Laura Anderson - Song of Summer

I’m just about to hit Send when I change my mind; I mail it to myself.

Robin

“Robin? You up there?”

I’m lying on my bed with my feet up against the wall, playing blues riffs. “No!” I yell. “Someone else is in my room playing B. B. King!” Blues is not always my thing, but it’s great for technique and super fun to jam to.

Jenni pokes her head around the door frame. “Ha-ha. Glad I caught you. Just stopped by to drop something off. Can’t stay too long.”

I make a face and sing, still upside down. “Ba-bananaNA. I have a buddy… Ba-bananaNA. And she’s so cool… Ba-bananaNA. We are both seniors… and we’re almost back to school! I got the bluuuuuues…”

Jenni joins in. “I got the ‘my-rich-guy-summer-fling-is-going-back-to-Albany-’cause-it’s-almost-time-for-school’ blues.”

I stop playing the guitar.

“Aw, I’m sorry.”

Jenni shrugs. “It’s okay. We both knew it was just a summer thing.” She plops down on my bed, causing the guitar neck to bounce and my hands to fumble. “Anyway, I made my first online sale. Somebody bought two keychains and asked for a vest!”

“Really?” I look up.

“Yeah! Pretty cool. They’re paying, like, a ton for the vest.”

“Nice,” I say. “Congrats.”

“Here: catch.” She throws a pile of soft cloth in my face. Once I get past the initial sweet smell of homemade waffle cones, I smell spiced oranges and motorcycle exhaust and Asian food: Carter’s house.

After a flood of memories, my right hand takes the pile of sweet-smelling cloth off my face. It’s my All-County select choir sweatshirt.

“What’s this?” I ask.

“It’s your All-County sweatshirt,” says Jenni.

“Thanks. I mean, where did you get it? I’ve been looking for it for a while.”

“It’s been in my car for forever. Trina gave it to me to give to you a couple of days after you guys broke up. Sorry.”

“I’m glad it’s not lost.”

“Yeah.” She pauses a minute. “So how are you doing?”

I shrug. “Fine, I guess.” My fingers start to noodle around in the key of A. “Better than last week, you know? Kind of wish I’d known it would just be a summer thing.” I bend a C-sharp until it’s a D. “Did you know? That it would only be a summer thing for me and Carter?”

Jenni shrugs. “I didn’t know. I guessed, maybe. Just because of logistics and whatever. But it really seemed like the real thing to me.”

I sigh. “Yeah. Yeah, it really did.” My hands stretch, fiddling with the baby E string, going into a range only classical musicians or rock gods can perfect. Jenni makes a face. “I think I could forgive him,” I say for the millionth time, “if he hadn’t lied to me for the whole summer.”

Jenni nods.

“Like, if he’d told me that he has an implant but just doesn’t want to wear it… I think I could have handled that. But he never told me! He just let me think that he could hear absolutely nothing! That it wasn’t even a choice for him to hear my music!”

Jenni looks away, studying my Decemberists poster too intently. Something’s up.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she says.

“What?” I ask again. “Come on, Jenni. Tell me. I can take it.”

She begins to play with the split ends in her hair. “I just… I don’t know if that’s true. Can you imagine somebody that you like—”

“Love—”

“Love… telling you that he could listen to your music, he could hear it, he just doesn’t want to? How crappy would that feel?”

I let that question bounce around in my head and my fingers slow to a stop. “Pretty crappy,” I say finally.

“So… you still think you would have stayed with him if he’d told you?”

“Well, there would have been a chance anyway.”

“You mean there would have been a chance that you could have bugged him enough to put it in and listen to you play so you could blow his mind and fulfill a void he never knew he had!” She swings her arms around in what is supposed to be an imitation of me, then calms down and looks me straight in the eye. “I know you, Robin. You wouldn’t have let it rest.”

I shrug. “Maybe… I mean, people change.”

“And that’s probably why he didn’t tell you. Because he wanted you to like him the way he was. Without him having to change.”

I sigh and roll off of my bed, leaving my guitar lying on it. “Well, he still shouldn’t have lied.”

“And I agree with you there. He shouldn’t have lied about something so big. But I can see why he did.” She picks up a magazine from off my floor and I get the sense that the conversation is over. We can only rehash this breakup so many times.

I walk over to my computer and she sits next to the guitar on my bed, her back against the wall, engrossed in whatever article she’s reading.

“Maybe I’ll unblock him.”

“It’s up to you.”

“We’ll see.” I wiggle the computer mouse and the screen wakes up—YouTube. The videos that are recommended for me are lining the side of my screen. Among all of my favorite music videos I see, “Cochlear Implants: A Simulation.”

I’ve seen that video recommended for me before—must be from all of the CI activation videos I watched before. I don’t know why I haven’t watched it. I guess I just thought that it couldn’t be that different from hearing the way I hear. After all, Trina’s chirpy little voice sounds just like every other nine-year-old I know. How could she be hearing different things from all the rest of us?

I click Play. It’s not really a video; there are no people in it. There aren’t even any pictures. It’s just a sound bar with words. “Sentence, voiced,” it reads, “1 channel.”

One channel? What does that mean? Evidently not much, because what comes out of my speakers sounds like sandpaper or static.

“What’s that?” Jenni looks up from the magazine.

“Some video about cochlear implants,” I say. “This is supposedly what it sounds like to hear with one.”

“It doesn’t sound like much,” she says.

“I think it gets better,” I reply as “4 Channels,” scrolls across the screen. But the sounds coming from my speakers still don’t sound human, let alone like speech. “8 Channels,” and I can kind of understand a few words. “12 Channels” sounds like words, but I don’t know what they are. Finally, “20 channels” comes up. “A cat always lands on its feet,” says a robotic voice that sounds something like a multivoiced chorus of Borg aliens from Star Trek: The Next Generation.

“That’s it?” Jenni says. “It doesn’t really sound human.”

“Yeah… ,” I say.

Then the sentence plays again, just a plain recording of the person. Like every other recording I hear. And what I thought was a Borg chorus is a child’s voice.

What?

I shoot a look to Jenni. “Whoa… ,” I say.

I click on Replay Video and listen again. This time I catch the words earlier, at the twelve channels mark, because I know what the kid is saying. But it still doesn’t sound like a kid. This time when the kid is done talking, I realize that the video hasn’t finished yet.

“Jenni! They’re going to play music!”

She puts down the magazine and watches the screen from across the room. “What’s it say?” she asks, as text appears on the screen.

“Just that this kind of music is the easiest for CI users to understand. It’s a solo instrument that’s not too high or too low, with a strong beat.”

But the first track, played on four channels, sounds nothing like that. I laugh. It’s not a single-note instrument at all! This song is a rocking industrial piece that sounds like something out of Stomp. Poles bang against sheet metal and electronic static distorts the percussion.

I turn around and laugh to Jenni. “This is awesome! Too bad the description’s wrong.”

She smiles and nods but avoids my eyes.

Eight channel sounds a lot like four channels. The beats are cleaned up a little, but it’s still the same rhythmic industrial piece. The song continues on into twelve channels. If anything, it sounds worse. The beats have developed some deep, strange, sonar-like echo. It sounds like somebody’s breathing into a microphone with the pickup turned way too high.

I shoot a confused look at Jenni. “It’ll get better,” I say. “It’s not at twenty channels yet.”

“How many channels does Carter have?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Probably as many as they make. He can afford it, after all.”

I let the music play on to twenty channels. The strong, steady beat gets higher, sounding kind of like a tambourine or a hi-hat. The deep, sonar-like sounds change pitch slightly, but there’s still no discernable melody.

“See, that was a little better,” I say to Jenni. “Now it’s supposed to play the normal music recording. It’ll probably be so close. Like the voice was. Just maybe sound more… unplugged.”

She nods at me, eyebrows creased, but her worry is unwarranted. I mean, it’s an electronic industrial piece. How different can it be?

And then a tambourine starts playing, clear as day. My brain barely has time to register its surprise when another instrument starts: a guitar.

This song is folk music. Scandinavian folk music. I would know it anywhere. It’s a country dance played by a guitar and a tambourine.