A Song for a New Day

by Sarah Pinsker

  “Come in,” he said.

  She stepped inside, then took a step back as everyone turned to look at her. In hoodspace you didn’t have to feel this exposed when you walked into a room. You spawned directly in to make a statement, or you walked in invisible and decloaked when you were ready. She wouldn’t turn heel and leave. She could do this.

  Aran sat on a queen-sized bed with his back against the headboard, his legs out in front of him. Rosemary had expected his bandmates to be the friends in attendance, but she didn’t recognize the others. A black woman with short locs lay on her stomach crossways at the foot of the bed, head on elbows and Hoodie up, and a white guy with long blond hair sat on the floor, his mouth full of microwave pizza, using the box as a plate. She was glad she’d changed out of the spangled shirt. They all wore T-shirts and jeans, though Aran’s T-shirt looked soft as a lamb and fit him as perfectly as an av’s.

  “Hey,” said Aran. “I didn’t think you’d come! Y’all, this is my friend Rosie. She’s a new recruiter.”

  “Rosemary.” She didn’t want anyone getting ideas about nicknames.

  He continued as if he’d never goofed. “Rosemary, this is Bailey. You might know her as MC Huntress. And that’s Victor. He makes pop music.”

  The woman dropped her hood. Rosemary tried not to notice the once-over they gave her, or show that she’d recognized Victor Janssen. Half her classmates had crushes on him in high school.

  “Hi.” She wished they’d go back to whatever they’d been doing a moment before so she could figure out her place in the room. She wanted to flip up her Hoodie to see if the cottage had a Veneer, but didn’t know if it would be rude, since nobody else was in theirs anymore. There was the bed, a little kitchen area with a sink, microwave, and minifridge, a bookshelf, a metal rod with clothes hung on it, a dresser. A door to the bed’s left, which she assumed led to the bathroom. An acoustic guitar hung on one wall, and a keyboard rested on a stand beneath it with a paper notebook on its bench. Behind the front door, she spotted an empty chair with a jacket hung over the back and picked that as a reasonable place to situate herself.

  “You don’t have to sit in the coat closet,” Aran said.

  Rosemary jumped. She looked for another spot, but the keyboard bench was taken by the notebook, the bed was too awkward, and the rug too close to Victor. She sat down. “I’m fine here, thanks.”

  Aran shrugged. “Did you figure out where to go on your first trip? Rosemary is supposed to figure out for herself where to find musicians to sign, but she doesn’t know where to start.”

  Bailey cocked her head. “But that’s savage! You can go anywhere. Is there any city you’ve ever wanted to see? A scene you want to check out?”

  “What’s a scene?” Rosemary felt the color rising in her face again. The more she considered her situation, the more she felt in over her head. There was a whole vocabulary she didn’t know.

  “It’s hard to know what a scene is unless you’re in it, Bail. I know it’s easy to forget when you’ve been here a hundred years. Rosemary’s starting from scratch.” Aran turned to Rosemary. “A scene is the bands and audience and venues of an area, all combined into a stew. Musicians inspiring each other, working with each other. Sometimes there’s a similar sound or feel that gets associated with the place.”

  “I thought that was what I suggested,” Bailey said. “I said, a city she wants to see.”

  “What’s there to want to see?” asked Rosemary. “Anyway, I’m not supposed to go see some city. I’m supposed to find local musicians, but I don’t know how, so I guess I’m not going to have this job for long.”

  She crossed her arms over her chest and examined the book titles on the shelf on the opposite wall. Decided to take control of the conversation. “Aran said he just walked in here and told them to sign his band. How did you all get found?”

  Victor snorted. “Aran’s full of shit. Don’t believe everything he says. I was one of the zillion people who are out there uploading music. Nobody hears it because if you don’t have an SHL contract you have no access to Superwally distribution or audiences or anything but the tiniest streaming services, which you can’t even access without hacking your own devices to ditch the proprietary stuff. SHL makes sure nobody hears you if you’re not theirs. But I got to chatting with a recruiter when we both played on the same team in a shoot-’em-up, and she invited me to send her some of my stuff. Then I had to audition for an audience of one, which was weird, and then another audition as an opening act for Huntress here, and I got her fans dancing, so here I am.”

  That story calmed Rosemary’s nerves a bit. If he had been discovered through a game, there was a chance she could start out online, from home. Baby steps.

  Bailey rolled over onto her back and rested her head on her hands. “And I was playing in the Atlanta underground clubs when a recruiter told me he liked my stuff. I thought he was trying to scam me, but he kept coming round to shows ’til I started to believe him.”

  Rosemary filed that information away, too. What had the training packet said? Don’t be a stranger to them, but don’t get too involved. Bailey’s story bore that out.

  “How do you find underground clubs?” she asked. Better to sound ignorant in front of three people and learn something. If she asked anything too embarrassing, she’d have to make sure she never saw them again. “I’m sorry if it’s a stupid question. I really don’t know. Do you need a password? Aran mentioned earlier how some bars have secret music rooms, and I’d never have guessed that in a million years.”

  Bailey stood and stretched her legs. She was smaller than Rosemary expected, compact and muscular. “Sometimes you do need a password, or a person to vouch for you. Sometimes it’s a matter of showing up in the right place on the right night. You wouldn’t be there if you didn’t know, so obviously you’re meant to be there.”

  “I’ve never understood that logic,” said Victor. “Anyone could be there if they did enough research. Cops, shooters.”

  Aran threw a pillow at him, which he ducked. “That’s why nobody would’ve found you in a million years if you hadn’t gotten lucky. Little bedroom geek making music in your room for nobody.”

  Victor threw the pillow back, with a little more force. It looked like Aran’s comment had stung. “Better to be a bedroom geek than get arrested making music for slightly more than nobody. Why risk it?”

  “And this is what you’re up against, Rosemary. There are talented musicians hiding in their bedrooms, and talented musicians playing for ten or twenty people in hidden rooms all over the country. The company doesn’t care where you find us, as long as you find us. Bring us in! Make us yours.”

  Aran tossed the pillow Rosemary’s way, and she grabbed it and held on. She felt a little more comfortable now, a little less like a mouse for the cats to bat around. Still, if she asked another question, it would keep them from asking her any. They were performers. They didn’t mind attention.

  “So, what else can I tell the, ah, new talent about what they can expect if they come out here? They want me to sell something I’ve never seen. I think there’s a talent FAQ, but maybe y’all can tell me more about what I’ll be asked?”

  “You can tell them all this can be theirs.” Aran waved his hand at the room. “If they want. They can also live at home and travel in for shows, but if they’re not a solo act, they’d be better off staying here for a while to practice in the isolation booths.”

  “Free food,” said Victor. “Well, free-ish. It gets deducted from our pay, but the prices are reasonable, so it’s not like owing the company store, unless you have fancy tastes or eat a ton.”

  “Or unless you’re an alcoholic,” said Aran. “If they drink a lot and buy at the commissary, they’ll be poor very quickly. If they can wait the hour, they should drone it.”

  “It doesn’t feed you in the same way a real live show does,” said Bailey
.

  Victor squinted at her. “Superwally? The commissary? Are you still talking food?”

  Bailey ignored him. “It’s different from performing for an audience. More intimate, in a way, because it’s more like playing for one person—the camera—than a whole crowd. If you’re somebody who gets charged up by screaming fans or playing to the cutest person in the audience, you’re not going to be fed.”

  “They do bring in audience for some people.” Victor stood to toss his pizza box in the garbage, then returned to the floor.

  “Yeah, but they don’t like to, except on special occasions, and even then it’s only, like, ten or twenty people. Cuts the profit margin. They have to screen everyone, and worry about security on campus . . .”

  “But it can be worth it.” Aran had a dreamy look in his eye.

  Bailey swatted his leg. “You’re only saying that ’cause you found a guy to hook up with at the festival last week.”

  “I used to meet someone at every show. Don’t tell them that part or they won’t come, Rosemary.”

  “That’s the choice,” Bailey said. “Fame and fortune, a chance to make an actual living playing music, but you have to give up the most fun parts of the job. I’m not even saying sex, but talking with fans after the show, signing stuff for them, watching their reactions . . .”

  “. . . Sex . . .” said Aran.

  Bailey frowned at him. “Living here doesn’t make you a monk. There are new hires all the time. It’s a big campus.”

  “Not big enough when things don’t turn out well.”

  “Not any smaller than the incestuous scene you came out of.”

  Aran nodded, conceding the point.

  Rosemary listened in silence. She still had the sinking feeling she wasn’t the person for this job. Who was she to tell some musician in some as-yet-undecided city that playing for millions on SHL made more sense than what they were doing? Not that she could speak from experience on any of the subjects they talked about, either; all of her dating had been within the safety of hoodspace.

  She wasn’t in a position to give anyone advice on music. She had expertise in other areas. Growing carrots. Solving database errors. Troubleshooting. That was what SHL had seen in her: good problem-solving skills, resourcefulness, enthusiasm. If they hired her, they must believe those skills carried over. She worked on memorizing what everyone had said, so she’d be able to repeat it back if she ever needed to have an opinion.

  12

  LUCE

  Never Really Ever Had It

  We had a large dry-erase board on the kitchen wall. On one side, roommates put notes about groceries needed and leftovers available and things like “Good luck on the interview, Jaspreet!” On the other side, we kept a running list titled “Don’t Forget Normal.”

  The Don’t Forget Normal list included: street festivals, Renaissance fairs, amusement parks, supermarket runs, movie theaters, malls in December, talking to strangers in a waiting room. We debated whether some of those were things we actually missed, but decided they all went on the list. Just because something had needed improvement didn’t mean the solution was to cancel it entirely. Jaspreet, the public school teacher, had hated her school’s principal and adored her students. She applied for the new virtual grade schools one after another, but there were far more teachers than spots, between the sick kids out of school and the ones who had died, and the constricting job market.

  The whiteboard was impermanent, and some of the changes were clearly not going away. Plus, there were too many of them. They snowballed. We traded the dry-erase for permanent markers and expanded off the board and onto the kitchen wall, moving from generalities to specifics, good and bad. Pride parades, school assemblies, outdoor movies, outdoor concerts, baseball games, crowded trains, roller derby bouts, grocery store crowds before a snowstorm, and how the shelves emptied of bread and milk and bottled water and toilet paper. The “list” spread out of the kitchen and onto the dining room wall, black and blue and green and red against eggshell. We brought in a ladder.

  With more room, it expanded into anecdotes, paragraphs, whole stories. Write it all down, we thought, so it would still exist somewhere. I found it safer to share there than to utter any of it out loud.

  My first contributions were personal but distanced. We used to play this room that had been a strip club in its previous life, the Wrecking Bar. Every surface was mirrored, and the bands played around the poles, and the stage extended out onto the bar, which worked better for a strip club than a music venue, but made for some interesting and unsanitary shows.

  I remember watching Patti Smith ride a bucking Stratocaster to a standstill, then rip the strings off one by one until she had nothing left to play.

  The Patti Smith show had destroyed me in all the best ways, but I couldn’t explain. I tried again, another day. I remember Young Sport’s set at Bumbershoot. I saw them a few other times as well, unmemorable shows, but for some reason that performance in Seattle was transcendent: the band was so present they moved a seated audience of thousands to dance in the aisles. Will we have festivals again? I miss joy sweeping through a crowd. The good contagion.

  I used to sneak into clubs without paying cover or showing ID by carrying my guitar in behind a band loading in. Some of them took pity on me and shared their fries and drinks. That was personal; so many kindnesses I’d never forget.

  And finally, the most personal of all, though I wasn’t ready to expand on it: I wrote on another wall once, on the hardest night. I don’t know if anyone ever noticed.

  Jaspreet photographed the whole thing and created an interactive online exhibit. She encouraged others to add to it, in comments or photos, which they did, by the thousands. We all felt our world slipping away, in cascades and cataracts, the promises of temporary change becoming less and less temporary. Didn’t we feel so much safer? Weren’t safe and healthy worth more to us than large weddings and overcrowded schools? Hadn’t the pox been spread by people working and attending school when they should have stayed home? Never mind that they didn’t stay home because they couldn’t afford to. The talking heads were in agreement that necessity would fuel innovation. Good things were coming fast, they promised; I stopped watching the news.

  My money was running out equally fast. The royalty checks still came, but they got smaller and smaller. My roommate Lexa, a nurse, suggested I look into getting certified as a nursing assistant, and it seemed as good an idea as any. I started taking online courses. It made sense on several levels, beyond just making sure I had cash coming in. As Lexa pointed out, no matter what happened, we’d still need medical professionals. I hadn’t saved April, but maybe I could do some good for other people.

  I threw myself into the nursing gig. If music wasn’t going to be my thing anymore, I had to have a different thing. My world turned gray and quiet. Even when the roommates had parties (small parties, nothing to scare the neighbors into calling the police), I stayed upstairs or scheduled shifts to coincide. Better to leave it all behind completely. People, parties, fun. When I played music for myself, all I could manage was deep noise, mournful chords, janky tone. Every wanting sound.

  * * *

  —

  I wasn’t keeping track of time, so when Nora Bowles from Superwally’s Tuning Fork ezine contacted me, I had no idea why she’d sought me out. She offered me six different platforms to talk, including one of those new Hoodie things some of my patients wore to distance themselves from their current reality, before I gave up and agreed to a phone call.

  “You’re hard to get hold of,” she said without preamble. “Your old label didn’t have any contact info for you.”

  I still had the same phone number and email; I’d told them not to pass my info along to anybody.

  She continued. “I finally got your phone number from your old guitarist. He said to say hi.”

  Good old Hewitt. I’d never ta
lked to him again, but he’d been a nice guy, when he wasn’t drunk or stupid.

  “Why are you calling?” I could tell she wanted me to ask.

  “Well, as you know, we’re coming up on the third anniversary of the Stadium Tragedy, and I pitched a story to my editors about finding the last musicians to play big live shows, and, well, as far as I can tell, you were the only one who actually played that night.”

  I didn’t think that was true. She meant the only one who played a venue big enough to count by Superwally standards, and probably the smallest one of those. Surely there were others in living rooms and tiny clubs who’d had the same instinct as I’d had that night to push back against despair. Before I’d realized it was pointless. That I could make all the noise I wanted, and nobody would hear it anymore.

  “Cool,” I said.

  “So are you still playing?”

  “For myself. Sometimes.”

  “Writing new songs?”

  “Yeah,” I lied.

  “I’d love to hear them sometime. I really liked ‘Blood and Diamonds.’ You should get with StageHolo to do a show sometime.”

  I remembered the name, but I hadn’t kept up with any of the new platforms, so I made a sound of noncommittal agreement instead. We chatted a little longer, and hung up.

  A week later, I heard a low whistle from one of my roommates, then a door creaked open.

  “Luce!” yelled Lexa. “You’re famous again!”

  The article blew up. Tuning Fork had sold it to the other news outlets. The title was “The Last Power Chord,” and we were indeed the only band of any renown that had played that night, according to Nora Bowles’s research. The article linked readers to Superwally to buy the song, and the article went viral. I watched the song and the album climb their rankings. A couple of TV shows paid me to use it, then a movie. I even heard it playing in a car once as I biked to work. And still, I didn’t realize the extent of its reach until I was bathing a patient and she reached over and touched my name tag. “Luce,” she said. “Like the singer.”