Accord Progression
by Douglas A. Martin
1.
My sister stood out in the yard with the rhythmic ribbon, the cassette tape playing on the machine we shared, one for everyone in the family, telling her what to do next.
Not a real boombox, too small to be considered a ghetto blaster, but with the recording part, I am able to take apart measures of beats, stopping a sample before any lyrics come in, copying over to the other side on a Memorex or something else I am taping over, making a quilt of sound.
These were going to be my own tracks. I start the music back after a click-released pause.
2.
I am in the cab of my stepfather’s parked truck, key just turned on for the radio tape deck.
To be friends with him, my best friend Angel (only friend really) has given me a bootleg recording, the singer I know. Her songs were still English, but Chinese characters of writing on the paper folded up inside the tape’s clear case to make the cover and booklet.
Angel wants a girl like my sister, and he wants to give her a necklace with a small spiral shell tipped in gold soldered somehow to a little loop that could slip onto a chain to be worn around her neck.
At the end of the video for the song, the singer climbs up into someone’s old truck. I want to try to get my voice like hers. A story is a shape that takes place in time. But we are living in a pornographic world.
3.
Eventually, Angel was going to disappear, and so would they who I have moved on to after him, giving me this some other thing to try to imitate before I myself was more gone from there, off in a dorm room trying to block out all surrounding sound with my music, a voice quiet enough that listening to it guide helps me dream something more soft-spoken.
4.
I had waited until the living room where the only screen was then emptied of mother, stepfather, my sister long already in bed.
“Sit down, relax. We will begin,” instructed the voice in the videocassette’s opening scene. They took turns taking it, zipped out of a duffle bag books went in, everyone in the row where there was an empty seat for me if I wanted to come to that side of class. They were passing it around quietly. I could have it next, if I wanted, and we could talk all about.
Dr. I. B. Brown is how the character introduces himself, pipe put back in his mouth, I hear though I have the sound accompanying the image that comes out of the plastic shell slipped in so low, barely up from all the way down, sound that soon will be nothing but moaning, more varied than the plaintive repeat in jokey sex songs whether versions “nasty” or “clean.” My ears getting warmer, I have to decide to look or hear, before I find my arrangement away from there.
I heard it putting the rose shell of my ear up against the old television’s one speaker, while VCR played, kept pausing tape running between the two spools, anytime it seemed I heard another movement in the night of that quiet house.
With works spanning fiction and nonfiction, poetry and prose, Douglas A. Martin has published ten books, including Outline of My Lover, named an International Book of the Year in The Times Literary Supplement and adapted in part for the multimedia live film ballet, Kammer/Kammer. Douglas’s most recent title, Wolf, creates narrative meditation around a sensationalized case of patricide and has been called "an anti true crime novel."