Mouthquake by Daniel Allen Cox

Author:Daniel Allen Cox
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781551526058
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Published: 2015-09-04T04:00:00+00:00

SCREAMING HANDFUL OF NOTHING

For some reason, I started to panic that I wouldn’t find the music I was looking for at CKUT. Radio stations could be tune cemeteries, for all I knew, where pop hits went to gentrify and die. Maybe the answers were lurking in random Walkmans and Discmans around the city, in the secrets that people played to themselves as they caromed around and avoided each other. I decided to put my theory to the test.

I found myself in the Place-des-Arts Metro station one day, staring at people more than I usually do. There was a twenty-something guy with cornrows and a beard and a really creative way of twisting a scarf through his hair so it looked feathered. His clothes were filled with mysterious pockets. I eventually landed on his eyes, and we locked. I held them across the platform and pulled him several feet before finally letting go. Then there was the person in the clothes of the preppy young professional—pinstripe suit, crisp and starched white dress shirt, canary-yellow hankie—obviously so many secrets to hide under all those codes. Made me curious. But soon I was distracted by a new round of passengers who had just descended into the station: Woman in punk T-shirt, baby punks in big punk clothing, day jobbers and people coming home from all-nighters. They collectively turned into a grey sludge of humanity, a mass of meat run through a sluice and decayed to the colour of rotting flesh and maggots. I wanted to know what music they listened to, what had made them that way. Perhaps I craved their boredom.

Their eyes were like mine, empty mirrors, reflecting pools with holes in them, searching for a missing piece of themselves in another, endlessly darting from face to face, as I was doing, looking for a spot of recognition in the light of another, a place of relief to rest temporarily, take a break from the search. All eyes travelling and revealing nothing. Birds over the ocean with nothing to do but keep flying.

I started to notice the people wearing headphones. They were different, their eyes free of armour. There was honesty in the waves of their movements. It connected in my head like a line of dots, like little blue stickers.

I knew that the only way to honesty, to the truth, was to rip the headphones off every music listener I passed in the hopes of finding out what made them so peaceful and remote, not necessarily in contrast with the others on the platform, but rather, in contrast with me. I did it one by one, swiped their headphones in swift moves, knocking off hats and sunglasses, completely destabilizing them while they tottered at the edge of the platform as a train approached.

I lifted the jangle of headphones up to my head, a multi-headed hydra hissing treble and screaming mid-range. I listened intently but heard nothing that I was seeking in this cacophony.

Trouble is, I couldn’t shake the wires. I ran

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