Chapter 7: Outside Noise
Early May, 2015
Almost three months had passed. Three months of a grey existence, marked by the hum of the Burger Barn's freezers and the silence of his house. The routine, which at first was an anchor in madness, had become sandpaper, slowly wearing away the urgency he had felt.
Michael sat down in front of his second-hand MacBook. Ableton's screen greeted him, a grid of possibilities that felt more like a prison. He had reached a plateau. A desert.
In the weeks after buying his team, he had progressed at a feverish pace. Driven by adrenaline, he had devoured dozens of tutorials, learning the fundamentals. But now, that initial excitement had evaporated.
He had the map, the guide to the System. But it felt like trying to build a Formula 1 engine with an instruction manual and a set of hardware store keys. The theory was there, but his hands were clumsy.
He opened the project he had been working on for a week. It was his attempt to recreate "hellboy". The guide was clear: "Aggressive beat, distorted 808, alternative rock guitar sample." Simple on paper. Impossible in practice.
He hit play. A four-bar loop filled his headphones. It was pathetic. The 808 I had found in a free pack sounded weak, weightless. I had tried to distort it with a pirated plugin, but the result was a muddy, uncontrollable noise.
'No, no, no. That's not what it sounds like,' he thought, stopping the music with a tap on the space bar.
He closed his eyes, trying to remember the original song. I remembered a bass that was like a punch in the chest, dirty but defined. What he had sounded like a broken speaker.
He spent the next hour on YouTube, searching: "how to make your 808 hit harder." He saw a producer explain concepts such as saturation, parallel compression. They were words that meant nothing to him. He tried to mimic what he saw, turning virtual knobs randomly. The sound only got worse.
Frustration was a metallic taste in his mouth.
He moved away from 808. I would try the melody. The guide mentioned an "alternative rock guitar sample." He didn't know how to sample. Instead, he tried to recreate the melody with a virtual guitar instrument. His fingers, clumsy on the MIDI keyboard, were playing the wrong notes. He sounded like a beginner in his first guitar lesson.
After another hour, he had managed to program the melody. But it sounded plastic, fake. It lacked the dirt, the soul of a real guitar.
'This is bullshit,' he said to himself. 'Sounds like a beginner. Because I am.'
In his afterlife, he could spend twelve hours debugging complex code. It was frustrating, yes, but it was logical. There were rules. If a function didn't work, there was a reason, a forgotten semicolon, a misdeclared variable. You could find the error and fix it.
But this... This was different. The goal was not for it to "work." The goal was for him to "feel good." And that was a problem that logic could not solve.
He leaned back in his chair, the silence of the makeshift study deafening. He looked at the team he had fought so hard for. The Neumann microphone on its stand, the Yamaha monitors on the desk. They were professional tools, but in their inexperienced hands, they felt useless.
Irony struck him. I had access to some of the best songs ever, but I didn't have the ability to bring them to life. He was a chef with the recipe for a Michelin three-star dish and only knew how to make scrambled eggs.
He turned off the monitor. The room was left in darkness. He sat there, silent, the echo of his failure ringing in his ears. The fire was still there, somewhere deep. But that night, it felt far, far away.
…..
School was a blur. Michael would go, sit down, and let the hours pass. His body was in the classroom, but his mind was a thousand miles away, lost in an 8-bar loop.
The professors had stopped questioning him. He would just nod, his gaze blank, and they would move on to the next student. It was easier for everyone.
The work at the Burger Barn was worse. It was a raw, greasy reality that I couldn't ignore. The smell hit him as soon as he entered, a mixture of fried meat, stale potatoes and the chemical of the floor cleaner.
He spent his shifts in the back, with the roar of the dishwasher and the constant sputtering of the air fryer as a soundtrack. The heat was suffocating, the ground was always slippery.
'Just hold on until ten', he repeated to himself, over and over again, while scrubbing a tray with cochambre encrusted with it.
Sometimes, during his ten-minute break, he would go out into the alley and smoke a cigarette, staring at the brick wall. It was the only time of day when he didn't have to move. The only time the noise stopped.
I would get home around midnight, completely exhausted. The pain in his back was a dull and constant discomfort. He showered, the water dragging the smell of grease but not the tiredness.
And then, instead of sleeping, he would sit in front of the laptop.
Music, which had been his only hope, was becoming another form of work. Another source of stress. He would open Ableton and stare at the screen. The same beat, the same failed melody.
He was trying to work on it, but his brain was fried. He moved a note, he didn't like it, he returned it to its place. He turned a knob, the sound got worse. There was no inspiration, only the obligation to keep trying.
'I have to go on,' I thought. 'If I stop, I'm finished.'
Often, he would simply close the laptop without having done anything. He went to bed feeling a new kind of failure. He failed in school, he failed at his job with no future, and now, he also failed at the only thing that mattered to him.
The routine was consuming him, grinding his spirit day by day. He felt trapped in an endless cycle, and he saw no way out.
Friday, May 8, 2015
It was Friday, during lunch. The chaos of the school cafeteria was white noise to Michael. He was sitting alone at a table in the far corner, as always.
His headphones were on, although the music was playing at a low volume. He was reluctantly pecking at cold fries from the school tray, his gaze lost on the back wall.
Suddenly, a shadow loomed over his table. Michael looked up, annoyed by the interruption. It was Jake, a boy who worked with him at the Burger Barn. He was a senior, senior, a couple of years older than Michael.
Jake gave him a friendly tap on the shoulder, a pat that echoed through Michael's tired body. "Hey, Gray. You look half dead."
Michael slowly removed a hearing aid. "What's wrong?"
"I say you look like shit," Jake repeated with a smile. "You need a night off, brother."
Michael just stared at him, expressionless. I didn't have the energy to respond.
"My sister is at state university," Jake continued, unfazed by the silence. "Your fraternity is throwing a party tonight. It's going to be crazy. You should come."
'A party.' Thought did not even register as something desirable. It just sounded... noisy. Tired.
"I don't know, buddy. I've got things to do," Michael said, his standard excuse.
Jake laughed. "What things? Sitting in your room in the dark listening to music? I know you. You have to get out. Seeing people. Disconnect."
Michael shrugged, hoping Jake would take the hint and leave.
"As you wish, bro," Jake said, finally giving up. "But think about it. Sometimes you have to turn off your brain." He took his phone out of his pocket. "I'll send you the address in case you change your mind. If you decide to go, just tell me and we'll pick you up."
Jake walked away, joining his own group of rowdy friends in the center of the cafeteria. Michael was left alone again. The offer floated in the air, strange and unexpected.
He put the hearing aid back on. But this time, he couldn't focus on the music. The word "disconnect" was repeated in his head. It had been months since I really disconnected. Months.
The idea of a party, with its noise and anonymous people, suddenly didn't sound so bad. It didn't sound like fun. It sounded like an escape.
…..
Michael sat at the cafeteria table long after the doorbell rang, ignoring the stares of the janitors who were starting to clean up. Jake's offer kept floating in his mind.
'A party.'
His first instinct, the one that had governed his life for the past few months, was a resounding no. It was a distraction. A waste of time.
Finally, he got up and walked home. The afternoon was warm, but he pulled up the hood of his hoodie out of pure habit. The road felt longer than normal. Every step was heavy.
He arrived home and silence greeted him. He put down his backpack, went to the kitchen for a glass of water, and then, like an automaton, headed to the room that was his study. It was what I was supposed to do.
He turned on the laptop and opened Ableton. The project I'd been stuck on appeared on the screen: "hellboy." He hit play. Same powerless battery loop. The same muddy 808. The same plastic guitar melody.
He stared at the screen, but he didn't feel anything. There was no frustration. There was no inspiration. Just a void, a total exhaustion. He realized that he had been moving the same notes, turning the same knobs, for three days, without advancing a single centimeter.
'I'm not creating,' he thought with brutal clarity. 'I'm just going around in circles.'
Jake's voice echoed in his head. "You need to disconnect. Sometimes you have to turn off your brain."
The idea of the party, which had previously seemed like an annoying distraction, now felt different. It felt like an escape. A reset button. He needed noise, people, something, anything, other than the silence of his house and the frustration of that screen.
I needed to feel something different. Something real.
With a sudden and determined movement, he closed the laptop. The click was a sound of finality. I wasn't going to make music tonight.
He picked up his phone, which he had ignored all day. He looked for Jake's number. His fingers moved across the screen, writing a short message before he could regret it.
"Hey, I'm still up for the party. Send me the address."
He hit "send."
A strange sense of relief ran through him. It wasn't excitement for the party itself. It was the relief of breaking the routine, of making a decision that had nothing to do with his plan, with his mission.
He got up and went to take a shower. As the hot water poured down on him, he didn't think about chords or BPMs. He thought about what he would wear. In itself I should bring some money.
For the first time in months, he wasn't preparing for a creative battle in the solitude of his studio. He was preparing to go out into the world. Even if it was only for one night.