through each of them. Eventually it became evident that I was the first real big-city kid she’d ever met. I convinced myself that I had a right, even a responsibility, to foster her fantasies. There would be no Mere Reality, not between the two of us, not if I could help it.
37.
“HEY, DICKHEAD,” FOLEY SAID. “You plow through those discs?”
Outside among the early-evening trick-or-treaters, he was more invisible than ever in a knee-length black coat over black jeans and a black hooded sweatshirt. His mom, he had told me, had cruelly forbidden him to dye his hair black, even for Halloween, and it was only this blondness that prevented him from altogether blending into the night. I was struck by how much I missed my own mother telling me no. Harnett wouldn’t care if I came home wearing pink pigtails.
His question was silly. Since Foley had handed me the plastic bag full of dozens of burned discs, some cheap earbuds, and a busted-up Discman, I had not stopped listening. The Discman wouldn’t function unless it was held shut with duct tape, but fortunately that was something Harnett had in abundance. I’d been isolated at home for so many weeks in almost total silence that the music had nearly electrified my skull the first time I pressed play.
At Foley’s recommendation I began with Black Sabbath’s first album. It seemed impossible to me that it had been written and recorded forty years ago. The very first line, sung with apprehensive terror by Ozzy Osbourne, a personality only known to me as a pop-culture punch line, was anything but funny: What is this that stands before me? Peering across the shambles of a small, dark cabin, I asked the same question of myself; elbowing into a swarm of disinterested high school students the next morning, I asked the question again; in Gottschalk’s class; at lunch; during Fun and Games; considering my face in the bathroom mirror or my future of burrowing among the graves: What is this that stands before me?
It was a question that the rest of Foley’s discs tried to answer. He had meticulously labeled each CD with artist, album, release date, and one of a dizzying array of genre variations that more than satisfied my itch for specificity: heavy metal, black metal, atmospheric black metal, doom metal, death metal, sludge metal, gothic metal, Viking metal, Celtic metal, speed metal, thrash metal, power metal, progressive metal, industrial black metal, industrial post-black metal, symphonic extreme metal, pagan folk, grindcore, goregrind, dark ambient, experimental ambient, ritual drone, noise drone, ritual rhythmic noise, and depressive rock. They included bands like Opeth, Moonsorrow, Pentagram, Motörhead, High on Fire, Type O Negative, Hammers of Misfortune, Wolves in the Throne Room, Primordial, High Tide, Waldteufel, Ulver, Nachtmystium, and Agalloch. The musicians in these bands often credited themselves by mysterious aliases like Necroabyssious, Panzergod, Defier of Morbidity, and He Who Gnashes Teeth. When I asked Foley where these bands were from, he listed countries all over the world. My life, for so long confined to Chicago city limits and now to limits even more constrictive, suddenly felt part of something expansive. Sometimes at night I was saddened that the music of my trumpet was being replaced, but I covered up those old tunes, as well as the memory of my mother’s needling, by thumbing the volume button on the Discman and letting the metal rattle me until I was numb and sleeping.
Foley was particularly passionate about a band called Vorvolakas; when he told me they were from Chicago I rushed home to listen. The album was called Greifland, and from the first moments of sonic wash and grinding guitar I found a fearless embrace of the dark and doomed that mirrored my present life. The chorus of the title track gripped me by the throat and I pressed back on the Discman again and again until I had it fully memorized. The words offered no escape; instead they dared darkness to do its worst. As the night overtook the cabin and the batteries ran out on the player, the words crashed through my memory over and over:
We became oblivion.
Caused our own extinction.
Ravaged our own hearts.
Damaged our own souls.
Ate our dreams of sleep.
Cried our miseries.
Darkness may await you.
But we are already there.
For the first time ever, I had not been able to wait for lunch so that I could somehow express to Foley the inspirational effect of these lyrics. My hands had trembled around my fork and spoon—I had