of Wolf Parade’s output is nothing special, and singer Spencer Krug’s side project, the hobbit-chasing Sunset Rubdown, is unspeakably irritating, the sonic equivalent of an itchy shirt after a haircut. Yet “Shine a Light” has a compelling universality; I could swear the band in the rehearsal space below my Brooklyn art studio was practicing this for years, though Wolf Parade hails from Montreal, the other city indie rock kids flocked to all decade long. The lyrics and music chug forward in step, capturing a desperate and unnameable yearning, a longing for an escape beyond the “boring hours in the office tower”. And if nothing else, “Shine A Light” makes a compelling case for turning Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray” into a straightforward pop-rock song, a trick that paid equal dividends for Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner”. Speaking of which…

9 M.I.A., “Boyz”, 2007

M.I.A.’s Kala opens with a lyric cribbed from Jonathan Richman’s masterwork, though her “radio on” is clearly tuned to some international pirate station. The album’s wild, exhilarating pastiche of pan-cultural sounds peaks with “Boyz”, which layers rhetorical questions about masculine aggression over a bouncing, choppy beat and what sounds like a bustling street festival. The music is punctuated by springy eight-bit noises, complementing Maya Arulpragasam’s predilection for seizure-inducing pixel art that suggests she attached a lengthy extension cord to her NES, popped in a Duck Hunt or Ice Climber cartridge, and pitched the console down the stairs. A monster on the dance floor, the less celebrated “Boyz” is a more comprehensive representation of MIA’s aesthetic than the lyrically astute but sonically sluggish “Paper Planes”.

8 The Knife, “Like A Pen”, 2006

Yes, “Heartbeats” is catchier, but I don’t like my Knife catchy, I like my Knife crazy. “Like a Pen” has an insane beat, insane vocals, an insane video. The latter apparently chronicles the adventures of an anthropomorphic turd, which makes some sense when connected to lyrics that suggest a woman abusing laxatives to stay thin. The overall listening experience is unexpectedly emotive given the relatively minimal spacing of the sound – and, of course, blissfully insane.

7 Camera Obscura, “If Looks Could Kill”, 2006

I tend to desire musical company when I can’t sleep in the small hours of the morning, which is more often than I’d care to admit. Lately I’ve used the time to pore over Camera Obscura’s latest, 2009’s My Maudlin Career, the way our ancestors were said to pore over Pet Sounds or Revolver. The album somehow manages to grow exponentially better with each listen, and maintains a marvelous flow even while swinging wildly in mood - particularly over the four closing songs, from the pixie-dusted title track to the brutally wistful “Forest and Sands” and “Other Towns and Cities” to the orgasmically blithe “Honey in the Sun”. If My Maudlin Career can be said to have a problem, it’s one most bands would envy: it’s more or less perfectly balanced, too consistently shimmering to have a single song leap off the record quite the way this number from 2006’s Let’s Get Out Of This Country does. Sounding simultaneously like the best 1960’s jangly pop single you don’t remember and uniquely of this decade, uniquely Scottish, “If Looks Could Kill” represents the moment Camera Obscura steps once and for all out of Belle and Sebastian’s delicate shadow and proves itself the superior band.

6 Of Montreal, “The Past is a Grotesque Animal”, 2007

On paper it sounds like a train wreck: Of Montreal singer Kevin Barnes rants for twelve minutes over a monotonous, four-on-the-floor kick-and-snare drum machine beat, while scatterings of noise blast over a seemingly unchanging chord. The lyrics manage to encapsulate the good and bad of his band’s career in one go: the song title is too long, the story is intensely personal, and the lyrics range from eye-rollingly pretentious (“the first cute girl that I met who could appreciate George Bataille”) to the searingly direct (“we want our film to be beautiful, not realistic”) to the obscure to the point of incoherence (“somehow you’ve red-rovered the Gestapo circling my heart.”) The solo acoustic performance found on YouTube is indeed tedious, but the studio version proves unexpectedly mesmerizing. The robotic “oo-oohs” that underline the vocals starting at the four-and-a-half minute mark bring chills, and when the whole thing finally collapses into what sounds like a car crash played in reverse, I inevitably skip back to the start. Barnes wove this magic consistently through 2007’s mostly wonderful Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?, then followed it with one of the decade’s most unlistenable albums: 2008’s Skeletal Lamping, like Beck’s career-lowlight Midnite Vultures and Cody Chesnutt’s laughably mistitled Headphone Masterpiece before it, reinforces the immutable law that Prince and only Prince can make Prince records.

5 Radiohead, “Idioteque”, 2000

Sigh…like choosing Superman as your hero, admiring Radiohead has gotten so danged obvious these days. Sure, they put on an exuberant, exhausting live show, with “Idioteque” perpetually stunning even amidst one brilliant track after another. Yes, they seem like nice enough folks, mostly lacking in rockstar pretensions, politically motivated without preaching from the stage. And their lone stumble, 2003’s unexpectedly mediocre Hail To The Thief, was remedied in 2007 with the career-best In Rainbows – not bad for a group that’s been around fifteen years. Even The Eraser, Thom Yorke’s solo foray into electronica - invariably a kiss of death for most rockers - is positively chilling, a pessimist’s delight. The band doesn’t repeat itself, and gets better all the time; there’s nothing negative to say about Radiohead, but conversely there’s nothing unique to be written. So this sad robotic gem lands in the top five because one Radiohead song has to, but it’s going at the bottom because I can’t get more excited about it. Sorry.

4. Kylie Minogue, “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head”, 2001

3. Hercules and Love Affair, “Blind”, 2008

Ranking the two best dance tracks of the decade, however dissimilar, proves difficult. On one hand you have Kylie as the sensuous android – flawless body, a vocal delivery that’s flat and icy yet impossibly sexy, purring over irresistible supercomputer-generated rhythms. On the other, Hercules and Love Affair spotlights the aching, nakedly vulnerable vocals of Antony, and how brilliantly his voice complements the six-plus minutes of transcendent disco behind it. Kylie’s visit from the space age sounds as effortless as Hercules and Love Affair’s resurrection of seventies disco and early Chicago House, but the soaring final verse of “Blind”, the release felt when the mood of the otherwise despairing vocal finally matches the ebullient sound of the music, pushes the past ever so slightly ahead of the future.

2 Outkast, “B.O.B.”, 2000

This song feels – is – stunningly original, but I’m not sure this can be attributed to any single characteristic. Other songs feature ridiculously fast rapping, pop culture references with looming expiration dates, a blur of synthesized sixteenth-notes, even chanting, though probably never layered together in such pulverizing fashion. When I woke up one afternoon after nodding off in the backseat and heard this song on the radio for the first time, my thoughts were something along the lines of “Mmphh… huh… what… the… fuck… is… happening?” as though, like a modern-day Rip Van Winkle, I had slept for ages and awoke to the national anthem of some twenty-third century society. The song’s most immediately bizarre element is the chorus, exceedingly relevant – prescient? – yet taking no apparent political stance. Maybe “Bombs Over Baghdad” is meant to describe the way the song sounds? Andre 3000 usually introduced the song as “hip-hop on crack” – when I saw him make this announcement onstage he was shirtless, and wearing breastbone-high pants that appeared to be cut from a pool tarp. If that’s so, hip-hop ought to consider doing more crack next decade.

1 Johnny Cash, “Hurt”, 2002

Would this song bear the same weight if Johnny and June Carter Cash hadn’t left us so soon after we first heard it? Questions like this are unanswerable; while Roland Barthes’s “Death of the Author” insists on separating the biography of the artist from the meaning of the artwork, it is ironically the author’s death itself that can render this task impossible. Who can say, for instance, how we would experience Nirvana Unplugged In New York had Kurt Cobain lived to see its release, or whether we’re astounded by the Joker or simply mourning Heath Ledger? Cash may not have intended “Hurt” to stand as a metaphor for a cataloging of memories at life’s end, but thanks in no small part to Mark Romanek’s indelible video, it’s difficult to attach any other meaning.

So: here we have the final hit by a man in his seventies, a man whose legend developed mostly between the mid-fifties and late sixties. It’s a recording capable of hushing a crowded room; a song that accomplishes the rare task of improving what was already a very good original, and the even rarer task of presenting a Trent Reznor composition in a way that even my mom would like it. (If you had heard some of the conversations Franny and I had regarding The Downward Spiral, you’d understand how miraculous an achievement that is.) It’s painful, spare, elegant, moving; it’s “Hurt” by Johnny Cash, and it’s far and away the song of the decade.