19. Against Pollution
Two banged-out chords and I’m in. There’s an industrial, gates-of-heaven quality to them; they’re both A5, played with the tonic low and high (A-E-A-E-A), and Hughes and the session drummer, Chris McGuire, hit their marks hard. The acoustic guitar falls into the sixteenth-note rhythm of McGuire’s hi-hat and starts alternating between two nearly identical chords: A5 and Dsus2 (D-A-E-A). An overdubbed acoustic guitar walks the Dsus2s back to the A5s in unison with Hughes, and someone plays single notes at intervals on the piano. After the first verse, the overdubbed guitar and the bass throw an achey G# onto the A5 before going up to the Dsus2, and in the chorus, there’s an Esus4 (E-B-E-A-E-A), but that’s basically it, musically. It’s all I want; I’m locked in on what Darnielle’s speaker has to say:
When I worked down at the liquor store
Guy with a shotgun came raging through the place
Muscled his way behind the counter
I shot him in the faceThis morning I went down to the Catholic church
’Cause something just came over me
Forty-five minutes in the pews
Praying the rosary
He’s only sort of singing—it’s more like he’s talking and then going into a little melody on the metrically interesting phrases (RAGing through the PLACE). Starting on the word “rosary,” though, and continuing into the chorus, the speech rhythms give way to a hymn-like tune:
When the last days come
We shall see visions
More vivid than sunsets
Brighter than stars
We will recognize each other
And see ourselves for the first time
The way we really are
Something in the speaker’s voice begins to stir, as if the idea of the last days is bringing him out of his shell, as if the richly expressive forms of the promises in Revelations and 1 Corinthians 13—not the promises themselves—are giving his imagination a little more to work with. In the third verse, he’s back to his near-spoken delivery, and he’s telling us, as if he can’t tell the difference between big and small things, about the decorative grating on his window, which inexplicably gets a little rustier every year. But his feelings are alive now, and in the final verse, when he goes back to his crisis moment, they rattle the lines:
A year or so ago I worked at a liquor store
And a guy came in
Tried to kill me, so I shot him in the face
I would do it again, I would do it again
Details are stripped out, stresses fall out, and the repetition of “I would do it again” is insistently unremorseful. And then the grand, charged chorus returns, which he sings, now, with added force and freedom. It’s not a sign that he’s gotten right with God; there’s no Judge in this Day of Judgment fantasy and it doesn’t seem like it would matter if there were. It’s a sign that he wants more life in his life—less guilt and dread and dissociation, more of his own indefensible, irreplaceable spirit spilling out into the world.
Right or wrong, there’s a force in living beings that presses outward like that, even if those beings have done things that make you feel like they shouldn’t press outward anymore. Or if no one’s paying any attention. “I’m all alone here as I try my tiny song,” Darnielle sings in the persona of the world’s last golden toad in “Deuteronomy 2:10.” “Claim my place beneath the sky, but I won’t be here for long.” “Against Pollution” is the former liquor store employee’s version of that song. The most important thing about “Against Pollution,” in this context, is not so much what it says as what it is: his own right-or-wrong way of claiming his place beneath the sky. And the fact that it’s beautiful, even though it’s not pretty—that it feels good to be inside it—communicates something to us too: that his tiny life, which gave rise to this tiny song, can still add something to the lives of others. You don’t have to be redeemed to merit the attention of the tiny creatures around you, each in its own tiny place beneath the sky.