Cold…

Part I: Recall

NORRIS swivels around in his computer chair after carefully laying his acoustic guitar to rest in its custom-molded stand. The glow from his massive computer monitor daubs at the curvatures of his face. It is a Sunday evening before the advent of a work-laden week, and he has resolved to make a quick check of his profile before going to bed. He chisels his password into the requisite field on the screen, pummeling the shallow aluminum keyboard with the pestles of his fingers. In but a fragment of a second, he has stepped forth into the next chamber of virtual social interaction. Immediately, his eyes lock on to two hieroglyphics, which are set into the right-hand side of the maroon-colored bar situated atop the page: the anonymous silhouette of some anthropoid being and a fast-and-loose representation of the terrestrial globe. Superimposed above both of these arcane markings are blue speech bubbles, which contain not words but numbers. Low ones.

NORRIS: I guess no one loves me today…

NORRIS takes a moment to savour the fact of any notifications whatsoever before clicking on the messenger icon. None of his incoming communications are terribly enticing — the latest entry to appear in his perpetual group chat is nothing more than the image of a tepid and forlorn youth draped in a baggy prom suit, likely pilfered from the closet of his absentee father. The youth’s face is a crustacean armor of acne. His hands have vanished into the deep wells of his father’s pants pockets and his back is miserably hunched. At the bottom of the image, printed in a bold, Gothic Copperplate font, are the words: “Liar’s Club”

NORRIS: [muttering to himself with a grim air of self-satisfaction] Heh, who’s this chump?

NORRIS sighs and leans back in his chair, turning his head to look out of his window at the setting sun. The wispy muslin curtain draped over the glass has transmuted the objects of the outside world — trees, houses, wooden fencing, even the sun itself — into conglomerate sculptures of compacted ash. The warmth of the solar orb continues to die at the passing of each second. The skin and musculature of NORRIS’s face appear to loosen from the moorings of his skull as he toys with his baristo’s name tag and allows his gaze to fall upon a mountain of guitar picks, heaped with a nimbus of mold, which shackles them to the windowsill.

Then he returns to his profile, his features taking the shape of a reasonably pleasant and positive human being once more. This time, he selects the notification icon, which promises him only one acknowledgement of his existence in this crippled world. But it turns out that this is no response to some devilishly clever comment he has left on a picture; no commemorative tagged post composed by one of his loose acquaintances, recalling a sincere and intimate friendship to which NORRIS has been the supreme contributor. Instead, it is one of those completely irrelevant reminders to catch up on a post bearing not even the slightest relationship to his own online activity, “in case he’s missed it.”

Knowing not what else to do with his hands, or with the precious durations of his short life, NORRIS clicks on the notification anyway, after which an image with poor resolution dominates his screen. It is a selfie taken by an individual whom NORRIS has held repressed at the periphery of his consciousness since the sixth grade…

NORRIS: What?… Gavin Jager?… There’s no way…

In the selfie, GAVIN stands before an American flag thumbtacked to the otherwise plain and sullied wall of a college dormitory. His posture possesses an air of unearned confidence. He is wearing a cotton tank-top, under which his rounded shoulders evoke the fatted cuts of a butchered cow, soon to be commended to an open-pit Bar-B-Q tank. As a result of the angle at which he has tilted his head toward his phone camera, his skull box resembles a dense and pendulous egg, across the entire breadth of which a bloodless smile cuts its paraboloid outline. His hair is an obnoxious scrim, buzzed flush with his scalp. His doughy features are hemmed in by a pair of generic thick-rimmed glasses. But perhaps most maddening… most likely to generate the first twinges of a homicidal ideation… is the caption with which GAVIN has adorned this horrific image: “New Look, New Me!”

NORRIS: [muttering to himself in catatonic disbelief] Christ… I haven’t even thought of Gavin since… since I was twelve. Ugh… who does he think he is?… A plague is stalking the streets and… a-and he just posts about how he’s been shirtless for days? Like, how do peons just fail to know what cool is? His best contribution to the world was putting on this tank-top. He could have posted a shirtless photo, but he held back… right…

How, after more than a decade of its uploader’s psychological non-existence, can GAVIN’s post have been the only notification lying in store for NORRIS today? The truth lies within a most awful synchronicity, which causes the vessels cloaking the bones of NORRIS’s hands to swell and throb: a woman, nominally friends with NORRIS on his profile, with whom he has been obsessed for years and who has not given him the time of day every time he has made an attempt to approach her, has commented on GAVIN’s picture with the words, “Looking good, Gav’!”

NORRIS: Not on your life, you formless wretch!

NORRIS clicks over to GAVIN’s profile as his eyes begin to bulge out of their sockets and cease to blink, growing red with a lack of lubricant. It takes him no more than a few seconds to discover that, not only has GAVIN won the casual favor of NORRIS’s most coveted desire, but that he is also an aspiring, yea, even prolific musician! With quivering index finger, NORRIS presses the play button on a shared video containing one of GAVIN’s freshly recorded singles, ceremonially released and tremendously burdened with a galaxy of likes and comments…

[The song “You’ll Be Cold Tonight” plays all the way through at full volume]

Lyrics:

You’ll be cold tonight,

You shall never see the light,

Though you’ll try to with all your might,

It just won’t feel right.

I see you… I see you… I see you…

Tonight

You’ll be chilled tonight,

In a darkness full of spite,

A sarcophagus seems about right

To cut you off from the light.

I see you… I see you… I see you…

Tonight

The song is configured, as per Gavin’s premeditated settings, to play on an unending loop. And, indeed, it rings more than once through the blank hollow of NORRIS’s bedroom. In fact, it is not until the sun has begun to emerge once more from the shadowed treeline beyond his bedroom window that NORRIS becomes aware of himself and his surroundings. The alarm on his phone blares and vibrates epileptically, falling from the edge of his desk onto his lap. Under his grey hand, the sleek, modernist sculpture comprising his computer mouse is fractured in several places as the result of a consistent, violent pressure. NORRIS wipes at his stinging eyes, catching the moisture of several hours’ pouring forth of tears on the back of his wrist, and affixes his nametag to his shirt before stumbling through the front door of his apartment to his car outside.

Part II: Gestation

The time is 7:30 a.m. The engine of NORRIS’s frail vehicle has sputtered to life no more than ten minutes ago and is now knocking around in the metal cavity before his knees, continuing to function on its own momentum. A curtain of dew is constantly swiped away from the windshield by wipers, each time revealing the exsanguinated environment that borders the road on either side. Though it is mid-October, the canopies of trees, as well as grass framed by parking lots and fractured curbs, are already withering away. There are no pedestrians on the sidewalk. The only trace of human activity to be found is a discarded black-and-fuchsia weave tossed onto the yellow painted border of the turning lane in the middle of the street, which lies coiled up like a dormant copperhead.

NORRIS hardly manages to breathe through a tightly-knit cotton mask, which sends plumes of his own humid respiration up into his eyes, fogging up a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles for which no wipers exist. This does not dissuade him from leaning heavily on his gas pedal. At this rate, he will arrive at the Java Juga Coffee Shack over half an hour before his shift begins. 

Save for himself, there are no other drivers on the road at this hour. And NORRIS’s commute has proven just lengthy enough to allow the silence to eat at him. This only lasts for a few moments, however, before he begins mentally to recreate the injurious tones of the song to which he has just been listening for more than nine hours straight. 

NORRIS: Cold… 

[Ragged snatches of GAVIN JAGER’s “You’ll Be Cold Tonight” begin to merge in and out of the noise background, heavily distorted and processed with a gaudy amount of reverb — occasionally playing in reverse and interspersed with even more menacing lyrics that were not present in the original song]

The lustful discord of GAVIN’s untrained vocals transport NORRIS to a time he has utterly redacted from his memory, perhaps intentionally. He is no longer sitting in the driver’s seat of a pathetic early-millenium family car. Instead, he inhabits his twelve-year-old body, which sits slumped over a wooden picnic table behind Fountasia Arcade and Bumper Boats. He is at a birthday party with a modest gathering of other boys his age. They are all here, held at a sort of punitive gunpoint by their well-meaning parents, to celebrate the day upon which GAVIN JAGER was born. And here he sits, at the head of the table in his own special canvas camping chair brought out from the trunk of his parents’ van, flapping his arms more than he probably should as a demonstration of his excitement over a meager molehill of gifts.

GAVIN: Okay, guys. Get ready! I’m going to open my presents from all of you, one at a time, and very, very slowly. Get your cameras out!

GAVIN does as he has warned, working his sweaty, inflamed fingers under the vacuum-sealed seam of a cellophane wrapper, containing the large, rattling cardboard box of an outdated computer game which NORRIS’s parents have picked up from a discount department store on the way to dropping him off at Fountasia: “Slugs 3D.” 

GAVIN: Wow, I’ve been wanting to play this game since it came out four years ago! But I didn’t do enough chores, enough yard work, you know, mowing the grass. But I sure have it now! Right, mom and dad?

GAVIN’s parents, a weathered-looking couple with jaundiced eyes cloaked in an insomniac stain of deep purple, sit off to the side of him, apparently leaning against each other for balance. The father has the long collars of his indefinitely hued beige-olive outdoors jacket pulled up, so that his face is obscured from the nose down. His corroded irises slide over toward his wife, who lifts her wooly head to regard him. Neither of them either speak or acknowledge their son.

GAVIN: Heh, hey, Norris! This was a great gift, man! I call dibs on the bazooka and the napalm grenades! Hahaha! When do you wanna come over to my place and slug it out on the surface of a petrified cheese moon? Hah! I’ll turn you into slug slime. But are you doing anything after this? We can go right to my place…

NORRIS begins to feel the grease of the pizza and french fries he has devoured for lunch commingling in his stomach with a disintegrating slice of GAVIN’s birthday cake and devolving into a sour mash. He attempts to steer his eyes away from the birthday boy, lifting his blurring gaze across the wafting hillocks of the putt-putt course over to the stagnant and disused terraced pools, housing tarnished yellow bumper boats, whose bladders are slightly deflated and stained with an unusual carmine algae. 

GAVIN: Norris! Over here, buddy! I like your present the best! Sure, these little Homeboys figurines are cool — thanks Marcus! — and I looooove this deck of Slimebag Children cards — nail on the head, Hank! But, Nor! Slugs 3D is the crown jewel of this birthday haul. Hey, Norris, look at me. Love this thing, buddy! It will work perfectly with the new sound card I just had installed last week!

Each of these words has pelted NORRIS’s ears to devastating effect. He begins to feel palpitations of the heart as icy rivulets of sweat course from his armpits, down the slight indentation of his underdeveloped biceps, and accumulate at the creases of his palms, where they separate from his flesh and are immediately absorbed into the wooden planks of the tabletop. The three other kids sitting at the table cautiously rise and begin to depart as a group, increasing their distance from GAVIN and his moribund parents with measured steps. GAVIN’s eyes flicker over the corner of the building as they disappear behind it, and it is only for this fleeting instant that his unfaltering, explosively bright grin is corrupted, inverting into what can only be described as a gaping frown. 

GAVIN: Heh, well… I guess they had a little bit too much soda! Some kids just can’t hang. Isn’t that right, Norris? Haha! No matter. It’s just me and you now! And I’ve been saving a special performance for just this moment of the party! I’ve prepared my first song from a little bit of a… concept album I’ve been coming up with on my karaoke machine at home… I call it: “Lifescars.” Wanna hear it?

NORRIS’s soul drops to the pit of his sweat-saturated tennis shoes, evaporating along with the moisture. His parents have militantly refused to pick him up before six o’clock this evening — a gulf of time away. 

NORRIS: Uh… s-sure… Let’s hear it, Gavin.

GAVIN: Okay! Get settled, now, because this is shaping up into a real ballad! 

[GAVIN breathes in the requisite amount of air in order to belt out a crowing first note, which screeches in the background, dampened and melting into the ambience of the desolate amusement park: the odd putt-putt ball being struck with a rubber-coated club, the sound of wind rushing through the trees, birds calling to each other, brackish water from the bumper boat arena, lapping against the walls of the tank containing it, the very faint sound of traffic from the interstate just beyond the building, whispering a steady condemnatory curse of car exhaust and burned-out tires]

At this moment, for the first time in the course of the entire birthday party, GAVIN’s father makes eye contact with NORRIS. The desperate plea radiating therein causes NORRIS’s eyes to water, dissolving the clarity of the concrete patio, the slabbed glass windows of Fountasia’s back facade. He detects the movement of the father’s hand in the pocket of his outdoors jacket, maneuvering, fumbling with… something. And at the very last moment, he hears a notable and quite familiar mechanical sound… The ratcheting of a hammer, belonging to a lovingly maintained blued-steel .38 caliber semi-automatic pistol…

[The sound of a gun slide ratcheting back is melded with the sound of a cash register slamming open; ambient cafe noises]

It is now past 3:00 p.m. in the evening. NORRIS is standing at the cash register, having unknowingly opened it for no discernable reason. The cafe is completely unpopulated with the exception of himself and his co-barista, SYLVIA. She is standing between a brushed-steel art deco wine rack and a deck of small plastic drawers, containing whole roasted coffee beans of various extractions. She is emaciated, very reminiscent of a bird, and quite likely composed of equally hollow bones. Her arms are crossed over her lime-green T-shirt and she is scrutinizing NORRIS with hard, hateful eyes, which glower over the caul of her filtered mask.

SYLVIA: What’s going on with you? You’ve been catatonic all day, Norris. Hello? You’re creeping me out, dude.

NORRIS: [coming back to his senses] … What? … Oh, yeah. Sorry. I… didn’t get much sleep last night.

SYLVIA: Uh, yeah? I can see that. You’ve been staring out the front windows at the parking lot your whole shift. I’ve been doing everything for you. Do you need to, like, go home or something? 

NORRIS: No, no… that’s… alright. I just… had a weird experience last night. I’m just trying to get over it. I think I can ride this out.

SYLVIA: Alright, dude. Just snap out of it, okay?

SYLVIA turns away for a moment to check her phone. NORRIS sees the radiant gleam of her screen streaming over her shoulder from the gloom of the mop closet. Judging from the general color pattern there, she has just logged into her profile and is scrolling through recently minted posts. NORRIS rises on the balls of his feet ever so slightly in order to see whose posts she is perusing, hoping to make out his own features amidst the creeping parade of doctored images. Just forty-eight hours earlier, he shared his own recently-recorded single — a meticulously engineered acoustic number, embroidered with synthesized horns and somnambulant, pensive lyrics. He has been waiting for acknowledgement of this achievement to pour in, and at this moment the hairs on the back of his neck are standing on end. 

But it is not the dulcimer reverberations of his honeyed guitar strings which he hears suddenly buzzing in her phone speakers. Nay… it is a melody of an entirely different sort… Now all too familiar…

[The very first line of GAVIN’s “You’ll Be Cold Tonight” plays before fading into a seemingly endless reverb]

Part III: Ideation

Two days have passed since NORRIS’s last shift at the Java Juga Coffee Shack. In the intervening forty-eight hours, he has hardly moved from his bed. He is lying there now, still fully dressed, with his leather shoes tied firmly to his feet. The fabric of his jeans is fused to his sheets with a petrified adhesive of urine and faeces. Faint tracks of salt — a testament to evaporated tears — trail from the corners of his eyes to the receding border of hair at his temples, and what at first appears to be an oddly tinted five-o’-clock shadow is revealed on closer inspection to be a translucent layer of vomited bile, which has dried to a speckled film, coating his cheeks, chin, and neck. His fully dilated eyes rest unblinking upon the featureless ceiling directly above him. 

Across the narrow span of his room, his computer blazes with a demonic blue light, casting expressionistic shadows across NORRIS’s sepulchral face. The computer has been on for as long as he has been home, playing GAVIN’s song without respite. 

[“You’ll Be Cold Tonight” begins to play, more distorted and processed than we have heard it yet thus far, with even more menacing and disjointed lyrics that were not initially present upon NORRIS’s first listening. There should be a molten mix of demonic commands, short periods of dead silence, snatches of static, unintelligible desperate whispering, the twang of badly tuned guitar strings, etc. But keep the song to an ambient volume throughout this entire act.]

NORRIS has long ceased responding to these aural stimuli. Within the first fifty play-throughs of the song, its amateur melody has entirely vanished for him, blending into the ambient background of his grey, carpeted chamber. Now, the only movement he seems capable of is a mild rocking motion of the head. 

But his trance is broken when he hears the sound of a new messenger notification wrenching through his computer speakers…

[Some horrific messenger ping — this is NOT what notifications should sound like by any stretch of the imagination]

With a lax effort, stirring his soiled limbs, NORRIS unglues himself from the mattress and staggers over to the desk, where he collapses into his chair. 

[Capture the sound of something coated in a starchy, dried glue-like substance being swiftly torn off of a bedsheet; unsteady, hammering footsteps; falling into a rickety old computer chair; heavy breathing]

At the bottom of his profile screen, the maroon title bar of a chat log is flashing. GAVIN JAGER has written a message to him. For a moment, all NORRIS can do is gape at his monitor. He is not even friends with GAVIN, nor has he ever been — neither in the world of flesh, nor in the world of internet voyeurism. And yet, here, scrawled in pixels upon this unrelenting panel of electric luminescence, are GAVIN’s words… addressed to… him…

[You should accompany this segment of chat dialogue with intermittent typing noises]

GAVIN: Hey Norris!

Unsure whether he can even bring his fingers to manipulate his keyboard, NORRIS types a hesitant response, beyond any capacity he may have previously possessed to ignore such a communication…

NORRIS: Uh… hey…

GAVIN: Where are you right now, Norris? 

NORRIS: I’m… home. 

GAVIN: What is your street address?

NORRIS: I’d… rather not say… 

GAVIN: Okay! You can tell me that later. Oh, hey, Norris!

NORRIS: … Yeah?

GAVIN: Do you like Slugs 3D, Norris?

As GAVIN’s messages continue to spill into the chat box in a manner reminiscent of rapid machine-gun fire, NORRIS experiences a wave of vertigo and, through the dismembered haze of “You’ll Be Cold Tonight,” begins to hallucinate the sounds of his interlocuter’s pale, worming fingers on the keyboard, his rubescent jowls filling up with saliva as he masticates handful upon handful of store-brand honey BAR-B-Q chips. NORRIS even begins to visualise GAVIN’s protruding breasts, arrayed on the plastic folding table he uses for a computer stand. NORRIS can see GAVIN’s opaque obsidian eyes, scanning the screen methodically, awaiting the transformation of the pulsing ellipsis at the bottom of the chat box into a colored bubble full of words, like a dessicated reptile of the wastes that awaits the nocturnal hatching of a moth from its chrysalis.

[every time you read GAVIN’s side of the exchange, read it through a mouthful of chips, while rifling through the chip bag with your hand off in the background. Be sure to record plenty of muffled vocal satisfaction; and take the grotesquery of this detail as far as your stomach will allow.]

NORRIS: I… I’ve never really played it…

GAVIN: Neither have I! What a weird coincidence, Norris! Do you remember how you gave it to me for my twelfth birthday? It was my favorite gift! But you never played it with me. No one has ever played it with me… Not even once! And I’ve asked hundreds of people!

NORRIS: Huh… I wonder why… You can try Slugs Online, can’t you?

GAVIN: No one will play with me on that either. Even on the servers that pair you up with random people online. They exit the game immediately when they see my name. I think everyone who tries to play ends up having internet connection issues. Weird, huh, Norris?

NORRIS: Yeah… Maybe call the hotline… 

GAVIN: Do you want to play Slugs 3D with me, Norris? I can come over with the game and pop it into your disk drive! I still have it in the original box it came in when I received it as a gift from you!

NORRIS: I, uh… can’t, really. I… have to go to work in about an hour…

GAVIN: But, Norris! You haven’t been to work for two days straight! I’ve been hanging out in the parking lot outside, waiting to see if you would play Slugs 3D with me. But nope! You never showed! That’s okay, though, Norris. I can just come to where you live to play the game with you.

Suddenly, a wave of heat ripples down the entire length of NORRIS’s limpid body. He sits up a little straighter in his chair and begins to grind his teeth.

NORRIS: What were you doing at my place of work? I haven’t seen you or even so much as looked at your profile in over a decade.

GAVIN: Oh, it’s fine, don’t worry. I was just working on a project recently that made me think of you. It’s a new album I’m crafting. Well… not really new. It’s actually something I’ve been sitting on for a really long time — I told you about it at my twelfth birthday party. It’s called: “Lifescars.” 

NORRIS: “Lifescars”… Doesn’t ring a bell… But that still doesn’t explain why you came to my workplace… or even how you found it…

GAVIN: I wouldn’t worry about that, Norris. You can find just about anything on the internet these days. No biggie! But really what got me thinking about you was my work on this album. I’ve been putting out songs on my profile recently, maybe you’ve heard a couple. But then I remembered that you, too, have always sort of thought of yourself as a musician, and I figured: “Hey, maybe I can bounce some of these ideas off of my best friend, Norris!”

NORRIS’s grip begins to tighten around his already ruptured computer mouse, further pulverising its carapace. In his chest, his heart begins to thrum. Sweat sprouts up on his forehead and neck. His eyes are bulging an alarming distance past the rims of their orbits. 

NORRIS: No, I AM a musician. Let’s get that straight first and foremost. And, quite frankly, I couldn’t care less about these little karaoke sessions you’re recording on “Voice Recorder” in your basement. Your voice is atrociously out of tune and your playing is rudimentary at best. Don’t flatter yourself, you flopping waste.

For the first time since the chat has begun, GAVIN hesitates in his reply, evidently taking several seconds to compose his words.

GAVIN: Thanks, Norris! That really means a lot! I’ve been getting a lot of great feedback from my awesome fans on my profile. You see, when I write music, it’s coming from the soul. Sometimes it’s more upbeat and makes you want to dance. Sometimes it’s slower and makes you want to pop open a cold one and relax and just listen, Norris. As long as you are touched or inspired by it, I feel like what I love to do is meaningful to others besides me. Without people like you standing in the crowd and cheering me on, it would all feel like a big waste of time. Don’t get me wrong. I would still write, play, and have fun, but it wouldn’t be as meaningful, Norris!

NORRIS: I’ve been listening to your bullshit song for days on end. It’s pathetic! It lacks rigor! You don’t deserve any praise for this slapped-together trash! And meanwhile, I slave and hone my craft. I pick the nickel-coated strings of my guitar until I’ve dyed its veneer with a watercolor abstraction of my own personal blood! I’ve deleted more songs in a year out of a fastidious sense of self-censorship than you have ever recorded in your entire life! And you think you have “awesome fans?!” You, Gavin, are the SWINE of the singer-songwriter community, and you belong in a deep, deep grave. 

Again, GAVIN hesitates in his response. In fact, his words fail to appear for several minutes. NORRIS is now trembling with such extremity that the plastic wheels of his chair have begun to dig furrows past the carpet into the plywood flooring underneath, raising minute piles of sawdust in their vicinity. But, finally, a response appears in the chat box:

GAVIN: Okay, Norris. I’ll see you tomorrow!

Part IV: Katabasis

NORRIS is back in his car, racing across a municipal bridge on the way to “Agoria’s,” the regional chain of premium fresh food markets which are prevalent in the town of Groever, Georgia. The whites of his eyes appear to have gone a deep yellow, and the borders of his irises have begun to widen and split, as if some internal pressure is impinging upon the aqueous humour inside. Around his mouth, whose previous film of bile has begun to flake off like a healing sunburn, tufts of a greenish, dust-like substance are clinging to what has now actually become a five-o’-clock shadow. If one were to trail along the reckless tracks of his current route, following them back to the front door of his home (flung ajar), and into his bedroom, one would find a cataclysmic scene: his beloved guitar reduced to jagged splinters with a ball-peen hammer; a still-smoking cauldron of cotton and polyester slag sunken into the middle of his mattress, which NORRIS has attempted to destroy with a small plastic lighter; The caved-in aluminium shell of his gigantic computer, wedged between the back of his desk and a cradle of mutilated drywall; and, upon the windowsill nearby, where previously there had been a stack of neglected guitar picks, colonized by an amorphous halo of inexplicable mold growth, nothing remains, save for a miniscule pool of saliva, a fork, and a spoon. 

NORRIS now coasts up to a stop light, only just capable of willing his foot off of the gas pedal until the drooping semaphore above him blazes green once again. He is trembling so violently that drivers in neighboring lanes are unable to see him sitting in the driver’s seat of his battered black hatchback. Instead, they see a blurred column sitting upright behind the steering wheel, which suggests the vaguest hint of flesh. But from NORRIS’s perspective, he can see his hand raised before his face, holding his smartphone. He is following GAVIN’s daily story as it unfolds on his profile, and has triangulated his position to an Agoria’s just a quarter-mile away from his house. GAVIN is putting on a self-appointed “community spotlight” for his new album in the produce section, next to the deli station and the flower alcove. Every few minutes, another thirty-second clip appears on his profile, showing a segment of one of his live songs from the vantage point of a camera affixed to the neck of his guitar. Each time his hammy, yet strangely pale fingers hook themselves onto a shuddering guitar string, NORRIS spasms in his seat, rocking the vehicle on its suspension system. The traffic light goes green, and NORRIS peels off…

In the Agoria parking lot, he leaps out of the driver’s-side door before the car has come to a full stop, neglecting to put it in park. The vehicle’s worthless grille crunches softly against the chromium bumper of a brand new pick-up truck in the opposing spot as NORRIS sprints around to the passenger side, opening the door and removing a pistol from the floorboard. NORRIS has never been a defender of gun ownership and, therefore, has never owned a gun. No, this Beretta 92FS with matte coyote-brown finish and modular under-barrel rail, affixed with laser sight, was once a prized component of his next-door neighbor’s small arsenal. But now it is in NORRIS’s hands, already dappled in a fine mist of someone else’s blood. 

Already in the vestibule, shattering his shins against a protruding column of shopping carts, NORRIS can hear the cursed tones of GAVIN’s set. As he darts toward the produce plaza, he cocks the pistol. Coming around the corner of a promotional installation bearing a scuffed plastic bowl filled with vague flavored wheat fluffs, NORRIS begins to see the ovoid curve of GAVIN’s profile. He is sitting on an upturned paint bucket, dressed in the accoutrements of an earnest singer-songwriter: two-tone trucker’s cap, artificially faded graphic tee depicting the founding date of some agrarian township and a bucolic tractor in the midst of its reaping, a pair of jeans dyed a perfectly inoffensive blue shade, whose cuffs are fraying toward the back, just above the sienna rubber soles of his construction boots. 

GAVIN: [voice amplified through a PA system, squealing with a slight amount of feedback as he concludes a song] Alright, everybody. That was “Country Burial” from my upcoming album, “Lifescars.” Now I want to pump the brakes a little bit and settle into one of my very first compositions. There’s a little bit of a story behind this song. It’s about a man with… well, I’d say a magnificent sense of humor and a winning personality, who deserves to record his albums in the hallowed soundproof booths of the greats who have gone before him, who nonetheless has never quite received the attention he deserves. In this song, a man sits in silence with a cardboard box in his lap — it’s a computer game, still snugly wrapped in its packaging, whose contents rattle around inside every time he shifts position. And this guy is just thinking to himself, “what am I gonna do to the people who won’t play Slugs 3D with me?” It’s a sort of childhood fantasy — a reflection on the fatal distortions to which a personality is susceptible when its worth goes unrecognized. Anyways, y’all, here goes: “You’ll Be Cold Tonight.” Hope you enjoy it!

[GAVIN begins to play “You’ll Be Cold Tonight,” obnoxiously out of tune; and yet, there is some deeper, inhuman voice, layered in a barely perceptible way below his own voice]

Now that GAVIN has concluded his intimate “behind-the-music” backstory, NORRIS is stunned into stillness, momentarily held back from his target. He gazes around to see whether anyone else is listening, only to find that he and GAVIN have been alone from the moment he entered the market. Glancing over his shoulder, he spots a shimmering ray of sunlight as it bounces through the red and blue lamps of a police cruiser which has driven up onto the curb, blocking the entry doors. 

Seeing this, and still holding the pistol slightly in front of him in a two-handed grip, NORRIS turns back onto GAVIN and slowly begins to approach him. He stops within half a foot of him just as the song is concluding. When the last note fades into the metal struttings of the remote ceiling, GAVIN lifts his blissful visage toward the halogen bulbs suspended above him, his eyes closed and occluded beneath his illumined glasses. 

NORRIS: G-gavin…

GAVIN suddenly opens his eyes and stares straight at the pistol before raising his gaze to NORRIS’s. Then his mouth parts open in a vicious smile, reminiscent of a sudden rent in the taut flesh of an overripe squash. 

GAVIN: Hi, Norris! Did you like my song, Norris?

NORRIS: … I’ve… heard it… before…

GAVIN: Really? Wow, you must be a big fan of mine, then. What’s your favorite part, Norris?

NORRIS: D-do you… Do you not remember… our chat last night? 

GAVIN: Hah, chat? Nope, can’t say that I do, Norris! I mean, maybe we did, but I’ve got a busy inbox. You’d have to refresh me if we did.

NORRIS: Your song… Your album… They’re…

GAVIN: Marvelous? Inspiring, Norris? Monumentally anthemic? Haha! I think so too. Hey, matter of fact… I’ve got a new album coming out next month. You may have heard of it: “Lifescars.” Want to check out the demo? I’ve got it right here on CD, Norris! You can have a copy, and I won’t even charge you! …Norris? …Norris?

In the midst of GAVIN’s promotional barrage, NORRIS’s chest has begun to heave. His shoulders slouch forward — the pistol plummets from his hands and skitters across the checkered vinyl flooring, coming to rest somewhere next to a stand of organic dragon fruit. If one were situated just behind him and off to the side, one would faintly notice the dancing red sprites of high-powered sniper rifle lasers as they pirouette in a tight grouping through a thatch of auburn hair which juts crazily from the back of his scalp. GAVIN extends the demo of his new album, packaged in a cheap yellow jewel case, toward NORRIS’s chest.

GAVIN: Here you go, my buddy Norris! Also, be sure to check out my Photogram.

NORRIS: [in a suddenly out-of-place “yeah-m’n” voice] Yeah, m’n, sounds cool.