Turned Up to 11 [shrimp]

There’s lots of things that you wouldn’t know unless you asked.

First, I once tried morphling in the middle of November during a rave at the underground. Wilfred wasn’t the one that handed me the dose (in fact, when I told him, he gave me the weirdest paternal lecture about how it was for me), though from the look on his face, I wasn’t the only one to dabble. And yes – I can already feel the judgment for having admitted to have tried it. You know, you see the bodies all over district six of these folks, wasted away to skin and bones, yellow skin and sagging eyelids. They’re the cautionary tales of it – but when you’re in a world surrounded by music, and darkness, and flickering lights, you can give in to the moment.

You have to be willing to ask. To stand tall, and not be afraid of the resounding no that could come your way. I mean – people act as though hearing no is the end, that they should tuck their head between their legs and hide away. But sometimes no isn’t the end, because you’ve gone and asked the wrong question, or worse still, the wrong person. What sort of thing is courage if all you’re meant is to face your known fears. That’s easy, having to walk alone home in the dead of night and not shiver, or sweat at the silence that lingers those last few blocks home. It’s the unknowing that should be the most frightening.

And sometimes you’re mistaken, that the no that used to exist has gone and faded all away.

So I was crawling out of my skin the second day, having to listen to some of the other boys and girls talk about things that just weren’t a part of me. Or maybe it was the constant drum of feet on the floors, the sound of fist against polystyrene, or metal against metal that drove me to leave the main training floor altogether. And so I went out walking, because why the hell did we have to stay in there, anyway? They had about a hundred rooms all dedicated to different things, so I started to ask what each and every one of them did (spoiler alert: it turns out the training center has every sort of death training available).

Well, what about sounds?

I asked a trainer that and it was like I’d scrapped my fingernails across a record. They had music, right? And they had whole rooms with sensitive speakers that could pretend to play bird calls or whatever the fuck they wanted, so what about music? And the more I asked the more it seemed to unravel, that there were in fact delicious speakers that popped and fuzzed and swam sound through a room that looked like the encapsulation of a jungle safari. It was almost half as good as the time all of us in the underground had dressed up in body paint and underwear as different animals and danced until dawn.

I started by sampling the sounds and slipping through the bits and pieces of music that they had – their library was a literal heaven of music, millions of data files – and the system would let me select cuts and splice them, depending on the length, and then layer. So here I am, standing along the glass pane at the front of the little jungle room, with the settings in front of me (because of course the capitol is extra, and isn’t just some sort of computer screen but able to project out on the glass in front of me). I amp up the sound, slowly at first, until the thumping starts to play across the speakers, cutting through the air and echoing in the simulated jungle.

And so the music starts to roll out, and I’m twisted my head this way and that way, doing a signature shuffle, hands waving and directing a set that wasn’t fully formed, but pulsating through the trees behind me. It was the first time since before the reaping that I’d felt it – a sort of electricity across my skin, a want (a need?) to feel alive. Just a whole thumping, pulse that echoed with a bit too much base through the jungle.

And in a place that wasn’t anything like where I’d been, but entirely home.

tag: shromp! words: 778 notes: dancin'