Under the Same Stars Read online

A VARIATION OF WAVE PRESSURE

  The Girl waits in line with the others, both friends and strangers. The sun has gone down already, and the evening has taken on a chill; not a you can see your breath in the air chill, a softer, less brutal chill than that, but still a chill. She regrets now her choice of a top, a faded and thin lime green t-shirt with a logo on it, a screeching skull with a long, serpentine tongue lolling from its mouth that seemed to leer out at you, and beneath the skull a bucket that was tipped over on its side and spilling foul contents across a dirty tile floor. This was the logo of the band that was playing tonight, Scuzz Bukkit, an orthographically challenged group of young men from a town in the Midwest called Willmar, Minnesota.

  When the Girl first discovered the band, on a warm, June night in the apartment of a friend, the first time she felt the pounding pulse of their music, she decided that she wanted to learn everything about them. Late at night, back in her own apartment, while sitting up in bed with her laptop throwing a pale blue glow on her face, she searched out every little thing she could about them.

  That was when she learned they were from Willmar, Minnesota, a place she pictured as a near-empty town far from anything that could be called civilization, a place where angry men spent their days working in factories that would soon close, and their nights drinking in bars whose bathrooms smelled like piss and vomit, nursing their wounds (both literal and figurative, for surely they were barroom brawlers, these men), thinking of all the things they should have been, and could have been if only, always if only, if only being the one thing that stopped them from achieving some greatness.

  And the women, the wives, mothers, sisters and daughters of these men (and boys who thought they were men), they spent their days wiping the asses of squealing babies, and the noses of dirty-faced toddlers, and worrying about the baggy clothes their teenaged daughters had started wearing lately, and wondering if the clothes were hiding something, a growing belly perhaps, hoping that they are wrong, that it is simply a fashion choice. These women spent their nights looking out windows with worried looks on their faces, wondering why their particular man wasn’t home yet, wondering if maybe there had been an accident on the road tonight, wondering if they should call the hospital, but afraid to call, because last time they’d done that their man had gotten angry when he found out, and he had shouted at her that she was too paranoid, that nothing had happened to him, that he had stayed out a little late drinking with his friends, and that wasn’t a sin, was it? And when the men finally came home, and the fears about five car pile-ups, and skid marks on blacktop were put to rest, then another kind of worry set in, a worry about the effect of alcohol on a bitter man, a man who could’ve been something if only; and maybe they knew, all the woman of Willmar, that they were the if only, or at least suspected it. They sat quietly at the dinner table, hoping that they would not have another bruise to explain to the neighbors tomorrow.

  And somehow, four young men had broken free of all of this, had used their guitars, drums and amplifiers as chisels and picks, and had escaped from the darkest prison they would ever face. They had given themselves a funny name that wasn’t meant to be funny, and they had run from Willmar, Minnesota.

  Or at least that’s how she imagined it that night, sitting up in bed and staring at the screen of her laptop.

  The line moves glacially forward, and the Girl gets ever closer to the front of it. She hopes that the club doesn’t reach capacity before she gets in, thinking what a waste it would have been to drive into the city for nothing. She moves closer, and closer still. Eventually, after the passing of several epochs, she makes it to the door, and the man waves her inside without bothering to check her ID, and she wonders if this means something, if it means that she no longer possesses the girlish look that had once been a pain in the ass to her, that had meant that every bouncer in town always asked for her ID, and checked it over twice before letting her in. Then she feels the music, and all this bullshit scatters like dandelion fluff.

  The music thumps against her chest, a steady wallop. The club is filled with people with strange haircuts, and even stranger piercings, and Mandy, who drove the Girl into the city, mouths something slowly and carefully, so that the Girl will have no trouble reading her lips, but Mandy’s consideration counts for nothing as the Girl nods politely without bothering to read her friend’s words. Mandy, thinking she has been understood, disappears into the crowd, and the Girl stands alone despite the crowd around her. She closes her eyes and feels the thump thump thud of the music. She enters into something like a trance or a waking dream as she stands there, an island of calm in a sea of sweaty and violently moving bodies.

  She is jolted back to the world by another person bumping into her, and she opens her eyes to see a guy whose face is covered in tattoos, and he is trying to tell her something (to apologize for bumping into her, most likely), but she cuts him off with the old familiar gesture--she grabs an earlobe, then points to the ear and shakes her head. The guy smiles nervously and walks away.

  The Girl looks up toward the stage, and sees the four men from Willmar up there, playing their instruments roughly, as if their instruments have somehow offended them. They are earnestly playing the music that most of her friends can’t understand the way she understands it, can’t feel the way she feels it. To them it’s just noise, but to her it’s something else entirely. She moves forward through the crowd, politely nudging people aside so that she can get closer to the stage. A few people give her rude looks, but she pays them no mind. As she nears the stage, and the big pulsing amplifiers, the thudding grows heavier, deeper. Closer still, and she can feel it in her teeth. She walks right up to the stage and smiles up at a large speaker rising high above her. She reached up and touches it with her hand, cautiously at first, as if she is afraid that it might shock her, or bite her. Then she places her hand flat against the speaker and she can feel the sound, the waves of pressure coursing up her arm, vibrating her entire being. And on her face, shining forth like a rugged beam of light cast into the night to warn ships of the rocks ahead, there is a smile, a simple smile.