He whispered through the phone, “I need you to come with me.” Ten years of silence, and I turned the volume down anyway. “Please,” he said. It was 7 p.m. My son was brushing his teeth.
I said yes before remembering why we’d stopped talking. My wife had been following him on Instagram. He used to post wallets hand-stitched from old ties, handbags from T-shirts. Then came the bathtub selfie. “You should go,” my wife said. “He’ll probably tell you in person.” That evening, we arrived at my first hardcore punk concert in an old pharmacy with no windows, no air, all the old shelves still stacked in a pile out back. Outside we pulled earplugs like corks and reviewed the bands. Every band felt the same. Deep screaming, pointing, jumping off the stage. Indistinguishable. But no one said that. Maybe they Googled the lyrics. Maybe they didn’t care. Maybe I cared too much. One band spoke their lyrics slow. I almost memorized them among fists. Outside, people called them boring. Too lazy. A girl smoking a long cigarette looked at everyone. “It’s art,” she said. “So it’s never wrong.” Headlights passed, but the road stayed quiet. I breathed a sigh of relief that I had left early. That night, I Googled the lyrics anyway. Turns out they weren’t lyrics. They were instructions for how to kill someone and hide the body behind old pharmacy shelves. I still hum them sometimes.
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