Free This Is How It Really Sounds by Stuart Archer Cohen

head.
    â€œDo you know where you’re going?”
    Camille looked at him and her mouth twisted out of shape and her eyes narrowed. “This will be new for you,” she said, and she took him straight toward a high barrow of rock whose center collapsed into a vague black emptiness. A stab of dread went through him. He had a feeling that she was leading him to his death.
    She felt him resisting. “Oh, are you afraid of the dark? Poor little boy! Hold on to me.” She grasped his hand and he entered into her shroud of jasmine fragrance as they plunged into the darkness. She seemed to curve to the left, and in seconds they had both disappeared. The smell was of moist earth and dead leaves, as if they were deep inside a cavern, or a grave. She stopped and stood there silently in the pitch darkness. Soft bursts of color and swaths of light swarmed across his vision. “Where are we?” he asked. He just wanted to hear her voice.
    â€œAre you frightened?”
    He didn’t know how long he hesitated before answering, tumbling headlong through her question. It might have been one second or it might have been a minute. In the dark cave, there was no way to measure anything. “No. I trust you.”
    â€œGood.”
    She started moving again and took a turn to the right. He thought he could make out a change in the quality of the darkness, and with every step it seemed to become less uniform, to break into different shades of black, then charcoal, and then, to his surprise, they turned left again and were facing an opening whose large expanses and yellow luminosity seemed, after the cave, to be the most brilliant vision he’d ever beheld.
    They were at the edge of a pond, and on the other side, rising from its own reflection, was a pavilion adrift in glowing light. Dots of red and white lanterns curved off to the sides, mimicking the upswept roofs that rose into the darkness. A confetti of gay voices wavered from across the water, the sound of jazz that he’d heard before, nicked by a shred of laughter, or an expression of surprise. Amid the glow were elegant men in ties and women with their shoulders wrapped in silk or cashmere shawls. It seemed less a party than a dream that he was entertaining.
    â€œHow do you like it?” Camille asked him, still holding his hand.
    â€œI don’t believe it.”
    They walked around the small lake and into the middle of the gathering. A jazz sextet with a black saxophonist and a white pianist played with their Chinese cohorts, all of them in white dinner jackets and black ties. He could see fragmentary pieces of a huge buffet along one side of the room, and servers weaving through the dancing crowd with silver trays of champagne. The strange sight of it, and the brief caress of Camille’s fingers on his hand as she released him, made him lose track of where he was and who he was and go tumbling through the night garden.
    He felt a swiftly moving stream of electrons coursing from the nape of his neck and through his brain, and a giddy sense of excitement. He was so ripped! He wished Kell was here. Kell, I am so ripped! I don’t even know what year this is! He was at a party in a Chinese garden with a woman he barely knew, and his whole life felt incomparably grand and wondrous. As they ascended the steps of the pavilion he became acutely aware of all the expressions in the room: the sudden laughter and the polite smiles. He sensed the somber alienation of the people at the edges, the earnest incomprehensible arguments made and received in avid conversations. He ricocheted through a dozen tiny fragments of other people’s lives. The middle-aged woman over there, in the olive-colored blouse and black skirt: pondering something. The young man speaking too eagerly into the face of a pretty young woman, who listened and subtly withdrew at the same time, as if looking for more distance.
    A waiter came by and Harrington pulled a glass of red