Forty Plays

And the hum stayed there, annoying like a stupid fly against a windowpane.

Salomé didn't reach out to turn off the interface. She kept staring at her fingers, the wine-red nail polish on her right thumb peeled halfway off, revealing a pathetic yellowish half-moon. On the screen, the gain curve remained frozen at an absurd peak, a sawtooth wave that had nothing to do with the strings they had commissioned for the mattress commercial.

It was stupid, she thought. Old sound cards do those things when they heat up: they throw garbage into the buffer, invent noises, read leftovers of memory that nobody cleaned. Whatever.

But the voice had said Kurata with a clarity that doesn't come from a power glitch.

The three-blade Samurai fan, with its grille tied up with soft wire so it wouldn't rattle, oscillated from left to right on the edge of the desk. It came and went, blowing a warm breeze over her that smelled of 30th Street dust and the grease from the auto repair shop on the corner. Every time the appliance completed its swing to the left, the plastic window curtain lifted two inches, letting in the glare of the Belén sodium streetlight. A thick, heavy yellow, the kind that keeps nobody asleep.

Salomé scratched the back of her neck and sighed.

On the other side of the laundry patio, a mere three yards away through the skylight, Edwin's window was still lit. Edwin mixed bootleg vallenatos and reggaeton tracks for hair salons on near-field monitors that pointed straight into the shared courtyard. When he turned up the volume at two in the morning, the jars of jam Salomé used to store screws on the shelf would vibrate.

"If it plays through that animal's cones," she said to herself in a low voice, "it means the file is truly out of its mind."

She opened the browser. The Une connection was stuttering as usual at that hour, with the black modem blinking green on top of a stack of old magazines. She went into SoundDump, a dying server where people used to upload demos back in 2008 and that now only served as a dump for orphan producers and Russians trading percussion samples. She hadn't opened that account in two years.

The profile was still intact, with a blurry photo of a coiled cable and a ridiculous name: sj_audio_medellin.

There was only a single track uploaded: an acoustic guitar loop she recorded back when she still believed she was going to make a living playing in El Poblado bars. The counter read forty plays. Exactly forty. Thirty-eight must have been her own checking the mix, and the other two some lost bot crawling metadata.

She dragged the file to the upload button.

The percentage indicator advanced in jerks: twelve percent, thirty-seven, an endless pause that threatened to throw a network error, and then the definitive jump to one hundred.

In the kitchen, the refrigerator gave a dull click and the motor kicked on.

Salomé got up from the plastic chair, feeling the stickiness of sweat on the back of her thighs. She went to the counter to pour herself a glass of water from the plastic pitcher Marcela always left half-full. Marcela slept in the back room with the door bolted shut; she wouldn't wake up even if lightning struck the zinc roof, but if she found dirty dishes in the morning she was capable of chewing her out for half an hour before Salomé could even set foot on the bus to Robledo.

The water tasted like old chlorine.

She went back to the bedroom with the glass in her hand and set it down on a spiral notebook where she had jotted down chord progressions she never ended up using. It left a round, damp ring on the cardboard.

She opened the courtyard window a bit wider, pushing the aluminum frame that screeched against the rusted track. The light from Edwin's room was still cutting through the patio's gloom.

"Edwin," she called out, without raising her voice too much.

Nothing. Just the muffled rumble of bass drums filtering through the glass.

"¡Edwin!"

The neighbor's curtain pulled back slightly. Edwin's round face appeared, pale from the light of his own screens, with headphones hanging around his neck like a broken scarf.

"What's up, Salo? Still awake with that jingle?"

"I'm sending you a SoundDump link. Play it for a second on the big monitors, see if it throws you a crackle at two thousand four hundred hertz. I need to know if it's my converter."

Edwin twisted his mouth, scratching his sparse beard.

"I'm sorting out the vocals for some dude from Envigado who sings like he's got a potato stuck in his throat. If I hit pause now, I'll lose the thread."

"A second, fatty. It's a thirty-second track."

"Send it over, then."

Salomé went back to her screen. She copied the public link and threw it to him via the platform's internal chat. She stayed still, arms crossed over her chest, waiting.

For half a minute all you could hear was the oscillating Samurai and the distant whistle of a semi-truck climbing up the South Highway. And suddenly, across the courtyard, Edwin's monitors spat out the track. The synthesized strings sounded fat, opaque, dirtying the night with its monotonous march.

And then, right at second twenty-two, the click.

It wasn't interference.

It was the unmistakable sound of a hard plastic mechanical key being pressed down and then released, followed by a very brief, almost imperceptible breath trapped on the tape.

The music stopped dead on the other side of the courtyard.

Edwin stuck his head out his window frame again. He was frowning and holding a half-finished soda can.

"Listen here, Salo. Where did that sample come from? That's not a clean synthesizer no matter what the fuck. It's got room air."

"It's an old pack," she replied, resting her hands on the windowsill. "A tape emulator."

"Well, delete that crap. It's got a tail that's gonna dirty up your whole mix. Nobody's gonna pay you for a commercial with that much filth."

"I think it gives it body."

"Body my ass. That's line noise. On the radio they'll bounce it back instantly."

"Stop being an idiot. If it sounds broken, it's because it's got character."

Edwin let out a dry, reluctant laugh and took a swig from the can.

"Way too much philosophy for four in the morning, girl. Go to sleep instead, you've got bags under your eyes that look like bruises."

Edwin's curtain snapped shut and the courtyard went back to silence.

Salomé sat down in front of the computer again.

On the screen, the thread in the Russian forum where she had downloaded Takumi Nishimura's installer was still open in a secondary tab. The last reply was from nine years ago. A certain vlad_sound99 was complaining that the audio files came with an unfixable lag in the left channel, and Nishimura —if it even was him— had replied with a single message in broken, telegraphic English: no correction. original support lost at kurata warehouse, kawasaki. use as is or delete.

Kurata Warehouse.

She searched the name in the Google bar. No audio companies came up, no record labels. Just old references to a pawnshop near the train tracks in Nakahara-ku and a couple of articles from a local Kanagawa newspaper about a 2011 expropriation due to dampness.

Fatigue weighed on her eyelids like damp sand.

And yet, she couldn't get up.

The cursor blinked over the SoundDump link. Salomé rested her index finger on the left mouse button, ready to log out and throw in the towel for the night. It was almost five already. In three hours she had to be in Robledo enduring her mom's reproaches about why she wouldn't look for a real job at a music academy or a collection agency, anything that had health benefits and didn't force her to spend her nights locked up in a tiny room smelling of reheated coffee.

She was going to close the browser window.

Instead, she hit refresh.

A silly reflex. The habit of refreshing the page out of inertia, like someone opening the empty fridge for the third time knowing damn well there's nothing inside.

The screen flickered white once.

The play counter, which had been stuck at forty since kingdom come, didn't read forty-one.

It read 12,840.

Salomé blinked, thinking fatigue was playing tricks on her with the tiny font numbers.

F5.

13,210.

The Samurai fan completed its sweep and hit her face with another gust of warm air while the SoundDump interface began to freeze. The right-hand column of the page, reserved for the comments nobody ever left, began to fill up from bottom to top at a mad speed, a cascade of text overflowing the HTML code margins.

None of the messages were in Spanish or English.

They were angular characters, dense blocks of kanji and kana following one another relentlessly, lighting up the screen with a pale, unceasingly trembling light.