A small book of small stories, written in prose as clean and spare as a hotel counterpane. Most of the stories are extremely memorable: bits of them tend to break off inside you.
The subtext is quiet, leaving room for the reader’s thoughts. I don’t know if Antiuk intended a theme or if one emerged by accident, but it’s “people making mundane life bearable”. The stories tend to be about folk confronting tedium, poverty, disabilities, old age, and incipient death with humor. They paint cartoon mustaches on the mouths of dragons. They are fundamentally happy, despite their circumstances.
“Bruises” details a couple whose violence is a secret love language between the two of them. Their behavior is indescribable, which is literally the point. They communicating things via contusions and cracked bones that words cannot describe. I was reminded of Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain, and her claim that pain represents a basic and universal biological language—if aliens exist, we might not be able to communicate through anything except injury and violence against their bodies.
“Mold” is about people scrubbing a bathroom at the end of their lease, so they can get a security deposit back. It captures something I haven’t often seen in fiction: the way even filth and stains seem “yours” once you’ve lived in a spot for a while. Removing them hurts. Particularly as it’s a reminder that you’re living at someone else’s sufferance, that your home is not actually yours in a legal sense. In that light, the behavior of the protagonist at the end seems natural and obvious.
“Dumpster Pizza” is about two people who have gone on a hunger strike (“for no reason other than we had nothing better to do”), and how it warps their thinking. Dumpsters of moldy pizza seem like an Aladdin’s cave of gustatory delights.
“The Festival” is about two older men, trapped in the rhythm of a life that may be winding down (“almost everyone we know either lost their mind, or their bodies. Sometimes it was both.”). Their conversations are all haunted by the idea that death is close. They talk about the Grim Reaper. One feigns a heart attack, terrifying his friend. Even though it’s a joke, soon it might not be.
“Porch Pirates” is about thieves whose actions have some of the tarnished but alluring romance of pirates or highwaymen. Unfortunately for them, truly valuable parcels are usually delivered via consignment signature these days, not left on a porch.
“Gobbler Bowl” is overtly sinister. A person takes a ride with a taxi driver who seems strange. Aggressive. Off. He makes inappropriate comments to his passenger, and starts crossing line after line. The protagonist doesn’t seem to realize that things might be heading in a dangerous direction. Optimism doesn’t always protect you.
Some of the stories hint at dark things happening off the page (or maybe on the page, but at a later time), but the general mood is a happy one. The setting and time period is harder to pin down (though smartphones appear in some of them), but I’m reminded strongly of my own childhood in the 1990s, where unyielding boredom existed everywhere, and if I couldn’t play outside or read a book, my mind started to go insane…but insane in a creative, weird direction. I invented bizarre games and rituals, created new languages that I immediately forgot. Kids (and adults) become brilliant when there’s nothing to do, and Dumb Music stands like a shrine to that impulse.
That’s the thing: nobody has to work hard to have fun anymore. There are devices that stream algorithmically-optimized entertainment into our brains until they’re vortexed into mush. Dumb Music captures a playful creativity that I worry is being lost in the modern day. In a recent Stephen King story (“Mile 81”, published 2011), the young protagonist encounters a boarded-up rest stop, that some kids are using as a hangout. Taped to the wall, he sees a poster.
This one was Justin Bieber. Justin’s teeth had been blacked out, and someone had added a Notzi swat-sticker [sic] tattoo to one cheek. Red-ink devil horns sprouted from Justin’s moptop. There were darts sticking out of his face. Magic Markered on the wall above the poster was MOUTH 15 PTS, NOSE 25 PTS, EYES 30 PTS ITCH. Pete pulled out the darts and backed across the big empty room until he came to a black mark on the floor. Printed here was BEEBER LINE. Pete stood behind it and shot the six darts ten or twelve times. On his last try, he got 125 points. He thought that was pretty good
That detail rang false to me. Kids don’t put that kind of effort into stuff anymore—now they just let their phones facehug them into oblivion. As he often does, King is shifting details of his childhood in 1950s Maine into a modern context where it’s simply anachronistic. When I talk to a teacher, I’m struck by the sense that our cultural idea of a child is warping and melting at the edges. There’s less play now. More conformity. Vicious circular social media firing squads for girls. Ebola-grade pornsickness for boys. Not my favorite timeline, but what can you do? At least we fixed the hole in the ozone layer.
So there’s a tragic sense of Atlantis vanishing beneath the waves in Dumb Music. “Oh yeah, I used to do that kind of stuff too.” By “that kind of stuff”, I mean “Crab Day”.
I was seven. I had a weekend, and nothing to fill it with, so I made a decision. Today would be Crab Day. For an entire day—morning to night—everything I did would relate to crabs in some way.
I woke up, and I drew a picture of a crab. My mom said it was OK. Then I watched some nature shows on public access TV, hoping they’d be about crabs. None were. I tried walking around the house sideways, but it was exhausting, and I soon gave up. I drew some more pictures of crabs (with the idea of hanging them around the house) but I couldn’t find thumbtacks or tape. I asked my parents if we could have seafood for dinner. They said we couldn’t afford it.
Judged objectively, Crab Day was a failure. But I still remember it. I’d taken what would have been a boring day, and made it a little bit different from all the others. By default, the vacuum of life fills with either silence or noise. With some effort, we can fill it with a third thing: music.
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