Dead Set

rehearsal space in this old warehouse off Mission Street and I could hear another bass player practicing in the next room. I never saw who it was, but he or she was a monster. Really beautiful sound. Loud, aggressive, but smart, too, you know? I knew I’d never be able to do that, even if I practiced all day for ten years. I was mediocre and that’s all I’d ever be and I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life being second rate.”

“That must have been hard.”

“It wasn’t fun. On the other hand, if I had been good I’d have been on the road all the time living out of a van and I’d never see you or your mom.”

“So, lucky us you sucked.”

“Lucky us,” her father said. He stopped for a minute to stare at a worn copy of Fun House by Iggy and the Stooges. “Okay, here’s a philosophical question for you, is Sonic Youth punk?”

Without hesitation Zoe said, “Hell yes. Yeah, they played noisy avant-garde and stuff, but they did it punk, so yeah. They’re in the club.”

Her father smiled without looking at her. “You only say that because you want to be Kim Gordon when you grow up.”

“Or a cowboy. I haven’t ruled that out yet.”

“I’m not sure your mom would let you keep a horse in the backyard.”

“I won’t tell if you won’t.”

“It’s our secret,” said her father.

Zoe sat on the sofa, alone in the apartment. Do I go back to school or hide here and watch TV all day? she thought. Neither. Both options were too depressing to seriously consider. She put on a ripped Clash T-shirt that she’d bought at a garage sale for fifty cents and went out.

Zoe walked along Ellis Street in the opposite direction of the school, turned north after a few blocks, and kept walking, heading nowhere at all, just killing time. She walked with her hands in her pockets and her head down, not even looking where she was going, only glancing up at streets corners so cars creeping through the red lights wouldn’t mow her down.

She’d been walking for about half an hour and guessed she was somewhere along the edge of North Beach. Up ahead was an old shop with rusting metal grates over nearly black front windows. A hand-painted sign on the side of the shop said AMMUT RECORDS. RARE, USED amp; LOST.”

Zoe went to the windows and peered in. The glass was so dark and dirty she wasn’t sure if the place was open or had been abandoned years ago. But there was a dingy little sign in the front door that said COME IN. Zoe pushed and the door opened smoothly, without even a squeak.

Inside, the shop was cool and the air was pleasant, not musty like she’d been expecting. There weren’t any lights on, so the place was lit by the little sun that streamed in through the dirty windows. But it was enough. Torn and dusty posters for bands that were old before Zoe was born were thumbtacked to the walls. There were rows and rows of bins, all full of battered vinyl LPs. Zoe had always found something mysterious about the old records stacked in her parents’ closet. It made no sense to her that dragging a needle across a flat black piece of plastic could make all the music they’d grown up with and loved. When she was six, someone had explained to her that the grooves on the LPs were really little hills and valleys and that the needles made music from bouncing through them. One day when she learned that her fingerprints were little hills and valleys, she got a sewing needle and dragged it across her fingers. All it did was draw blood. Lesson learned. People weren’t records. Records were.

“Hello,” came a deep voice. Zoe looked around and saw someone standing behind a counter near the door. The man was tall and completely bald. His skin was very pale. His forehead was high and smooth because it looked like he didn’t have any eyebrows. It made him look a little like E.T., Zoe thought.

“Can I help you, young lady?” the man said.

“Are you Am. .?”

The man smiled. “It’s a tricky name to say right,” he said, and came around from behind the counter. “Just call me Emmett. All my friends do.” He extended his hand and Zoe shook it.

She couldn’t begin to guess his age. When Emmett turned his head one way, the shadows on his face made him look eighty. When he turned another way, he looked twenty. But she was sure that he couldn’t be that young. His skin was strange. Smooth and stretched a little too tight, like Laura’s aunt’s face. She got Botox injections all the time and Laura said that she’d had about fifty face-lifts. Emmett didn’t seem like the face-lift type, but who knew?

“What lovely eyes you have,” he said. “Like a cat’s.”

“My mom used to say that all the time,” said Zoe.

“Your mother is a smart woman.”

Zoe nodded, not because she agreed but because she didn’t want to talk about it with some guy she just met.

“Is there something I can help you find? We don’t get many customers your age.”

“I was just going by,” said Zoe. “I don’t want to buy anything.”

Emmett waved a hand to the records. “That’s all right,” he said. “Look around. Maybe you’ll find something for next time.”

Zoe walked to the closest bin. It was so stuffed with ragged old records that they barely budged when she tried to flip through them. A plastic hand-lettered divider read TRAD JAZZ.

“Do you have any punk?” Zoe asked.

“We don’t carry new releases, you know. No Green Day kind of stuff,” said Emmett.

“I like the old bands,” said Zoe.

“Good girl,” said Emmett. He pointed. “Over against that wall.”

Zoe went to where he indicated and found the “Punk” divider. The bin wasn’t as crowded as the jazz section but it was just as beaten up. The first record was Frankenchrist by the Dead Kennedys, a San Francisco band her parents had played a lot when she was in elementary school. There were other records she recognized from the old house, now boxed up and put in storage like baby clothes and furniture no one liked in the first place. Toward the back of the section, Zoe found a single by the Cramps that looked familiar. She looked at the back and saw her mother’s name at the bottom. She’d designed the cover.

Zoe put the record back and wandered through the rest of the store, running her hands along the smooth wooden bins and across the tops of the disintegrating cardboard LP covers.

“Why is it so dark in here?” she asked.

From behind the register Emmett looked up from a book. “It hurts my eyes,” he said. “I can see fine like this. If you can’t, I can turn some light on.”

“No. That’s okay,” she said. Emmett went back to whatever he’d been reading.

At the back of the store was a beaded curtain and printed across it was a burning heart encircled by thorns. Zoe could see more record bins beyond the curtain. She looked around, and when she didn’t see an “Employees Only” sign she pushed her way through.

The back room was different from the rest of the shop. It was brighter, but in a soft and diffuse way, like sun through water, though Zoe didn’t see any lights on the walls or ceiling. The room had a thick smell, like burning pine. She followed the scent and found an incense burner in one corner. It was a chipped ceramic volcano. Dark lumps, like brown sugar, burned at the bottom and smoke curled out the volcano’s cone at the top.

Zoe circled the record bin. There weren’t any plastic dividers saying what kind of records these were. She picked up a couple of LPs at random. They didn’t have regular covers with a picture and the name of the band. Instead, they were wrapped in coarse brown paper printed with strange symbols that reminded her of the Egyptian hieroglyphics she’d seen in the mummy program. Some records only had a few symbols, while others were almost covered with them. Zoe slipped one of the records from its case to check the label, careful to touch only the edges of the disc the way her father had taught her. The record didn’t have a label. It was the strangest record Zoe had ever seen.

The disc wasn’t black, but milky white and translucent, shot through with a spidery red-and-blue web work