The back door of the apartment opens from a narrow wooden alley-staircase to a tiny square kitchen. The lights are off, but across the linoleum floor, to the right of the sink, is a small black light switch that, when flicked, bathes the room in fluorescent white light. You are stricken immediately by the plainness of it, the whole setup: the room is almost empty with no trinkets or adornments or pieces of kitchenware beyond those dictated by the necessities of eating; it is a spartan space whose contours are carved only by the needs of living and nothing more. Immediately next to the kitchen light switch is an open doorway beneath which the kitchen linoleum meets a ragged, tiled wooden floor only dimly visible under the fading kitchen fluorescence. As you pass under the doorway into the new room, there is a light switch to your left, and at its command the dark wooden room is brought to life under the vibrant yellow light of a ceiling fan. The floor, about five paces in length each way, is old and beaten with shoe smears and stains and every kind of mark of wearing in every color between black and brown and even almost red. The light-olive walls of the room, coarsely-splattered with the spectral scars of old nails and painted-over contours of past coats and the brushstrokes that placed them, rise around you from the vibrant floor to meet the plain white ceiling above. The windows line the left wall of the room and are drawn over with folding plastic drapes whose leaves are crusted still in a fine coat of dust from tenants past. You turn about-face and notice a small plastic device mounted on the wall next to the gateway through which you entered: a smoke alarm, the same color as the wall, barely noticeable except to the inspective eye. Nothing else but small holes and minor paint chippings adorn the walls of this room.
Inside the enveloping walls and cut off from the pale streetlight outside the windows, the room takes the feel of a chamber of sorts. Across the floor from the gateway is a white plastic folding table, its metal legs elevated upon four grey cinder blocks. Upon the table sit two rectangular black speakers facing out toward the room and before them a pair of headphones and some black metal slabs — two turntables and a mixer. On the ground beneath the table rest three plastic milk crates full to the brim with vinyl record sleeves of every color, stacked one after the next in slice-after-multi-colored-slice like a collection of illuminated manuscripts on the shelves of a monastic library. Everything is still, and except the distant white noise of street traffic that trickles in through the windows and dusty drapes, the room is silent. Still, it is not an empty silence; there is a feeling that something electric lurks in this room that is poised to shout aloud at any moment, reigned back all day only by the commands of inhibition that issue from the necessities of the rhythms of a grown man’s life.
In late hours past sunset he arrives from the alleyway stairs to the back door and enters through it to the pitch-black kitchen. He turns the first switch and under the pale light traverses the linoleum floor back and forth robotically, shuttling ingredients from the refrigerator and pantry to the stove and collecting them in a pan to huddle over a small blue gas light for a short while before they are how he wants them; then he eats, and after that his hunger is gone, and the kitchen has served its purpose to him.
Though he is fed, still he is weary. His face is textured with the coarse stubble of a young workman’s five-o’clock-shadow — except now it’s eight, maybe nine o’clock — and his eyes are lined with the faint youthful beginnings of the shadowy crevasses he sees on his elder coworkers’ faces daily. His day was unremarkable, neither exceptionally joyful nor soul-crushingly terrible but just a day full of hours, another day among seven on one line of a calendar page among twelve: forgettable, perhaps. The chores of the day are behind him now, and he is free to sleep or read or listen to radio or do whatever he wants; in his mind he begins to peruse his podcasts to choose from among them an enjoyable conclusion to the long day. Tiredly he wanders under the gateway into the dark chamber beyond the kitchen. At the flick of a switch the pale kitchen fluorescence is drowned away immediately by the blooming light of the ceiling fan. From across the beat wooden floor he spots the table, covered in his contraptions, the centerpiece of the room, and upon this sighting his face, like the room and its soulful shades and contours, is illuminated under a new light.
With bright eyes and a developing grin spreading fast across his face he glides light-footed in his work socks across the floor, a pilgrim on the last leg of his journey making excited approach to his final destination: the shrine at the end of the road. At the flip of a few switches the buttons on the cold metal dashboard burst into blinking lights of many hues, a soulful mural in the halls of a Byzantine church sprouting forth from the wall and come to life. Turning his gaze to the crates on the floor, he squats and begins fingering through the many pages of record sleeves stacked one upon another. After a short search he spots one he likes: a white background titled in dark navy lettering and decorated all over with the pale green silhouettes of leaves. From inside he draws a large black vinyl disc — his starting hymn, his jumping-off-point into tonight’s ritual — and places it carefully on one of the turntables. He moves the needle into place on the grooves and presses a start button, and immediately the electric energy that lurked silently before bursts forth through the speakers and fills the space of the room in only an instant.
As the rhythm expands to fill the room so too it creeps into him, and he begins to nod gently along with it to the beat. He bends down to a different crate this time and begins his search again, head nodding along to the music of the first record all the while, and soon chooses another sleeve, this one colored plain black with only a white title printed across the front. He removes from it another vinyl, which he places on the second deck on the other side of the table from the first. He moves the needle into place and presses a button, and the second disc too begins to spin; as it does, he grabs the headphones resting on the table and places them over one ear. Nodding his head, he looks down at the table and enters into full engagement with his craft.
The nodding is gentle at first, but gradually it creeps through him and with heightening ferocity begins to take him, and soon he is swaying and tapping his foot away on the cold worn wood of the floor. The tapping is faithful and in adherence to the commanding calls issuing forth from the altar in perfect rhythmic succession, for this is the power of the beat over this space and its inhabitant. It continues in this way as he fiddles all the while with the knobs and levers on the table. Occasionally the flavor of the beat takes a turn, and when this happens he removes a disc from one of the decks and places it back within its sleeve and returns it to the library in the crates; but soon after he finds another to replace it and places it anew on the deck, and eventually a new beat emerges, and so on. Each plastic disc contains its own hymns, and like a weaver he stands there at the desk sewing them dutifully together. The stuff of these discs is unlike the stuff of the dead plastic tiles of the kitchen floor that sit collecting dust and grime and the empty white fluorescence of electrified mercury. No — this plastic is alive, and as he stands there at attention lost in the trancelike worship of his craft, the needle draws ever along its grooves and the contours etched therein, drawing his thoughts from the vinyl and summoning them forth into the world through the altar. The walls of the room and the air within and even the dust that sits on the window drapes: everything in the room is subject now to the vibrations that issues from the tabletop shrine at the soundweaver’s command, and in their wake the chamber transforms into a brilliant cathedral in whose hallowed halls echo with the bountiful sounds of worship.
In this gentle hour of supplication he finds his day’s solace, where the worries of time and task are forgotten and the shackles that bind him to the needs and musts of adult life in his world released. Soon it is ten-o’clock, and then it is eleven, and then time for sleep. He stands back now nodding gently still and lets the last record spin to its conclusion. When it is finished, he lifts it carefully from the deck and places it back within its sleeve and the sleeve back in its crate. Now the music is done and the walls still again; the cathedral is a chamber once more, and at the flip of a switch the colors on the mixer recede back into the austere black metal they sprang forth from. He stands away from the desk and takes a deep breath, then exhales and walks wearily across the beat wooden floor to the light switch by the kitchen doorway and turns it off. The room falls dark once more. In silence he trudges across the apartment to his bathroom and makes his final preparations for sleep. When he is done he retreats to his bedroom, and the door closes behind him.
The apartment is still and quiet now like the late hours of night that pass on the street outside, and only the distant echoes of an occasional motor passenger on the road can be heard from within. But as the man and his apartment and their side of the world sleep, the chamber buzzes still with the electric energy that sleeps stacked away in the crates and locked within the circuitry on the table. Now it sleeps inside him also, and though he lies there in bed in stillness and silence, in his dreams there is music and flavor and all the things that colored the room from the speakers earlier. This is the stuff of dreams, the stuff that textures the grooves of records and paints the sleeves that hold them; it is the vibrancy that lights our world with the colors of our thought, which never sleeps but only dreams, ours to call forth as we will at the shrines and altars of our choosing — this is the secret magic that lurks in within our dreams.
Written December 2018
© 2020 Ilyas Taraki
notes from my iPhone 