I don’t know how JD got back to the hotel, but all his stuff was gone from the room he and Hewitt had shared. The DO NOT DISTURB sign was still illuminated, the pink room still a problem we’d have to deal with later.
“Do you want me to take JD’s bed so you can have a room to yourself?” April asked, reaching into the painted fridge.
“No,” I said. “But I’d love a few minutes alone.”
“You got it, boss.”
On the way out, I snagged the can of glo-paint. Back in our room, I propped my guitar in the corner and grabbed a needle from the emergency sewing kit I kept in my bag. Pushed aside the dresser, dipped the needle in the remaining paint.
Where nobody was likely to ever see it, I wrote the lyrics to a song I wasn’t yet prepared to put to music: a song that had come to me on the silent drive back to the hotel from the show, jumbled and half-formed. Some songs stayed that way forever, ragged and ruptured and far from reach; those ones I’d rehearse and put aside, start again and put aside, saying it’s not ready yet, but someday. I locked this one into order, painstakingly, letter by letter.
The dresser was back in place by the time April slipped into the room. I had the lights off, my guitar in hand, and I was listening to the tiny words that glowed behind the dresser, waiting for them to tell me what form they wanted to take. There were, to my knowledge, one hundred and seventy-three ways to wreck a hotel room. The one hundred and seventy-fourth was a slow, small form of destruction: tiny words, tiny fears, tiny hopes, etched in a place they might never be found.
6
ROSEMARY
Career Opportunities
She’d never had any plan to leave Superwally, so Rosemary couldn’t say why she started poking around StageHoloLive’s job listings, only that she was curious. The position that initially caught her eye was “upload supervisor,” which involved being online at home to make sure there were no glitches in getting performances to the people who had paid for them. She was qualified; she had six years’ experience at Superwally, including working out that bug before one of SHL’s own concerts.
She debated expanding her one concert experience into talk of a lifetime’s love for SHL, but they probably had ways to check. Cross-reference her address and they’d know she didn’t have a home box, much less an SHL-enabled Hoodie. Cross-reference her credit account and they’d see the one drink at the one concert. She settled on mentioning how wonderful that Patent Medicine show had been, leaving out that it was her only one.
As she went over the job description one last time, she noticed a listing for an “artist recruiter.” It paid the same, but included travel and expenses. What kind of job required travel? Plumbers and construction workers and blacksmiths drove around the area, but they made it home every night. This position didn’t require experience; just enthusiasm, love of music, people skills, and a willingness to travel. She had enthusiasm, she loved music, and she could point to her vendor services record as proof of her people skills. She was willing to travel, even if she’d never done it before. She checked the boxes to apply for both positions.
The skills assessment and psychological section were easy enough. Then there was a fun little field test, where they posted a series of live videos with all information stripped from them, and she had to decide whether to pass on each act or make an offer. Five in total.
She didn’t know anything about the music business, so she approached the problem in the same way she approached code, envisioning a perfect combination of catchy music and visual style first, using Patent Medicine’s show as a guide, and then looking at the examples to see where they deviated. There wasn’t such a thing as perfect in this case; music wasn’t code, and musicians didn’t snap to her rulers. Still, she disqualified one video because the act lacked energy, and another because they came across unfocused. She “signed” one band of the five. Nobody had messaged her to ask for the SHL Hoodie back, so she used that for the remote interview, rather than risk using her work rig or the glitchy old Basic model.
She was surprised when the offer came through for the recruiter job instead of the upload supervisor position. She closed and reopened the message, making sure she hadn’t misread it. “Uniquely qualified,” they said. She went back and reread her application to make sure she hadn’t promised anything she’d be unable to deliver, but she’d made no rash declarations. She hadn’t even exaggerated much. Her enthusiasm must have shown through, or maybe her dedication to her current position. Or maybe they saw her as a blank slate. Moldable.
Leaving Superwally was trickier. For starters, she had no idea how to do it. For all their “You are valued but replaceable” posters, they didn’t leave any instructions for severing ties with the company. Maybe that was deliberate. In the end, she waited for Jeremy’s morning call.
“You’re doing what?” he asked. He was a young Igbo man today, wearing a mix of traditional and modern clothes. The Superwally avatars weren’t fancy enough to show much emotion, but his made a good stab at surprise.
“Quitting. How do I quit?”
“Why would you quit? You have six years’ seniority. You’re good at your job.”
“I found a better job. I hope. A different one, anyway.”
“Nobody quits, Rosemary. There are no better jobs.”
“You mean no better jobs for people like me?” That was what she’d been told since high school. She hadn’t been able to afford the online certification courses she needed for higher-end jobs, and her parents’ credit hadn’t been good enough for loans. She spent all of high school preparing for Superwally customer service. Leaving was unthinkable.
“For people like us.”
“I am. I’m leaving. I’m leaving Superwally.” She psyched herself up in the saying. It was as much for her benefit as Jeremy’s.
He sighed. “I’m sorry to lose you. You’ve been reliable.”
He gave her instructions for contacting a mysterious Talent Management hotline. She repeated the whole conversation, almost verbatim, with a generic gray-blonde white woman avatar exuding generic concern. It wasn’t that anyone was worried they couldn’t replace her. It was touching; they genuinely didn’t believe there were other jobs out there. She appreciated the concern. It embroidered her own terror nicely.
What was she doing? She had a real job, a good one, one she performed well. She was leaving it because she had been struck by lightning, had gone crazy, had some idea she could do something else.
“Superwally is reliable work. What if this new company goes out of business? Where will you be then?” her father asked when she told him. He asked all the questions that swirled in her head, as if they were leaking out.
She held a panel for him at the windmill’s base while he fiddled inside it. They wore thick winter work gloves, which made the adjustments cumbersome and slow. “They’re not new. They’ve been around for a bunch of years and they’re in eighty percent of American homes.” Answering felt good. It built her own confidence in her decision.
“What if Superwally decides to go into the concert business? They’re in even more homes.”
“If we—they—wanted that they’d have done it already. It’s some kind of partnership, with Superwally as the conduit.”
“And tell me again why you have to go there in person?”
She hadn’t yet mentioned that her job would involve more travel after this trip. Baby steps. “It’s a training program. They want us to see how they make the magic happen, so we can fix it when it goes wrong.”
“Wrong magic?”
“Wrong metaphor, I guess, but you know what I mean. And how cool is it that I get to go someplace?” Her father looked hurt, and she scrambled to appease him. “Not that I ever felt like I needed to go anyplace before, but I’ve been doing the same job for six years. I think I’m allowed to want to change it up a little, aren’t I?”
He scratched his
winter beard. “I want you to be safe.”
“And happy?”
“And happy, but mostly safe.”
“I’m old enough to take care of myself. You lived in a city a thousand miles from your parents by the time you were my age.”
“That was a different time . . .”
She knew the speech by heart. “‘That was a different time, and this was a different country. The best thing we can do now is take care of each other and stay in the safest place we can, and make ourselves as self-sufficient as possible.’” She paused. “But Dad, you’ve been saying that my whole life. You’ve made this a great place to grow up, but if you don’t want me in a hood twenty-four/seven and you don’t want me to go anywhere, then I’m trapped with Superwally forever. I’m not going to do anything dangerous. I just want to know what else is out there.”
He held out his hands, and they fit the panel back into place. The more he argued, the more convinced she was she needed to try this.
7
LUCE
Something’s Gotta Change
A hotel in Pennsylvania found another bomb before it detonated. A gunman had shot up a bus station in Mississippi and barricaded himself in. That was the news we woke to the following morning: a study in random lone wolf horror, with nobody sure if it was actually random lone wolves or not, and the same ominous requests from the government to get home, and stay home. Whatever they knew, they weren’t telling.
“The tour is over,” Margo at the label repeated over the phone. “All the venues are dark. Go home.”
Home. I didn’t have one. I’d sublet my rented room in Queens a year before, to a guy who had taken over the lease when I didn’t come back. He had offered to give my bed back if I came knocking, but I didn’t have any particular ties to the furniture, and my few personal belongings traveled with me.
I sent messages to friends in a few cities I thought I could survive lying low in, and was rewarded with an offer of a situation similar to the one I’d left: a furnished sublet in a Baltimore artists’ collective. The occupant was also a touring musician, currently on an extended gig in Europe.
What about a European tour? I texted Margo.
Months to arrange. Visas, instruments, etc. We’ll see, she wrote back.
April and Hewitt tried to book flights home, to New York and L.A. respectively, but the planes were grounded. Hewitt ended up squeezing into a rental car with two businesswomen who were also trying to get west, and April bought a one a.m. bus ticket, the only one available.
The van felt empty, quiet, even with music playing. Loosed from the magnetic pull of the next show, the next stopover, the potential of any nextness at all, the road dulled and flattened. I was the losing team slinking home, except my destination wasn’t even home. I dumped my meager belongings at the new place, turned in the rental van with a wistful pat, and resigned myself to a stay of unknown duration in someone else’s bed in someone else’s room in someone else’s house in someone else’s city.
* * *
—
I had no idea what to do with myself. I woke around noon every day. Checked the news before leaving bed, to see if the curfew had been lifted; it hadn’t. People protested here and there, on principle, but the protests were halfhearted. The frequency of the attacks and the randomness of the ongoing threats had left people genuinely scared.
I’d pad downstairs in pajama bottoms and an old T-shirt, not even bothering to get dressed. There were four roommates: a sculptor, a nurse, a filmmaker, and a burlesque performer. The filmmaker, Jaspreet, was a teacher by day, but the rest of us kept odd hours. We mostly ran into each other in the kitchen: someone on coffee, someone else eating breakfast, another lunch.
“We should be getting back to normal,” one would say. “Before we forget what normal is.”
“We have to find a new normal,” said another. I knew all their names by then, but it didn’t really matter who said what. It was the same conversation, over and over.
Then somebody would point out some aspect that was improving—schools reopening, say—and we’d all pretend to be cheered. I’d fill a bowl with cereal and slink back upstairs. It wasn’t that I disliked their company; it just wasn’t what I was looking for.
I’d call Margo at some point in the afternoon. “Have you heard anything today?”
She’d assure me that she’d let me know if she had, and I didn’t need to call daily. She didn’t understand that I did. I needed her to tell me to head back out on tour. I thought of Alaia and the staff at the Peach, and at all the other places we’d played. They all got paid hourly. How many people were going to struggle to pay their bills next month if the clubs stayed closed? Clubs, theaters, cinemas, stadiums, malls. Even a day could be devastating for an hourly worker. I remembered what that was like.
I’d never done so much nothing before. High school had been a blur of new experiences once I relocated myself to my aunt’s couch uptown: jeans, guitars, music, girls, the entire glorious city I’d missed out on. When I graduated, booking and playing and promoting for myself were three full-time jobs, even while I held a fourth to pay my rent. Touring and promotion kept me busy once I got on the road; writing and recording and rehearsing kept me busy the rest of the time. Downtime was new territory.
Telling myself to write didn’t work, either. The song I’d written on the hotel wall had hidden itself from me. The lyrics still glowed in my head when I closed my eyes, but it didn’t feel right putting them to music. I lay on my bed and did nothing, a pointed nothing, an arpeggiated chord of a nothing, strung out over the afternoon.
April called once to ask me the same question I asked Margo; I gave Margo’s answer.
“You’re a mess.” April’s hands tapped a beat into her kitchen counter.
I turned off my camera, though she’d already seen me. “How are you not a mess? Where are you, anyway?”
“Home.” She looked unperturbed. “New York is always New York.”
My heart lifted. “Do you mean clubs there are open?”
“No. The clubs and museums are still closed, and there aren’t many tourists, but that makes it nicer. I’ve found enough session work to pay rent. Everybody’s recording since they can’t play out. What are you doing? You look like shit. When was the last time you washed your hair?”
I couldn’t remember. “I’m not doing much. Our stuff has been selling well online since people got stuck inside. SuperStream royalties are decent. It’s paying the bills.”
“Silver lining, I guess. You can come visit if you want.”
It took me another month to convince myself to take her up on that offer. Schools reopened, then a scattering of other places: local stores, a movie theater here or there. More threats rolled in behind. Major League Baseball discussed kicking off an abbreviated season, then called it off. A museum opened for a day, then closed again.
“If this were a war zone, people would go about their business.” My sculptor-roommate was Syrian, and knew war zones. “People here fool themselves into thinking they’re safe, and they can’t take it when that illusion gets shattered.”
I nodded, retreated to my room again, called Margo. “There’s got to be someplace to play.”
“Not enough to build a tour on, Luce,” Margo said. “Hang in there. We’re waiting to hear about summer festivals. If those are a no-go, we can start looking for small clubs again, maybe.”
I called April. “Waiting is killing me. Are you still telling me there’s not a single club open in New York?”
“That was last month. Now there are some spots booking shows under the radar.”
She tossed venue names at me. One was a hole-in-the-wall I’d played as a teenager. I called and convinced them to let me do a show under a different name, no publicity; nothing that would draw attention while they were supposed to be closed at night.
I took an inter
state bus up to the city. I’d expected people to be warier, but we stood in line and chatted as if the social contract was still being followed by all parties. Everyone angled for a window seat; I earned a few dirty looks when I leaned my guitar into the window and sat beside it on the aisle, but I waved a second ticket at them. “She paid, too.”
The road looked the same as when I’d left it, if a little emptier. The bus spit me out at six p.m. in midtown and I wasn’t due until eight, so I walked the forty blocks down to the bar, stopping on the way for a hot dog and pretzel from a vendor. New York looked the same but emptier. Mine and not mine.
Mine: the street corners where I’d played at eighteen; the clubs that hadn’t blinked an eye as long as I walked in with a guitar; the bands that saw me sitting hungry in a corner during their soundchecks and shared their fries and let me open for them.
Not mine: the combination of the resolute “We are New York” bustle and emptier-than-usual streets. The feeling that behind the bustle, even New York was afraid.
I wondered if my parents had noticed any of the upheaval. They and all my siblings were over the bridge in Brooklyn, where they might as well have been on another continent, living as if a wall separated them from the rest of the city, with their own wonderful social structures that I guessed were impervious to the closures hitting the outside world. Once in a while I’d tried calling a sibling to invite them to a New York show, but I never expected them to come, and they never did.
April was already at the Carryback when I arrived, nursing what looked like a hot toddy. I almost hugged her after so many months living with strangers, but I held back. She looked more tired than I’d expected.
A Song for a New Day Page 7
