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Hum | Feb 09 2003

I’m at the gym and I’m riding one of the exercise bikes, the one I always ride, the one in the back corner, the one next to the room where the yoga classes are held. It’s a recumbent bike, the kind you sit on like you sit on a lounge chair, and as I’m riding I’m listening to music through my headphones. There’s a gizmo on the bike that’s wired into the gym’s audio system, and this gizmo has little arrows that allow you to navigate between channels, which is what I’m doing, I’m going from one channel to the next in search of a song to listen to.

Some channels are music-only channels; they’re like music stations on the radio but without any commercials or announcers. Other channels are audio feeds of television stations. Across the room, mounted above a bank of elliptical machines, are five television monitors, each set to a different station. Using the gizmo on the bike, I’m switching between MTV2, which is playing on the middle monitor, and three music-only channels.

And then suddenly I hear the oddest sound. It’s on MTV2. It’s like a hum of some kind. Not an electronic hum, a human hum. Like the hum of someone imitating the hum of a machine. I glance at the MTV2 monitor expecting to see a blank screen, but instead there’s a video playing, one I’ve never seen before.

Just to confirm that the audio system is working, I switch to a different channel, and this channel sounds fine, so I return to MTV2, where the hum seems to have gotten louder. It’s weird and frustrating, this hum, but soon I stop thinking about it so much because I become immersed in the video. It’s not like anything I’ve ever seen before on MTV2. It’s very spare and low-tech. It’s shot in black and white and appears to be slightly out of focus, although my sense is that this was intentional, that the videographers wanted to create a certain dreamlike effect, although it’s also possible that this was an accident, that the people who made the video simply didn’t know how to focus the camera.

Best I can tell, the video consists of a tour of an empty apartment. The camera moves from room to room, panning clockwise through each. It takes a few moments, I suppose because I hadn’t expected this, before I realize I’ve seen this apartment before. It’s the apartment I lived in in 1989, for a time with K.

The video begins in the room in which K and I had sex the first time, the room in which she cried, saying how much she’d wanted this, this meaning us, until I broke down and said that I’d searched all my life for her, for what I felt with her… truly the most embarrassing dreck you can imagine, although I meant every word of it. It’s a small room, barely big enough for a futon and dresser. The camera pans from left to right, then backs out through the doorway and swings into the room I made into the living room when K left to move in with a woman she met through an ad she found on a bulletin board in a woman’s bookstore, having explained to me that she couldn’t be my girlfriend or anyone’s girlfriend because being someone’s girlfriend means being that person’s possession, although she would continue to have sex with me if I wanted, to which I told her to fuck herself, I wanted a real relationship, not just someone to have sex with.

The third room isn’t the kitchen, which actually comes next, but the room on the far side of the kitchen, that is, the room I lived in after K left, the room that K and I would have sex in during the period immediately preceding her move to California with her roommate, who by this point may have also become her girlfriend, although K has always claimed that happened later, during the cross-country drive, which is something I’ve never believed: K lied to me the same way she lied to the man she left for me, the same way she lied to whomever she left her girlfriend for—not that I’m bitter about it; I’m just stating facts. Regrettably this room, which in the video appears darker than I had remembered, is also the room where I slept with my coworker during lunch one day in order to get back at K, who said I could fuck whoever I wanted to, not that I wanted to fuck my coworker, I just wanted to tell K what I had done and have it be true and look into her eyes when I said it.

The fourth room isn’t a room exactly, it’s the back porch. I switch at this point to one of the music-only channels because it wasn’t until after K had gone that I started using the back porch, and so nothing of any significance ever happened there.