In the past two months, Samantha has probably heard “How Many Zeros?” playing out of Dmitrovitch’s computer thirty times. He pulls it up ostensibly to work on it (to “tweak” it, as he says), always claiming that he’s going to add some new sound, or manipulate some detail. “The beauty of distributing my music through the Internet,” he’s said, on at least five occasions, “is that I don’t ever have to say that it’s truly ‘finished.’ I can always go back and tweak it some more.”
He says that, but she’s never seen him tweak any of the songs (there’s ten or so) that he’s made available on the Net. He’ll say that he will and then he’ll pull the master file open and listen to it, sitting there for the song’s entire duration, with his pointer finger thoughtfully resting on his pursed lips, listening. When he’s done listening to the piece he’s chosen he won’t change it, he won’t touch it; instead he’ll create a new file, an glowing empty field within which to place some of the new sounds he’s acquired (rattling tools, subsonic rumbles, complicated beat breakdowns: each shape appearing on the screen as a picketfency green waveform, snugly fit inside its own window) and these he’ll play with for a while, juggling them, overlapping bits, slowing a bit down, reversing it, at most he will moving a piece of the old file into this new one and see how it sounds in conjunction with the other bits. Half the time it’s fruitless and he deletes everything, and the other half he saves it under a name like “experiment.37.”
It’s an incredibly boring process to watch. He hasn’t completed a new song in the entire time they’ve been together, although he’s played around with something every single night she’s stayed over. “It takes a lot of time to get one of these pieces together,” he’ll say, if she asks him even the most innocuous question (like “How’s it going over there?”). “I’m not writing music for open mike night at the coffeehouse here. I can’t just slap a couple of chords together on the guitar and write some treacle about some time I got dumped and how sad I felt. I’m dealing with a lot of pieces of things here. Fragments of a culture. It takes time to figure out what the secret connections between those fragments are. It takes time, time and concentration.” And so now, normally, when he goes to work on the computer, she shuts up, and she lies on the mattress, stares up at the billboard woman’s smiling mouth, and smokes. (She’d quit; she’s started again.)