Survival Of The Fittest

BB Gunnerson stood far from the center of everything and let the world dissolve into noise. The candle she held flickered with the breeze—no, with her own unsteady hands—as the words from the mayor and the priests blended with the ambiance. Silence was relative, and no matter how still and respectful the crowd, there was always something to be picked out. The faint hum of the failing streetlight nearby, the buzz of mosquitoes and crickets, the rumble of the far-off highway—they all came together into something larger and more than even the collective here, let alone any of the individuals. This could have been comforting but was not.

BB had seen people she knew and knew of, but she was pretty sure they hadn't seen her. Nobody but her parents had since she got back from school, and while that was not unusual in itself, the cause was; as soon as she found out that the buses were missing, she'd withdrawn to her room and locked the door. She looked at her keyboards and her bass and it was all she could do to keep herself from either hitting every note she could all at once or smashing the instruments; she gently laid them in her closet and closed the door, then cued up Earth 2 on her CD player and turned the volume up so loud she could feel the hum when she laid her hand on her desk.

She killed the lights and crawled into bed and pulled her blankets tight around her, thoroughly-temperate afternoon Arizona warmth be damned, and stayed there, sweating and staring at the wall, for seventy-three minutes and thirteen seconds plus a little bit, only finally moving to start the album over again when the silence after its last notes became too much to bear. She expected all the while that her parents would intervene, but they didn't. It was only as darkness fell that her father came and knocked and when she did not respond opened the door and said there was a vigil, would she like to go? And she'd said sure but had ditched her parents just about as quickly as she could and made her way to a spot far enough to be isolated but close enough to be inconspicuous.

The noise of it all was crushing, and she felt filthy and disheveled, and she wished she'd changed before leaving the house. This was the wrong weather and scene for shorts, and if her black shirt made it easier to hide any sweat stains, it did little to reflect the lack of normalcy in the world. She had a robe in her closet—not a bathrobe or one of those slinky silk things from steamy scenes in movies, but a heavy brown robe like an ancient monk or druid might've worn, that she'd used for a couple gigs over the past year—and that seemed more appropriate to the unearthly spectacle.

As she watched the crowd, the insects picked up and blended with the voices again, and the word "teeming" came to her unbidden. This place was teeming with mourners, arms and legs and abdomens dragging as they writhed over each other, a pulsating mass, and her candle fell from her hands, the flame snuffing in the air before it impacted the concrete and cracked into three sections loosely connected by wick. She glanced left, right, but nobody had noticed, and nobody noticed as she turned and slowly fled.

Half an hour later, her parents brought the car around and picked her up where she'd texted them to, and nobody said a word as they sat in the traffic that came with such a large gathering, listening to the hum of engines and their own breathing.

The almighty humming and thrumming rip-roared and rumbled through wood, metal, flesh, and bone. It surged and swelled, screamed and soothed, and in its wake everything melted into one big nothing. Time passed, but just how much was impossible to say; hours, days, months, a year—what difference did it make? The room shook with the power of the speakers and the amps, and BB shook with it, emerging only briefly when she had to slip down the hall to the restroom or go refill her water bottle or disinterestedly chew a few bits of stale snacks. And all the while, when she was outside her sanctuary, there was this all-pervasive uneasiness, a need to get back to the one place where she was truly a part of the world, a part of everything.

What do you like about this stuff, BB? It was a question she’d been asked time and again in the past few years, but rarely in good faith. What people actually meant was more like, “How can you tolerate this garbage?” or “Is this all a big joke?” or “Just how high are you?” There was often this nasty little insinuation, this implication that she was faking her passion for the sake of some kind of perverse hipster credibility, that she would sit alone in her room for hours on end blasting feedback and slow motion riffs just for the image of it.

Of course, in every insult that really hurt nestled a grain of truth. When first she had been introduced to drone doom, it had been in the context of online discussions about extreme and challenging music. “You think Black Sabbath is heavy?” someone might say. “Black Sabbath is nothing. Black Sabbath is kiddie stuff. This Earth band, this is the music Kurt Cobain’s drug dealer was making.” And BB had never cared much for Nirvana, but hey, Kurt Cobain’s drug dealer, that was a pretty high recommendation, so she checked it out, started with the album everyone posted everywhere, and at first she didn’t get it at all, but she still said it was good shit.

She didn’t force herself to love it, though. She was intrigued from the first, and she found herself coming back to it, putting it on in moments she didn’t expect to, as background music when she worked on homework or eventually even when she went to sleep. The fuzz and burble came to mean something more, to wrap around her like an old comfortable blanket, to settle on her with real weight. Yes, this music was heavy, and finally she understood what that word meant on a sonic level.

She was from then on insatiable. Sunn O))) and Earth were the best, of course, the purest. They meant what they did wholeheartedly, and the weird stuff, the druid robes and the Jimi Hendrix covers, they weren’t just gimmicks. These were bands without a hope of ever going mainstream, bands that only earned their spot on the throne of a niche genre by building that genre from the ground up, discovering that people like BB wanted to listen to it. But other bands were good too. Sleep was a great entry point, something she could play to her band and go, hey, see, this isn’t all just double-discs of straight fuzz, this one has lyrics, and the lyrics are about making a holy pilgrimage to smoke weed, so that’s pretty relatable, right? It takes an hour because, you know, who wants to rush smoking weed? And stuff like Stars of the Lid was wigglier, creepier but more ephemeral, but that had its place too.

The big thing, though, was that this music, this drone, it let her step away from boring backwater Kingman. It let her tap into something deeper and more real, something primal, something that was everything and everywhere. It let her be relax into being one with the universe, no need to rush anything, no hurry, all the time in the world to trundle with heavy plodding footsteps towards oblivion under the blazing desert sun.

But nothing lasts forever, no matter how monolithic. Even a CD player set on repeat pauses for a moment to engage the loop. Time slipped into nothingness for BB, and she ate and drank and slept huddled under heavy covers despite the summer heat, but outside reality marched on. Reporters came, and theories were hatched, and everyone secretly knew what BB secretly knew also, and the last fraying thread of denial could only hold so long.

Finally, the footage was released, and it snapped. Everything flew apart like a rubber band stretched too far, and BB awoke from her stupor to find that not even the greatest amplified onslaught could keep the brutality of reality at bay eternally.