She thinks of Gregor. Gregor is someone whose musical career is a string of failure—he’s been barred entry to the YesMen, ejected from the obliterated Now Hiring when the Nameless Relationship ended, blocked from playing by cranky neighbors, denied even silent practice by a burned hand, regulated now to a dank basement—and yet he keeps trying. And somehow this has begun to make him stronger. She has seen it.
Melody in her head. In her neck, her back, her arms and fingertips. Melody moving in her spine. She begins to wonder what it would be like to play the melody with Gregor there, playing along, with his bass; she begins allowing herself to remember last summer; she remembers him diving his shitty old green Datsun over to her house on nights when Mom and Mom’s new boyfriend were out; she remembers him pulling his bass out from the backseat, remembers how the two of them would set up and jam, remembers the way the two of them sounded together and just that feeling that something there was clicking.
Love is the science of manufacturing scintillating intersections.
She begins to supply her melody with imagined accompaniment; she can hear the sound of his bass behind it.
It occurs to her that she would like to play with him again. And she’s not thinking about it in terms of getting back together with him in a romantic relationship—she’s still not sure that that would work at all—and she’s not thinking of it in terms of how the two of them complete one another or any such bullshit—but she knows, or she’s beginning to learn, at least, that that space, the space that you need to create something, the space that’s defended against the shit and money of the world, doesn’t need to be a space that you inhabit alone: the myth of the solitary artist is exactly that, a myth, just another one of those male bullshit stories dressing itself up in the drag of fact. To keep that space, to defend it, takes a community. A community of people together, she thinks, is what can stand—is the only thing that can stand—against the forces from the outside, the Saxes and McLeggs that roam the planet in the name of the David Geffen Company, the Starbucks and the Barnes and Nobles that replicate themselves across America, the Nikes that paste their Swoosh on any surface that’s for sale. Those forces are corporations. They have incorporated. The only response that makes sense is to incorporate back, against them. Not in the name of profit, like Dmitrovitch and his Invisible City, but in the name of something else, something more important: creation.