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pathological preoccupation, the great enigma was over. And it didn’t solve anything or make me feel any better.
    That night was the first and last time I posted a comment on Melinda’s blog. KafkaDreams had set up a message board for people to give their opinions of “Poets of Rage.” Mine was this:
It changed my life.
    She’d never know how much.
    Of course, I didn’t realize it then, but I was another big step closer to Detective Sergeant Ogrodnick and the cavity search.
    I’d been in music stores before. But when I stepped into the HMV at the Brickfield Mall, I felt everyone looking at me, as if I were naked or something. And when I found the rack devoted to Purge’s discography, I half-expected somebody to say, “Checking out the Old Man’s albums?”
    But nobody could know who “the Old Man” was.
    Still, going to the register carrying a CD entitled Sewer-ride made my cheeks hurt.
    The cashier was impressed. “Oh, I love that one! The first time I heard it I shaved my head.”
    A ringing endorsement.
    I listened to it on a Discman, of course. The last thing Mom needed was to hear her old mistake screaming the house down. The next voice screaming the house down would have been hers.
    There weren’t a lot of punk Republicans, and Sewer-ride offered nothing to add me to the list. The guitars were muddy, loud, and relentlessly pounding. All I could get from the drums was that someone was beating them to a pulp. The vocal was a violent harangue—against what I’m not entirely sure. It was impossible to make out what King Maggot was bellowing. It was just too distorted, a cross between ranting and quacking.
    The CD cover listed all the songs in order: “Bomb Mars Now,” “Number Two,” “The Supreme Court Makes Me Barf,” “Bleed Me”…
    I couldn’t connect the titles with the vocals, or even tell where one track stopped and the next began. Okay, I wasn’t exactly a fan, but should it be so hard to understand what you’re listening to?
    I tried. Honestly I did. I set aside all my opinions about punk and approached it as an intellectual exercise. Nothing. No melody. No rhythm. I might just as well have headed to the nearest airport and listened to them revving up jet engines.
    I stuck Sewer-ride so far in the back of my sock drawer that it was practically not in the room. Nothing was different. Finding out was just a hiccup; Project X was still on. Now that I knew I was harboring a McMurphy far worse than my wildest nightmares, it was more vital than ever to keep the guy under control.
    I woke up at three o’clock in the morning. The CD was trying to interface with my McMurphy DNA. I could feel it out there, like a fax signal waiting for another fax to make a connection.
    Tomorrow, I resolved, I would bury it in the backyard. If that didn’t do the trick, I was prepared to carry it to Mordor and hurl it into the fires of Mount Doom.
    The next day at lunch, I admitted something to Melinda that ordinarily I wouldn’t have confessed under torture.
    â€œI was listening to Sewer-cide last night—”
    â€œDon’t patronize me, Leo,” she interrupted with a snort.
    â€œHey,” I defended myself, “I listen to music.”
    â€œOh, yeah. Kenny Chesney and Zamfir, master of the pan flute.”
    I bristled. “You’re the one who’s always calling me a musical Philistine. Forgive me for taking the initiative and trying something new.”
    Owen was humming tunelessly and drumming on the cafeteria table with a plastic fork. I was so amazed to find that I recognized the un-melody that I actually sang a few words along with him: “Bomb Mars, now; nuke Mars now…”
    Melinda was round-eyed. “I can’t believe you got turned on to Purge! So? How much did you love it?”
    I shrugged. “I didn’t shave my head, if that’s what you