The Loudness

by Nick Courage

  What I remember most about that trip, though, were the shafts of light cutting through the branches overhead and playing across my hands, clenched in my lap. They seemed so wrong, like they knew what had happened and didn’t have the grace to leave us alone.

  Everything seemed wrong then.

  The sun is shining this time too, but less cruelly, and our bikes whir contentedly as we hug the road by the river. I tilt my head back and squeeze my eyelids so they’re just barely open, my eyelashes merging with shaggy treetops in soft coronas of light. Squinting, I can convince myself we’re riding through prehistoric grasslands or Jurassic marshes. That the steam shovels and cranes and cement mixers are lumbering dinosaurs. That no Tragedies ever happened, not even the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs or whatever.

  A major tenet of our proposed city charter is that the “Grey must be Greened,” and we’re coasting down the first attempts at that greening: smooth black asphalt all the way from the park by my house to past downtown, on the littered outskirts of the Grey Zone. I take a deep breath, filling my lungs and refocusing on the road. The air is halfway between warm and cool, and it smells like caterpillars, which is strangely reassuring. I’m as excited to be out of the Green as I am worried about being in the Grey. Mom gave us her blessing, though, when she kicked us out the door. Since she’s in charge of the Zone, I decide to trust her despite my instincts.

  “It’s like a baby Green Zone,” she’d said excitedly. “With people from Outside.” Outside, we’re told, things are still pretty much the way things were before the Tragedies . . . or, at least, similar enough that you’d expect the Outsiders would want to stay there. That they don’t strikes me as suspicious, but Mom thinks that people giving up their lives to start again in what’s essentially a wasteland is the first sign that we’re on the right track with Greening the Grey. I’d nodded blankly, wary of her enthusiasm. “Henry, it’s like . . . The. Next. Step.”

  That’s when I told her the Outsiders sounded crazy.

  To my surprise, Mom agreed.

  “Oh, they’re definitely crazy,” she’d said, like it was something to be happy about. “They’re a bunch of musicians and artists.” I rolled my eyes, but she just pointed at me with a twirling finger and said, matter-of-factly, “Turn up the music and people’ll start dancing.” And to feed the construction workers and other people coming in from Outside, a few sandwich shops popped up, and then a bar, and—Mom said, thrilling at the thought of it—a place to get a decent cup of coffee.

  “That?” I’d said, noting the happy shiver that ran up her neck when she’d mentioned coffee. “That was the next step?”

  The sun’s in our eyes and the wind’s in our hair as Dad and I ride, anticipating the new and unknown; the hot sandwich on thick, nutty bread Mom promised we’d be able to get on the Other Side. Something to take our minds off of Before.

  Our bicycle baskets are jammed full of as many old records as we could fit, collateral for bargaining in case our Green Zone scrip isn’t accepted on the Other Side. The scrip is basically an official I.O.U. from the city, loose paper rubber-stamped with the city symbol: flowering laurels around a sprouting acorn. Mom has a ton of it because the city pays her in it . . . or more accurately, as acting mayor of the Green Zone, she pays herself in it. It’s the same idea as the cash the rest of the country runs on, but even so, it hasn’t completely caught on in the Zone. When you do try to barter with scrip, it’s hit or miss—some people will take it and some people won’t. Since we don’t know what to expect with the Other Siders, it’s worth a try . . . and we’re looking to unload the records anyway, a sort of psychic cleansing after this morning, so they’re good backup.

  The construction goes on forever—literally, figuratively, forever—and it feels like everything I think I know about the Grey Zone, a ghostly expanse of empty houses and broken hearts, is proven wrong. Men and women in orange vests are everywhere, and they look tough, sure, but a friendly sort of tough, like they have good reasons for doing good work.

  And rebuilding the Grey is definitely good work. Just seeing the workers as we coast through the Grey, chipping away at my fears and expectations with their hammers and crowbars, is enough to erase the melancholy of the morning. I’m riding, smiling at the workers and at the back of Dad’s head, the handlebars from Mom’s bike just barely vibrating in my hands, subtly buzzing with electricity from my mechanical heart.

  And then we reach the bend in the river.

  Downtown was never much for high-rises, so the skyline from this distance isn’t anything to write home about. There are a handful of buildings with marble facades shooting up ten or twelve stories, glinting forlornly in the midday sun, but the most impressive buildings are less than half that tall, built by the Old French and Spanish centuries ago; rows of wrought-iron balconies rimming weather-worn colonial buildings. The kind of creaky places my parents rented in their bohemian post-college years, before they had me. Those fade like memories into the distance, so it’s not the view that stops me.

  It’s just that Downtown, from so far away, looks almost like it did before.

  Like nothing’s happened.

  The Zone was always the heart of the region, and when it went, so did everybody else. Outside of the Other Siders and construction workers, there’re no people for hundreds of miles in any direction from the Green. They all migrated west and east and north, and after that, animals took their places. Alligators, black bears, and swamp panthers. With the exception of us, the state became one big nature preserve, red in tooth and claw.

  But now . . . there’s an aura of activity; a presence that’s been missing for years. I can see it reflected in Dad’s face as he scans the heart of the Grey from the crest of the levee: a long-lost familiarity; a guarded hope. “Race you,” Dad idly challenges, already pedaling toward the ghost of the city by the time I snap out of my thoughts and into the saddle.

  As we near Downtown, the construction noises get louder and louder, metal scraping on metal, cement foundations getting jack-hammered to bits. We had planned on riding directly through it, thinking we’d be safe enough in the middle of all that city-endorsed industry, but the noise is unbearable, so we impulsively decide to take a chance and skirt the construction on side streets. Before I’m able to get my bearings, we’re bouncing on cobblestones beneath a canopy of broad-leafed magnolias, past quiet houses with imagined eyes in every fifth window. Dad seems to know where we’re going, which keeps my confidence up—but all the buildings in this neighborhood still have water marks on their flood-rippled walls, and you can smell . . . not mold, but something musty and alive. It’s almost overpowered by the magnolias above—big white flowers that are almost too sweet-smelling, like they have something to prove. And beneath the fading construction sounds, muffled conversations, the hint of a melody.

  And just like that, the old road T-bones and we’re suddenly clear of Downtown and in the thick of the Other Side: a riot of greens and blues and pinks and reds. Houses in the Zone are mostly white or dirty white—here they’re every color you can think of, sometimes all on the same wall. Everywhere I look, murals and flags, vast swathes of painted tarp and canvas, hang from the buildings on the strip. Some are advertisements for shops inside, like one with a ten-foot tall sandwich eating another, smaller sandwich. The lettering on that one says “Food Eats Cafe,” and the place it’s hanging from smells so toasty and delicious that any misgivings I may have had about the neighborhood melt away like butter in a hot pan as we roll past it.

  “Henry,” Dad calls out, and then again, louder: “Hank!”

  I’ve stopped in front of the restaurant and am staring into the dark interior. I look toward Dad, squinting blankly. He’s pointing at the adjacent wall with his chin: it’s painted with cartoon monsters having a cookout—a happy Frankenstein at the grill, a vampire drinking a lemonade and shooting the breeze with a black-lipped and laughing Cleopatra in a gold-leafed snake tiara.

  I smile and nod in ackn
owledgment as Dad keeps rolling down the street. Even though I want to go into Food Eats with every salivating fiber of my being, I follow, and am quickly distracted by the bubbling life of the Other Side. Any surfaces that aren’t painted are plastered with flyers: show posters, street poetry, and ads for everything from dump truck trash removal to drum lessons. My favorites, though, are flags that are just blocks of color: frayed yellow and turquoise and salmon-pink sheets blowing lackadaisically in the warm summer breeze against a clear blue sky.

  Whatever anyone might call this place, I think, it definitely isn’t grey.

  It’s only after I’ve adjusted to the color that I tune back into the melody, that undercurrent of sound that we’d been subconsciously following since our Downtown detour. I can still hear the pounding construction that’s been the city’s de-facto soundtrack over the past few months, but mixed with that: another, more urgent thumping. Our bikes are pulled toward the noise like divining rods.

  It’s funny: the Other Side can’t be more than five blocks long, and even though there are one million blaring signs that it’s lived in, the street is mostly empty except for the occasional orange-vested construction worker. And they all seem to be either going to or coming from Food Eats.

  As we near the end of the street, it becomes obvious where everyone is. The colorful stretch that is the Other Side ends in a canal or something, previously spanned by a bridge that’s now collapsed in the center. At the apex of the bridge, right before the break: The Sound. And, surrounding it, the Other Siders—a dancing mass of people so incongruously grubby that they almost seem to melt into the muddy banks of the river. We hop off our bikes and walk them toward the crowd, not wanting to look too conspicuous. I nervously straighten the records in my bicycle basket just to be doing something, but no one’s paying any attention to us.

  Everyone’s focused on The Sound, which is coming from three people—a dirty-looking girl on bass and two dirtier-looking guys behind her, one thrashing on a mustard-yellow guitar and the other banging on overturned plastic buckets with heavy-looking drumsticks. The beat is unmistakable—if Dad wasn’t here, I’d be tempted to start dancing—but everything else is too distorted to really make out. The girl is yelling something into a taped-together microphone, and I can sort of tell that the guy on guitar is basically just playing the same note over and over . . . but that’s it. It’s more of a roaring, sonic wave than a song—like they’re somehow playing three different songs at once, and it doesn’t sound good, exactly.

  But it doesn’t sound bad either . . . just interesting.

  After a few minutes I stop trying to make out the specifics and close my eyes, letting myself fully enjoy the experience without distractions. We’re at the intersection of the River and the Other Siders’ canal, so even though it’s the beginning of summer, there’s a cool breeze, and I find myself prickling with goosebumps despite the heat. It could be that my heart’s picking up the current from their amplifiers, which are huge, or it could be one of those perfect moments; either way, as I turn my face toward the sun, I feel an undeniable premonition . . . like something really good is about to happen.

  And then, with a pop and some feedback crackle, the girl unplugs her droning bass.

  My heart sinks. Just a few minutes after we get there and my first concert echoes out into instant nostalgia. I reluctantly open my eyes, confirming my disappointment: the band’s already packing up the stage. Dad’s a few feet away, talking to a woman holding a bouquet of pinwheels, and they must’ve been at it for a while because he’s holding a pinwheel himself. Unstuck from the rest, it spins lazily in his hands while I edge next to them and eavesdrop, wanting to be part of the conversation without really being a part of it. The lady’s telling Dad that the band is called Big Dumb River, and that we shouldn’t feel bad about showing up late because they put on shows pretty regularly, like every other day. She has an irritatingly high-pitched, but kind, voice, and when she offers me a pinwheel, I take it, even though I don’t really want one.

  “Welcome to the Neighborhood,” she squeaks, a one-woman welcoming committee. I shuffle my feet and thank her, feeling weird to be thirteen years old and still hiding behind Dad, who’s holding his pinwheel like it’s a glass of champagne. I pull on Dad’s arm, anxious to break away and do our own thing, but apparently he’s feeling magnanimous because he asks the pinwheel lady if she wants to join us for lunch, our treat, that he’d “consider it an honor.” Thankfully, she just laughs and says that everybody eats free at Foods, at least for the time being.

  “It’s the construction,” she says, sensing our confusion, her pinwheels spinning blue and green. “City’s paying for everything while they’re here. Other Side, brought to you by . . .” She curtseys with fluttering hands and laughs. “But I’ll see you around, I’m sure!”

  She stares expectantly at me, waiting for an unnecessary response, so I mumble that I’m pretty hungry, especially if we’re going to be eating at Foods, and the woman smiles and nods, backing into the crowd as we let ourselves be jostled up the street with the rest of the Other Siders, who—judging by our shared destination—also seem to be pretty hungry.

  On the inside, Foods is about as spartan as you can get: one long wooden counter snaking around the front and side walls of a medium-sized room that has a window to the kitchen at the back. In the center of the restaurant, it’s mainly an eat-standing-up sort of situation, which is what most everyone in there is already doing . . . with varying success. The menu seems to be a cup of coffee and a sandwich, but the sandwiches are so generous and there’s so little counter space that most people—unable to manage both food and drink—have placed their steaming mugs on the already coffee-slick floor as they attack their lunch with both hands. The sound of kicked and crashing coffee mugs punctuates the din of the lunch crowd, so Dad and I are very careful as we pick our way to the back window, where, without comment, a man with tattoos on his neck and a super-villain mustache hands us our sandwiches and slopping mugs of black coffee.

  “Not just popular—it’s mandatory,” an Other Sider behind me jokes as he reaches over my shoulder to grab his own dripping cup.

  Apparently, the way it works at Foods is that everyone gets the same meal. Today: a buttery grilled-cheese sandwich on warm, crusty bread. An entire halved avocado brings the combined height of the thing up to about four inches tall. I’d never had avocado before—the wax-leaved trees grow in the Zone, but never fruit—and after my first creamy bite, I make a promise to myself to come back as often as possible.

  We don’t keep coffee in the house, either, so I’ve never had a chance to try it. From what I understand, it’s the biggest vice I’ll have a chance at for years, so even though Dad teases me that it’s going to taste like egg-water and dirt, I drain it down before I can second-guess myself. It’s not like anything I’ve ever tasted, definitely nothing like the mineral-heavy water in the Zone, sulfurous and rotten-smelling. It’s thick and hot and nutty, and it does taste a little like dirt—but in a hearty, good kind of way I wasn’t expecting.

  I can see myself getting to like this, I think, setting my empty mug down on the sticky floor and starting work on the rest of my enormous sandwich.

  The best part of Food Eats, after the avocado and the sludgy black coffee, is that I get to see all the Other Siders up close and personal. Even just superficially, there are some obvious differences between them and us—which, when I notice them, make me a little self-conscious, although Dad doesn’t seem to mind. For starters, the Other Siders wear all sorts of clothes, but mainly stuff that seems lived in. Like the singer for Dumb River, who bumps into me a few times at Foods: she’s wearing a dress made out of an oversized guy’s tuxedo shirt—a black, frilly button-down belted thickly in the middle—and army boots that go almost all the way up to her knees (although she only has them laced halfway up). I spot the two other guys in the band, and they’re wearing ripped-up, patched-over jeans and variously stained T-shirts that they’ve scrawled
DMBRVR on. The shirts have the sleeves cut off, and the guys are all arms in them. From across the room, it’s hard to tell what’s a tattoo and what’s a grease smudge.

  Everyone else at Foods has something going for them fashion-wise, too. Me, on the other hand—I’m wearing pleated khaki shorts and a plain white shirt, both pressed and looking just like they did the day I got them from the Zone’s uniform supply store. Dad’s wearing the same, which is no accident. It’s not a rule or anything, but City Clothes is convenient and they accept scrip, so most everyone in the Zone shops there.

  I thought we looked fine this morning, but now, for the first time in my life, I realize that Dad and I look like . . . well, dorks. One of the best things about Dad, though, is that he’s pretty much clueless. Which seems like it would be a solid check in the con column, but his complete lack of cool usually has this funny side effect of making him kind of cool. For instance, picture me standing silently in the geometric center of Foods, slowly chewing the last of my grilled cheese and contemplating the cuffs on my khaki shorts with the kind of remorse most people save for funerals. My shirts have sleeves, so I feel regretful about them, too. And my shoes—

  I look down . . .

  My shoes aren’t that bad, actually. Plain black canvas sneakers and a neat double knot. I glance around the cafe and see a few Other Siders wearing them, or similar, and start to feel better about my situation. The shoes are a start. I can build my look from the ground up and . . . I feel Dad’s hand squeeze the back of my neck.

  “This is my son, Henry . . . Hank, this is the band: Tom, Rachel, and over there is—did you say his name was Greg?”