Signal to Noise

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Nina Simone. Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood. The Animals covered it and Santa Esmeralda made it famous, but Nina sang it like it was nobody’s business. Powerful blues and a voice that just punched you in the gut.

On Mondays he had the seafood soup. Tuesdays the stuffed chilli. Wednesdays he fought with his wife. The weekends were for playing pool and dominoes. He drank every day.

He sat back, his head against the door of the building. Meche, in turn, rested her head against his shoulder. For others, it might have been an intimate gesture. Maybe it was, but not in the way most people might think. Meche and Sebastian were used to each other, comfortable in their proximity. They folded and kept their dreams in the same drawer, spun fantasies side by side, lived in the easy harmony of youth which did not know the need for tall walls and sturdy defenses.

She didn’t think about magic very much anymore. That was part of her childhood, when Dolores and her sisters stitched spells with their needles. Spells to make the clouds release a gentle drizzle upon their heads. Spells to catch the eye of the boys in town. All those spells which were now gone, erased the same way a slate is erased with a warm cloth. But the memory of the feeling, of the magic...ah, that was still there.

“I think your boyfriend is making a pass at Isadora,” Constantino said. He was by himself, eyes fixed on their beautiful classmate. “He’s my buddy,” she said. “Not my boyfriend.” “Honest mistake.” “I think your girlfriend wants to make out with my buddy.” “She’s not my girlfriend.” “Honest mistake,”

She was beginning to think the record was her own white whale, and although Sebastian might be proud to know she had internalized some of his knowledge about Moby Dick, she would much rather find the damn thing.

“I don’t know you,” she muttered. To the pillow, again. “You’re a stranger.” He turned her around and Meche frowned as she looked into eyes which were exactly the same as she remembered them. But the rest wasn’t. And this man... she had never ridden down the boulevard on this man’s motorcycle, never scrawled idly in his books, never listened to vinyl records in an old pantyhose factory with him. And that was that. You don’t get to rewind your life like a tape and splice it back together, pretending it never knotted and tore, when it did and you know it did. Didn’t he get that?

“And what will be the first song?” he asked. “I figure Absolute Beginners, though if you don’t like Bowie—” She was going to suggest a whole swathe of songs. Somewhere Only We Know by Keane if he wanted to go recent and even Coldplay’s Swallowed in the Sea and the Goo Goo Dolls with Iris if he wanted to be cliché and had never watched Wings of Desire. Though if he mentioned I Can’t Fight This Feeling Anymore she was going to just stomp away. There were some things she would not accept. Not even for him.