Inside, the electricity worked. The apartment stretched, four rooms long and claustrophobically thin, from the front of the building to the back. The bare wooden floors creaked with every step. The kitchen was floored with crumbling white hexagonal tile. From a plastic two-liter bottle, he offered her iced coffee with a Japanese brand name. She took it and they locked eyes. He reached for her shoulders and kissed her a little feebly, then backed away. They drank the coffee, which was sweet and absurdly strong, from robin's-egg-blue mugs decorated with a corporate logo.
He was nervous now. His speech returned to sudden, sporadic bursts. She asked for a tour. As they walked, she absently rubbed his back with one hand. There was the familiar thrill of entering someone else's domain. The bedroom was small and spare; the bed on the floor. A study held only a metal chair and desk. On it, a Sony computer was jury-rigged to use his Manhattan Cable VTV. She knew that was illegal, but that a lot of people did it for the high resolution.
The front room was the only one that Freddie had bothered to decorate. Two wooden bookshelves looked freshly oiled and out of place. Maps filled the walls. They were world maps, strange projections that warped the shapes of the continents. She remembered that the New York school system had adopted one of them; its peculiar geometry meant to compensate for the old Mercator map that had favored the Northern Hemisphere. The result had been a short, patriotic controversy drummed up by the tabloids.
There was also a stereo. It had a turntable for playing the old oversized disks that she remembered were called Long Playing, even though they didn't play for long at all. Freddie had a stack of these disks in their cardboard covers. She suddenly realized why microdisks were called micro. The old disks were huge.
He leafed through the stack nervously. The best way to calm a man was to talk to him about his toys.
"You collect these old things?" she asked.
"Yeah. LPs, they're called." He pulled one out of its cover. She took a step forward and grasped the disk, pulled it closer. He tensed a little.
"It seems a little . . . dark. Is it plastic?"
"Actually, you're not supposed to touch them," he said, a bit too loudly. He added lamely, "It's vinyl, actually." He held the disk as if it were fragile, by the edges. It had a circular paper label in the center and a tiny circular hole within that. She squinted and manipulated her eyes a little, adjusting their focal length. The record had grooves, or rather, a single groove that spiraled from the inside out to a smooth band around the circumference.
"How does the laser read vinyl? It's not very reflective, is it?" she said. She let her eyes relax, and the room slowly came back into focus.
"It's not an optical medium. It's mechanical." He put the disk on the turntable. A small robot arm jerkily picked up from beside the turntable and swiveled until it was over the disk's circumference band. The arm ended in a tiny pin that she assumed was the read head. It was odd seeing the workings of the machine out in the open. It made her slightly nervous. At least MD players were contained. After a moment's pause, the arm lowered. She was alarmed for a second, thinking it was going to miss the disk altogether, but it made contact on the outer edge and the speakers suddenly sprang to life. The sound was a kind of low static, bright with tiny pops.
"Isn't this great? It's called surface noise."
She looked at him a little quizzically. "But - "
The music started. It had a distant, haunting quality, like the cry of a seagull. She had always heard that LPs were tinny, but this was not just lack of fidelity. It was as if the musicians were far down the hall of an old house. The quality of sound was familiar and comforting. It was, she realized, the melancholy sound-track quality that filmmakers used to signify nostalgia. There were saxophones and drums, and some sort of bass that was barely distinguishable above the rumble of the speakers.
"My dear, I offer you the Ink Spots." Freddie was suddenly much happier.
They danced, slowly, their bodies pressed together.
They were about the same height. His arms wrapped around her. She reached through them to feel the muscles of his back and his tight shoulders. Her cheek rested against his, and she could smell the sharp scent of amphetamines on his sweat. So that was why he was so damn nervous. She kissed his ear and murmured into it.
"How does it work?"
"What?" His voice sounded dry.
"The LPs. You said they were a mechanical medium. What does that mean?" She kept up the massage of his shoulders. As his mind shifted to the explanation, he began to relax.
"Well ... it means not digital. The disk has an analog of the sound waves pressed onto it."
"Yeah?" She slowly worked her hands toward the muscles around his sharp shoulder blades.
"Yeah. So the music is stored as undulations in a long sinuous groove on the surface of the record."
"Mmmm. Tell me more."
"And as the record rotates, the stylus - that's the read head - slides along the groove. . . ."
"Are you making this up?" She smiled at him as he reached for the light. Her massage reached his flanks, his hardened groin.
He continued. "And the stylus moves with the undulations. Its vibrations, thousands per second, go to the speaker, which reconverts them."
"Into?"
"Into music."
They kissed, deeply and for a long time. Their dance stopped and her breath was arrested. The Ink Spots sang in a sweet harmony blurred by the ancient medium. After a long moment, a salty taste entered her mouth from his. She broke from him and felt her teeth with her tongue. One of them, a canine, was still quite sharp from her transformation in the park. She tensed and quickly smoothed it. She had cut his tongue. He didn't seem to have noticed.
She kissed him again. A few drops of blood were nothing after what had happened in the park.
The stereo and its power strip gave off a red glow, but it was dark enough. She was wary of making love in the light. Sometimes at climax her face contorted inhumanly. It wasn't the sort of thing lovers should see. Freddie was nervous enough about her alien hands. He took a sharp breath the first time she touched his cock. His advances became more frantic after that, and his breathing deepened, but it wasn't just fear. Freddie knew how to channel his nervous energy into passion.
He was naked first. She was drawn to his pale, damaged arm. As she kissed it, she breathed the strong odor of speed. The smell of the bandage and of contained sweat sharpened the scent. He lay back a moment, as her lips brushed his nipples and the hairs on his belly. She went down on him deeply, the taste of his blood still in her mouth.