The interior was all white. The whitest walls surrounded white columns, at turns circular or square, with Ionic capitals and no striation. The paint looked fresh, maybe still wet.
Sage and Chason stepped cautiously down the still escalator. The basement floor was dark, but walking past voluptuous mannequins and boxes of t-shirts toward a lone light emanating from a distant hallway, they found the restroom and entered one at a time with a clandestine dap in-between. By the time Chason popped out a line of four guys had formed, and one of them, noticing the crystalline white-lined rim of Chason's left nostril, said, "Why you hitting that in there? You're good here." Chason nodded and climbed back up the escalator.
He knew what Sage was on before he had eyes on him: in his post-bag bag, swaying and trigger fingers. Chason pulled up with a bag adjacent, bopping in and out of time with the beat and its distorted bass, which was equal parts signature of the sound and product of the shitty PA system finagled for the night. It sounded like a plug somewhere in the mess of wires behind the DJ booth was left half-inserted in its socket, but no one seemed to mind. Not even the DJs, their sets interrupted by silence as they tended to some further glitch in the CDJs; they kept patient 'til the tech allowed them to carry on. So the boys followed suit, continuing their abstract movements with or without music so as not to disrupt the flow, though preferably letting drums determine their rhythm, otherwise things quickly got off-kilter and out of sorts-like, and that's when self-consciousness crept in, sure enemy of joy.
The night's impresario came forth from the escalator with a light squad of fledgling creative director creatures. They wore button downs and choker chains, she had on a barely dress-length Tracy McGrady pinstripe Magic jersey and stilettos. A crowd quickly formed and subsumed her. Sage and Chason laughed and skirted wobbly past a living sculpture, a tall, motionless androgyne adorned in white make-up, asymmetric garb, and Balenci Ogre boots, toward a corner of the vast space where they promptly depocketed and traded bags. Chason thought about asking Sage if he fucked with the song playing, or where the Blitzers were at, or what he thought of the whole scene, but instead remained silent and returned his focus toward the movements of his body. In this state, swallowed by empty space between white walls, air filled with nothing but sound waves, he figured he might embody something other than a hereness of a thereness, as if he could finally soak into the fabric of the moment. So he moved, and smiled.
Yoooooo. It echoed through Sage's head when, from a corner of his eye, he saw a mass of twenty-odd figures shuffle opiately toward the DJ booth. They were immediately recognizable by their anonymity; faces obscured by sheisties and COVID masks, they wore dark clothes that signified at once but neither drip nor athleisure, cool and regular. Fashion that isn't about fashion. Fashion that isn't fashion. Nudging Chason, not quite interrupting his reverie, Sage nodded toward the crew. "It's Not Enough."
The squad's stoutest member swiftly overtook the CDJs while the rest set up camp nearby in a dim area behind caution tape. USB inserted, cut and prolonged rewind—thirty seconds in real time made awkwardly then humorously endless—'til subwoofer belches disgustedly a mangled Moloch bass tone. A knocking; subaudible groan ascends toward intelligibility: my Goyard got a FN Five-seveN, I'm moving cautious. Sage is transfixed, Chason lost in an anti-logic of embodied sense. The track fades out after just a few bars and Sage, seeing a knowing in Chason's eyes that disquieted him, wordlessly suggested they gather themselves away from the cluster. Sage led the way toward an unoccupied cut of the gutted department store, where they swayed, nodded, and sipped water.
As Chason remained silent, Sage felt all too present and distant from his friend's remoteness. He was reminded again of disappointment, and, fondly remembering a few moments earlier and the real transcendence of rapt being, he fantasized about a reverse engineering. But no, this here, this thought: it's enough.