Hunter became Melanie’s life coach. He messaged her at 5 a.m. to make sure she was out of bed and doing her Fiverr jobs before work. She signed back up for all the doubles she could pull and sent Hunter her Pappy’s schedule so he could message her inspirational quotes during her shift.
THE PATH OF MOST RESISTANCE IS THE ONE LEADING UPHILL
She bussed massive trays. She pulled pitchers faster than anyone. She turned tables like a motherfucker.
PAIN IS A FOUR LETTER WORD THE WEAK USE TO GET OUT OF DOING WHAT MUST BE DONE
She popped aspirin. She drank coffee. She rubbed Tiger Balm into her aching wrists.
THROW ME TO THE WOLVES AND I WILL WIND UP LEADING THE PACK
She ignored the guys who pressed their boners against her when the crowd got packed in butt to gut. She smiled at the ones who said, “Smile, beautiful.” She did fake shots with the ones who said, “Dat butt.” She piled up the tips in her bank account. Especially the cash. It was too easy to spend if she kept it at home. She could do this. She was doing this. She had never been more tired. She had never been happier.
Sitting on the couch one Monday, the one day she let herself have off at Pappy’s, she almost didn’t notice how good the graphics were on Greg’s TV. Her head was on his thigh as he played what looked like Call of Duty, but from the future.
“What game is this?” she asked.
“Shockwave: Infinity,” he said.
“Is that new?” she asked.
“Looks rad, right?”
“I thought we weren’t buying anything new,” she said, sitting up.
“I borrowed it from a friend,” Greg said, too quickly. “Stop moving. You’re fucking up my score.”
“Which friend?” she demanded.
He couldn’t even be bothered to lie. He confessed he’d only worked at GameStop long enough to get his employee discount and buy the new Xbox when it came out. That was three weeks ago. When she thought he was going to his shifts, he was getting stoned with his friends. He’d dipped into his account and used the money to make it look like he was still depositing his paycheck into their joint account. He’d opened up a new credit card with a 26 percent APR to buy games. He wasn’t just broke, he was $1,100 in debt.
She screamed. She broke his housemate’s bong. She Frisbee-d the Shockwave disc so hard it left a divot in the kitchen wall. She raged out of the house as his housemates came back from brunch.
“Dude,” they said to Greg as he jogged by them, “she is so on the rag.”
“Are we breaking up?” Greg asked, clueless, through her car window.
It took all her self-control not to back over him as she drove off.
At home, she went into her bedroom and turned off the lights. She blocked Greg’s number on her phone and crawled into bed and felt her life fall apart while her skull filled up with black static. After a while, she could think again. She could take everything out of the joint account. Even paying Greg back his share, she still had almost enough for one person to get on the road. She needed a new transmission if she was driving the Subaru to Las Vegas, but that was only $1,300 if her cousin did it. Greg wouldn’t get out of here, but she would.
She opened Kik. She messaged Hunter:
U STILL HAVE TICKET FOR ME?
After a second her phone pinged back,
2 TICKETS
NO, she messaged. JUST ME.
IF UR DREAMS DON’T SCARE U, he messaged, THEYR NOT BIG ENOUGH
GRETA ULABY: Why stage Hellstock 2019?
TERRY HUNT: I don’t “stage” concerts. Conjuring Koffin requires a magikal working. To perform this ritual, hundreds of hours of labor are sacrificed, structures are built, millions of volts of electricity are routed into sacred spaces. To enter those spaces, worshippers sacrifice the most valuable thing they own: their money. At the appointed hour, on the appointed day, they are led to the correct position. They’ve memorized the chants and they summon their god, losing themselves in a communion where their personalities are subsumed into mine.
GRETA ULABY: There were several incidents of violence by fans on your latest tour. Does that bother you?
TERRY HUNT: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
—90.9 WHYY, “From the Culture Desk”
June 11, 2019
very day at Well in the Woods was like a pharmaceutical commercial: sunny, beautiful, and stress free. Everyone woke up with the sun and journaled for twenty minutes before joining Miranda for sunrise salutations. On the back deck, she led them in breath work and a gentle asana sequence followed by silent mindfulness, and their first Paxator of the day.
That was followed by a healthful breakfast, then the Silent Sunrise Session, then crafting in the Activity Barn, followed by midday’s Learning to Listen. They had picnics in the late afternoon on a sunny meadow deep within the property, throwing a Frisbee, eating tomato sandwiches, drinking iced tea, laughing and talking about their lives. The day ended with Sunset Review, then they got another Paxator and watched the sky darken to lavender, then purple, then black, and walked home while fireflies sparked in the trees.
Everywhere was safe at Well in the Woods because of the cameras nested in the trees, and built into the walls, and concealed inside artificial rocks, roosting on roofs, in showers, under bushes. If a butterfly went somewhere they shouldn’t, an attendant would instantly appear to guide them back. At Well in the Woods, you were never alone.
They had Kris on so many sedatives, mood enhancers, stabilizers, and anxiety reducers she didn’t walk across the grass, she floated. Nothing had sharp edges. Well in the Woods was suspended in a bubble of Now. There was no need to worry, because you always knew what was coming next. They were butterflies, and butterflies lived in the present.
Kris stopped speaking. She never wrote a word in her journal. But otherwise, she went where they told her to go, did what they told her to do. Miranda subjected her to numerous one-on-one encounter sessions, but Kris never said a word. They wondered if she’d had a break. They wondered if everything had been too much and she’d simply shut down. They wondered if she even heard them when they talked to her. Bill wanted to schedule an EEG to see if she showed any brain activity at all.
There was plenty. Inside Kris’s head, all day, every day, she played the album that Terry had never wanted released, the one that scared him so bad he’d buried it down deep. Song by song, chord by chord, note by note, Kris silently reconstructed Troglodyte inside her mind.
The first track on Troglodyte was not actually a song, because no self-respecting metal album ever begins with a song. They all begin with an intro. Sometimes it’s spooky samples over an ambient soundscape, sometimes it’s keyboard swells and distant bells. Some people think intros set the mood. Others think they’re pretentious bullshit.
Dürt Würk fought over the intro like they fought over everything. Scottie said they were fucking bullshit. Kris agreed with him because the frontline sticks together. Bill, though, he was nuts about that intro track. He wouldn’t shut up about it until they gave in and let him make one, as long as it was less than two minutes long. Every night, while the rest of them drank warm beer from the kitchen cooler, Bill headed out into the woods around the Witch House with their portable DAT recorder, and in the morning they’d wake up to find the kitchen sink stuffed with mangled celery stalks, smashed tomatoes, and broken tree branches. Bits of black gaff tape littered the counter where he’d stuck his mic.
He finally unveiled it to them, a densely layered audio collage called “Little Sounds from Underground.” It started with birds in a daylight field and the breeze in the trees before the mic descended into a well, the daylight sounds becoming muffled and fading away, then the sound of digging worms, maggots gnawing corpses, the dead pounding on the lids of their coffins and, far away, the massive creaking of the ever-grinding Wheel. The sound of screaming voices
rose up, and then the audio panned across two channels, going from mono to stereo as the mic entered the massive underground cavern that housed the Wheel. Even Scottie had to admit it was an impressive effect. You could hear millions of slaves chained to its spokes, moaning as they pushed its great weight in a never-ending circle. The sound of their torment got louder and louder, and then came the crashing first notes of “Beneath the Wheel.”
Just to be a jerk, Bill made the intro three minutes long.
“The world is not a complicated place,” Miranda told the group at midday’s Learning to Listen. “It’s actually very simple.”
The nine residents sat in a circle around Miranda. The sun was strong, the grass smelled sweet, and the wind shushed the treetops while Miranda told them the truth about the world.
“Who is right, and who is wrong?” Miranda asked. “What is the value of this thing? What is the value of that thing? What should I be doing with my life? These are the big questions, right?”
The circle nodded.
“Who is right? You are,” Miranda said. “What is the value of something? Most actual things come with a price tag. The more it costs, the more valuable it is. What should you be doing with your life? Whatever feels good.”
People nodded at her wisdom.
“Worry about yourself, don’t worry about people you don’t know,” Miranda said, and everyone smiled because they’d never thought about it like that before. “We like to create crises where we can be the hero. But life is very simple, my butterflies. We don’t need heroes. Take care of yourself. Ignore everything else. Rinse, repeat.”
Kris sat, the way she always did, the same neutral smile on her face, but she didn’t hear Miranda. Inside her skull, she heard Terry singing the opening lines of “Beneath the Wheel.”
History
Is a boot
Smashing your face
Forever
The chords were all magisterial doom-metal tritones, each one a big black slab of sound crashing into the next. She wrote it as a showcase for Terry’s voice, letting his high tenor contrast against the draggy, doomcore opening. He hit a high, clear C note on “crushed” before dropping down the octaves to a Cookie Monster growl for “beneath the wheel.” Tuck’s bass picked up right off the end of his low note, dragging the song forward like a corpse. And so it went, a grinding, repetitive song designed to replicate the eternal grinding of the Wheel.
Eternity
In the mud
Crushed like a bug
Whatever
Born with a squeal
Die where you kneel
All that is real
Crushed
Beneath the wheel
“Accept each day for what it is,” Miranda said, and everyone agreed.
Identity
Scrubbed away
Chemically
Forever
My leprosy
Is all that
Remains of me
Oppressor
“No one is spying on you or controlling your life,” Miranda said. “You are responsible for what happens to you. Only you.”
Imprison me
Underground
Slaves chained
Together
“Focus on the here, focus on the now,” Miranda said. “Forget about the past.”
Born with a squeal
Die where you kneel
How does it feel?
Crushed
Beneath the wheel
After “Beneath the Wheel” came “My Master’s Eye,” the obligatory ballad. No one in Dürt Würk wanted a ballad on Troglodyte because they figured a ballad meant a power ballad with the whole band singing on the chorus, a steel guitar making sad cowboy noises on the bridges, and an acoustic intro full of fake finger scrapes. They were thinking KISS’s “Forever” or Mötley Crüe’s “Without You.” But Kris had taken a glam-metal riff she’d been playing with and fit it to an idea from her notebook to turn “My Master’s Eye” into the darkest and most cynical love song ever recorded.
Everything I do he studies
Everything I do he knows
He watches me wherever I am
He follows me wherever I go
In her head, she heard the band come in on the chorus, all sickly-sweet cynicism.
He has one hundred hands
He has all-seeing eyes
He is all I am
Without him I die and die and die and die and die
Then it went to a solo with Kris fingerpicking an acoustic guitar that sounded like rose petals falling in slow motion, candles burning in a circle around the band, a sincere guitar player sitting on a broken chair inside an abandoned house, filmed in black and white. Terry sang the next verse with his voice trembling on the verge of tears.
My master won’t abandon me
For me there’s no escape
His loving hands leadeth me
He owns my mind, he made its shape
Then the band came in again on the chorus, all soaring swoony vocals, the kind of sound that says “Girl, I’ll always love you forever,” twisted into a message about their total humiliation before the Hundred Handed Eye.
I am deaf and I am dumb
My master calls, I will come
Don’t ask for anything
And one…two…three…four…
I am numb
One evening at sunset, they had a bonfire behind the Witch House and while everyone watched, Miranda presented Kris with her guitar and her Bones, placing them on the ground in front of her.
“How do you feel when you see those things?” Miranda asked.
Kris didn’t say anything. She simply continued her silent smiling. Miranda was starting to get frustrated.
“I know they make you nervous,” Miranda said. “That’s because they tie you to an unhealthy past. They are your chains.”
A white butterfly pulsed on the sleeve of Kris’s Bones. Next to it, her guitar lay on top of its soft case, glowing in the twilight. The guitar that Kris had recorded the original Dürt Würk demo on, the one she’d played on Troglodyte. It made her think of Scottie Rocket and the next song on Troglodyte, the one she gave him as a showcase for all his hyperactive tremolo picking and ascending runs, a song where he could run wild and blow off steam so he’d settle down enough for them to record the other nine tracks.
It was called “Eating Myself to Live.”
“It’s time to move on,” Miranda said. She held out a white plastic bottle of lighter fluid with a red cap. Kris looked at it blankly.
Miranda bent down and picked up Kris’s Bones. “Don’t think,” she said to the group. “Just do.”
The fire feature was an enormous rusty bowl anchored to a concrete pad. Miranda dropped the Bones on the fire and it smothered the flames. The air went dark. The white butterfly floated around Kris’s shoulders, bouncing up and down on an invisible string.
“Be free,” Miranda said.
Then she sprayed the lighter fluid and a blue sheet of flame crawled across Kris’s Bones, the white paint bubbled and split, and the leather dimpled and caught. The flames suddenly surged up to her chest. The heat baked Kris’s face, stretched her skin tight over her skull. Everyone clapped and hugged her. She didn’t resist.
“Next week,” Miranda said, “we’ll burn your guitar.”
Kris thought about Scottie Rocket in this place, chained to the wheel, Miranda and Bill breaking his mind. Sweet, trusting Scottie, twisted into something dark, having that butterfly tattooed onto his calf. She thought about him in the basement, performing one final act of resistance, refusing to hurt anyone but himself, pressing the gun barrel to his own head. Thinking like that almost made her scream, so she thought about what made Scottie happiest, i
nstead: the breakdown on “Eating Myself to Live.” He loved that breakdown the way Slash loved Jack Daniels. He played it all the time, and when they hung around the blood-carpeted living room of the Witch House he kept fingering it on his unplugged guitar while they shot the shit and talked about tomorrow’s session.
The breakdown was where the song dropped tempo until it practically stopped, Kris chugging her guitar with Tuck following on the bass, as Scottie ran all over the place with his chromatic progressions. After giving Scottie almost a minute to deliver fireworks, Terry cut in like a razor as the tempo slowly picked back up.
And everything’s a game
And everyone’s been tamed
And everything’s the same
And everyone’s to blame
And no one wants the pain
The Blind! King! Reigns!
“Poincaré’s Butterfly” was the next song on Troglodyte. Terry didn’t want it because the first half was all soft, trilling runs over the fretboard with echoing, pensive pauses, a rippling fingerstyle opening played by Kris with no pick, just her calloused fingertips, a sudden introspective calm that Terry thought was the equivalent of putting a gun in their mouth on a metal album. But Tuck stuck up for it, which surprised Kris, and that was that.
Bill had come up with the title, taking it from a book called Chaos he was reading about how the world was interconnected and a butterfly flapping its wings in Bombay could cause hurricanes in Boston. Kris studied Mark Knopfler’s fingerstyle for a long time to be able to play what was inside her head, and it had impressed the hell out of Terry. In the basement studio, he’d watched her lay down her track in one take, then quietly stepped up to the mic and gave it everything he had on the vocals, singing in a high sweet falsetto:
Down
We Sold Our Souls Page 11