Snow on Snow
The Company owns your info. It owns everyone's. That’s how you can have your outfits chosen, your eggs cooked to perfection, your days arranged with enough precision to leave you two full hours of free time. They won't reveal it, certainly not in any way that jeopardizes earning potential. The Company adheres very closely to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.
Content needs to eat.
Corporations may be people and everything, but real people are now legally defined as ‘authors’ under U.S. Copyright Law. Which means that "Specific and individuated expressions" of an idea are their exclusive property. As a result, whatever comes through the Listeners can only be sampled. A song made up in the shower, a spat about power outages, a new recipe for linguini with shungiku pesto that was dreamt up because it was too cold to go to the market. There’s so much out there, so much of the same, nobody can recognize themselves in the end.
Only six narrative arcs. Five types of rhythm.
You used to think otherwise.
You were a DJ once. Had some notoriety in clubs from Santa Ana to Echo Park. You specialized in what you called Paleo-Trad, a mix of chest-rattling techno beat and ‘the artifacts,’ you called them, ‘of primitive violence.’ Your battle record was of the clicks and scrapes of a flint-knapping session you’d sampled from an undergrad paleontology class. You were exposing the creature under the creature comfort, you said. The same old stories. Stone age and age old.
But you did well, which means moderately well. You broke even on a recording once, but your life wasn't going anywhere.When your girlfriend left you for a Newport Beach accountant, you took stock of the threadbare sofa in your rent-controlled apartment and the chipped dining set you’d lugged from your dorm room five years ago. You knew things had to change.
That was right around the time they recruited you.
The Company has its tendrils in everything from streaming holoshows to leather-bound books--now making a comeback. They’d heard one of your dubplates, they told you. Thought maybe you were what they were looking for—someone to sift the gold from all that monotony. You only heard ‘gold.’
The universe is listening—that’s the mantra of confirmation bias.
The Company has a monopoly on cacophony, and it’s your job to sift through that dissonance for the sweetest, darkest, most relatable strains of the human experience: quotable moments, the sad tinkle of a dishwasher being loaded after the guests have gone home, a revealing whisper in a wedding hall. It’s a brave new world out there and you’re getting paid to eavesdrop.
You bring order. Turn bits of lives into profit.
Now, you have a new ‘sofa.’ You’re careful to call it that because it cost twice your rent, and when you sit down in it, you almost feel like an adult. You kind of like the girl you took to dinner last night, even though she was squeamish about the sashimi and texted during dessert. You didn’t mind. You could pay for it. You can keep paying for it if you make them happy.
One of your co-workers, a graphic artist named Damien in a shirt with mock pit stains, nudges you in the corridor. "Good time to stand out,” he says. “They usually cut some folks come January. That way they can fire up the newbies just in time for Valentine's."
You thank him for the heads up and knuckle down in your home studio, the one they fitted with a console and a Listener. The Listener scans the country 24/7, eavesdropping on whatever keywords, pitches, or sounds you plug into it. They were initially developed for market research: how many women are talking about facial waxing? Are Chris Byres and Metal-Hex really household names?
Tonight you'll think kind thoughts. Start simple. You punch in the words "Christmas, snow, jingle,” and “child" to start with and land on an argument between a husband and wife. She asked him to replace the batteries in the baby monitor a week ago. He jokes that it’s nice not having to hear the kid squawling for a change.
"That's not funny”, she says. "Shhh," he says back. It’s a moment you capture more and more frequently: authenticity slipping into caution.
You move on to a group of mothers, newly arrived home from a shopping-cum-playdate. They're blending margaritas and chatting while their kids watch Thomas the Tank.
You find your head bobbing to the music and almost miss it when a woman named Maureen starts boasting about a tryst with a guy at the post office.
"His..." she starts.
Shunting trucks and hauling freight.
“…just huge.”
You hear one of the kids—hers?—ask a question that gets muffled by the other women’s laughter.
"Nothing,” Maureen tells him. “We’re having a great big chicken for dinner. Watch the movie."
Guffaws.
You think about the proximal zone of development: How adults speak to children just above the level they will understand.
How far of a leap is it from a chicken to a man's junk?
You lower the slider and jump to another part of the city, tuning in to—although you're really not supposed to do this—a young het couple having sex. You think that maybe they'll whisper something spicy, some starry-eyed phrase during the act that you can maybe set to Nina Simone or Julie London, but they don't talk enough. You tune in on a lesbian couple, but they talk too much.
Do you talk that much?
God, you hope not.
You pour a finger of the scotch you can now afford and remind yourself to be patient. When you were a DJ it took days, sometimes weeks for the right breaks to come to you, to find the right outro, to muscle down on a balancing level in a room built from drywall and light weight blocks.
You must have forgotten to turn off the Listener because when you come out the next morning, she's there.
In the bleak mid-winter long ago…
It's an old song. In the public domain, which means that maybe you can use more of it if you disguise her voice enough. But it’s that voice that gets you, intimate yet far away, as silky as that pricy tofu you still can't bring yourself to buy. You're at your console even before you ask the Listener to switch on your coffee maker.
Snow had fallen… snow on snow… in the bleak mid-winter long ago.
Sad, but hopeful, so full of a loose and languid joy.
She has an accent, Spanish maybe, although you like to think it’s Portuguese because her voice is like the greatest Fado you’ve ever heard. Her doorbell rings and there's a knock, loud and sharp, and she stops. You frown at the interruption and rewind her, play her back again and again until you finally hit upon an idea.
You program the Listener to scan through the most compatible captures of Christmas songs, or even just love songs—you're not picky. At first, you think you'll patch it together with others singing the same thing, like when they mashed a bunch of dog barks into an approximation of Jingle Bells. But everything you find is off key and using hervoice like that? That would be a waste.
She makes you want to reach through the speakers and touch her, to reassure her that whatever it is, she’s going to make it. Anyone who hears this is going to feel this way, you think. You spend hours, patching together bits and pieces from other households, different songs, sung in backyards and living rooms, in choir rooms and in grocery aisles. You bring a whole goddamned community together, all of them bending over backwards to make her happy, to sing her out of her lonely funk.
You take it in the next Monday and pitch it to your boss, a guy who wears a jewel on his lapel. He thinks it's brilliant. You think it's brilliant.
Within a week Snow on Snow is on the air.
Two days after that, the accompanying video—a mash up of beautiful people singing karaoke and shaking snow domes—goes viral.
By the time Christmas rolls around, other companies are mimicking your idea. Some goofus even slapped together a New Year's song from a bunch of Midwestern bingo parlors. It fails, of course, because they’re just not as good as you.
You get a huge commission check and a pay raise. You buy a Miyabe knife set and try to prepare Peking duck from scratch. It comes out chewy and pink. The girl you've invited to dinner tells you she's vegan after the fact.
It's right before Valentine's Day when you see the security guard dragging a woman toward the door of the lobby. She's trying to pull herself out of his grip, but this guy is a smirking pit-bull. He swivels her around like a desk chair and shoves her through the hydraulic doors. As they close, her hand swipes at the glass, fingers leaving a trail in the condensation. "You can’t do this! I'll sue you mother—"
That voice. It's her.
You meet your boss in the elevator. He confirms her identity, although he won’t give you a name. Then he rolls his eyes. "Read the fine print. Best and most ignored advice."
"She want money?" you ask and a brief fantasy flickers through your mind. You think about running after her and writing a check right there on the corner. At least for the same amount you paid for your sofa.
He shakes his head. "She wants us to pull it. As if we could. She's claiming repeat emotional distress. Apparently, she was singing that little ditty right before she got notified of her husband’s death in a car crash. Has to relive it everywhere she goes now. Can't turn on the TV or the radio. Can’t even go outside some days.”
Your face goes pale. You only sampled the song, you say.
He slaps a hand on your shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. They all know the rules and you followed them.” He shrugs. “I'd almost feel sorry for her, but who the hell doesn't associate a few unpleasant memories with a song?"
Unpleasant?
You go back to work, try to wipe her from your mind by sampling farts. For real. You're compiling the ultimate musical scale of people's flatulence for some jackass keyboard app, but not even this distracts you from what you saw in the lobby. She was as pretty as her voice. She was alone. And she obviously couldn't afford a lawyer despite her use of the "S" word.
You go back home and pull up her samples, pouring yourself more of that scotch. You listen to the whole thing this time, to her humming while she slices vegetables, to the call she takes from a sister who teaches art at South Coast Community College. Then she gets another call—from him. She asks him to pick up some vegetarian consommé at the Costco. She complains good-humoredly about having to make a meal for a carnivore and one for her sister. You can't hear what he's saying on the other end, but it's a happy conversation. Before she hangs up, she says, "I love you."
It takes another hour or so to get to the part where she sings, and you savor it even more this time because you haven't corrupted it yet. When you hear the doorbell ring, you don’t stop. You hear the knock, contrasted by lightness in her voice as she calls out "just a minute!" the creak of the oven door, the sound of her hands swiping against the rough cloth of her apron, or maybe, her jeans.
You hear her footfall across the softly squeaking floors. You hear her flipping up the latch, turning the knob, and the sound of a heavy door as it brushes the carpet. Then you hear a man's voice, muffled and subdued. He asks her a question. Two maybe. There's a silence. Then you hear her scream.
You shut it off and down the scotch even though you're a sipper. You try to distract yourself with more farts, a couple fighting, and what you think might be a major drug deal. You used to think you were lifting the gold out of the mud, but it’s never that easy. Mud sticks.
You decide, an hour later, that you're going to find her.
You don't have her name. The Company wouldn't give you that, but you have a face and a voice. On the phone, she'd mentioned the Pritchard Costco and her sister's job at South Coast. You go to their website and find the sister in the faculty profiles, or a woman who looks like her. You do a likeness search and within two minutes, pull up a photo of the two of them at Huntington Beach. They're both holding up surfboards, squinting into the sunlight, their arms slung loosely around each other’s shoulders. It’d be nice to go surfing with her, you think.
You can’t surf.
You locate the house and what you see makes your stomach sink in shame. There's already a moving van out front. You think that maybe that's your fault.
You park out of sight and wait, then follow the truck to an affordable housing unit in Costa Mesa. She's moving back in with her mother.
It takes you a week to think up a pretext. It's ridiculous really. You follow her into the building's communal laundry room with a basket full of smelly socks and the T-shirts you use for cleaning rags. Then you pretend to read a magazine and wait for her to sing. Who wouldn't? It's a coin laundry after all. The acoustics are great.
When she does, your hands shake and your mouth goes dry. This is a good thing because you sound sincere when you work up the courage to speak to her. You tell her you like her voice. You tell her you’re a DJ and would she be interested in singing on a few tracks? You'll pay her. She’ll even get credit.
She doesn't find this creepy in the slightest. You're a woman, after all.
And you do pay her. Maybe even enough to consult a lawyer. You want her to fight even though you know she won't win. You want to at least give her that chance. Instead, she drops the money in an IRA and puts the rest down on a car.
You're happy to see her happy.
You think up other jobs, other reasons to keep seeing her. You even help her with her taxes.
You fall in love.
And yeah, when she finds out you were the one who mixed that song, she freaks out and runs home to her mother for a while, but it's a predictable dramatic arc. Only six of them. She comes back.
You'll never be certain it wasn't for the financial security. She is four months along with her husband's child.
You don't care. You're happy.
So happy that a year later, when you see your life story on one of The Company’s up-and-coming streaming sites, you just shrug and enjoy the show. It's a rom-com or maybe a pilot. You don’t know. In this version, you're a dude—some arrogant one hit wonder who really needs to get his shit together. She's a waitress whose dreams of Broadway are nearly destroyed when her director boyfriend dies in a car accident. She doesn’t see it as she sits next to you on the sofa, the baby fast asleep in her arms. Or if she does, she doesn’t say anything.
But you know it's you. There is nothing you can do about it. All you can do is see yourself in the narrative.
That's all you can ever do.
Six types of story and five kinds of rhythm.
Snow on snow.
This story previously appeared in the UK magazine Visions and was later published in translation in the Bulgarian zine Shadowdance. I'm not in the mood to scour for reprint markets atm, but I wanted to put it out there.
