I.
It was fourteen below zero in Minneapolis on the second Saturday of January, 1986, and the windows of the Lyndale Vinyl Exchange had frosted over from the inside, so that the hand-lettered sign taped to the glass—NO, WE DON'T HAVE "WE ARE THE WORLD." STOP ASKING.—could only be read in reverse by people already in the store.
Augie Nyquist had written that sign. He had written most of the signs. He had written the one over the cash register that said OPINIONS FREE, BAGS 5¢, and the one in the bargain bin that said THESE ARE HERE FOR A REASON, and the one in the Easy Listening section, which was a single milk crate shoved under the radiator, that said ABANDON HOPE.
He was twenty-six years old. He had a thrift-store overcoat with a torn lining that he wore indoors because Gordy Haugen, who owned the Exchange, kept the thermostat at sixty-one degrees on principle. He had a Hüsker Dü button on the lapel, a pencil behind his ear, and the specific, unhurried posture of a man who had been asked about Phil Collins four times since lunch and was preparing himself for a fifth.
The store was mostly empty. Two kids from the U were flipping through the import bin with the reverence of altar boys. The space heater under the counter ticked. On the turntable behind him, the Replacements were being loud and sloppy and magnificent at a volume Gordy called "commercially unwise."
And underneath all that, somewhere near the front of the line, someone was singing.
It wasn't loud. That was the worst part. It was the low, unselfconscious, half-under-the-breath singing of a person wearing headphones who had forgotten that the rest of the world could hear her. And leaking out around the singing, from a pair of orange foam earpads, was a thin tinny ghost of music that Augie's ear caught and identified, the way a dog catches a whistle, before his brain had any say in the matter.
An organ. A cheap organ, slightly flat. A drum machine going tick-tocka-tick-tocka in a rhythm that had no business being under that melody. A boy's voice reaching for a high note like a man reaching for a bus that was already pulling away.
Augie's spine went cold, then hot, then cold again.
No, he thought. No. It can't be. Nobody has that.
The woman stepped up to the counter. She was about his age, maybe a year older, in a navy blue work coverall with a parka over it, unzipped, and a red stocking cap pulled down over a lot of dark hair that was trying to escape from every side. A patch over her heart said GOPHER STATE AMUSEMENTS, and beneath it, in looping red thread, a name: FRANKIE. She had grease on one knuckle and a tool pouch on her hip and a yellow Sony Walkman clipped to her belt. Her eyes were closed. She was swaying, very slightly, and singing about the moon.
"Ma'am," Augie said.
She didn't hear him. She hit a note about a quarter-tone south of where it should have been—exactly, he noted with horror, where the boy on the tape had hit it.
"Ma'am." He leaned across the counter and tapped the air near her shoulder. "Ma'am."
Her eyes opened. They were brown and startled and then, very quickly, amused. She slid one earpad off. "Sorry. Was I loud?"