If Alton Park Was A Gunslinger, There’d Be A Whole Lot Of Dead Copycats

by Trevor James Zaple

Alton walked into the coffee shop down on 7th and was immediately assailed by a I-IV-V chord progression. The melody over it was major key but only faintly cloying. Silver linings. He ground his teeth and scoped out the scene. Few tables were occupied. It was opening night for the latest Star Wars iteration in full resplendent 3D down at the arena, so most of downtown was deader than usual.

Many of the people in the café were hipsters. You could ask it to describe the word and it would construct this very scene. Men and women in neopseudotradware, reading physical books whose covers all had the same pastel-wistful colors. The titles seemed just on the verge of being too much and they all had the size and cut that marked them as being fresh off the versificator. Alton always thought they looked like people who’d grown up in vaguely edgy Christian youth groups who just wanted to get serious and fuck like regular folks.

He took an empty seat near the back. The place wasn’t that underground; the tablets in the tables were a dead giveaway. The voice it put on as he sat down was a cheery, spicy Australian, greeting him with a shockingly loud howdy mate before Alton hurriedly turned it down to text-only. Everyone looked at him, but only briefly. The smirks on their faces told him it was something they did to lots of people. A shared experience of in-group/out-group solidarity repeated often and with glee. It had probably come up with it, originally. It was the best buddy; it would never find an over-repeated joke onerous or second-guess the fun. Alton kept his peace. Let them prank the stranger. He had an urge to just beat it out of there. Pop back up and dash out the door. Leave a sign for Shan. But what? Break a branch on the oak outside the café? Leave a little pile of stones?

He rose slowly and walked up to the counter. The clerk gave him a bored look. Alton ordered a coffee, just plain black, and the clerk looked relieved. It was an easy enough order. Alton took the coffee outside and waited by the door. He blew the steam off the cup and stared out into the neon-haunted night, feeling restlessness cramp up his legs and back. Some part of it would have something to say about what he’d done. Why did you sit for a while and then suddenly get up and wait outside? If you’re waiting for someone, why not just wait for them inside? Instead of consuming product or engaging in paid content online through the tablet, why did you buy a solitary item and leave? Suspicious, suspicious. The algorithms shift, tables on tables are re-weighted, fit to models, left-joined. What was permitted before may be forbidden ahead.

Shan came around the corner and Alton immediately grabbed their elbow and whisked them away down the street. Shan gave him a hooded look but didn’t say anything. About two blocks down he turned them down an alley, moving like it had been his plan the entire time.

Midway down the alley he leaned against an air unit. Shan took out a vape pen and took a long drag. They offered some to Alton, but he shook his head.

“Think we’re out of the soup?” they asked quietly.

“We should be fine,” he replied. His phone was in a baffle, and he assumed Shan’s was as well. It was de rigueur these days when you were out and about in public. You didn’t want the things other people said around you to play hob with the calculations running under you. “Where is this place?”

“Six blocks south,” they said, dragging harder on the pen. “Sub-basement under a burger spot. Noise cancelled; upstairs is kept strictly strait-laced.”

“Sounds like fun,” Alton said. “Shall we?”

The night was fragrant with ozone and competing foods. They walked through the scents of a dozen cultures wafting out of doors and billowing from carts at regularly spaced intervals. They chatted lightly about the third season of Water Rescue North Shore, adding to the general algorithmic flow coming up from the street.

The burger place was a modern-and-glass module, which surprised Alton a little. He would expect a brick-retro-graffiti number if you were going to put a bootlegger in the basement. Maybe that was too obvious, though. If you wanted to hide something from becoming a part of it, you needed to keep it from being obvious. Otherwise, a few days or weeks down the line you’d be walking on the street and see five different iterations of it, with the barest amount of variation between them. You had to be careful, and you had to be quiet.

No one paid them any mind as they came in. Alton went to go place an order and Shan sat down at a table near the shadowed alcove with the stairs leading downward. He brought over a couple of burgers, some fries, and two drinks. They ate half the food and Shan got up to use the washroom. While they were gone, Alton cleaned up and snuck away through the alcove. The stairs went down for quite a while and ended in an austere cement basement, unadorned by anything but grime. He leaned against the wall and presently Shan appeared at the bottom of the stairs. Without saying anything, they walked side-by-side deeper into the basement.

At the end of the passage was a door and in front of the door was a man. The man gestured to a basket next to him.

“Phones go in here,” he said. “No phone, no entry.” There was a faint noise coming from the basket, a light air of burger joints in the lull of the middle evening. Alton and Shan handed their phones over without comment. As far as it was concerned, there would be a little more weight on Traditional American and Fast-Food ads added to their algorithms, and some more of the ubiquitous 20th Century rock that was everywhere all the time. Beyond that, nothing to differentiate the night from any other.

Beyond the door was another corridor that also ended in a door. When Alton opened this second door, he was struck by a wave of sour sound, a rush of notes on a blearing cloud that seemed to jumble and jeer and struggle at odds with each other. He couldn’t immediately place it, which led to a cold thrill rushing down his arms and into his legs.

He and Shan wandered into the carved-out little secret nightclub like children in the woods. There were a few dozen other people there. Some of them were at the raw plywood bar buying drinks. The rest were all facing toward the low-rise stage at the other end of the room. A quintet of people stood on the stage playing instruments. Two of these were DIY: a percussionist playing a combination of metal objects of varying thicknesses, and a woman manipulating a soldered Frankenstein of circuits, strings, and cross-wired pedals. One person, a tall woman like a gothic crow queen, played an electric singing saw. A ratty man in patched canvas played a complicated and expensive synthesizer, and the final player, a woman in an old black sweater and a faded t-shirt, vocalized into a megaphone that was fed into a series of effects pedals and then into a speaker that looked as though someone had put a foot into it.

It was noise at first, pure chaos that seemed to fill the room like undulating black static. It had a physical presence, pushing Alton back lightly as he approached the bar. You couldn’t hear much; the walls kept the sounds inside, reverberating wildly. Others flipped a finger up at the bartender and he provided them with the same drink, two fingers of a clear liquid in a plastic tumbler. He did the same. The liquor was explosive and left a taste like rubbing alcohol on his tongue and lingering in his nose.

As he reeled from it, the noise coalesced into movement, structure, motif. The percussionist bashed out a brutal rhythm, something deeply ingrained in the back of the monkey brain. The saw-playing crow queen laid an eerie, shifting drone on top of the stomping beat. The girl with Frankenstein’s monster and the reedy wizard with the synth traded blasts of twisting, propulsive melodies, searing lines akin to the chants heard at the dawn of the species. All through this, the singer wore a sardonic expression and alternated between shouting barely understood invective and singing odd, wordless melodies. 

It was all glorious. It was something you couldn’t wander into an office supply store and hear eighteen variations of it piped through the overhead radio. The more Alton listened, the more intense it became. After an hour he was enthused; after two he was in love. The girl with the soldered stick of effects pedals and strings saw his enraptured expression and shot him a warm smile.

On the way home they spoke quietly about what they had seen. There had been a savage majesty to it, something that couldn’t be found in any of the plug-and-play blocks of playlists or podcasts or needle drops or any of the musical tendrils of it. That bog standard pop song that had been playing when Alton walked into the coffeeshop, the tune with the chords that went E-A-D, was something you could expect it to generate at will. The concerts and clubs were filled with songs like that, songs that it had gifted to people, songs that were tender to chew and smooth to swallow. What they had witnessed had been neither; rather, it was like eating some unknown species of fish, lightly fried, in a place where you couldn’t ask questions because you didn’t speak the language. The tastes challenged the tongue, held it fast and close until the brain came to terms with what it had been offered. Maybe you were allergic to it. Maybe it was just lethal. The danger of the unknown was a thrill, one that trumped anything else in the modern world.

That night, his algorithm suggested Lo Fi Bedroom Pop calculated to get him off to sleep in the requisite seven minutes, but he turned it down and lay in silence. His eyes remained open, and it took him an hour to fall into fragmented dreams. He spent the entire time trying to fix the music he’d heard into his mind, to hold onto it forever.

They went back twice in the next month, and then the location changed. On their fourth trip to the burger joint they found the basement empty, the only sound their footfalls and their breathing. It was another two months before Shan found the right combination of posters and signals.

The next time it was in an old hotel on the edge of downtown. The place predated the building modules granted from it and the lobby had a sense of the genteel but rundown past, before you could ask for a vibe and be presented with it down to the last detail. It spoke of flopsweat and old smoke, earnest art mixed with unwashed sex. Past the lobby was a stairway down into an underground concert hall. A singer and backup band went through the motions of cranking out the Alt Rock Standards while men and women in easily recognizable fashion modules danced and drank. Alton and Shan moved through the crowd with relative ease – Alton in High Hip Hop Couture and Shan in regulation Grunge apparel. In a back corner of the hall, behind a stack of equipment crates, there was another of those mysterious shadowed alcoves with the stairs that went down longer than expected. Shan went first this time. Alton waited for a moment but at the last second a co-worker spotted him and insisted on chattering inanely about everything and nothing. By the time Alton broke free twenty minutes had passed, and he was halfway down the stairwell before he realized that his dash through the crowd and down the stairs might have been conspicuous.

There was a service elevator in the shadows that lay beyond where the stairs ended. Like the burger spot, a man stood by the elevator with a basket full of phones. Alton placed his into the basket, nodded to the man, and took his place in the elevator. As it sank into the bowels of the earth, he heard faint sounds like an industrial process rolling on and on.

When he left the elevator those faint factory noises grew a tiny bit louder. Another corridor; this time it ended at a vault door, the kind they used in old movies about bank robberies. It seemed solid and eternal. There was no obvious way to open it. He stared at it for a while. Clearly, Shan had gone through. There was no trace of them, though. He reached forward for what he thought might be a handle.

“I wouldn’t,” a voice said. It sounded as though it was coming from the door itself. “It’s too heavy for you to move it.”

Alton backed away from the vault door and it began to spin open. Once it had cracked wide enough, he slipped through. The industrial noises flowed out through the partially opened door, loud and overwhelming. Once he was inside, they once again coalesced into structure, movement, meaning.

It was magic again, and this time it was more. The woman with the Frankenstein stick was playing again, and this time when Alton caught eyes with her, she waved him up on the stage. His first instinct was to slink away, shy and embarrassed, but he made himself take her up on the offer. He was fumble-fingered at first but that was alright, the jarring noise seemed to blend well with the movements that the rest of the players were conjuring. Once he figured out the way it was played it grew easier, and by the end of the night he was being cheered and toasted by players and crowd alike.

The next few months were a whirlwind of activity. First, he learned the practice secrets of these noisy magicians. The Frankenstein stick player showed him how to make his own mutant instrument and how, with a scrounge through the scrap electronics shops, you could wire in some headphones that reported to your ears alone. If you left your phone in another room, it was a purely private experience. Percussion and vocals, he was told, spent their time practicing in loud places: factories, subway tunnels, construction sites.

Twice a month he and Shan found the next place the session would be and would spend time playing loudly with the others. There were other players, drawn like Alton to the novelty, the purity, and the noise. They traded off time, going on extended jams long into the night. They played for themselves, the crowd moving up onto the stage one by one to ascend before cycling back down to the floor. Shan shouted into the megaphone, crying foul against the nature of the day, the living of life by the cookie cutter, the rubber stamp, drowning in the pseudo-variations of it. Alton thought they were quite good at it.

Why paint a picture? Why write a book? It was these endeavors that they had turned its talents to and for all but the most discerning it was good enough. The people worked in drudgery but let the machines live in art. For Alton, their whirlwind of noise and chaos – don't call it jazz, for to fit it to a pre-existing name was to invite the categorization and replication of it – was a way of tossing a sabot into the machine and grinding it, even if briefly, to a halt.

Which is to say that Alton was not particularly surprised when the police finally showed up.

He had spotted the woman right away. She seemed a bit too clean-cut to be in a crowd of noiseniks; her demeanor was a too-obvious mixture of in-the-right-place confidence and tentative nervousness. Plus, her boots were new, and that was always a dead giveaway. Alton decided upon seeing her that he needed to take some air, right then. Unfortunately, the woman had also been looking at Alton and when he made his sudden movement she got spooked and spoke quickly into her shoulder.

Within seconds a squad of the hulking gorilla-robots the cops liked to use burst in, followed by a speaker. The crowd burst into panic but quickly quieted, realizing that there was no way out that didn’t involve a losing battle with the finest killers Boston Dynamics had ever turned out. The speaker was a pair of treads rolling a body that supported a pole with a tablet screen secured to it. The screen bore a face that Alton was sure was generated. You couldn’t really tell, of course, but the intonation of the voice was too smooth and perfect for it to be a real human on the other end.

“Everyone in this room is in violation of City Order 678-C, Gathering for Uncategorized Entertainment Without a Permit.” The speaker’s tone was bored, as though they had done this a dozen or more times already that day. “The evidence at hand has been fed into the Oracle and the Oracle has proclaimed you guilty. You are hereby sentenced to thirty days in jail and a fine of no less than 15% of your weekly income.”

The burly robots with the sleek sheen to their polycarbonate skins waited to herd them. There was no avoiding it. On stage, Alton plucked a string and one last discordant detuned note buzzed throughout the chamber.

Jail was fine. It wasn’t Alton’s first trip through it. Once you figured out how the system worked, it was duck soup. He’d even managed to get on the same housing unit as Shan. Alton preferred to live the life of an ascetic in jail, but Shan went the opposite way, and Alton liked to live vicariously through them.

They emerged together a month after their arrest, trial, and conviction. It was a cloudy day with a bit of a chill in the air, so they went to a likely-looking coffee house a few blocks from the processing facility.

After they ordered coffee and sat at a table, they checked out the crowd. It was still neopseudotrad but at some point, it seemed to have decreed that silver stars on shoulders were a necessary customization. None of them gave Alton and Shan a second look. The DJ, X The Great and Powerful, announced the end to the set and then called for a vibe: a vibe called “power jazztronics.” The familiar crunch of drums came, followed by a dying-vintage-fan buzz that warped and faded and knotted itself around frenetic finger work. Alton and Shan looked at each other, unable to breathe.

“That line right there,” Shan said a few minutes later. “I heard you play that exact line three months ago.”

Alton grimaced. “But not next to that line. And not over those drums. This feels like someone pasted elements together without actually understanding what any of it meant.”

“It’s in it now.” The words sounded heavier than a handful of the sun coming out of Shan’s mouth. “It’s been taken into it and normalized.”

Alton looked around uncomfortably. He winced at another line, which seemed like it had been randomized without care for the nuances. The coffee was still too hot to drink but he drank it anyway, relishing the way it scalded the slimy pink skin of his tongue.

“I think this one’s going to be a big hit,” one of the nearby hipsters said. “Maybe even a Grammy winner.”

Alton held his head in his hands.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” he whispered. Shan shot him a look that was part sympathy, and part warning.

“If you’re going to be sick,” it said from the table-tablet, “you’d best be moseying on outside.” It had adopted a grim pastiche of John Wayne’s cowboy accents. Alton stared at the table, and he swore he could feel his algorithm changing. On the screen, an almost-Duke grimaced up at him and spat digital tobacco into an unseen receptacle.

The playlists, the faux radio shows, generated spontaneous musical eruptions. Every one featuring jams he’d taken part in with the edges sanded down. The lines he’d helped pioneer, bastardized beyond recognition. It would be all around him, his tables weighted to furnish it wherever he went.

He dashed up from the table. To his credit, he almost made it.