In a wo r short fic k of Cyrus Sh tion, a contemp hrad the inte lates rn obsessi ational on DJ Shad with o legenda w’s r debut L y P. His name was Arthur Fury, and he’d been a model tenant, or so claimed the landlady as she led us to his room along a corridor bathed in stuttering halogen light. She pushed open the door and we found him as she’d found him that morning: slumped over his computer in a vest and a pair of khaki shorts, one hand still clutching the mouse in a comic book parody of sudden death. We combed the carpet for pills and powders but found nothing in the way of narcotics. Not even a beer in the fridge. Just a few tins of tuna on the sideboard and a loaf of long-gone bread torn to ribbons by the rats. Fury was clearly a shut-in: his neighbours described a young man they were aware existed, but saw only occasionally in the hallway. Who smiled politely, but never spoke. The lab report later confirmed what I could tell from lifting his tiny wrist: that he’d died of malnutrition. I don’t know what made me take the box. I’d say a hunch, but in thirty years with the NYPD I’ve learned to recognise hunches, and this didn’t feel like one. My junior partner Dax was distracted by paperwork when I glimpsed it in one corner of the room; the next thing I knew I’d hoisted it under my arm, mumbled something about a phone call and slipped downstairs to stash it in the car. It was like I was in a trance. That night, after the wife had gone to bed and the apartment was silent save for the reassuring rattle of the air con, I cleared the dinner plates and opened the box. What I found made no sense at all: a bunch of video cassettes, countless seven and twelveinch records, and a dozen or so sheets of A4, taped together and covered in a frantically scrawled time code, punctuated with the names of films and songs, very few of which I recognised. My heart leapt like a colt when the phone rang. It was Dax at the office, and thankfully he was too excited to notice my nervousness. He’d been sifting through Fury’s computer files, all of which were snatches of tunes or movies that in some way pertained to an LP released almost fifteen years ago – a record, he
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said, made entirely from parts of other records. He told me how he and his friends had fallen for this album in college, how they’d been to see the producer perform live in the summer of 1997, and as he talked I found myself scanning the spidery handwriting on the sheet in front of me, a strange pattern emerging before my eyes. “It was basically a student music project gone wrong,” said Dax. “He started out trying to identify every sample on the album, then became obsessed with the idea of remaking the record from scratch on his computer.” “How far did he get?” I asked, holding up a cracked seven-inch of Marlena Shaw’s ‘California Soul’. But Dax didn’t hear me. “Poor guy plain forgot to eat,” he said. “Goddamn, that was a good record.” That was six months ago. I picked up a copy of the album on my way to work the next day, spent my lunch hour listening to it in the car while a summer rainstorm lashed the windshield. I had to admit that it was really something – all those fragments of old tunes and films elaborately embroidered, glittering like stars or a thousand overlapping stories. And I knew then and there that I had to finish what Fury had started. I smuggled the computer out of the office that evening and set it up in the study. It took me three days to open his project, and three weeks to figure out how he was recording samples and layering them in tracks. Even now I’m slow, taking hours at a time to decipher the next entry in his tangled time code. But I’m getting there. Last night I finished ‘Midnight In A Perfect World’, which means I only have two tracks left. And then what? God knows, but I keep thinking I can feel what Fury must have been feeling in that squalid, rat-infested apartment. Like there’s something gathering in shadow in the corner of the room. Something awesome, something monstrous coming into being. Thank god for my wife, because otherwise I’d probably be forgetting to eat right now. Cyrus Shahrad