Phantom Center

“I’m trying to live fast, die young, and be a nice corpse by the end of it,” were the words I recalled when I saw his number on my phone. I wasn’t trying to live at any particular speed; I was afraid of dying, and being born with my appearance meant my corpse would never look good, regardless.

Still, his partying words had left that impression, and I remembered them before I thought about how long it had been since I last heard from him—maybe a couple of years, less than ten but more than five. I would ask him somewhere between the first few greetings, once he picked up.

Despite being an old friend, my hand still shook as I made the call. I wasn’t even the one who needed to contact the other person, but the situation itself made me tremble. My cigarette held more steadily between my lips than in my fingers as the phone finally connected somewhere.

“Do you have your studio running?” came from the speakers. It was his voice, mixed with urgency; even through the distorted overtones, the quality of his voice was the same one I remembered. “Look, I referred you to someone. Can you make the twelve happen, around noon? You have to, man.”

No hello and no how-have-you-been, but it was partially my fault for failing to push back. It wasn’t because of all our years of friendship, but because I lacked a solid backbone.

“Su—” I took the cigarette away from my mouth, making it awkward to speak. “Yes, I can schedule the twelve at noon.”

“Thank God. You’re a lifesaver, Flaco.” An honest sigh of relief escaped through the tiny speakers of the cellphone. “The twelve at twelve. Don’t forget it. Alright, I’ll call you back, then—”

He hung up. I never got to ask him how long it had been since he’d gone to try his luck in Gringolandia.

After checking for any other missed calls and messages, I tried to return my phone to my back pocket, colliding with the pack of cigarettes already there. I shifted it to my right pocket, which I disliked; I hated having heavy items on one side. That side was reserved for spare change and the wallet. There always had to be an equal weight in both pockets, usually the wallet and pocket change distributed between the sides, or my keys if there was no change. I used the same approach with panning.

Sometimes there were weird reasons for tilting the mix to one side, but those were weird, and the move itself was a weird one. Normally, I kept everything balanced.

I finished the cigarette with the delusion that I would either reject them or charge more than usual to the person being sent by him. Deep down, I knew I would fold the moment the client mentioned it was a favor, or that he had been sent by our mutual acquaintance.

Good thing there was nothing booked for the twelfth. I knew because I was busy on the eleventh. It was a Sunday, and I would be playing bass for the culto service, as I did every weekend. The same way this appointment had been set up, I had landed that gig without much input of my own, though that had been some time ago, and the folks at the evangelical church had gotten used to relying on me by now.

The hardest part of closing was securing the locks at the bottom of the metal rolling shutter.

I didn't mind shutting off the equipment or putting things away. I usually didn't need to put much out for most recordings anyway. It was mostly an operation run by myself, so the kind of work I did could be handled with just a handful of tools. Rather, it was setting the alarm and knowing that tomorrow I would have to bend down and lift the sheet of metal, making a loud noise early the next morning, that bothered me.

At least I wasn't on some second or third floor. Being adjacent to the main street meant I could just close up and walk away, and it acted as a disguise, making the place look like any other store around the Zona Centro. There weren't any windows either.

That appointment sprung on me by an old acquaintance had quickly faded from my mind as I walked up Avenida Revolución; the man himself also pushed away from my thoughts. It wasn't intentional; it was simply because of where I was heading.

One would think it would be common in any coffee shop, but I had realized that wasn't the case. The odor of coffee becoming stronger as you reached it wasn't something that occurred in all of them. I didn't think it was an indication of the quality of their drinks, but rather of what they did to the store itself; maybe it had to do with the ventilation. For all I knew, the smell was artificial, amplified by some product, like adding even harmonics to a thin signal.

Just like saturation, it could give the coffee shop an added warmth, making it seem more expensive than it actually was.

The saturation unit adding warmth to my eyes, however, wasn't the odor. That would be weird, since smell was a sense tied to the nose, not the eyes. It was the specific person working the register and sometimes the espresso machine. It was an awkward comparison, but well, I'm not an ENT specialist. I'm just a sound engineer.

One who would occasionally travel a couple of blocks from First Street to Avenida Revolución to order a chai with one espresso shot after work, at this Colombian coffee shop, usually about two hours before they closed.

There was a sense of congruent beauty in her. Besides the asymmetry of her face, her whole person was just, well, congruent. It produced the same feeling as seeing all the tracks in a project correctly colored, each track in the color I assumed was right for its section: red, obviously, for vocals; blue for bass.

Her grace was more than enough to supersede the awkward color combinations of her apron and the uniform beneath it—the colors of the Colombian flag on the apron, but for some reason, a fluorescent green underneath. Regardless of that odd pairing, I never grew tired of looking at her, from a normal distance as I ordered and from afar as I sat in a circular corner chair, stealing glances from time to time.

“Agustín—dirty chai.” Her voice, with my order, echoed barely in the room. It would seem there was no echo, but in reality, the short early reflection made her voice sound as if it had an added depth that wasn't there in her regular speaking voice.

Even that detail fascinated me: the fact that she would just call out ridiculous nomenclature like that. Apparently, a chai with an espresso shot was called a “dirty chai,” as if it were some cocktail. I don't think I would have had it in me to say an order like that if I worked a job like this, yet she made it sound correct, as if that was indeed the name of the drink and there would be no arguing.

Like how yellow just seemed to be the natural color for keyboards.

“Thank you.” It wasn't difficult to speak with pleasantries like this. In fact, they were my favorite part of conversation because it seemed to be the only time my voice sounded normal.

“You are welcome. Please enjoy,” she said with a resplendent smile. I could tell she recognized me by now. The fact that she had asked for my order before I said anything when I approached the counter was proof enough. Maybe that feature of my being there gave her some small satisfaction in her job, that now she could confidently say the regular's order and get everything right. Maybe I was part of giving her that slight sense of happiness.

Maybe it was all just in my head, and she wasn't thinking of anything while serving me.

“Maybe I’m Amazed” sounded through the in-ceiling speakers. It was a good record.

Even through the mono speakers, I could tell it was a remixed version, since the drums sounded present in the center. Once collapsed to mono, the panned percussion of the original seventies would be buried further in the mix. The same slightly detuned piano, ever so present, kept the rhythm, as a rhythm guitar would.

Despite my better senses, my eyes glanced toward the counter, hoping to imprint the last picture of her for the day. The opening door had already alerted the workers.

“Thank you for coming!” she said, looking at me, the standard greeting coated in the reverberations of the room. “Have a good day, Agustín.”

I never liked my name. My father had wanted to name me Agustín after Agustín Lara, but also because our family name was Lira; he thought it would be a funny joke, even though the Lira part of our last name was just a coincidence.

Regardless of the background surrounding my old-fashioned-sounding name, her voice had managed to make me feel as if there were nothing wrong with it at all. At least, I didn’t hate it coming from her mouth.