They walked up the concrete steps to the back doors and entered. The silver door handle felt hot from the sun, but as Tom pulled it open a rush of cool air blew against their mouths and noses and cheeks, and Brandon’s thin blonde hair lifted in the breeze.
“Do you think they’ll have it?” asked Brandon.
“Probably. Check used first,” Tom said.
“Maybe I’ll just ask the people.”
A florescent light flickered. Neither Tom nor Brandon perceived the drone of the lights, masked as it was by the song “Creep”.
“They don’t know. We gotta check used first. All they’ll do behind the counter is try to get you to buy a new one for more money.” He walked faster down the aisle, past some t-shirt carousels and a broken-stringed acoustic guitar propped on an end cap. Brandon rushed to follow. “All they want is your money,” said Tom, pointing at a cashier, a big girl with acne who wore a big red shirt and a big silver name tag.
“I’d almost rather have a new one,” Brandon said.
“What do you mean by that,” Tom said, “almost rather?”
“Well,” said Brandon, “like, what if it’s scratched? Or if the liner notes are marked up or the jacket is ripped? I kinda like it new...” He put his hands in his pockets and turned his eyes down toward the scuffed fronts of his Converse.
“Good point,” Tom said, “I guess if you have the money and want to spend it.”
“Heh...yeah.”
“My mom and dad have an old Leonard Cohen record that a person wrote all in. I read all about this affair these two people were having. At first I got grossed out because I thought it was between my mom and dad but then I saw it says ‘used’ on a yellow tag on the case. Anyway this guy bought this girl this record to thank her for some favor she did him. He underlines lines that have 'naked' in them and writes about how the lyrics are poetry about love and sex and beauty or something. He wrote in script all between the lyrics. Can’t get that from a new CD, can you, Brand?”
“I still like the new.”
*****
He squatted in the aisle of the school bus, brushing past arms and backpacks to the front seats. “Three for a dollar,” Brandon said to the girl in the second seat. She was a few years younger but Brandon knew she had a sweet tooth and that her mother stuffed dollar bills into her paws each morning as she shoved her out the door.
She looked into his eyes, they were blue and honest and caring. “Six please.”
*****
“Happy Days, I knew they’d have it new.” Tom watched Brandon fuss with the shrink-wrapping. He thought of a comic strip he’d seen that depicted a fat man in a lab coat whom a Satan figure took great pleasure in spiking from behind with his trident. Sweat flying off his head, the man struggled to unwrap CDs as they piled up at the end of a conveyor belt. The caption read, “The Inventor of Shrink Wrap.”
They stood facing the bulletin board. After boring of Brandon’s struggle, Tom looked up at the flyers. Yoga workshops, firewood for sale, lawn mowing, Lyme disease prevention. This was supposed to be a record store, yet this board never had anything to do with music. Probably because of the mall. Everything in the mall feels at least a little inauthentic. A bunch of ancients and space-eyed teens spending all their cash on whatever the mannequins happen to be wearing. The bulletin board was at least partly real. Whatever is up here, someone put here.
Tom fingered through the flyers, looking behind ones that hung over others. He pushed away an 18”x24” glossy proclaiming upcoming events at Bard College and found an expired basement hardcore show flyer that advertised the bands Deafening Silence, Dracularia, Stuck Pig, and Scatface. Every time Tom found a new bulletin board, he’d try to find the oldest event flyer he could. He liked when the layers added up. It became easy after a while because the people that worked there cleaned off the dated ones as the dates passed as long as they were clearly visible, but sometimes, if one was covered up, like this Deafening Silence flyer, he would unearth it. He took the flyers that had expired and taped them with scotch tape onto other flyers he’d already hung on his wall at home. Sometimes they fell off while he slept.
Off to the left, he noticed a photocopied flyer for a show at Flirty Bernie’s. The flyer said it was a show/dance party. There would be five bands and two djs. It was in three weeks, on a Friday. 21 and over, it said. 8 pm. This presented a number of obstacles, but none that couldn’t be managed. He took the flyer, folded it, and stuffed it into his back pocket. Maybe he would take Vinny. He could not perceive the drone of the florescent lights.
The power went out in the mall. Everything was completely silent. Eerily so. Tom noticed the quiet. “C’mon Brandon. Let’s leave.” They walked across the sunlit parking lot to the woods.
*****
They walked through the woods, looking for the abandoned garage Tom had sworn he had found. Brandon surveyed the land, occasionally holding his string of beads close to his eyes even though Tom knew the compass didn’t work and that Brandon was just pretending. Brandon claimed he always knew where he was in the woods and that he was never scared of getting lost. “Besides, these woods aren’t that big anyways, and at night, the mall lights up.” They walked along the valley where the stream used to be. Tom swung a hickory switch he found at passing branches of hemlock and white pine. Woodpeckers and sapsuckers flew among the trees. On occasion, they sang.
He charged an ambush. A neverending swath of soldiers, each of whom he engaged one by one, like a medieval guerrilla fighting to the death on principle.
Tom ran over to a hemlock. It had fallen into the crotch of another tree and split it. The hemlock trunk was jammed into a broken ash tree, leaving its dead tip half-jutted over the dell. He started climbing up the spires of rusty grey hemlock branches, the bark dropping off as he positioned his sneakers. He took it slowly, planting each foot securely into a crotch. Brandon followed. He pulled his CD out of his cargo pocket and placed it on a rock. Then he slid up the trunk on his stomach, only leaving the complete embrace of the tree to maneuver through the branches. Dipping through a pair of branches in this fashion, Brandon inhaled part of a spiderweb. He coughed but shook it off when Tom asked him if he needed help. As Tom reached the spot where the two trees had collided, he double-checked his footing and stood. He looked around him, but saw no one. He’d expected to see Dennis. Brandon edged himself further on his belly as a snail would. As Brandon edged closer, Tom started even further out onto the branch. Now he too was on his stomach, because there weren’t any limbs to get in the way and there was more open air around him. As Brandon made his way beyond the spot where the two trees collided, the hemlock slowly started to lift, as if the spirit of an ancient forest warrior had been haphazardly and mistakenly awoken. Brandon fell back before it got very far, but Tom could not move but in contraction. He became bodily attached to the tree, squeezing his chest against the trunk with his arms and legs. The spots of sweat on his green shirt enlarged into blotches, and he slowly slid down from the tip of the stick, saying “I’m cool…I’m cool, it’s cool” over and over again the whole time, more to himself than to Brandon.
