Dropping the Needle

My wife figured out that if you synced up a certain album with a certain website, you would be able to physically enter and inhabit the internet. I walked through it as though it were the streets of my old hometown on a grey dismal evening. I could feel the air stir around me and I could feel the light patter of the drizzling rain on my shoulders. It was completely immersive and real. But right away, I noticed that something was a little off with the sound. When a car rounded a corner, the splash of its tires came a little too late. I walked past a house where a dog was penned up behind a chainlink gate in the back yard, and when the dog barked, it reverberated from the wrong side of the street, bouncing off the wrong walls of the wrong houses.

I decided to stop in and use the payphone at this neighborhood diner, so that I could call my wife out in the real world and let her know about the problem. There was a cacophony of misplaced noise as soon as I stepped in the door. The busboy dropped a dish and I heard the howl of a passing train blowing its horn in the night. I saw one of the diners wave his hand in the air and call to the server and point to the empty coffee cup sitting on the table in front of him, but the only thing I could hear was the intrusive crackles and beeps and buzzes of the emergency broadcast system breaking in to make an announcement.

The payphone was in a narrow hallway in the back by the restrooms. I picked up the phone and fed a quarter into the slot. I had to make a very deliberate effort to concentrate on what numbers I needed to dial, because I kept hearing the random beeps and clicks of the buttons just before I hit them or just a moment afterwards. My wife answered the phone and thankfully her voice was matched up with mine as we talked to one another. I explained to her that she hadn’t quite synced everything up the right way. She told me that she had dropped the needle on the record at the exact moment when the lion logo was roaring for the third time, just like she was supposed to. I rubbed my hand over my eyes and shook my head. “Lion logo!? There’s no lion logo. You’re thinking of something completely different.” I looked down at my watch and told her that I was heading back. I hung the phone up on the hook and I heard my coin dropping through miles of the payphone’s inner mechanisms, clattering down through endless caverns of metal and machinery, until it finally landed with a wet plunk in a pool of water somewhere deep down in the dark.