The music of Vitaly Chernobyl and the Meltdowns is blasting through bad speakers all around him. It is their first single to hit the Billboard charts, entitled "My Heart Is a Smoking Hole in the Ground." The ambient sound processing cuts it to a more reasonable level, evens out the nasty distortion from the speakers so that he can hear his roommate singing more clearly. Which makes it all particularly surreal. It just goes to show that he's out of his element. Doesn't belong here. Lost in the biomass. If there was any justice, he could jump into those speakers and trace up the wires like a digital sylph, follow the grid back to L.A., where he belongs, there on top of the world, where everything comes from, buy Vitaly a drink, crawl into his futon.