This is the best moment I will ever have, he thought, but it was already over, they were on their way up the stairs. She undressed quickly. It was cold, and she got under the covers, leaving just her panties on. Then she reached under the sheets and took those off and tossed them on her pants and blouse on the floor.

[...]

Nash felt the same thing again as he sat by the window early the next morning and watched the sun come up. He looked at Miranda asleep in his bed. Her hair was in her face, and he could just see her lips and nose. He watched her stir, push the hair out of her closed eyes and then sink back into sleep. He sipped some water. The worn oak floor reflected light, the sky brightened from deep blue to light blue and Miranda finally pulled herself up on the bed, smiling.

He smiled broadly. “This is the purity of capitalism. There is no judgment about content. You have to marvel at its elasticity, its lack of moral need, its honesty. It is the great leveler—all can be and will be commodified. Besides, what’s wrong with Emma Goldman being sold at the mall as a cool accessory? It is still Emma Goldman, isn’t it?”

“A confused context is the essence of alienation,” Miranda said.

“I’m not going back to New York with you,” she said.

He started to laugh. “It is true that I enjoy making money, I won’t deny it. Thing is, I feel the same. I don’t think I am a materialistic person, you know. I never wanted stuff.”

She leaned her head against the window. Conversations in cars are the strangest, because you don’t look at each other even though you are sitting close enough to touch.

“What it comes down to is I just don’t want to look at other people’s garbage my whole life. There is always garbage blowing around the street outside our apartment. Life is too short. All I want is a clean, quiet place. Beauty and order and peace. If Allegecom contributes—as it most certainly does—to the world’s degradation, undermining, at least in a global sense, order and peace, as well as multiplying garbage, and—let’s face it—suffering, then it also mitigates, quite directly, my own contact with garbage and suffering.”

This wasn’t the usual indifference, but then what was usual? She resisted her impulse to push his hair back from his forehead. He was in an awkward stage, slightly pudgy and spotty. She didn’t mind if he shrugged her off when she put an arm around him. She couldn’t comfort him through his adolescence, but she could stay out of his way. She believed that if she didn’t interfere, her talented, brilliant son would get everything he needed from the world. She also knew that the day would come when he would find her out, but she refused to think about it. Two weeks of his schizoid scrutiny unnerved her. When he finally confronted her, it shouldn’t have been a surprise.

First, at some point enough time will have gone by of not listening that I’ll listen again and it might sound fresh and new. It could again totally engage me, maybe in even deeper ways because I’ll be an older, and presumably deeper, person. I might find things in it I never was able to hear before in my younger life. I might become just as enchanted, just as joyously captivated. I could fall in love all over again. All of that could come to pass. It is possible, isn’t it?

The second reason I feel compelled to keep these artifacts is because of something I am quite certain will transpire. I need these records because one day, years from now, I will listen to this music and I will remember exactly what it was like to be me now, or me a year ago, at fifteen, totally inhabited by this work, in this very specific place and time. My Beach Boys records sit there, an aural time capsule wired directly to my soul. Something in that music will recall not just what happened but all of what I felt, all of what I longed for, all of who I used to be. And that will be something, don’t you think?