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track on their two sides in different versions—vocal mix, instrumental mix, or remix. At first I didn’t discern any principle of order, but gradually concluded that they must have been put in a chronological, almost geological, stockpile following when they were released, since, when I listened to them, one after another came slow and then fast rhythms of different, if not contradictory, genres. I listened briefly but attentively to about thirty records in a quarter of an hour, forming a basic outline of classification. I had never studied music; the few violin lessons that my grandmother had given me were of little use—I had been loath to learn traditional musical notation and so my studies had come to a quick end, lacking any foundation. The music I listened to at home or at concerts was completely different from what I had to tackle then. The sequence of the initial list I was compiling wasfounded in what I perceived instinctively in the thuds of the bass in each of the tracks. What I was able to observe of the dance floor compelled me to think that the dancers’ movements revolved around these inaudible resonances shaking the floor beneath their feet. The tape that was playing while I was honing my technique confirmed my intuition. I tried a few times to identify the right moment to move from one record to another, and soon the essence of this transition became obvious to me.
    The end of the tape was approaching. I put the two records Michel had left back on the turntables, restarting the musical continuity where it had been abandoned, and eased my way into the vast wave of rhythm carrying these bodies. On the mixer, for each turntable, there was a corresponding volume fader with its own equalizer—midrange and treble. I cued the first track on the turntable and sent the signal through the amplifiers and loudspeakers while gradually fading out the music from the tape recorder. I learned to repeat the same transition about every five minutes; the rhythm of my night was decided not by the music itself but by the necessity of its unfailing continuity. I didn’t have anyone to teach me this art form, but my approach, although it entailed quite a bit of initial fumbling, guaranteed a methodical manner that I later noticed many DJs lack.
    I must have done a decent job; at the end of the night, George relayed the compliments people had made to him about me. In the implicit comparison with the deceased, whom people believed had left on a whim, I came out on top. People asked who I was, where I had come from, where I had previously been mixing, and George told them that one of his friends had brought me back in his suitcase from an underground club in Berlin where I had worked until now. As delighted as one can be with a corpse on his hands, he proposed that I continue the next day and, since the university’s vacation was coming up, that I take over theposition for the three months of summer if I had nothing better to do. He gave me the five hundred francs that normally went to Michel and asked me to make a decision by the next day.
    Around six in the morning, as I was starting to acquire a taste for my new post, he told me to stop the music. The club emptied of its last clients. In one corner the personnel were dividing up the tips collected during the night and receiving their allocated percentage on each beverage served. George stayed, along with the Padre and me, to turn off the lights and the amplifiers and to close the doors. The Padre, passing by the bathroom, made an ironic comment in allusion to the resurrections sprinkled throughout the Bible. Leaving the darkness of the Apocryphe, the light of day hurt my eyes. That sleepless night left me in a stupor. George went to execute the final steps of our plan. He left the Padre and me at the edge of the sidewalk with the following words: “God be with us!” The invocation wasn’t funny but it made me smile. I looked at the Padre; the