Frequency
When the bass drops, the bodies follow. And one faithful night never ends.
Content Warning: this story includes substance use, body horror, medical crisis, and emotional distress.
The Bill Graham breathes neon nicotine, a cathedral of concrete where dreams go to die electric deaths. Two hundred souls scatter like spilled pills across a floor built for thousands, each one a ghost haunting their own story, each one deaf to the gospel Christian is about to preach.
DJ Verse. The moniker blinks morse code above his altar of turntables, a prophecy written in dying LEDs. He chose it back when love was a language he thought he spoke fluent, when he believed hearts could harmonize, the oscillators finding their perfect pitch. Now the name is a copper penny under his tongue.
His phone thrums—Maz’s rejection arriving in Arial font: “Can’t make it tonight. Need space to think.”
The words are insects under his skin. Three years of entangled frequencies, and Maz can’t even ghost-write an appearance at his resurrection service. The device slips through fingers slick, those midnight tears, the space between what was promised and what was delivered.
Thump.
The first track drops, and it’s a fist through glass, a bassline born in the belly of a whale, rising from somewhere deep in his sternum where hurt pays rent. Christian moves the way water finds a path downhill, body swaying to beats older than hearts, and the first time someone said love and meant maybe.
Near the merch table, where forty-dollar t-shirts sell out dreams, the bathroom refugees stumble into fluorescent purgatory, none the wiser. Black cotton dusted white with pharmaceutical hope, oh they’ve been snorting salvation in the stalls, searching gram bags at Graham, their pupils blooming midnight flowers, hungry for any frequency to fill the static in their souls.
And it’s
Thump-thump.
Layer two drops heavier than gravity, more insistent than hunger, and sweat overwhelms Christian’s hairline, each droplet a tiny evidence of rage, each bead carrying the DNA of of his discontent as the laser constellation above pulses crimson lectures across the scattered congregation, the geometric psalms a painting of faces that refuse to lift toward the light.
The security guard near VIP can’t withhold the virus rhythm, his radio dying a quiet death on his hip, and behind mahogany and brass, a bartender freezes mid-pour, the bourbon baptizing her Air Jordans as she discovers the ritual of 4/4 time.
Look at me, Christian thinks to his flock, watching thumbs scroll through digital distractions, their eyes married to the glass instead of surrendering to his sonic seduction. I am right here bleeding frequencies, hemorrhaging harmonies, giving birth to sound babies you’ll never learn to love.
Track three is his bastard child, his nameless, shameless, conception in those predawn hours when Maz would serve communion wafer accusations: “too much,” “too needy,” “too desperate for the spotlight that never shines back, ya know.”
The synthesizer screams his autobiography in B minor, kick drums pounding prison riots against ribcages.
Reality slides.
Lasers bleed a little sharper now, a lot sharper now, their beams slicing atmosphere into razor blades, when a woman touches her cheek and her fingers return painted red, she’s grinning to the heavenly sway of the sensation she can’t hear.
Christian drowns in his own climate, his sweat a brisk San Francisco July as his shirt becomes a second skin, a gown soaked in salt, the water kissing the turntables, amplifying the signal, pushing deeper into the eardrums, deeper into thought, straight into the soup where feeling lives to die.
Security abandons their posts for a synchronized possession, their bodies writing new choreography in the language of lost control when the bartender birth-screams as bottles explode against mirrors, with seven years bad luck multiplied by the speeds of sounds, her face twisting into ecstatic mathematics.
Bodies drop like punctuation marks at the end of unfinished sentences, machine gun synapses firing without reason, hearts trying to match the BPM only to be outrun by Olympic ghosts as others transform into beautiful monsters, fingernails suddenly too long for this world, sharp teeth curving into perfect predator smiles.
The music transcends its medium into transmission, by way of infection, by way of the bridge between pain and nervous system, but this is connection, like Maz never understood, showing up when promises get got.
A man convulses near the stage, mouth foaming, drowning in reverse, body trying to process the emotions of his maker, when a couple consumes each other with passion indistinguishable from warfare, love and violence dancing the same dance they’ve always known.
Lasers burn geometric stigmata into willing flesh, and the metallic fog is a dream deferred too long, so as to lose the aftertaste.
And Christian conducts this symphony of collapse, every knob adjustment sending fresh waves of satisfying anguish through what remains of his people, his sweat inventing entire weather systems, pooling lakes around his feet, short-circuiting the world in showers of sparks, just more percussion to the apocalypse.
He nods—crescendo.
The final track tears the universe apart in a godly divorce, where the moment between lightning and thunder stretch for all eternity, and the survivors begin to weep from pure, overwhelming joy. They have witnessed something beyond the hertz of human comprehension, have touched the exposed nerve of artistic truth and found it wanting.
The applause, when it doesn’t arrive, is rain on tin roofs, a chorus of hands clapping thunder back to life as twenty-seven people give standing ovation to the ending of their lives with eyes incapable of sight.
Christian steps back from his altar, his shirt a transparent liquid confession, to survey his masterpiece. Bodies dance death across the floor, their broken instruments attempting one final song as survivors sway with tears streaming scripture down their faces, eyes reflecting the fervor of last breaths and first loves.
He unplugs his life support and walks toward the exodus, stepping careful around his fallen angels, and in his skull, the fake applause continues its existential echo, its endless, perfect, validation he’d been starving to taste, more-so than eat.
Outside, the night air is a cold revelation against his replenished skin. Across the asphalt wilderness, a hot dog vendor takes focus, a shadow-man emerging from alley, still zipping pants over his absolved sins, and Christian approaches, sneakers squelch-squelch-squelching their wet testimony with each step.
“One dog,” voice hoarse from the screaming silence.
The moneylender serves a mustard and onion poisoning, and Christian bites into his supper, sits curbside, applause still echoing in the swooning graveyard of his mind, and Maz’s rejection has been deleted from his side, but phantom vibrations are still a steep current against his thigh.
He has finally found his frequency, this one the distant sirens coming, wailing their blue-light, but they cannot touch him now. He is already composing his next verse in his head, drowning out the applause.
Jon Negroni is a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s published two books, as well as short stories for IHRAM Press, The Fairy Tale Magazine, and more.
Author’s Note
Back in July, I saw Illennium’s latest set (my third time with one of my all-time favorite EDM artists) at Bill Graham in San Francisco, and I wrote the pitch for this story in one stream-of-conscious paragraph…during one of the openers.
That’s right, Illennium was nowhere near the stage yet. I was instead fascinated by the opening DJ’s constant battle with the crowd for attention. I wondered about how easy it is to confuse a crow'd’s noise or lack of noise for love. I’ve been to enough shows—tiny ones, big ones, goldlilock ones—to know the difference between people dancing with you and people just waiting impatiently for the next drop. In this story, Christian doesn’t know the difference, or maybe he does and refuses to admit it. Same result, though.
The music here isn’t realistic, mainly because even as an amateur musician I know next to nothing about producing electronic dance music (I have actually tried, it is not my “thing” in the slightest). So for this story, I’m actively avoiding details about BPMs and EQ settings, because my lane is in the “feels like” of a song hitting so hard it rearranges your internal organs, and you’re either grateful for the new plumbing or you’re feverishly coughing on the way home. Maz is the ghost in all of it, the one person Christian actually wanted in the room, the one who left him to play messiah to strangers.
Side note: Fans of Gaspar Noe, particularly his film Climax, will likely see some clear inspirations of his style and function, which is entirely an accident I only realized during the editing process, so take that subconscious admission for what it is.
Anyway. I guess the point, if there is one, is that not all applause is worth hearing, and not all silence is empty. Sometimes the crowd goes wild. Sometimes it just goes.
And as a little extra treat for you wonderful subscribers and passersby, here’s a bonus look at that paragraph I wrote on my phone during the show before turning this idea into a story:
DJ opener, dancing while he plays, dealing with codependency burnout, outwardly dancing but internally roiling over a perceived emotional affront from his partner (name/personality never specified?) as the scene crescendos it matches the wavelengths of a song and the music becomes a lethal extension of his turmoil, gradually causing people in the audience to either collapse or go feral (bath salts symptoms). Sweat motif so like we see his body become more and more soaked in embellished ways, whiplash ending where the final few in the audience are weeping tears of joy at this euphoric musical experience they just witnessed and he gets rapturous applause (sees his self doubt early that no one pays attention to his shows, so the horror is that as his emotion enters his art, it becomes “better” but more destructive). Laser light show can even burn people’s skin? His DJ name should thematically tie to the story and maybe foreshadow the mayhem. Set it in Bill Graham SF since I know the layout pretty well. Definitely a merch table joke somewhere, people flocking from the bathrooms so quickly their black shirts are dusted with cocaine. Security team should be frazzled but maybe gradually can’t help but get lost in the music as well, bartenders start going rabid and throwing drinks everywhere. Maybe the DJ walks out of the auditorium past the dead bodies, casually approaches a hot dog stand with someone he definitely saw pissing over in the alley over and probably never washed their hands, buys a dog and sits down to eat it still hearing the applause is in his head and that’s how it ends
Thank you for reading Cetera. Subscribe for free to receive new stories every week, right in your inbox. And if you have a few extra seconds, please consider sharing this story with a friend who might like it.
