A Song for a New Day

25 LUCE ^{Are You Ready}

Any note can be played over any chord and any chord can be played over any note. I read that in a book about jazz. It doesn’t quite jibe with the Neil Young solo theory; that one implies there is such thing as a wrong note, one you move through if you hit it: dissonant, discordant. A pebble, a splinter, something stuck between the song’s teeth. Yes, live songs have teeth, and teeth are messy things, tearing and rending and helping spit ideas into the world. A live song has notes that don’t want to be there, that call attention to themselves in their wrongness. A botched chord, a chorus taken too soon, a forgotten lyric. I love those moments.

Sometimes everything goes well, too. It doesn’t matter where you are, or how many people are in the room. The stars align, the band locks in, the audience gets what you’re trying to do, and you transcend bodies and bad days. The song is you, and you are more than yourself.

If I can only express myself in song (or in words that describe song) please take these notes as a eulogy for people and places I’ve lost or left behind: my family, and that entire community that I grew up in, which took care of everyone but had no space for me; April, whose friends never held a memorial; the basement in Baltimore where I rebuilt myself, where I redefined community for myself in a way that I actually felt included. They’re all gone now. They simmer under my surface, boil over as chords wrung with bleeding fingers from a battered old guitar.

When Rosemary came back for me the day after the raid, I didn’t answer the door.

I watched her from behind my curtains on the second floor, waited for her to pound harder, call attention, try going around the back again. She did none of those things. She knocked, then paused, then knocked again, three times, harder. She looked up once, and I recognized the look on her face, even if I hadn’t seen it on her before. She looked hopeful.

For a moment, just that moment, I hated her. What gave her the right to be hopeful, when she had so casually, so effortlessly, destroyed everything I’d created? She hadn’t meant to, I know; she thought she was helping. It was my fault for thinking I’d seen myself in her: the desire to exert some control over circumstances, to not be bound by a life planned by well-meaning others, to find community of her own choosing. I wasn’t sure how much of that was her, and how much I had overlaid.

I hadn’t hated many people in my life; even when I ran from my family, it hadn’t been hate that drove me; it had been the fear that I would never get to be myself if I stayed. Their refusal to talk to me afterward had been on them. Pain, not hate.

Hate was reserved for front-page villains. Abstractions: the pox, the bombers, the bombs, the gunmen, the guns, the chaos they sowed, the politicians who wielded restriction in the name of freedom and safety, or the ones who didn’t stop them, or the ones who were sure it would only be temporary. I could hate StageHolo and the other companies that sold the restriction back to people as convenience. I’d already been suspicious of their effect on our community, but now that I knew how they operated, I could spare some disgust, too.

The last time Rosemary knocked, her face changed. She didn’t look hopeful any longer; she looked lost. And I thought: maybe she had been right to hope. We’d had a connection. The offer she’d made me had been sincere and generous. She could recognize what she had done but still hope to make amends for some of it. By hiding, I was denying her that chance. Even seeing all that, I couldn’t call down. I recognized her desire to make amends without being ready to forgive.

She raised her arm to knock one more time, then looked down at her fist, unclenched it, and walked away. I thought of that often over the years that followed: the conscious letting-go. I wrote it into the song “Leaving Town” a few weeks later. I didn’t realize it would link me to her forever, but every time I sang that song there she was again, opening her hand, letting go. Letting me go. It was in that moment I knew I couldn’t stay.

What else do I love about live music? I love when a band segues from one song to another, blending the two, highlighting their similarities before breaking them apart. I love when a band throws a snippet of a cover into one of their own tunes, gives away a piece of their musical identity, shows they know that those chords—the I, the IV, the V—share an unbroken lineage with almost every rock song ever written. It says I dare you to call me derivative, when I know better than anyone that they are all one song. Pick a note, any note. Wear it out. Play it again.

I could have made a different choice. Opened the door for Rosemary. Offered myself to StageHolo in exchange for keeping my space. Started a new venue, improved security, developed new layers of Alice. Those options would have made more sense than leaving, but I couldn’t bear to see that basement sitting empty on a Saturday night or my own failures laid bare, and I couldn’t imagine ever saying yes to a company that had turned an enthusiastic kid into a weapon without her consent.

If I had it to do over, would I save the 2020? The space shuttering pushed me back out into the world, out of my comfort zone. I had become complacent. I’d hidden behind my conviction that keeping the 2020 going was a public service. I loved that room and everybody who played there. I was glad I’d had the opportunity to give that gift to my community—and to myself—for as long as it lasted.

I thought, too, of how Rosemary had come looking for music because she didn’t find it at home. I’d thought of myself as a vector for noise, and then I’d settled for being a vector for noise in one city, for the people who sought me out, for the people we trusted enough to let into the room. That was a slow way to pass a message, when there were kids like Rosemary out there waiting to receive it.

Once I had that idea, I realized the road made more sense. Time to unclench my fist and let go of the comforts I’d accumulated. If the only constant is change, why fight it? Embrace the change, outpace the change, be the change, change the lineup, change the locks, change the key, change everything but the melody and the message.

Daisy the Diesel Van was Alice’s discovery, at a city impound auction. Ten years old, with only three thousand miles on her, and not a dent or speck of rust; I guess nobody wanted to bid with the diesel price being what it was. What did anyone need with a fifteen-passenger van these days, anyway? I bought her on the spot. One of the kids who came to our shows worked at a garage that did biodiesel conversions. Some others helped pull out the middle seats and put in a bed, and then a cage at the back for my gear.

Alice moved into 2022, one of the vacants I owned on either side of the performance space. I left a lawyer friend—his band was called Octopus Sex Arm—fighting to keep the 2020 from being seized, but he said I didn’t have to be there for that, and I didn’t think I could bear to be.

I left Baltimore with: two guitars, acoustic and electric; my old Marshall amp; a week’s worth of clothing, plus leather jacket and two sweaters; stage boots, snow boots, sneakers; four paperback books; my swag suitcases; a case of fresh strings for each guitar; a drive containing every song I could imagine wanting to listen to; my writing notebook; my bike; the ancient annotated Rand McNally USA atlas I had bought on the last tour Before. I sold or gave away the rest of the instruments and music gear, and boxed all my personal stuff to put in a friend’s garage. Not the first time I’d pared my life down to what I could carry.

How do you find a place to play in a new city when everything is underground? Rosemary never did have to figure that out. We were handed to her on a silver platter. If she had known where to look, she’d have found the others. Step one: You scope out all the coffeehouses. All the dive bars. The bike co-ops. You know the look when you see it, the kids who share a collective secret. Getting them to trust you is harder. It takes time, but once you’re in, you’re in.

The first destination I chose was Pittsburgh, Baltimore’s sister in rough-hewn beauty. Philadelphia or D.C. would’ve been closer, but I needed to feel like I’d gone somewhere I couldn’t turn around and head back from the same night. It had been so long since I’d been anywhere. I drove through Baltimore toward I-70 saying mental farewells: goodbye, 2020; goodbye, Heatwave; goodbye, adopted home. How many times had I left before? I could do it again. Reframe it to be about the place I was going, instead of the place I was leaving. Pittsburgh bands and clubs had always been unpretentiously fun. And all those rivers! I remembered driving through Pittsburgh on the last tour, seeing the venue from a bridge heading in the opposite direction, with no clue how to get turned around again. April drumming on the back of my seat, Hewitt repeating directions given by his phone as it rerouted us again and again. This time I couldn’t really get lost, since I didn’t have a set destination beyond the city itself.

I had been on I-70 for five miles when I saw flashing lights behind me in the side mirror. I pulled over with a sigh, unsure what I’d done wrong. Both hands on the wheel, mentally reviewing the locations of wallet, phone, registration.

After determining that my van was mine and I was me, the trooper returned to my window.

“Do you know why I pulled you over?” he asked.

I resisted the urge to catalog all the possible reasons. “No, sir.”

“Did you notice anything about the other cars around you?”

“No, sir. There’ve barely been any.”

“This highway is restricted to self-driving vehicles.”

“I had no idea,” I said, in all honesty.

“It’s been restricted for eight years.”

Oh. “Officer, I haven’t been anywhere in ten. You can see how new my registration is.”

He sighed. “I think I actually believe you, but I have to write this ticket.”

He took a few minutes writing it up, long enough that I worried that he might have seen something to do with the venue and decided to cause me more trouble, but eventually he returned to my window. I stuffed the ticket into the glove compartment; I wasn’t planning on returning to Maryland anytime soon.

The trooper thoughtfully provided me with a personal escort to the next exit. I waved him a cheery goodbye and pulled into the first parking lot to look at my ancient atlas. I drew several X marks on I-70. An updated online map would have been helpful in investigating alternate routes, but I was stubborn. Roads might change, but the basics of A to B were still the same.

The old pike that ran parallel still existed; maybe it was good for me to be on a smaller road. It would let me see how people like Rosemary lived, instead of bypassing the small towns. Prove that farms were still farms, fields were still fields. Until, near Frederick, an enormous building rose out of the flatness. The biggest building I’d ever seen. An airplane hangar? A server center? No: Superwally distribution. As I got closer, I saw that what I’d assumed were starlings or sparrows were in fact drones, rising in a stream, a flock, a cloud, to head to points unknown. Self-driving trucks, drone delivery. No jobs for the humans, other than consumption, which was itself a full-time occupation.

What a weird world we’d created. As I drove through Frederick’s empty downtown to pick up my next small road, I was struck by the reasonableness of it all. The transaction we’d made. Of course it made sense to trade company for safety. To trade jobs as makers for jobs as consumers, consuming from the comfort of our homes. We’d set ourselves up.

Maybe I was stupid for pushing back against this system, still looking for a place for myself. Stubborn in this, just as I was stubborn about my atlas or buying a van that needed a human behind the wheel. Left behind. Nothing to do for it now but keep going and get left behind somewhere new.

Pittsburgh welcomed me with signs saying to smile for the cameras. I slept in the van behind an abandoned-looking church, and spent the next few days haunting the streets. Took tiny notes in the tiny inset map in my atlas: this bar is smaller on the inside than the outside, maybe has a secret room; this place where I changed my bike chain has a raised platform in the back, for no discernible reason.

My third week of morning coffee at a coffeehouse playing the Shondes over speakers, I complimented the music. Was rewarded with, “Come back tonight after we close.” I returned that evening to blackout curtains and an unlocked side door and a succession of solo musicians. It was a weekly series.

On my second week in the audience, somebody asked me if I played. By the end of the night I had an invitation to do a set the following week. Nerves gnawed at me; I hadn’t played a solo show in years, not since that night with April in New York. I had always preferred the safety of numbers. Not just the actual physical security of having people on the road with me. With a band, if nobody came we’d still have a good time. We could treat it as a glorified practice; we still had each other. If someone messed up, they could hide behind the others. What I had forgotten: on your own, nobody needed to know you messed up. There’s no chord to make your note dissonant. Nobody to look askance when you forget a verse and go straight to chorus.

I told myself the Pittsburgh crowds were hungry for new music, the same as I’d been when I started the 2020, the same as I was playing in the same space with the same bands cycling through, week after week. I loved all my bands, don’t get me wrong. I loved the way they pushed themselves—the way we pushed ourselves—the way we pushed each other—to bring something fresh to each show. To make sure the audience had a reason to come and listen. Still, hearing a band you know and love play something new is not the same thrill as falling in love with a band you’ve never heard before. It’s a tamer joy.

I framed that from the audience’s perspective. The truth for me was that every time I stood in front of our 2020 crowd, I was challenged to dig deeper into myself, to find words I hadn’t already said in all the weeks and months and years before. That, too, provided a different challenge from the one of facing a new audience and knowing I had one song, at most two, to convince them I was worth their time. They didn’t know me; when I stood on the stage in Pittsburgh for the first time, I gave a chord-by-chord introduction.

Nerves punched my chest from the inside and made my legs shake. I played bare-bones versions of the songs we had played full band in Baltimore, which calmed me somewhat, and “Don’t Even Think About It,” the only song from Before that I still tolerated. No one booed.

I sold fifteen album codes and five T-shirts that night. Three kids asked for records, which I hadn’t brought. Made enough to cover the coffees I had bought over the previous weeks.

“Will you play again next week?” the barista asked.

I shook my head. “I want to see what’s going on in other cities.”

“Come back anytime. I’ve got a friend with a basement house concert in Cleveland, if you want me to tell them you’re coming.”

I hadn’t decided which way to go yet.

“Perfect,” I said.

26 ROSEMARY ^Bridge

The sign read OUT OF ORDER, like the bridge was an elevator or an automatic teller. Do Not Trespass would have made more sense, or Authorized Access Only, or even a simple Danger, or Keep Out. “Out of Order” wasn’t intimidating at all. Beneath it, someone had scrawled Ce n’est pas un pont.

Rosemary scaled the chain-link fence, careful where she placed her feet, remembering the last fence she had climbed. She made it over this one with her feet below her head where they belonged. On the other side, stone steps crumbled, the mortar between shifting slabs gritty underfoot. Easy to see why they didn’t want people trespassing in this area of the SHL compound. Out of order, out of time. It didn’t even span water anymore. This bridge had been here long before SHL, long before congregation laws, long before an After had been made by a Before.

She knew this wasn’t the smartest idea, hiking into parts unknown without telling anyone where she’d gone, but she didn’t know her destination, other than someplace to pretend she was unreachable. She knew people now who lived their entire lives noncomm or semi-noncomm, people who might never speak to her again. Luce, Joni. They had only been in her life a few weeks, but their absence still stung, as did her part in it.

She’d omitted that from her debriefing. Omitted the fact that she’d caught movement in the upstairs window when she knocked on the door at 2020, that for one moment she’d glimpsed Luce behind the curtain and thought maybe she hadn’t broken everything. She had. She knew now that it was all on her.

They had brought her back to the campus, back to a room identical to the room she’d stayed in the previous time, but on the compound’s far side, a small building called the Retreat Center. She was the sole inhabitant, with food droned in from the other side. It wasn’t a prison, but it matched her mood: she was a part of nothing, and better left where she couldn’t taint everything she touched.

Management met with her in hood, in a virtual replica of an office in the building across campus, complete with meadow and woods out the window. Their avatar sat in a leather office chair, a massive oak desk between them and Rosemary. The furniture and the avatar were overlarge, so slightly as to be almost imperceptible, obviously meant to leave her feeling small.

“Why do you do that?” she asked Generic Management—Male (1 of 5). “Why are we meeting in hood when the real me is here, and the real you is here? It’s a nice day outside.”

“I’m at a different compound. Washington State.”

Oh. “Then why bring me back here at all? We could be having this conversation anywhere.”

The fake breeze through the fake window rustled in his fake hair. “Best practices dictate bringing recruiters back to decompress after their first successful acquisition. We can send you home if you’d like, too, but that tends to be trickier emotionally.”

“A little vacation while we struggle with our consciences? What percentage of us come back?”

“Sixty percent.”

Enough to justify their ridiculous policies. Enough turnover to teach them they shouldn’t waste too much time on training. A perfect system. “At this moment I’m wondering why anyone keeps this job.”

“Most don’t actually see a venue shut down on their first assignment—it’s not supposed to happen until after you’re gone. The reaction is less visceral if you hear about it from afar. Anyway, it’s a good job, and you know it. Money, travel, expense account, excitement, music. We’d like you to stay. You didn’t disappoint.”

“How could I disappoint?” Rosemary dug her fingers into her palms; her av echoed the motion, though it was too cheap to bleed. “You only hired me because I liked music and I looked naive enough to lead you straight to a venue for you to close.”

“We hired you because you were competent in your old job, in a way that usually translates to competence in this one. Which it did. We got two promising new acts from you, and would have gotten more if it hadn’t been for our own screwup.”

At least they acknowledged their screwup, even if their apology had to do with timing, rather than the act itself. And she’d connected SHL with the Handsome Mosquitoes and Kurtz, both of whom wanted the connection. “They both passed the audition?”

“Yes. We’re signing Kurtz and Josh diSouza. They both show tremendous star potential.”

One of her nails broke skin. “Josh diSouza—not the Handsome Mosquitoes?”

“He’s the whole package. Looks, voice, presence. He’s a little tall for the cameras, but we can make adjustments.”

“But the band wrote the songs. The band is amazing.”

“If he can’t write, we’ll get someone to write for him. The band was sharp, but they had bad optics.” Management held up his thumbs and forefingers to form a box, squinted at it. “He’s the real find.”

“Did he fight for them?”

“A little, but we told him he’d go further without them, and he saw reason. He was beyond excited, really.”

“I need to finish this debrief later.” She tried to control her voice.

He gave an oblivious wave. “I’ll be here all day. Buzz me when you’re ready to finish.”

Rosemary studied the map and then headed off through the woods in the opposite direction of the manicured walking trails, into the unmapped areas, which was how she found the old, unmarked path, and then the cordoned-off bridge.

She stood on the bridge and peered over. The width and height suggested it had spanned a decent-sized body of water in the past, but the river was at this point nothing more than dried mud. Maybe it came back after rainfall. Or maybe it was like so much else she’d encountered, forever diminished.

At least this wasn’t her fault. She pictured the looks on the faces of the Handsome Mosquitoes when they were told their singer had signed on without them again. Did they blame her? Would they go back to Baltimore and keep playing? Not that they had a place to play anymore. She kicked the bridge, then again, harder, until her toes protested.

Her phone buzzed, surprising her since she’d had no reception last she checked. She expected it to be Management, telling her she had strayed too far, telling her to make a decision, to stay and accept what she’d need to become, or go home and try to forget all the destruction she’d caused. It was her mother.

She wasn’t ready to talk to her mother yet, either, to put her complicity into words, so she ignored it. Kept the phone in her hand as she leaned on her elbows. She contemplated tossing it off the bridge, watching it smash on the rocks, running away into the forest to live on tubers and berries. The Ghost of the SHL Woods.

It was as reasonable an alternative as any, and at least she wouldn’t be able to cause any more trouble. SHL would hire somebody to take her place. She’d haunt their windows at night, whispering warnings, so they knew what they were committing to, so they’d go to their first assignment with their eyes open, or quit before going at all.

Or, more realistically, she could go home. Her parents would listen sympathetically and tell her she’d made the right choice to quit, and maybe she’d get her old job back if she groveled enough. Her father would try to hide his relief that she’d returned to “live happy in hoodspace!” like the old ads said. She’d pretend she hadn’t found anything better in her travels. She’d live happy in hoodspace as long as she didn’t think about how monumentally she’d screwed things up for people who’d opened themselves up to her.

That return to status quo offered so much comfort. No crowds, no umbrellas that looked like guns, no police sirens, no strangers sneezing on her. If she still had a musical itch to scratch, she could save up for some SHL shows, if she could stomach supporting the company, knowing what she knew.

Except when she thought about stepping back into her old life, she felt like she was watching an avatar of herself go through the motions of putting on her work Hoodie, waiting for the Quality Control call, meals with her parents. Everything felt small and dulled. Now she understood how much she’d missed; how much had been taken from her in the name of safety and control. That knowledge meant she’d even ruined home.

If she left the company they’d hire someone else to take her place. Someone new and naive, as she had been a few weeks ago. Someone who’d destroy something, somewhere, and then face this same decision. The job would still need to get done, and the cycle would continue whether she stayed in the position or someone else took it. Maybe it was better for her to stay, to save somebody else the heartache and guilt. Maybe the whole sixty percent stayed by saying, “If I don’t do it, somebody will.” Maybe this was who she was meant to be: a person who blighted everything she touched, for the benefit of her corporate overlord.

She studied the maps of where artist recruiters had been recently. Some embedded themselves in a single large city, which presumably meant that they managed to make themselves invisible, so nobody connected them with venue closings. Some crisscrossed the country, taking full advantage of the opportunity to travel. The maps color-coded them, but she couldn’t find any further information on who they were. She wasn’t supposed to know.

At the time she’d gone through training, she’d noticed that the others in her group had been hired as makeup techs and audio and such, and she’d been the only recruiter. She’d assumed they were trained in batches based on hire date, but now she wondered if the company had deliberately isolated her from other recruiters, the way they’d isolated her now. No chance to talk to other employees, compare notes. If she’d quit, she guessed she’d have been shuttled out with no chance to talk to anyone, and maybe a nondisclosure agreement held over her head in exchange for debt forgiveness. Even now, when she’d agreed to stay on, they weren’t giving her any chance to tell anyone what she had done. Maybe they assumed by the time she’d completed her second or third assignment, her complicity would keep her from sharing. No wonder their system worked.

So, where to go next on her tour of destruction? First option, close her eyes and pick a target at random. Second option, call Aran, though then she’d want to ask him why he hadn’t told her his name would close doors rather than open them, or if he’d known what they’d make her do. Third option, search interviews of SHL bands to see where they came from, under the assumption that where there was one there might be others, if their scene hadn’t already been picked over. Maybe the trick was finding a place that had produced good music before, but hadn’t been visited in a while.

What was she doing even thinking about trying again in a new city, or approaching it like something with a good solution? She put the puzzle aside. It felt wrong to hack a Hoodie that still technically belonged to the company, so she hacked her own phone, a small illicit thrill. She looked up the underground music site Joni had mentioned, now unblocked. The Coffee Cake Situation had a page, just like any band on Superwally, except this wasn’t Superwally. They had three songs for sale and one awkward band photo. The recordings had nothing on the live show. She wrote an apology to Joni, then deleted it. Joni didn’t want to hear from her.

The Handsome Mosquitoes had a page, though Josh diSouza’s name was missing from the band lineup. She wanted to apologize to them, too, but she didn’t think they’d want to hear from her any more than Joni would. Luce’s band Harriet was on there, and Rosemary bought an album download, meager penance. She could throw every penny she made at Luce’s bands and it still wouldn’t make up for what she’d done. “Not knowing is not an excuse,” she started writing to Luce, though she didn’t know who monitored this page. And if Luce wrote back, could she really justify that she was still with SHL after what they’d done? She deleted that message without sending it, same as the others; all her apologies were worthless, sent or unsent. She might as well embrace that she was everything they said she was.

Maybe she’d find a way to make it up to them, she told herself as she walked through the maps again, as she chose a new city, as she resigned herself to being disappointed in herself no matter what she chose.

27 LUCE ^{Sixteen-Bar Solo}

The basement series in Cleveland charged admission. Ten dollars cash a head, fifty-three people, three acts to divide the $530 between. The homeowner didn’t keep a dime, and the two local bands were sweet enough to offer me their shares, which I turned down. I’d never have found the place if it wasn’t for the barista in Pittsburgh, and the homeowner gave me a note that would open doors if I headed to Columbus. Notes and passwords and names to buy entrance: after what happened with the 2020, I understood.

The road had changed since I’d been on it last. Most freeways had lanes reserved for self-driving cars; in some places, as I’d already seen, entire highways were closed to Daisy the Diesel, part of the reason I’d gotten her so cheap. I got an unwanted police escort through some towns that weren’t big on strangers. Ate dinner in chain restaurant isolation booths when I couldn’t find anyplace local and slept in the van in parking lots when there were no motels. Only the smallest motels had avoided shuttering over anticongregation laws, those and the big chains that made the necessary renovations. I kept my old road atlas next to me, the one we had bought on tour Before, and started taking notes in it again: which towns were safe to pass through, where I found a decent meal. Circle marked the venue, hopefully not to be crossed out by SHL before I passed through again.

There was an odd déjà vu in entering cities I’d toured through long before and seeing them so changed. Sometimes the bones of the places I remembered were still there, signage fading and drooping, parking lots gone grassy. I never minded seeing a Superwally or one of the other big-box stores reclaimed by nature, but the little places made me sad. I told myself that if I knew these cities like I knew Baltimore, I might see the secret life hidden under the decaying surfaces.

I did odd jobs in the long gaps between shows, washing dishes and tending bar for spending money so as not to dip too far into my remaining savings. The veggie oil reduced the one big expense; the other, food, couldn’t be helped. I slept in the van when I had to, or crashed on couches like I had starting out. Slow and steady, making friends as I went, doing my best to win invitations back.

I spent two weeks in St. Louis after playing there, sleeping in the van and tending bar, then headed to Memphis for a show set up by a friend of a friend, a tiny dance studio that hosted acoustic shows at night. I waited around for the instructor to take a break and turn off the camera, but when she finally did, she had only bad news for me. “Sorry. The police came by a couple of nights ago. We have to lie low for a while.”

She didn’t say StageHolo had instigated the raid, possibly didn’t know, but I knew.

It was only midday, and I had nothing to do, so I drove out to Graceland, parking on the empty shoulder of the empty road. There was razor wire on the fence, and through the shuttered gate I saw drones darting around the grounds, letting Elvis into hearts and Hoodies through the magic of some StageHolo subsidiary or another. They were getting a better show than those who had made the pilgrimage in person Before; their tours ended with a real live Elvis holo show, decade of choice. Interesting to see how they integrated the new into the old.

Elvis died before I was born; I had no beef with Elvis. I’d left Baltimore angry, driven angry, played angry, but I wasn’t even sure where to place it. Angry with StageHolo for being the actual force of destruction, for shutting something vital down while they shuttled people around this ancient shrine, and with Rosemary, the conduit. With myself, for not finding a way to protect what I had. With myself, for driving from city to city holding this in, when I could be using it, channeling it into song.

I grabbed my guitar out of the van and stood in front of the gate again. Played the first two lines of “Suspicious Minds,” the only Elvis song I knew, because the songwriter got that one right, about the trap we can’t escape. Just substitute fear for love.

A couple of drones turned toward the sound. I gave them the finger, even though that wasn’t fair, it wasn’t the Elvis fans I was mad at. A few more gathered.

“We’re still here,” I said to them. “We’re still playing music in real life. Come find us. Music is a living thing. Fuck StageHolo.”

That felt better. “Fuck StageHolo. Don’t give them your money. Learn an instrument. Go see a real band play. Get this place reopened and walk around it in real life. Everybody is afraid; it’s what you do when you’re afraid that counts. The world isn’t over yet.” That “everybody is afraid” bit sounded like it wanted to be a song. No, it was one; a fragment of something I’d written a long time ago and hidden away behind a hotel dresser. That’s how songs always happened: it might take years to come right, but if I sat on a line or a rhythm long enough, it revealed what it wanted to be. I was writing my way back into it in real time, for a bunch of Elvis drones.

“The world isn’t over yet. We don’t need to keep all the old things, but we need something new. Borrow a guitar and learn how to use it. If that isn’t your thing, figure out what is. Invent your own genre. Carve your initials into something. Brand them, paint them, shoot them, transpose them, change them entirely and sculpt yourself out of a new medium. Instrument and tool are synonyms: we can still construct ways to belong. Our song is a work in progress.”

Elvis fans were not the ones I needed to reach, but it helped me focus to say it out loud. I grabbed my guitar’s neck and started playing, looking for the chords and melody that would make me feel complete in the moment.

A siren wailed in the distance. When I looked up, the drones had multiplied. An army of drones, all waiting for my next move. One of them, or maybe the static security camera, must have called the police. I hadn’t trespassed, but they could probably get me on disturbing the peace or illegal parking or something.

“Good night, Memphis!” I waved to the airborne crowd, then cased my guitar and took off before they could find some reason to arrest me. I wasn’t really sure which direction I was heading until I hit a park on the banks of the Mississippi.

I saw a small cluster of people leaning against the railing. From a distance, I couldn’t tell what they were doing, but as I got closer I heard a familiar murmur, and I saw someone toss something into the water. I didn’t know the exact dates of the holidays this year, but it was the right season for this to be Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year. They were here for tashlich, casting their sins into the river. I dug in my backpack for a granola bar, ate most of it, then followed their lead, emptying the crumbs over the edge. Opening my hand, releasing.

I didn’t remember if there was a prayer I was supposed to say. My memories of doing the same at the East River as a kid were hazy at best. Still, it was a ritual I understood. It’s hard to hold a grudge standing beside a river. A river says move on, move on, move on. Flood your banks, alter your borders. I tossed away my anger at Rosemary and my anger at myself, though I kept the resentment of StageHolo. To my mind, that was a righteous fight.

I sat there for the whole afternoon, watching the sun set in blue and gold, then pink and purple. I wrote “Leaving Town” sitting beside the Mississippi, thinking of Rosemary’s unclenched fist, opening my hands, letting go. Then the start of “Manifest Independence,” incorporating the stuff I’d shouted at the Graceland gates.

In the morning, I headed to Nashville.

28 ROSEMARY ^{More Rock, More Talk}

If a hood backdrop existed for “Mountains as Far as the Eye Can See,” Rosemary had never known to look for it. Roads that rolled and turned on a hairpin, trees thick with summer, vistas stretching from one state into another. She alternated between clearview, capturing the scenery as it was, and a map overlay displaying the names of mountains and valleys: Fancy Gap, Meadows of Dan, Rocky Knob, Fairy Stone, Woolwine. She loved the names, loved the ways the peaks layered green to blue to purple in the distance. Some turns made her stomach flip, made her brace against her compartment’s sides, but she tried to turn it into a game. A long, long, roller coaster sim with an impressive view, leading into the small city of Asheville, North Carolina, which hadn’t been visited by a recruiter in two years. For a few minutes, riding a bus around mountains, she regained some of the excited anticipation she’d had on her first trip. If they had taken away her illusion that she was doing some good in her job, at least she could still appreciate the places it allowed her to see.

She’d figured out that Logistics gave new recruiters the fanciest hotels to make them feel they owed the company from the start. This time, she’d asked for lodgings that let her fit in better, and Logistics had said, “If that’s what you really want…” They’d found her a tiny apartment above a convenience store, the type of place somebody moving to town might realistically afford. It could benefit from a Veneer: it had stained carpet, burned-bottom pots, a hot plate, a microwave crusty with other people’s culinary disasters, sour-smelling minifridge, box fan in the window. Maybe this was their attempt to show her she’d overcorrected, but it felt right. She didn’t deserve better after what she’d done.

In the store downstairs, she bought a Micky’s-2-Go microwave mac ’n’ cheese, almost as good as the real thing, and then settled onto the sagging bed. The bus still rattled through her. When she finally fell asleep, she dreamed that Luce had ridden into Asheville on top of her bus, playing guitar to the mountains, shouting down to Rosemary that nobody had to hide anymore.

She woke to sun and music streaming through the unshaded window. The old overeager Rosemary would have rushed out to find the source, but she took her time dressing. Two doorways down, a tall black man with long dreadlocks played a fiddle, his instrument case open before him, as if it was legal to play on the street. People walking past tossed change in the case or nodded at the VCash code taped to the lid, doing the same in hoodspace.

She leaned against a wall to listen, but the fiddler glared at her and gestured her along with his bow in between phrases. Nobody else stopped for more than a second. Local ordinances must allow music as long as nobody congregated. She wandered the compact downtown area in circles that led back to her block, hoping to catch the fiddler on a break. Most stores hadn’t opened yet, but she cataloged them for possible return. One sold paper books, another musical instruments, another sex toys. Small restaurants she didn’t recognize offered every cuisine from Thai to Tex-Mex. The fiddler was gone when she turned the corner the fourth time, but at least now she knew there were definitely musicians around. It was only after she went to bed that night that she realized she might have scared him away by circling the block so many times. Stalking street musicians wasn’t the way to engage them. What was? She had no clue.

She developed a routine. She drank coffee at the bookstore each morning, pulling up her Hoodie and pretending to work while watching the half dozen other customers, trying to figure out what kinds of jobs people might bring people to work at a coffee shop instead of their homes. Not Superwally customer service, even if some had the jawbone implants that let you chat subvocally; Superwally mandated their uniforms and dedicated space. Writers, students, tech. She wondered why you’d choose to work in the company of one to nineteen strangers instead of the comfort of your home.

Except, as the days went on, she started to get it. She liked how the woman behind the counter, Sadie, greeted her by name after the first week. Her latte art changed from a question mark to a fuzzy branch which Rosemary thought might be her namesake herb. She was still getting used to sitting at tables without isolation booths, inches away from other customers, but she liked recognizing the others in the room, and the feeling that they were slogging through the same kind of day, even if she was pretending.

She started using the time to peek into her Hoodie’s code. She listened to music on her hacked phone while she explored, sending notes to herself about local bands, careful to change their names in her notes in case somebody at SHL spied on what she wrote. She found a way to freeze the tracking app without turning it off, so it looked like she was still sitting at French Broads Coffee & Books after she’d gone home. That might come in handy. She still felt terrible that the info her Hoodie collected automatically had been used to target the 2020.

She people-watched, and explored, and stewed over what she’d learned. She had been sold a bill of goods, since she was a little kid, that said nobody anywhere did anything together. That you could do it all from the comfort and safety of home: work, date, play games, hang out, listen to bands, watch sports or television or movies, have sex (“Superwally Stim Accessories for all budgets—whatever you’re into!”), maybe eventually visit your partners to figure out if you were as compatible in the flesh as in hoodspace. Who needed the real world when all that was at your wired fingertips?

And she’d bought into it all. If her parents told her cities were dangerous hotbeds of violence and disease, why would she have any reason to believe otherwise? If they said there was nothing more to life than farming and family and whatever job she could get from Superwally, and be grateful for that, who was she to argue?

When she called home, she found herself short-tempered. She was angry at the fiction they’d created; her father was angry the fiction hadn’t been enough for her. She knew that was unfair, that the entirety of hoodspace had been built to feed this narrative, to keep them all scared and complacent and docile consumers. Maybe she was mad they’d fallen for it and taken her with them.

In the afternoons and evenings, she walked the downtown blocks listening for music. The street musicians made her check-ins easy. It took her two weeks to figure out she could bring them coffee instead of stalking them. She learned their names, mentioned them to Management in categories of “no” and “maybe” so SHL would see she was working. The fiddle player from her first day in town was Nolan James, who taught music in hood and to local kids. Then there was Annika, who figured out any song anybody requested on her keyboard, but insisted the requester join her to sing; an old woman named Laurian, who played Appalachian murder ballads on banjo, an enormous dog asleep at her feet; Mercury Retrograde, who candidly discussed his mental health diagnoses over double espressos, and played ukulele in the costume of a supehero he’d invented. At least the street musicians were legal; if she found one she enjoyed enough, she wouldn’t be wrecking a venue when she sealed the deal.

As it got later, she tried to tune the street players out, hoping for a glimpse of movement behind a shutter, or music wafting from a closed shop. She wandered out of downtown and across the river, past warehouses and parks, in ever widening circles and ever longer spokes, looking unsuccessfully for the elusive crowds, listening for the low thump of bass rising from a basement.

29 LUCE ^{Cool Out}

Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Columbus, Toledo, Detroit, Ann Arbor, Chicago, Milwaukee, Madison, Minneapolis, Des Moines, Kansas City, Lawrence, Columbia, St. Louis, Nashville. Sixteen solo shows, five months. A slow passage. I needed those sixteen solo shows in those months after the 2020 died, and they were a necessary intimacy. All those couches, all those new friends, all those people who felt good for having helped me make a connection down the road; it wouldn’t have been the same if I’d had a band along. By the sixteenth show I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t itching for a beat beneath me.

That was when I found Silva again, the sound guy from that fateful show at the Peach; or he found me, I guess. It was pouring rain the night I played Nashville, and I was glad for decent road cases as I shuttled my gear out of the antique store where I’d played between racks of vintage clothing to wet people in Eames chairs. I’d seen him there, a familiar face I couldn’t quite place.

“Can I help?”

“Sure.” I nodded toward my amp. “Remind me where I know you from?”

In the second I asked, I remembered. “Scratch that. Just remind me your name. I’d never forget that show.”

“Silva,” he said, hoisting my Marshall into its wheeled case. “How’s it been going? I was so excited when the Bowmans said you were coming to their place. If anybody had the nerve to tour again, I should’ve known it would be you.”

I invited him into the van to get out of the rain. We sat cross-legged on the bed, sharing a joint he pulled from his shirt pocket.

“How’s Nashville dealing with the new world order?” I asked. “It was harder than I expected to find a place to play. I figured here of all places…”

“StageHolo songwriter pipeline. This city is crawling. I’ve done some sessions for them.”

He must have seen my distaste flash across my face, because he added, “They’re keeping music going.”

“Fuck StageHolo.”

“No, seriously, they have problems, but they’re making sure there’s still a path for pros, so I can’t call them all bad… but I miss playing live. Actually, I came to see you because I was hoping you might be, ah, looking for a bassist.”

“Huh. Bass without drums?”

He grinned. “I figured you’d say that. I know a drummer who’s looking to get out for a while, too.”

“I like playing as a trio…” In the back of my brain, songs started stripping down and rearranging themselves.

Two days after the antique store show, I drove out to the tiny cottage where Silva’s friend Marcia Januarie lived. She answered the door in shorts and tank top. “Sorry in advance for the heat inside. AC broke and I was hoping to get away with not turning it on again. Fall isn’t supposed to be this humid.”

When we shook hands, I glimpsed a small sliver of a possible future: the bright urgent heat of a new musical collaboration blurred with the bright urgent heat of a new love; a collision that would work for a while, until it didn’t; a map to a new and uncharted place. It was a terrible idea to mix the two, when drummers willing to tour were so thin on the ground, when anything that tanked us might tank the band, but really, nothing about this idea wasn’t a terrible idea, so we might as well go all in, especially when one handshake said so much. She’d sized me up in the same way, I could tell, leaving us in one of those rare instant mutual attractions. I hadn’t felt that in a while.

Silva showed up a minute later and we set up our gear in a loose circle with the drum kit that already took up a large portion of the room. Marcia was right about the heat; the room was stifling.

“Can we open a window?” Silva asked.

She shook her head. “Only until we start playing. I found the farthest place from neighbors I could, but they still complain. I’ve got it pretty soundproofed as long as we keep ’em closed. That okay? I’ve got fans.”

“It’s not any worse than my club was in summer. I’ll survive.” It was a little hot for me, but I was feeling her enough to agree to anything.

We played a few covers and one of my songs. Silva’d been a good bassist all those years ago, and now he played even better, filling in spots in the song where I might have missed a second guitar. Marcia’s drumming was compact and spare, perfectly in the pocket. Three songs in, I thought it would work; four songs in I knew.

After, we opened all the windows and ordered pizza and poured bourbon over ice, tossing around possible band names, laying out a loose practice schedule and our expectations for each other and the band. When Silva headed out again, I caught him winking at Marcia on his way out the door.

She returned to the couch with a second drink for each of us. The glass was sweating.

“So,” she said. “I’m not reading this wrong, am I?”

I’d always appreciated direct women.

My van stayed parked at Marcia’s for five days: five days of sex and music and getting to know each other, in no particular order. When we finally dragged ourselves from the cottage, it was for her to show me how Nashville had changed. Silva had said as much, but I had to see it for myself: the walled-off estates, the enormous StageHolo compound, the Ryman and Opry turned drone-infested shrines, all the clubs gone the way of all the other clubs. I shouldn’t have thought it would be any different here. The songwriting community hadn’t had to change too much; they were just working for a different kind of publishing company from the one Before.

It made sense if I thought about it that way, but it still made me angry. That night, the power died halfway through practice, and I said it was time to discuss where we were going and when.

“We’re going to need a name,” Silva said.

I pictured another hour lost to tossing random phrases at each other. “I don’t care what we’re called.”

“Luce Cannon? It worked before.”

“Not Luce Cannon. Not any of my old band names. This is something new and it deserves to stand on its own.”

Marcia stood and stretched behind her drums. “Ice cream, anyone? If this is like last time, I’m losing everything in the fridge again, so we might as well eat it now.”

Silva and I put down our guitars, turning off the amps so they wouldn’t surge if the power came back. We leaned over the kitchen bar, where some light came in from the moon. I took the offered spoon, but Silva passed on the ice cream and poured himself a bourbon.

“Dessert Spoon,” I said. “The Countertops.”

“Is that how you came up with all your band names? Random items in front of you?” I didn’t need light to catch Marcia’s disapproval.

“None of them mean anything until people notice you. Sure, there are some awesome names, but some of them are only awesome because you like the music.”

“But the other side is true, too.” Silva dipped into the nearest pint. “There are good bands with names you can’t forgive.”

I took the pistachio ice cream and roamed the room, naming things. “The Festival Owls. The Thesauri. Carpet Cleaners—hmm.”

Marcia laughed. “Those are awful. We might as well start throwing random words together. Lunchpocket. Powersuck. Cassisfire.”

I walked into her crash cymbal and had to grab for it to keep from starting a chain reaction. When I’d extricated myself, I asked, “What was that last one?”

“Cassisfire. Cassis and Fire. The two flavors you’re not eating since you stole the pistachio.”

“What’s cassis?” Silva asked.

“A berry. The ‘fire’ is cinnamon chocolate chile. Y’all are both missing out.”

I said it a few times under my breath. “Two words, not one. Cassis Fire. Like ‘cease fire.’ It’s not awful.”

“Better than any of those others,” Silva agreed.

“Sweet,” said Marcia. “Can I have some of the pistachio now?”

The power didn’t come back on, but by the end of the evening we’d finished all three pints and come up with a plan for a minitour to test the waters. They were both interested, ready in the abstract, but I was the one pushing. The thought of that StageHolo compound in the same city had me itching to get out again, like they could infect us if we were too close for too long. Sixteen solo shows had been enough to tell me I’d missed both road and band, not one or the other. The two combined, plus the new connections, the reconnections, the audiences, the kind strangers, the people who became less than strangers in days spread out over years: those were the things that could fill the hole inside me called home. Nothing else gave me that fix.

30 ROSEMARY ^Badge

She was working up to asking one of the street musicians outright when the barista, Sadie, invited Rosemary to her band’s show. After all her searching, it was as easy as an invitation; it had taken exactly what she’d been told all along. Get involved, get to know people, and you’ll find out what’s happening. Sadie might have been flirting with her, too; Rosemary still found it maddening that people in the real world didn’t use the same markers they did in hoodspace. Anyway, she wasn’t getting involved this time.

She thought of everything that had gone wrong in Baltimore, and debated not even going. It was one thing to stumble across a venue and later give it up to her bosses; it was another to come in as an invited guest, knowing she was a Trojan horse. She settled on attending with her new precautions in place. When she put her Hoodie on that night, she altered the settings to make the GPS tracker mirror her phone’s location on her bedside table. She’d left her wallet there as well, taking only cash and her driver’s license, so her spending couldn’t be tracked. As far as the company was concerned, she’d taken the evening off.

The address was a warehouse by the river. The thought occurred to her as she walked through the dark that Sadie could be a serial killer luring her to a deserted location. Then she remembered she’d had the same thought about Aran as she approached the 2020 for the first time, and remembered the way Luce had welcomed her, and her heart ached. She wondered if she’d ever think about it without shame.

“You’ll know it because it’s a giant building painted the ugliest shade of yellow-brown in existence.” Sadie had leaned over the counter and pressed a plastic coin into Rosemary’s hand. “Repeat the directions back to me so I’m sure you’ve got it? We’re trying to keep too many people from searching the address.”

It was hard to discern the color with the sun down and the security lamps in the parking lot throwing a sodium-yellow glow, but she was confident she’d found the right place. Other people arrived on bicycles and on foot from other directions, most in twos and threes. The parking lot was weedy and overgrown, every inch of the chain-link fence hosting a locked bicycle. As she passed under a security camera, she noticed it was aimed at the sky instead of the entrance, if it was on at all.

She followed the others to a door on the building’s far side and into a low-ceilinged office. Passed her invitation chip to the Door Alice, played in this instance by a fit and pox-scarred boy in his late teens. He gave her a curious look.

“Sadie invited me.” She waited for him to say, “Go back to wherever you came from,” or “I don’t know who that is, Officer.”

“Welcome to my shitty warehouse,” he said.

“Yours?”

“Yep. Hey, don’t look so surprised. Brown people can own warehouses.”

“Sorry! It’s because you look so young, not because you’re brown…” She started to explain, but he’d already moved on to the next person waiting to enter. Her record for insulting gatekeepers she should befriend was now two for two.

She walked through the next door, and the office gave way to a warehouse. The space had been divided at some point; it was nowhere near as large as the building’s footprint, though still bigger than anyplace she’d ever been other than the SHL hangar. She made out two orange Exit signs along the opposite wall from where she’d entered; nice to know there were other ways out. There were probably fewer people inside than had crowded into the 2020, dispersed over a larger area. She still felt more comfortable on the fringe and didn’t see a strong reason to press forward toward the low stage on the interior wall.

It reminded her of the hoodspace club where she’d seen Patent Medicine, the Bloom Bar. There was even a bar along the side, or at least an old conveyor belt studded with a dozen picnic coolers. People shoved their hands into the ice for drinks, then tossed cash into fishbowls interspersed between the coolers. An honor system. She glanced at the bills in the fishbowls and tossed a five into the nearest one, choosing an icy cider from among the beers and soft drinks.

She spotted Sadie at the same time Sadie spotted her. “You came! Do you hug?”

Rosemary nodded, still pushing her own limits. Sadie was a big woman, even bigger without the coffee counter in between them. The hug was strong and solid, and not long enough for her to get uncomfortable with the contact. She managed to return a one-armed squeeze with the hand that wasn’t holding a drink.

“Did you have trouble finding it?”

“You were right about the color.”

“Ha!” Sadie had great dimples, but Rosemary was Not Getting Involved. “True, but that doesn’t make it any easier to find.”

“Your directions were fine, thanks. Um, what’s the order?”

“We play first, then a duo from Charlotte, then the Simrats. You’ll like them.”

“Oh! I’ve listened to one of their songs! I can’t wait to hear you all,” Rosemary said in all sincerity. She was curious what to expect. She’d found the Simrats on the same underground site where Joni’s band had a page; they had a trippy sound, with better production than a lot of the other stuff she’d heard. They’d been on her maybe list, depending on how they came across live, if she could find them playing somewhere, which she finally had.

She had another thought. “Do bands from other cities play here often?”

“Not very. Lucien used to live here before he moved to Charlotte for love”—she elongated the last word, bringing her hands up under her chin in a mock swoon—“so when he wants to visit we build a show for him.”

Sadie excused herself to get ready, and Rosemary was alone again. All around her, people chatted with each other. She still envied the ease with which they navigated the space. Did anybody else here feel as awkward as she did? She scanned the room’s edges, looking for someone else hugging the wall, and was surprised to find several. One corner held an entire herd of office chairs gone feral. Three people raced chairs down the far side of the room, leaning over the seatbacks like jockeys, with their friends cheering them on.

Sadie’s band started playing. The chair racers kept racing, and a few others continued chatting near the drinks. Rosemary triangulated between the stage and the emergency exits.

She hadn’t asked Sadie her band’s name or their genre, and now that she heard it she had no category for it. Sadie played bass, and Nolan James played fiddle, with a guy she’d never seen before on guitar, and a woman she recognized as one of the coffee shop Hoodie-workers on drums. Despite the acoustic instruments, they had a looping, funky groove, and harmonies that reminded her more of R & B than rock or pop or folk. An intriguing sound, and they had a good interplay onstage, and most of the audience was up and dancing. Even though she had told herself to stay analytical, to hold herself back from feeling anything for these bands, she couldn’t help moving with the music. Forget analytics; they were fun.

The second group turned out to be a married couple, two handsome trans cowboys from Charlotte. Both guys played acoustic guitar, and their songs were catchy and clever. She filed them into her mental maybe box. She sometimes thought she was too easy to please, but she recognized the difference between liking a band and thinking they were SHL material. Two different things, especially when a definite yes came along to recalibrate her.

The last band took a little longer to set up than the others had. The guy who owned the place stood watching from the doorway, so Rosemary walked over to talk. If she was going to practice chatting with strangers, it made sense to start with the ones she had questions for. “So, uh, I didn’t mean to doubt this was your place. I just didn’t figure the owner was involved. I thought maybe an employee was letting people in, or it was an abandoned building.”

He smiled back. “It’s not abandoned. My mom has a bunch of empties, though this is the only one with power. She’s been trying to get Superwally to buy it for a distribution center, but they say it isn’t quite large enough, and it costs too much to bring up to code. It’s been years now. She said I could skate in here in the meantime, so here I am, ‘skating.’ You’re friends with Sadie?”

“Yeah.” Better not to say new friends. “Rosemary. Nice to meet you. Do you do this a lot?”

“Tomás. Twice a month.”

“Are there other places doing this, too?”

“Acoustic rooms, yeah, people’s living rooms, but as far as I know, this is the only one big enough for bands. I’ve got the space, why not use it?”

“You’re not worried about getting raided?”

“Dude, I’m terrified of getting raided, but if we all live the way they want us to, all scared and alone, nobody would ever hear a band like the Simrats.” He nodded toward the stage and grinned at his timing.

“Friends, Romans, Countrymice,” whispered the lead singer. “Lend me your ears.”

The lights went out at the moment they hit their first chord. The band’s clothing glowed under black light. Their instruments, too, painted to shine, and streaks on their faces. It reminded Rosemary of phosphorescent underwater habitats in aquarium vids. The band had at least ten members; it was hard to tell exactly how many in the mass of glowing limbs and instruments. Drums, two guitars, samples, a horn section. Their sound filled every corner of the room. The singer had a voice as good as any Rosemary had ever heard, slippery and strong, twining around and over the instruments without ever getting lost behind them.

On a hunch, she pulled up her Hoodie. Sure enough, a free local Veneer was available. She accepted it, and the space went even wilder. Now strange glowing cloud-animals drifted through the air above her head, dipping and diving, chasing each other. She dropped out of hoodspace again; she didn’t need the distraction from their sound.

This couldn’t be the same band she’d listened to on the drive. The fantastic live sound was nothing like the recording, which had been interesting at best. They deserved a larger audience than the group dancing in this room. She debated filming a clip, but didn’t want to risk it if she hadn’t managed to turn off the metadata the way she thought she had. Her description would have to do, packed with as many superlatives as she could provide.

Their third song sounded familiar. It took her a minute to recognize Luce Cannon’s “Blood and Diamonds” filled out and swung, the horn section adding something she wouldn’t even have guessed could be added. She forgot her professional reserve and screamed the words along with the others in the room: part of the song, part of the band, part of the moment. Part of other moments, too: the first time she heard “Blood and Diamonds,” in her mother’s car on the way to get ice cream a month before everything went bad; “Blood and Diamonds” playing hourly on the nurses’ station radio in the hospital, telling her she was stronger than she knew, strong enough to walk out someday soon. It didn’t matter that this wasn’t Luce’s original; this was a new version for the new Rosemary. She had room in her life for both.

Maybe this was why people risked arrest to come out to these shows. You could do the same thing at an SHL show, and if you’d never been in this room you might not even know the difference, but there was a difference.

Walking back toward her rented room after the show, she tried to analyze her exhilaration. She’d arrived here down on her job, but she could still take some selfish joy in the perks, when the perks involved spending her nights listening to amazing bands. Beyond how much she’d loved the music, she genuinely liked the idea of creating opportunities for musicians who had worked hard despite there being no end goal; they couldn’t be playing music in hopes of someone like her walking in the door. It wasn’t a money thing, either. They had to be playing because they loved to play, or believed in their songs, or something like that, which meant she got to ride in and change their world—not that they had any obligation to say yes when she offered it. This time, she’d find a way to do it right. She couldn’t fix what she’d done to Luce, but surely there was a way to get these bands attention without ruining what they had; there had to be a solution somewhere, if she could just think of it.

Someone called, “Hey!” from the darkness ahead, where a streetlight had shattered, the glass strewn on the asphalt below it. She looked up, assuming the voice was Sadie’s. In the moment she registered it was a stranger, someone else hit her from behind.

It wasn’t a hard shove, but she wasn’t expecting it, and it knocked her off her feet. She put her hands out to catch herself, jamming her left pinkie hard against the cement, a white flash of pain. She scrambled to stand, clutching her hand, but someone pushed on her head, so she sat.

“Stay down.” She couldn’t see the second guy’s face. He had his right hand in the pocket of an ancient jacket, denim with white leather sleeves, unless they were yellow. Hard to tell in the dark beneath the shattered streetlight. He had a logo over his heart, a jumble of letters she didn’t recognize. Her brain started untangling them because it didn’t want to think about the gun that he did or did not have.

“Cash, Hoodie, phone,” he said, as if placing an order.

“I don’t want any trouble,” she said, like someone out of her parents’ movies.

She dug in her pocket for the bills she’d wadded there in case she needed to pay to get into the show, and handed the money to him. He accepted with his left hand, the right still in his pocket. His hand was white, with short, dirty nails. She disentangled her Hoodie and passed that over as well. “I left my phone at home. I’m sorry.”

I’m sorry. Who said “I’m sorry” to a mugger? She sounded ridiculous to her own ears, and fought down the urge to apologize for the apology.

For a moment she worried he didn’t believe her, but then he shoved her to the pavement again and took off running in the direction she’d been heading. She sat watching until he was out of sight, then a little while longer. She had no idea how long. She didn’t see any sign of the first guy, either, the one who’d said “Hey.”

What were you supposed to do after a robbery? Nobody else was around, which meant nobody else had chosen this route. She hadn’t bothered to check the crime maps for this particular jaunt, after all her wanderings. She’d gotten cocky, or careless, or overconfident. Lucky, too, she supposed. He hadn’t shot her, or even taken her keys or wallet. No, he couldn’t have taken the wallet; she’d left it in the apartment. He’d only asked for the stuff he could wipe clean and use, or wipe clean and sell. Her Hoodie would reset if someone else put it on, so she didn’t have to worry he’d track her. Best possible mugging.

She didn’t want to walk down the same street they’d taken anymore, even if it led back to her room, so she took the next right, then a left to parallel the road she’d been walking. She wished she’d brought a jacket; her teeth were chattering for some reason.

Temporary noncomm. For this minute, putting one foot after the other, heading more or less in the correct direction to get herself back to her room, she was alone in the world. No way to call anybody. No way to check the safety maps if she wanted to, now, or summon a ride, or call the police. Joni’s way made more sense, carrying an emergency phone, but if she’d had an emergency phone they would have taken that, too.

A brightly lit diner sat at the next intersection, ten or twelve people inside despite the late hour. She swung the door open, searched faces for her mugger, or at least his jacket, and when she didn’t spot him, slid into the nearest open isolation booth and locked the door.

The menu was embedded into the tabletop. She expected offerings like Heatwave’s, but it was basically the same as a Micky’s. She ordered a grilled cheese sandwich, tomato soup, and hot chocolate, then pressed the panic button.

The response came quickly. “Do you have an emergency, Table Four?”

Was it an emergency? “I think I was robbed. I mean, I was robbed.”

“In your booth?”

“No. Sorry.” Apologies again. “On the next block over, before I came in. They took my Hoodie.”

“And your first thought was to order soup and a sandwich?”

It had seemed like a good idea. She didn’t speak.

The voice disappeared, then returned a moment later. “I’ve called the police for you. They’ll be here in five minutes. Is there anything you need, um, other than soup, sandwich, hot chocolate?”

“Nothing I can think of, thank you.”

She hugged herself for warmth and studied the menu. It felt strange not to have a phone or Hoodie to pass the time. How did noncomm people do it? Joni had carried a book. Maybe she should start carrying a book.

The hot chocolate arrived with so much whipped cream that the top sheared off in the pass-through. The server lingered longer than necessary. Gawking, probably, at the woman stupid enough to get mugged because she’d stopped paying attention to her surroundings.

The police officer arrived at the same time as the food—“Officer Selsor” and “They” read their badge and a pronoun pin—prompting an awkward moment as they squeezed into the booth opposite her, then turned and took the food from the staring server, putting it on the table in front of her. The officer was middle height, middle weight, acorn brown, with a shaved head and kind eyes of the exact same shade as their skin.

“You reported a robbery?” The officer wore a Hoodie but didn’t raise it, instead placing an old-fashioned tablet on the table to take notes. Less intimidating, she guessed. They had a smooth Southern accent.

“Yes.”

“Did they do that to you?” The officer pointed at her left hand.

Her pinkie looked like a swollen sausage, the skin tight and angry. Now that they mentioned it, pain came rushing in. She nodded.

The officer rapped on the wall of the booth. “Can you grab a bag of ice and a towel?”

The server, who’d lingered by the table, disappeared in the direction of the kitchen, and returned a moment later. Rosemary accepted the ice and towel through the pass, and held it against her finger.

Officer Selsor started with the basics. Rosemary gave her local address, hoping to avoid questions about why she’d come to town.

“Okay, now, can you tell me what happened?”

She recounted the moment. The details felt useless now—a young white guy she’d barely seen, an attacker she could only describe by his clothing and his left hand.

“What about when he ran away? Did you get a sense of his height? His hair?”

She shook her head. “Baseball cap, red maybe. Short hair, I guess, since I didn’t see it? The jacket was bulky so I don’t know his build. Hard to tell how tall he was because he was standing over me. Five-eight, maybe?”

“And the other guy? Any other details?”

“I barely glimpsed him. I don’t even know if he was trying to help me or working with the second guy.”

“Working with,” said Officer Selsor. “We’ve heard similar from a few people over the last couple weeks. What were you doing out this late? It’s close to curfew.”

“Close to curfew isn’t past curfew. I had the right to be out.”

“Of course. I was just curious what you were doing on that street.”

Rosemary had no reason to withhold any information from the officer, but the question reminded her of her last encounter with the police, when they’d chased everyone out of the 2020. “I was walking. I like to walk at night.”

Officer Selsor opened their mouth, closed it, paused like they were trying to decide what to ask next. “Can I take you to the hospital for your finger?”

“No, thank you. I’ll ice it.” Change of subject worked for her.

“Look, maybe it’s only jammed, or maybe it’s broken. That’s way easier to fix earlier than later.” They lifted their left hand. The middle finger bent back at a bizarre angle before joining the other fingers again, taking the long way when the rest had gone direct.

“No hospital. It’s not that bad. I can go to a clinic tomorrow if it’s still swollen.”

They shrugged. “Your choice. Can I give you a ride back to your apartment?”

Rosemary considered the blocks between the diner and her room. “Thanks, yeah. And, um, I forgot my cash had been stolen when I ordered this food. What should I do?”

“I’ll talk to the manager. I’m sure they’d be fine if you sent them money when you got home.”

The officer left the booth, and returned a minute later with a takeaway box. “It’s on the house. Manager said come back sometime and buy a sandwich under better circumstances.”

The handful of people still in the diner all watched Rosemary go. She followed Officer Selsor out to their patrol car, where they opened the back door. “Sorry, protocol. I can’t have you in the front seat.”

She didn’t really care. She watched out her window, examining the shadows for people.

Her street was dark and quiet. She groped for the door handle and realized there were none; she was in the seat where suspects rode. She waited for Officer Selsor to let her out.

“You’re okay? Do you need to call anyone to stay with you?”

“No, Officer. Thank you for your help.”

The muggers hadn’t taken her keys. Really, they’d caused her as few problems as a mugger could. She didn’t have to apply for a new ID or deal with reaching her landlord to say the keys were gone. She didn’t have to worry that they’d followed her home or knew where she lived.

She poured herself a glass of water, drank it, filled another, then flopped onto the bed. Her energy drained away, leaving only her throbbing finger. She reached for her phone to report her stolen Hoodie to SHL, then realized that if Management looked at its location, it would say she’d been in her room all night. Crap.

All she wanted was to sleep. Instead, she rummaged in her bag for a pen and paper and wrote out the phone numbers for SHL Emergency, Logistics, and Management from her phone. Checked the time: 12:40 a.m. Twenty minutes until Asheville’s curfew, an hour later than Baltimore’s. She filled a pot with water, grabbed a tissue, and headed back downstairs one more time. Looked both ways, but the street was deserted. She probably made a strange picture, wandering the street with a pot of water and a finger like a sausage. Somebody could do her a favor and steal the phone now, too, but nobody came along. She was oddly calm. Impervious.

She walked three blocks, to a restaurant where she’d had tacos two days before, and ducked around the back to the dumpster. She removed the data chip first and put it in the pot, then took it out and snapped it in two. She used the tissue to wipe her own fingerprints off her own phone.

The screen spiderwebbed as it hit the ground. Her heel did more significant damage, grinding it into the pavement, which was strangely satisfying. When she picked it up with the tissue and tossed the pieces in the dumpster, she knew she had finished it off.

Now she was noncomm for real, at least for the night. She made it back to her room a minute before curfew. Iced her finger, took two anti-inflammatories, and passed out.

31 ROSEMARY ^{Career Suicide}

The usual combination of violin and sunlight woke Rosemary. She pulled the pillow over her head, a movement that brought the events of the previous night back to her with finger-screaming clarity. She raised her hand to her face: still swollen, but maybe a little less? Maybe.

She iced it while she rummaged through the kitchen drawers, eventually finding a roll of masking tape, which had enough adhesive left for her to bind the pinkie to its neighbor. Good enough.

She was waiting at the coffee shop door when it opened.

“Thanks for coming last night! You look like hell,” Sadie said. “And you’re not usually here this early. What’s up?”

Rosemary told her about the mugging. “Can I use your phone to call my work and my parents so they don’t worry?”

“Of course. God, I feel awful that happened on your way back from my show. I shouldn’t have let you leave alone.”

“Did you leave alone?”

“Yeah.”

“See, it could’ve happened to you, too. Freak thing.” She’d walked down the wrong street at the wrong moment. For all her worry about strangers with guns and strangers with germs, she’d never even noticed how other people also added safety to a situation. Sure, it wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t left Jory, but she couldn’t imagine not having left anymore.

She called home and told her mother she’d smashed her phone (true!), and could she drone one to French Broads Coffee, Rosemary would send her the money when she got back to her room, and yes, she was fine and she’d talk for longer as soon as she had a phone again, sorry for the long silence. Management got a different story: She’d been heading out to a late show when she’d been mugged. She’d given a police report. She’d hurt a finger, but it was okay, and yes, she’d go to a clinic if she needed. They wanted to send an incident report immediately, but she pointed out she had no device with her. They promised to send a new Hoodie right away.

It was the first time she’d ever been anywhere without both her devices, and now she had neither, at least for an hour or so. She ordered a latte and watched the others trickle into the café. She felt alert, present, disconnected, tired; an odd jumble. Not bored, though. Her mind was unknotting the problem she’d been thinking about since Baltimore, adding to it the muggers, the quick “Hey,” the distraction before she’d been hit, the GPS tracking.

Her packages arrived in one delivery from Superwally an hour later. Our goals are speed and efficiency. She busied herself recovering info from hoodspace and setting up both devices with her preferred settings, then sent a quick thank-you to her mother and a quick “back in business” to Management.

Most people working at French Broads kept their Hoodies in some percentage of clearview, to still be aware of their surroundings. She felt safe enough to go full for a few minutes. She paged through the StageHoloLive archives looking for the Patent Medicine concert she’d attended all those months ago.

The recorded version started her off front and center, a perfect viewing location, but not the one she remembered. This time, she spawned after the band; she was the illusion here, not them. The same start to “The Crash”: three voices and two huge guitars, holding a note for ten seconds before the drums rolled in. It still hit her like a wave, but when she looked to the side to see if the others in the room had felt it, she found herself in a sea of bots. They bobbed their heads in time to the music, but none of them turned to exchange glances with her.

The song ended, and Aran Randall’s ghost said, “Good to see you all. Good to be here.”

They had edited out “at the Bloom Bar.” She knew now that he must have recorded the names of a whole list of SHL venues. His hair fell in his eyes again, and he brushed it aside again. “We’re going to go ahead and play some songs for you, yeah?”

The gorgeous bassist opened her eyes again, but this time Rosemary wasn’t in the wink’s path. It had never been meant for her. The second song’s bass groove began, and Rosemary exited the concert.

She pulled up her own recording of Luce’s band, that special night at the 2020. Flat video, not the immersion of the Patent Medicine show, but even seeing it brought her the physical memory of being there. The electricity, the immediacy, the thrill, the heat of the room. It was all there for her recollection.

She searched another band, another song. The Iris Branches Band, “Come See Me for Real.” Audio only, the way she’d heard it in the diner bathroom. She didn’t care what Iris Branches looked like. She flipped back to clearview and closed her eyes. The song used to remind her of high school, but now it sounded like the bathroom at Heatwave, like her heart beating faster, like Joni’s lips pressed to her own.

She almost had a plan. When she closed her eyes, she could see the result she wanted, the way she used to envision perfect code before looking at the flawed version. She’d repaid Luce’s kindness by killing her venue, and Joni had said she couldn’t undo what she’d done in Baltimore, but maybe she knew a way to make a difference. This time, she’d tell Sadie, because it wasn’t a plan she could implement on her own, and it wasn’t a thing she wanted to do without permission. Plus, she needed bait.

Rosemary met with Management a week later. A busy week, giving her a new respect for logistics. Event planning turned out to be hard work.

This Management rep had chosen a different background. No breezy meadow here, and no replica of an office to intimidate her and make her small. They were both seated at a small table in a bare but cozy room, in identical chairs, a pleasant blue sky visible out a large window. She guessed she’d passed the point where they thought they needed to scare her into submission; this was meant to convey a meeting of colleagues.

Generic Management—Female (2 of 5) was built on the same lines as Generic Management—Male (1 of 5). Slim, generic white person features, chestnut hair with a deliberate touch of gray, expensive-looking haircut and clothes. Rosemary wondered if the other three avatars were white as well. Most of her coworkers she’d met on campus were nonwhite, but every avatar she’d met in Management was white and thin and able-bodied. Superwally had played with age but otherwise left people as they were, as far as she knew. She tucked that information away for further pondering.

“Hi, Rosemary. How’s it been going in”—she paused—“Asheville? Good weather?”

She’d graduated to collegial chitchat as well. “Yeah, the weather’s been lovely. It’s a nice little city. Full of music.”

“Good, good.”

“Have you ever been to this area?”

“Um, no.”

Rosemary wanted to follow up, to ask if this Management person had ever been a recruiter, what scenes she’d destroyed to get promoted, but that would mar the illusion of model employee she was trying to project. “You should check it out sometime. It’s beautiful. There are real waterfalls and stuff in the area, too, but I’ve been too busy with work to see them.”

“Sounds nice. Whatcha got for us?”

She imagined the faceless manager sitting somewhere in a childhood bedroom turned workplace, points flashing across her vision for a perfect pivot from pleasure to business.

“Two acts.” She used their word back at them. “I’ve seen a ton of musicians here, but I think these two groups are SHL material. The first is called Way Way Down. R & B grooves on folk instruments. Catchy stuff.” She wasn’t sure they’d be pretty enough, but she was willing to stand behind their sound.

“Sounds interesting. Got video?”

“Sure. This is from a practice, since I got nervous taking my new Hoodie to a show after…” She let her voice trail off.

Generic Management gave a good simulation of a sympathetic smile. “Yeah, we heard what happened. Glad you’re okay.”

“Thanks. The other is called the Simrats. You’re going to love them. I’ll send along a vid someone else recorded at their last show. Twelve-piece band, sound as big as any room you want to fill. The singer’s voice is amazing, and they do this glo-paint thing that will translate well. People will line up to see them.” She was proud of having figured out how to alter the metadata on the video the band had given her, but that was another in a long list of tech victories nobody but her would ever celebrate. Maybe she should design a hoodbot to follow her around complimenting her code-tweaking.

“Wow—a twelve-piece. I don’t think anyone’s brought in a rock band that big in ages.”

“But it’s okay?”

“Sure, in the right circumstances. Expensive, but worth it if they’re as good as you say they are.”

“They are.”

“Nice job, Rosemary. You have contact info? No noncomm bullshit?”

Rosemary didn’t let her avatar wince. She passed their contact info along. “They’re all reachable. They’re doing a big show together a week from Saturday, too, if you want to send someone to watch.”

“No need. I’m sure your report and the videos will be enough,” Management repeated. “Hey, you haven’t heard from Luce Cannon, have you?”

“Sorry, no.”

“Too bad. The one that got away. Anyway, you can contact Logistics to get out of there anytime you want, now.”

“Is it okay if I stay a few days? To see those waterfalls I mentioned? My room is paid through the end of the month.”

Management shrugged her too-perfect shoulders. “I don’t see why not.”

Management thanked her again, said she looked forward to checking out the videos, signed off. The space resolved to blank. Rosemary switched to clearview and looked over at the coffee counter.

Sadie leaned on her forearms, watching her. “How did it go?”

“Good, I think. If they like you, they’ll contact you within the next few days.”

“And I don’t have to say yes?”

“Nah. They’ll offer you an audition or a contract, and either way, you don’t have to say yes. Thank you for helping, either way.”

“My pleasure. Gumming the works while negotiating with the Man. I’m into it.”

Rosemary grinned. She’d been terrified to explain her plan, nervous Sadie would share Joni’s or Luce’s reaction, though their reactions might have been different if Rosemary had been this honest with them. Maybe.

She’d tried to keep some distance, but it was hard not to consider Sadie a friend. The planning had made them closer, though she no longer had the impression Sadie was hitting on her, either because she now knew who Rosemary was or because she’d be leaving town soon. They’d settled into the roles of friendly coconspirators. “How are the invitations coming?”

“Rad,” said Sadie. “The warehouse concert of the year and group action. Spread the word.”

32 LUCE ^{Fix My Life}

Silva booked our first shows as a band, calling around to old friends until we had gigs lined up in Atlanta, Athens, and Dahlonega. He called it the Georgia, I Must Be Out of My Mind tour.

“Don’t expect much,” he said, hoisting his amp into the back of the van beside mine as we packed to leave.

Marcia joined us, staggering slightly under the weight of her drum hardware bag. They looked nothing alike, but I felt a strange déjà vu thinking of April and the massive duffel she always insisted on carrying for herself.

She gave me an expectant look. “A little help here?”

“Sorry!” I grabbed one handle and helped her lift it.

“Just saying,” said Silva, lending a third set of hands. “Keep your expectations low. These places aren’t what you’re used to.”

“I’m not used to what I’m used to anymore, either. You were there when I rocked out at an antique store. They said to keep the volume down so I didn’t rattle anything off the shelves.”

“I played backline for live karaoke behind chicken wire at a country-western bar.” Marcia put a hand around my waist.

Silva grinned, getting into the game. “I played an airport baggage claim. I don’t know why they thought people might want to listen to live music while they waited for their bags.”

They’d shifted into Before, so I did, too. “Busking in Manhattan. August. Garbage day.”

“Oooh, you win.” Marcia pinched her nose. “C’mon. There’s more gear and I’m not carrying it all.”

I watched the two of them head back toward the cottage, memorizing the moment because I didn’t know how long it would last. It felt good to inhabit that space again. My favorite space, with its shorthand of shared experience. I picked up my pace so nobody would accuse me of not pulling my weight.

In the old days, on a highway, the trip to Atlanta would’ve taken a little more than four hours, but it took us nearly seven on the back roads, between the speed limits, the meandering roads, and the overzealous cops.

“Don’t you need to have a reason to stop us?” I asked in frustration the third time we were pulled over. The first one had claimed he thought we weren’t wearing seat belts; the second said I’d been weaving, but declined to test me; the third said she’d had a call about a suspicious van.

The fourth one didn’t even pretend. “A van with Maryland plates this far from home is reason enough,” he said before asking for my license and registration. When everything checked out, he followed us through town, stopping only when we passed under their second license plate reader. I’d wanted to grab lunch, but he made it clear we weren’t stopping in his town. We ate premade sandwiches from a gas station automat a few miles down the road instead.

“Can we skip the towns entirely?” Marcia asked, as yet another trooper deigned to follow.

I concentrated on maintaining the speed limit and the straightest line possible.

“Not if we want to get there in time for the show,” Silva said. “But this is definitely getting old. Was it like this up north, too, Luce?”

“Not this bad. Dammit.” Lights behind me again. I sighed and pulled over. Again.

The Atlanta show took place in the windowless back room of a luthier’s workshop in Little Five Points. Walking past the workbench, the neat tubs of hardware, the cubbies full of guitars with labels saying where they’d been sent from and where they went back to, I couldn’t help salivating. It had been over a decade since I’d seen a guitar store; the guitars I’d bought and sold since coming off the road I’d bought from and sold to friends. This wasn’t a guitar store, but it was akin, and the owner clearly had her own custom projects going as well as the repairs. My own guitars could probably use some of the luthier’s TLC, but that involved being in one place long enough to come back for them, or having an address to send them back to. Someday, maybe.

We were slotted with two local bands, one of which had a drummer Silva had played with once upon a time. They were kind enough to offer us the middle spot, so that their fans didn’t get the idea to show up late or leave early and skip the band they didn’t know. We soundchecked, then ordered pizza together from three different pizza places, so that anyone monitoring deliveries wouldn’t think we were ordering for a crowd. It was good to get a chance to chat with other bands, even if neither was considering touring. They were happy playing this place and one or two others on a semiregular basis, the way I’d been happy at the 2020. Controlled danger; nothing like the vagaries I’d experienced since leaving home.

I watched the audience enter with the curiosity of someone who had developed her own security without consultation or any knowledge of best practices. Mine had been named Alice. If it hadn’t been for her amazing facial recognition and deep suspicion of humanity, I knew my place would have been raided long before Rosemary’s arrival. This place seemed far more regulated, and as I watched people enter, I tried to figure out the system. It seemed to involve key fobs, a scanner, and a question. I finally gave up and asked about the last part.

The luthier’s wife grinned. “On any days without a show, the landing page on our website is one of Mary’s custom guitars. On show days, she throws a picture of an old Bacon mandolin up in the morning, then at noon, some vintage piece or another. It’s a splash page with alternate text saying the make and year—doesn’t say that we have one. They have to come in and ask about that particular vintage instrument. Once we get to recognize somebody, they can buy a key chain that gets them in without having to jump through hoops.”

“What’s today’s vintage?”

“A 1959 Gibson Explorer.”

My jaw dropped. “You have one of those? Aren’t they worth like half a million dollars?”

“Of course we don’t! She repaired one once and snapped a picture. But anyone actually looking for one would call to ask, not show up in person, since we’re mostly a repair shop, not a store. It’s not listed on our sale page, and we mostly sell Mary’s work, not vintage.”

The system seemed complicated to me, but they still had a venue and I didn’t, so I wasn’t in a place to critique. I had one other question. “How do new people find out you’re here?”

“They don’t.” She shrugged, then reconsidered. “I mean, if a band is playing here and has somebody new to invite, they can vouch and we’ll start the vetting process, but we try to keep it pretty limited. No sense risking everything.”

Alice had wanted me to be that careful; she hated when I brought in strays. I’d argued that communities needed new blood or they stagnated, and that there was no point having the place if we couldn’t serve as an escape for people who needed it, no matter whether they knew us or not. Better safe than sorry, she’d said, and of course, she’d been right. I’d been too trusting.

The back room would’ve fit about thirty people in addition to the three bands and owners, and twelve showed up. Twenty minutes after the show was supposed to start, despite the low turnout, they locked the front door and turned out the shop lights. The venue space had a nicer smell than the 2020: wood and oil with a faint undertone of solder. The audience settled themselves into three small risers’ worth of thrift store couches and lounge chairs. A ceiling fan creaked overhead, stirring the air.

I leaned against the back wall and watched the first band. They were young, not much more than teenaged, and it would’ve cheered me somewhat to think that they’d found a way in here if one of them hadn’t called Silva’s drummer friend “Dad” over pizza. Still, they were decent performers, even if their songwriting was trite. They were here, and trying, and that was all I ever asked of anybody, and the idea of parents who encouraged their kids to break the law for music gave me hope for the future. I listened to their first two songs before slipping into the tiny green room.

The last band had vacated—to watch their kids play, I guessed—and I’d seen Silva sitting in the front row with his buddy. Marcia was alone in the band room, Hoodie up, drumming air. I couldn’t recognize the song from her pattern. I kissed her and she leaped a foot off the couch.

“Anybody could sneak up on you in that thing,” I said as she took it off. “I don’t get how people use them in public.”

“That’s because you’re old.” She looked miffed, but not overly so.

“You’re two years older than me.”

“Wouldn’t know it. You’re a dinosaur.”

“I’m not! I just don’t see the point of those things.”

“It’s awesome tech, Luce. I still think you should try it sometime. Here, put mine on for a sec. The women’s national team is a goal up on Canada.”

She held the Hoodie out, but I clasped her hand to my chest and then gently pushed it back in her direction. “I don’t want to watch people fake soccer for cameras. You have fun, though, if that’s what gets you ready to play.”

“They’re not faking just because they’re playing for cameras, any more than you’re faking if you play to an empty room. Anyway, I don’t like to hear the band that plays before me, so I don’t have to know if they’ve laid down something too amazing to follow.”

I grabbed my guitar from its case and sat down opposite her on the couch to tune. “Huh. I’d rather know, so I can up my game if I need to. Not that it’s a competition.”

“Girl, everything’s a competition.”

She settled back into her game, and I noodled on my guitar while I listened to the band. They finished to familial-level enthusiasm. I nudged Marcia that it was time.

“We have a treat tonight,” Mary the luthier said as we stepped into the stage area, such as it was. “They’re called Cassis Fire, and they’re from out of town.”

Not a superlative introduction. I guessed from it that Silva hadn’t sent music; his friend’s introduction had probably been enough to get us in the door. It didn’t bother me. I’d always loved winning over the audience.

I hadn’t given a ton of weight to the fact that this was our first show together, but as I jacked my guitar and hit a test chord, it struck me. We’d spent the last few weeks practicing in a circle for each other, and now we got to turn outward again. To see if the cues that worked at home carried to this context, too. The songs were still fresh to Silva and Marcia, and the arrangements made them feel fresh to me as well, even the ones I’d played before. A small thrill hit me, stage fright of the sort that could be tamed and harnessed and turned into energy. Even if we were still rough around the edges, we’d conjure something. A new band, a new tour, a dozen new people to win over. My favorite challenge; the one I would break any law to experience again.

“Hey,” I said, stepping to the mic.

The next chord was for real.

33 ROSEMARY ^{Pressure Drop}

Rosemary waited for the concert with a combination of excitement and trepidation. Only her career on the line, no big deal. She checked in with Sadie and the Simrats constantly, and was relieved when they both got their calls. The Simrats were signed on the spot—she even got a bonus added to her paycheck. Sadie’s band was asked to audition, which they were still debating. The clock had started ticking.

“My nerves have nerves today,” Sadie said in the cab they shared to the warehouse. “I’m usually anxious before a show, but my butterflies are wearing butterfly hats.”

Rosemary felt the same way. “Mine, too, and I’m not even playing. I guess this is what it’s like to put on a show? Worried everyone won’t be in the right place at the right time, or that nobody will come at all.”

“Sounds about right.” When Sadie grabbed her hand, Rosemary squeezed back. A solidarity squeeze.

The cab arrived at the warehouse, low and gray, like a thunderstorm. Sadie grabbed her bass and let Rosemary carry the box she called her bass head. Someday, Rosemary needed to learn all the terms.

“It’s weird to ride a cab to the front door of a show without worrying about leading cops here,” Sadie said. “One time only, right?”

“One time only,” Rosemary repeated, hoping she hadn’t screwed everything up for everybody again.

They walked in through the front door, with Sadie muttering under her breath, “That’s a weird feeling, too.”

The scent of decaying rubber hit them as they entered. The foyer was two stories tall, with light streaming in through a skylight, and dominated by a pink and blue pile taking up most of the floor with its deflated footprint. She spotted turrets: a giant inflatable castle. They tracked around it instead of through; behind it, the ceilings dropped back to a normal height.

“What the hell did they make here?” Sadie asked.

“Tomás said they sold something called ‘party rentals.’” Rosemary had spent a fair bit of time with the kid who put the shows on over the last week.

“That explains it, I guess.” Sadie pointed to a glassed-in showroom with three enormous tables, each employing a different decorating scheme. One was red and gold, one silver and glass, and the third one a beachscape, littered with seashells and sand. Up close, thick dust covered everything. “Can we help you choose a theme for your party?”

Rosemary scratched her head. “What’ve you got in ‘rock concert’?”

“Allow me to show you! Walk this way.”

They passed a few more showrooms before they got to a door marked Employees. When Rosemary pushed it open, they found themselves in blackness with a bright spot at the far end—an open door.

“Welcome! Step into the light!” Tomás shouted from that direction. They traipsed across the empty space, using their phones as flashlights.

“You found it okay?” he asked when they got closer.

“No problem,” Sadie said. “How’s setup going?”

He gestured toward two people moving among piled cables and speakers and lights and stands. A thick line ran out the open door. “Fine. We scrounged some crap PA equipment for the occasion, in case we lose it. We’ve got everything else we need. Extra generators, water to flush the toilets.”

“Yay.” Rosemary tried to hide her own nerves in front of people other than Sadie. If she were in his shoes, she’d want to know that she was confident this would work. Besides, he was smart; no sense risking more than needed to be risked.

She’d wanted to be early, but watching everything come together so slowly made her even more nervous. She pulled out her phone and checked her bus ticket.

“I can’t believe you’re leaving tomorrow.” Sadie peered over her shoulder, bass in hand.

“My work here is done.”

“Almost done. You haven’t done the part where you leave destruction in your wake yet.”

Rosemary’s stomach turned, but she forced a smile. “Oh, yeah, I forgot.”

By seven, they’d completed setup. Both bands had soundchecked. They sounded weak and flat; hopefully that was the emptiness of the space, not the sound equipment. If the plan doesn’t work, they’ll still get a show, Rosemary told herself, even if a crappy one. Bands will play and then go home.

And live with the undetonated threat she’d brought hanging over their heads every night, waiting for it to go off. It had to be tonight. She’d altered the metadata on the Simrats video she’d handed over so that it showed these GPS coordinates. She’d made sure to mention this show. That would be enough. She waited.

One of Tomás’s friends arrived with coolers. Soda and water only, so if they got busted it wouldn’t be for serving alcohol.

“What if nobody comes?” she asked at seven thirty.

“Relax,” Tomás said. “We told people eight so they’d be here by nine. They’ll come. If not for the music, then for the bouncy castle.”

“You inflated that thing?” Rosemary pictured people trying to escape a crush and running straight into a giant blue and pink roadblock.

He laughed. “That castle probably has more holes than the Titanic. Or did the Titanic only have one big hole? In either case, I didn’t. Yet.”

She was beginning to think nobody took this as seriously as she did. It was an abstraction to them, even if it would affect them and leave her unscathed. She hoped the joking was his way of hiding nervousness. Nervous was better.

At eight fifteen, people started trickling in, and she mentally crossed “no audience” off her worry list. She moved on to the next item, walking the perimeter to make sure all the doors had been unlocked. They’d told the audience members—friends of the bands, all—to come in through the staff door on the south side, and told them where to find all twelve emergency doors. When she came back from her tour, the space had filled. Fifty or so people milled in front of the stage, and a few more hung in the corners in the dark, if the glowing screens were any judge. A good number: enough to suggest this was a legit show, but few enough to make it safely out the doors as necessary. The whole audience knew what might happen and had chosen to take the risk.

By nine, about sixty people had arrived. Rosemary settled against a back wall, out of the light. As she’d hoped, Sadie’s band, Way Way Down, sounded way, way better than they had in soundcheck. The audience soaked up the sound and kept it from bouncing around the walls. They danced and swayed. She was too anxious to do anything but wait for uninvited guests. They didn’t come.

The band finished their set. Sadie packed her stuff and walked over to where Rosemary stood, lugging her gig bag and the heavy bass head by her side. “No sign?”

“No sign.”

“They might still come.”

Rosemary nodded. “This is the weirdest thing I’ve ever wanted.”

“Look,” Sadie said. “My oldest sister is a forest ranger. The preserve she works on sets their own brushfires sometimes. If you do a controlled burn, you get way less damage than if you let brush accumulate and wait for a wildfire to break out. I’m looking at this as a controlled burn.”

“A controlled burn.” The comparison did actually give Rosemary some relief.

The lights on the stage switched over to black light.

“Friends, Romans, Countrymice,” said the lead singer, face aswirl with color. “Lend me your ears.”

The drummer counted four on sticks, and the entire band kicked in at once. A cover Rosemary recognized from her parents’ records. “I Fought the Law.”

“Very funny,” she whispered. She wished she could enjoy this.

They played a second song, and a third song, and a fourth. Rosemary didn’t recognize them, but she caught a law enforcement theme. She didn’t remember the band being this political, but it was a special occasion. She still harbored a perverse pride in finding a good band for SHL, and a perverse concern that all this had been for nothing if they weren’t willing to toe the populist line needed for an SHL band. No, her instincts were good. This was a command performance for her special event.

And then a whoop outside the building—Rosemary flashed for one moment to the 2020 raid. And then the far door opened and flashlights poured through. A megaphone or speaker squawked: “Stop playing. This is an illegal gathering.” And then everyone was running, to all the doors, all unlocked. They’d positioned the stage so the audience got a head start on the police. Somebody swung a spotlight around to temporarily blind the cops as they entered.

The Simrats, under their black lights, a knot of painted bodies and instruments, played like the band on the Titanic, going down with the ship. A horn section soundtrack for a police raid. They had nothing to worry about; SHL would bail them out. If it went as she hoped, nobody would get hurt, nobody would get caught, and no scene would get ruined. Just a bunch of kids trespassing at one of Tomás’s mother’s warehouses; she wouldn’t lose it since she’d had nothing to do with the show. It wouldn’t be this easy in other cities, but if this worked tonight, she’d find ways. Like her muggers, this show was one big shouted “hey” to distract from the real shows. A controlled burn, as Sadie had said.

Someone cut the PA. The band played on through their amps, without vocals, until the generator shut off as well, killing all the lights and sound at once except the drums. People scattered. A thrilled panic surged through Rosemary, and she worked on harnessing it rather than letting it run away with her. She looked over at Sadie, who flashed a nervous smile.

Rosemary reached for Sadie’s bass head, but Sadie stopped her hand and grabbed it herself. “I’d rather have all my stuff with me if we get separated.”

A bobbing light came toward them, making Rosemary’s heart leap again. The closest exit was the one they’d walked in through, the one leading out past the showrooms and the two-story entrance.

“It’s been nice knowing you, Rosemary,” Sadie said as they moved closer to the exit. “Keep in touch.”

She swung open the door. The space ahead was dark; the sun through the skylight had been the only illumination earlier, and there was no electricity now that the generator was off. She hadn’t taken into account how dark it would be in a power-dead warehouse on a moonless night. Ahead, red and blue lights bounced at the edges of a monumental blackness, and a loud hum filled the air.

“Ah, shit, they’re out front.” Sadie stopped.

“Exit eleven is down that hall.” Rosemary put a hand on Sadie’s elbow to guide her. “There’s no parking lot on that side, so maybe they don’t have cars out there.”

“Thanks! Are you coming?”

“In a minute. You should go.” Rosemary hugged Sadie. “Thank you for your help. Good luck!”

Sadie disappeared down the dark hallway; she had no way of knowing that act was the first time Rosemary had ever instigated a hug outside of her family. Big nights seemed to have a weird effect on her, making her try all kinds of things outside her comfort zone. As long as she was scared, excited, worried, adrenaline fueled, she might as well double down. She wouldn’t declare this operation a success until it was behind her, but so far it looked like everything was going as smoothly as induced chaos could go. She didn’t deserve for it to go this well.

Rosemary turned back to the main entrance, where an enormous inflated castle dwarfed the vestibule. It looked intact other than two drooping turrets. She had seen these in old movies, in school carnival scenes and birthday parties, but never in person. That was a different kind of childhood, a different kind of growing up, a Before to her After, full of real human bodies navigating the space between each other. One bounce, just to try it, and then she’d run.

34 ROSEMARY ^{Free Will Astrology}

This time Rosemary couldn’t avoid the hospital. The cop waiting for her below the castle insisted, so she couldn’t say she got hurt during arrest or intake. He recorded the whole interaction, for his own protection, he said, though she imagined his buddies might get a laugh out of her misstep.

He also insisted on waiting for an ambulance rather than driving her himself. Everyone else had scattered, leaving Rosemary and a couple of others who must have been too close to the door the cops came in. The only one she recognized was the Simrats’ singer, who gave her a salute as he was loaded into a van. The van was mostly empty; they must have been expecting to pick up more people, which they probably would have if this had been a normal show and not a controlled burn. Hopefully the police weren’t suspicious.

When the ambulance finally arrived, the cop watched them load her, then followed in his own car.

The EMT who rode in the back with her was friendly and curious. “How did you do this?”

“I turned my ankle.”

“Well, yeah, I can see that. But how?”

“Have you ever seen a bouncy castle?”

The EMT laughed. “Not in a million years.”

“Me neither. I couldn’t resist.”

“And that’s why you’re being arrested?”

She tried to play it cool, like she did this every night. “Nah. That’s for trespassing and congregation. And, uh, resisting arrest. He said I shouldn’t have kept bouncing.”

“Huh. Must’ve been a fun night.”

“It was! We could make it more fun if you want to slip me out the door somehow.”

That was the end of the friendliness. “Can’t do that.”

“Sorry. I was kidding. I just didn’t plan on getting arrested tonight.” Then why had she stopped to bounce? She’d wanted to. And maybe part of her wanted to be caught, to be punished, for what she had done in Baltimore.

“You’re not going to get far on that foot, in any case.”

When they’d taken off her shoe to apply ice, she’d caught a glimpse, purple and swollen, majestically damaged. One look was enough; two would remind her where they were going, and she was trying very hard not to think about that. She loathed doctors. And hospitals. Probably nobody liked them, but the cocktail of hate and fear that her mind concocted on the drive made her queasier than the injury. It’s only your foot, she told herself. They won’t keep you.

The hospital wasn’t far. Certainly not far enough to hatch some grand escape plan. She let them wheel her off the ambulance and into the emergency bay. Her escorted entrance must have gotten her some kind of preferential treatment, because she was whisked right into the examination area. A nurse took her medical history, gave her another ice pack and a painkiller, then showed her to a sealed exam room to wait for them to call her to X-ray. She waited. And waited.

A quiet night, or just the way hospitals were these days? She had a closed door instead of a curtain; maybe the rooms isolated noise as well as germs. Her last reference point was a dozen years in the past. It involved halls lined with screaming people, the pox burning nerve-imagined holes in their skin; her own screaming, too, the sounds you made because your body had to make them, the knowledge that the doctors were doing everything they could, but it didn’t touch the pain, and they didn’t believe you when you said you were on fire. The thought of it made her want to run, but the cop was sitting in the bedside chair.

A diversion wasn’t a bad idea. What she wanted to hear right now was “Blood and Diamonds.” She raised her Hoodie and put it in clearview, keeping an eye on the cop to see if he objected. The song reminded her of hospitals—she’d been humming it since she walked in the door, she realized—but not in a bad way. It reminded her of nurses, of people who had tried to cheer the kids in their care without condescension. Safety, recovery, strength.

She played it twice. The song still retained its magic, but now it made her want to hear Luce’s newer songs again. She had an album on her hacked phone, old-school, which she didn’t want to listen to right now in front of the cop; she didn’t want her behavior to stand out in any way. She searched to see if anyone had ever uploaded any footage of Luce’s shows to the usual channels, but all she could find was stuff from Before. A different Luce.

Luce performed in spaces where people didn’t upload to hoodspace. Why would there be anything? Try again. And, wait—she played in bands. Rosemary was looking for Luce Cannon. She tried “Harriet” and “music” instead.

Her search returned dozens of versions of a single immersive video labeled some variant on “Harriet—live—do something!” “Harriet speaks truth!”

The cop was off in his own Hoodie—maybe doing paperwork, from the way his hand moved on his thigh—and surely somebody would get her attention when it was X-ray time. She entered the video.

Drone-shot. That much was obvious from the swift and steady pace. They moved through a wooded estate, toward a gate covered in musical notes. Other drones flew into view, aiming for the same location.

Someone asked, “What is it?” Someone else answered, “I dunno. Somebody’s losing it outside the gate. GlitterFan said to come see.”

Then they arrived at the gate, hovering, the noise of dozens of drones drowning out the person on the other side. This drone surged forward, until it was almost touching the gate, and its microphone must have been unidirectional, because the other noise fell away.

Luce stood on the other side, her hair greasy and disheveled, her middle finger raised in the gate’s direction. “Fuck StageHolo. Don’t give them your money. Learn an instrument. Go see a real band play. Get this place reopened and walk around it in real life. Everybody is afraid; it’s what you do when you’re afraid that counts. The world isn’t over yet.”

“This chick is crazy,” the operator said.

“Nah—wouldn’t it be awesome to be here for real?”

“Ssh,” said someone else.

Luce continued. “The world isn’t over yet. We don’t need to keep all the old things, but we need something new. Borrow a guitar and learn how to use it. If that isn’t your thing, figure out what is. Invent your own genre. Carve your initials into something. Brand them, paint them, shoot them, transpose them, change them entirely and sculpt yourself out of a new medium. Instrument and tool are synonyms: we can still construct ways to belong. Our song is a work in progress.”

She started playing, something Rosemary hadn’t heard before: angry, dark chords. A minute later, she looked up like she heard something, and then Rosemary heard the sirens, too.

“Good night, Memphis!” Luce said, waving in Rosemary’s direction, then running for a nondescript van parked up the road.

Memphis. She was in Memphis, which was in—Rosemary had to look it up—Tennessee. That wasn’t far from Asheville at all, but if she was traveling, she might be gone by the time Rosemary got there. If she was traveling, maybe that meant Rosemary hadn’t ruined her life. Or maybe she had, and this was a filmed breakdown. It didn’t look like a breakdown. She came across sincere and driven, if not entirely in control.

Her location wasn’t the thing that mattered, anyway. Message transcended location, even if it was a message saying to be somewhere and do something. And this message was reaching people. Four hundred thousand views and climbing.

She played it again, listening carefully, then dropped her Hoodie to think. We need something new. Create something better. Construct ways to belong. That was a message directly to Rosemary. Not only to her; she knew that. It would take more than just her, anyway. The concert tonight had been one step in the right direction, but only one step. What was the next one? She groaned in frustration.

The cop looked over. “Ankle hurting?”

“Yeah.” It wasn’t a lie, even if it wasn’t the whole truth.

She kept thinking it over. Thought about it as they came to get her for X-rays, as they mashed her foot into the right position for the X-ray, as a doctor eventually showed up and confirmed she had a bad sprain, not a break. They wrapped it tightly, told her to ice it and elevate it and try to stay off of it. When the doctor wrote a prescription for a painkiller, the cop interjected that she would probably be better off waiting to get it filled, if she could stand the pain.

“Are you really supposed to have a say in my care?” she asked, as if it had been her plan to go to the hospital.

“No. I’m not telling you what to do. I’m just saying less paperwork, less chance of your pills getting lost, less delay in getting you out the door after you’re arraigned. Speaking of which, are you ready to go?”

She wasn’t, but she supposed that didn’t really matter.

Lockup hadn’t been on the list of things Rosemary had been dying to experience in her travels, and afterward it made her list of things she’d prefer not to experience again. Jails had their own exceptions to congregation laws, with the result that she spent the night with thirty other women in a cell that wasn’t nearly large enough for thirty women standing, let alone sitting or trying to close their eyes. Only three others looked like they might’ve been at the warehouse concert, and she was glad North Carolina had recently done away with cash bail, according to the officer who’d done her intake, so she wouldn’t have to worry if they had the money to get themselves out; it was her fault they were there. When Management had shown all that concern about getting Legal involved after the raid in Baltimore, it had been only for her and Luce, not for anyone else who got caught up in their net. She hadn’t even considered that before.

She carved a few inches out for herself on the questionable cement floor and waited, which was an interesting exercise in itself. She had no idea how to keep her mind occupied with no Hoodie, no phone, no job, no music, no chores. Her foot throbbed, and she tried to get someone to bring her ice, but the request was ignored. Nothing to do but wait and hold on to her space and second-guess her life decisions.

Waking disoriented her; she hadn’t planned on falling asleep. She started to stand up before her foot reminded her to stay on the floor a little longer. Breakfast was a square eggish patty on square white bread, which she gave to another woman who looked hungrier than she was.

They’d done away with cash bond, but left a complicated recognizance system. The district court commissioner didn’t like that she had no personal ties in the state. He asked her not to leave the city until her court date; she successfully argued that her job demanded travel, and the restriction was amended to staying in state. It helped that she had nothing on her record, and that the charges were only congregation and trespassing, both level-three misdemeanors; apparently the cop had only said resisting arrest to scare her. Legal would have gotten her out faster, but she hadn’t wanted them to know she had stayed. It was possible they knew already, if they tracked her company Hoodie even when she was on vacation. She still wanted to pretend they wouldn’t do that.

So she was stuck in North Carolina for the time being. On vacation as far as the company was concerned, which was good, because she was still weighing out the ramifications of what she’d done. She had no way of knowing if anyone had gotten hurt, if anyone had picked up weightier charges, if Tomás would get in trouble—at least he was only seventeen—or his mother had lost her building. Tomás had promised she had others; he’d liked the subterfuge. Rosemary still couldn’t tell if she had the stomach for this, though it still felt better than the alternative. The waste she’d laid to Luce’s life and the scene she’d built so carefully.

She hobbled back to her room. Arranged to have her pills droned in. Realized she had no ice in her tiny fridge’s tinier freezer, and added a chemical ice pack to her Superwally order. What she wanted to do was go see if Sadie was at work, but that would involve walking. She collapsed on her bed and set her mind to work on a question that had been nagging her: Why was the video labeled “Harriet”?

The video she watched didn’t provide the answer, but one of the others did. From that drone’s angle, a large “Harriet” sticker was visible on Luce’s guitar case, and after much discussion, the uploaders had decided that was her name. None of them connected her with Luce Cannon, one-hit wonder, and if anyone from Baltimore was watching, they weren’t spilling. It added to the mystery. Between all of the versions, Rosemary counted over three million views. Three million people watching in amusement, or three million people taking it to heart, or some lower number of viewers watching it on repeat as she had done? She had no way of knowing. All she knew was she needed to do something to help; to answer the call to action.

She had one tiny grain of power: recommending bands to SHL. Two if you counted the trick she’d pulled on the company here. Was there any medium in which she could follow Luce’s instructions? A thing she burned to do? More than anything, she wanted to be a conduit for Luce’s message, to shout it from the rooftops in a way that it might be heard. Maybe, maybe she had a way.

It started with a twofold apology.

“Baltimore Homelessness Prevention Services, this is Joni speaking.”

“Don’t hang up. I’m sorry to call you at work.”

“Sorry? Who is this?”

“Joni, this is Rosemary. Please don’t hang up.”

There was a sigh on the other end, but the call didn’t disconnect. Rosemary took that as a positive sign.

“If you think the statute of limitations on my anger has expired, you’re wrong.”

Or not. “Look, you don’t have to accept my apology. I don’t think I would, either, under the circumstances. I’m calling because there’s a thing I want to do for Luce, but I need to find her to do it.”

“I don’t know where she is. She left town right after you killed her space.”

“I know. I was hoping you’d have a way of reaching her. Somebody has to, right? Somebody knows where to reach her if something happens with the 2020?”

“There’s a lawyer,” Joni admitted.

“So you could get the lawyer to pass a message for me?”

“I could, but I still don’t know why I would. What could you possibly offer her that she hasn’t already turned down?”

“A way to do it without selling out. A platform. Have you seen her vid at Graceland?”

“Her what?”

“I’ll send you a link. Borrow a Hoodie and check it out, and then call me back if you’re willing to help me reach her. And again, I can’t even tell you how sorry I am for what I did. You said I couldn’t fix it, and I can’t, but maybe I can make something else happen. Watch and call me back if you’re willing to let me try.”

Rosemary hung up. She still wanted Joni to like her again, to forgive her, but she’d settle for a return call, for now.

35 LUCE ^{Crying in the Wilderness}

Nobody answered the door at the Athens venue and Silva couldn’t get ahold of his friend who’d gotten us the gig. We’d planned on splurging on motel rooms, but the motels we found said we had to have booked in advance to clear their background checks. We ended up spending the night in the van, which we figured we’d be doing more of in the future, so we might as well get used to it. In Dahlonega we played to a cold and empty campground, where at least the owners were enthusiastic; they fed us and let us stay for free.

After those shows, we headed back to Nashville for a couple of weeks while Silva lined up some Tennessee shows. The Knoxville mansion show went well, except that the PA picked up police radio and broadcast it through every silence between songs. They said it was a bug and a feature, an annoyance that kept them apprised if the cops were headed their way. I didn’t think they had that much to worry about in any case; they were obviously rich enough to buy their way out of any trouble.

A pounding rain caught us as we left Knoxville, and continued into the mountains. It thankfully put a stop to our random police encounters; they didn’t want to stand around getting wet while they asked us questions about nothing, I guessed. I’d bought new tires for the van, and they seemed grippy enough, but it made me wonder where we should be when winter hit. Not these mountains. Not up north.

After all the back rooms and basements, I would’ve thought I’d seen the worst venues the country had to offer. I’d never played this particular barn, though, and this particular barn smelled like the cows had only recently vacated, and left a present on their way out the door. It was a modern milk cow shed, with rows of pumps and gutters running full with rain and manure. How could they not even have bothered to flush them out when guests were coming? I couldn’t imagine an audience would want to sit there to listen any more than I wanted to smell that while I played. Its only selling point was a roof.

“Really?” I asked Silva.

“A gig is a gig, right?”

I sighed and followed him, choosing my steps with care. We walked out the other end of the barn and down a set of limestone steps set onto a hill, slippery even with the single galvanized pipe railing. I picked my way carefully behind Silva, with Marcia behind me. The gig bag on my shoulder was waterproof, and so was my amp’s case, but it was going to be a long way down wheeling that heavy thing, not to mention Silva’s amp, which did not have a case. Also not to mention that it would be an even longer trip back up if it was still raining. Still thinking, my head down, hood up to keep the water off my face, I ran straight into Silva when he stopped.

“Ta-da,” he said.

I’d been concentrating so hard on the footing, I hadn’t noticed we’d arrived at another building. Looking down, the ground still looked the same, grass clinging for purchase as its substrate became mud. We stepped into an older barn, though, or a new barn designed to look like an old barn, since this one didn’t smell like cows. The tin roof amplified the rain to a near deafening volume, but there were no leaks. Fall dampness pervaded everything—rain was the overwhelming scent now—but the metal folding chairs laid out in neat rows were dry. So was the stage, an honest-to-goodness raised stage at the far end of the building. Lights hung from each support beam, and a couple of high-end speakers pointed out toward the audience seating.

“It’s a real venue.” I took it all in. “You were messing with me?”

Silva grinned.

“A real venue in a cow pasture,” Marcia said. “How are we supposed to get my drums down here? Or your amps?”

Silva was still smiling. “There’s a driveway that leads down to the side door. I thought it would be more fun to bring you down this way.”

Marcia leaned against a post and examined the muck on her boots. “You mean we didn’t have to walk down the Staircase of Doom? Or get soaked?”

“I’m still stuck on you making us think we were going to play in that cow palace. I’m not sure we’re at the point in our relationship where you can drag me like that. You can bring the van down. I’m not going out in that monsoon again.” I tossed the key at him and he snatched it out of the air.

“Fine, fine. It was worth it.” He disappeared into the rain.

I shook my head again. I wasn’t really annoyed; more relieved, really. Relieved I hadn’t sunken to playing for a mooing audience. Relieved we didn’t have to breathe cow for two hours. Underneath that, a little pleased to have people back in my life who felt comfortable enough to prank me. Nobody would go to that trouble if they didn’t care.

“You must be Eric Silva’s new band,” somebody called across the room. An older man, in his sixties maybe, wearing jeans and a Hawaiian shirt.

“Yep,” I said.

“Welcome to Music City. Have you played here before?”

“Years ago, with a different band.”

“Glad to have you back, then. I’m Dave.”

“Is this your place?”

“Yeah. The dairy is my cousin’s, but he let me build this place. It looks like a barn to any drone passing overhead, and it’s too far out in the country for anyone to complain about noise.”

In the last few months’ travels, I’d discovered that people had endless creativity when it came to carving out space for music. I told him about the 2020; he frowned sympathetically.

Silva backed the van up to the side door, and we went to drag the gear inside. The soundcheck went quickly and proved Dave a good engineer. After that, there was nothing to do but wait to see if anyone showed up in the rain.

I was curious to see who our audience would be. In this age of flying under the radar, it was hard to tell who to expect. The venues had their own methods of spreading the word, their own local networks. In several places, I’d played to only a handful of listeners, but I didn’t mind. I’d play to whoever wanted to listen.

People began trickling in. This audience fell on the older age of the spectrum, like the antique store had. There were probably twenty of them visible from the brightly lit stage as we picked up our instruments to play. Silva had said to expect a musician’s crowd, and we’d rehearsed based on that knowledge.

I was so caught up in the joy of playing again that it took me a few songs to notice that the audience wasn’t really responding. A smattering of applause, but it felt polite. Obligatory. I tried not to let it bring me down. The rain added a cool ambience, and the barn was cozy and dry. We sounded good. Don’t take it personally.

Dave had said to play for an hour, but by thirty minutes I felt like we’d overstayed our welcome. Metal folding chairs become instruments themselves when people start shifting in them. I couldn’t figure out why they were bored.

“Should we cut it short?” I whispered to Silva between songs. “I don’t think they’re into us.”

“Finish the set. They paid, so we should play. And Dave’s enjoying himself, and it’s his place. Play to him.”

It was an odd feeling. I tried to put myself fully in the music, as I usually did, but there was a part of me observing us critically. We weren’t doing anything wrong; it just wasn’t our night. Only toward the end did I start to feel like there was somebody out there for us. The stage lights were bright enough that we couldn’t see into the crowd, but for the last three songs one person made up for the others with their enthusiasm. It cheered me, and gave me the energy to finish on a high note.

There was no other band following us, so we didn’t need to hurry to strike our gear. I hopped down from the stage to hang out by the merchandise table, which looked lonely in the corner. Nobody headed that way. Instead, they were rearranging the chairs into a circle. Chatting, then sitting down again, pulling cases out from under their seats. It suddenly became clear.

I walked back to where Silva and Dave chatted. “What kind of music do you usually have here?”

“Old-time and blues.”

So that was the problem. They’d been polite, but we were just the opening act for a jam session. They wanted to play, not to listen. They probably weren’t even into the kind of music we were playing. Oh, well. A practice in front of people wasn’t a bad thing. A fiddle tune picked up, and I turned to listen.

They were excellent musicians, and their instruments filled the room in a way that felt organic.

I reminded myself that I needed to try to win every crowd, but I wasn’t always going to succeed.

We packed our gear into the van, careful to be quiet so we didn’t disturb the musicians, though they didn’t look like anything would distract them. When our instruments were stashed, we went back in to graze at the potluck table. I filled my plate and leaned against a beam to listen while I ate.

Someone approached from the direction of the music.

“Hey,” said Rosemary. “I missed most of your set trying to find this place, but you sounded great. I don’t know why they weren’t into you.”

“It happens.”

She shrugged and smiled. “I wasn’t too obnoxious, was I?”

“No—I guess I appreciated someone cheering for us. Um, what are you doing here?”

“I’ve been trying to get in touch with you for months. Nobody would give me your phone number, which I suppose is fair, but I finally convinced Joni to give me your lawyer friend’s contact info, and he said he wouldn’t give me a way to reach you, either, but he’d tell me where you were playing, on the condition that if I went to see you I couldn’t bring any device with me—I’m noncomm for the night.”

My lip twitched at her use of the phrase; it sounded too casual from the person whose Hoodie recording had killed my venue. She must’ve mistaken it for a different objection, because she rushed to add, “Sorry. I know noncomm is a philosophy, and I know I’m basically the antithesis. I shouldn’t have said that. I meant my Hoodie and my phone are both back at my place. No chance I’ll lead anyone here other than the people I came with. I’m still horrified that I did that, even accidentally.”

It still hurt too much to talk about the 2020. “How did you get here? Don’t you need a device to operate most cars these days?” I’d only recently learned that, riding around Nashville in Marcia’s little self-driving Chauffeur.

She waved in the direction of the musicians. “My friends Nolan and Sadie brought me. Nolan has a car, and he wasn’t hard to convince after I found out there’d be a jam.”

We both watched the fiddlers through their next song.

“So, Rosemary, are you still working for them?” I didn’t even want to invoke the name, lest I bring them down upon this lovely space.

“Yeah, but that’s what I wanted to talk—”

“You didn’t drive all the way out here to convince me to play for those bastards. Tell me you didn’t.”

“It’s not like that.”

I turned my attention to the casserole on my plate. “I’m going to eat my dinner now. Thanks for coming. Have a good drive back.”

“I didn’t come out here to convince you to play for them.”

“‘For them’ or ‘for us’? You can’t distance yourself if you’re still working for them after what you did.”

She sighed. “For us, then. But it’s not like that. I’ve figured out a trick. I find a place that’s got shows going on, and then I make offers if I see anyone good, and then I fake StageHolo out with a fake venue to raid. I’ve done it in Asheville and Charlotte now. Everybody wins. The bands that want a deal get a chance, the venue stays safe, StageHolo is off everybody’s backs for a while.”

I was a little impressed, but I didn’t let her see it. “Has anybody been hurt? Or arrested?”

She looked down at her left ankle. “Me. Both. Getting hurt was my fault, and the charges are minor.”

“Minor to you, but not to somebody who can’t pay the fines, or got in trouble in the past. Or the wrong officer gets called in on the raid, and somebody gets hurt for real. That sounds like a fun bait and switch, but you can’t possibly see yourself doing that forever. They’ll catch on if you get even a little sloppy.”

“I know, I know. I know it’s not a real solution. I’m still trying. That’s why I’m here.”

She’d clenched her fists into balls, the knuckles whitening. I softened my tone. “What’s why you’re here?”

“I came to tell you I have another idea. Something bigger. First I need to ask: have you seen ‘Harriet speaks truth’?”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a vid you need to see.” She reached toward her neck, then dropped her hands. “Oh, crap.”

I recognized the gesture for what it was: she was so rarely without her Hoodie that she hadn’t connected her promise not to bring it with her need to show me something.

“Give me a minute.” She waited for their song to end, then headed into the musicians’ scrum to talk with her friend Nolan. I took the time to finally finish my dinner.

She put his Hoodie on herself as she returned to my leaning post, then took it off to present it to me like a trophy. I’d never actually handled one before. I put my plate on the corner of the potluck table and accepted the thing from her like it was something unclean; in point of fact, it was vaguely damp, from either the rain or Nolan’s sweat. My choices were to hand it back or to put it on and find out what had her going, and I was curious. Once wouldn’t hurt, as long as Marcia and Silva didn’t see me; they’d never stop teasing me for my hypocrisy.

The only impediment was my complete cluelessness. After I wrestled with it for what must have seemed to Rosemary an eon, she reached over and put it right. “You don’t have to do anything. I already queued it up.”

The barn fell away. For one long second, I stood in blackout darkness. A moment later, I whizzed through the air just above the ground, following a drone that was following a noise. Oh. I was a drone, following a drone, hurtling across a lawn toward a wall. The sensation was disorienting and exhilarating at once. How had I never realized that all those hooded kids knew what it felt like to fly?

Then I recognized the gate, and I knew where I was, and when. The disturbance was me. Graceland. However many months ago. This video was shot by one of the drones hovering on the other side of the gate, watching me lose my cool. “We’re still playing music in real life. Come find us.”

I’d been eloquent that day. Poetic in my anger. I hadn’t thought about it since, but now, watching myself, it was memory and artifact at once, filling in things I’d forgotten. Some of it had been pulled from my song notes, from things I’d thought but never said aloud. It mostly left me thinking I’d neglected finishing that song for far too long.

I struggled out of the Hoodie, momentarily disoriented. The other place had almost felt more real; no wonder these things were so popular.

“So what? The video’s gone viral?” I couldn’t think of the modern term, but I figured she’d follow.

“It’s everywhere. Millions of views. Not only that, though. Here, I’ll queue up—”

I hung on to the Hoodie when she reached for it. “You can tell me without showing. It’s okay.”

“You’ve got followers. People posting responses, saying what they’re going to do, like your instructions said. ‘Carve your initials into something. Brand them, paint them, shoot them, transpose them, change them entirely and sculpt yourself out of a new medium.’”

Fuck. Up until that moment, I hadn’t entirely understood, but she had it memorized.

“Do they, uh, know who I am? Or am I just some woman yelling at a locked gate?”

“Nobody knew at first, but then somebody said you were a musician from Baltimore, and then there was a bunch of arguments about your band name, and they’ve decided your name is Harriet. All the videos say ‘Harriet speaks truth’ or ‘Harriet is right’ or ‘Be like Harriet.’ Well, except the ones that say ‘Lady loses it outside Graceland.’”

Which meant in either case they hadn’t connected my name, or “Blood and Diamonds.” It wasn’t a nostalgia thing. They were watching because they believed in what I was saying. Or because they got amusement out of watching what they thought was a breakdown; I couldn’t help those people. But the others… the others were my people.

She recognized the look on my face. “You’re thinking, ‘How do I reach them?’”

“Yeah,” I admitted.

“That’s why I wanted to talk to you. I have an idea. We need you to say all that again for SHL.”

I couldn’t believe we’d come round to the same thing again. “You said that wasn’t the idea.”

“Not you signing for them—not you signing for us, I mean. You agreeing to do a one-time show.”

“A, no, and B, didn’t you say those things are choreographed and timed? Am I supposed to ask them to block five minutes for me to trash them?” I handed her the Hoodie and retrieved my plate to make a leisurely circuit of the potluck offerings. I wasn’t hungry, but I put a sugar cookie on my plate to justify the movement.

“You call it ‘five-minute vamp on D’ or ‘sixteen-bar intro’ so that everyone knows when to come back in,” she said when I circled round to her. “They won’t pay attention to the content as long as the time is built in.”

“This is ridiculous. Why would you think I’d want to do that?”

“Because it’s the largest platform you could possibly get. You could subvert it.”

I put the plate with the uneaten cookie on the table corner again. “It’s not subversion. You keep working inside the system thinking you can change it from the inside. This works for them. They have zero incentive to change the way they do business.”

“Better than not trying at all!” She waved Nolan’s Hoodie at the musicians. “These people are nice, but is playing for this group getting you anywhere?”

We had reached an impasse. “Rosemary, you’re not listening to me. If you think I said something so important, why are you ignoring the actual message? I said fuck StageHolo and I meant it. I’d rather play barns and back rooms for a hundred years.”

“And you’re not listening to me. You’re being stubborn. You want to burn it down, but you’re not interested in saving the people inside before you light the match? Take us with you! Tell us where to go.” A tear ran down her face and she wiped it away with the back of her hand. “Tell me what it would take to get you to do one show. One show where I promise I’d make a way for you to tell them what you thought of them, for everyone to hear.”

“I’d still be taking their money. I’d be endorsing them.”

“You don’t have to take their money. Or you could take the money and donate it somewhere. Argh. I didn’t come here to argue with you. Why are you so stubborn?”

“And why are you so naive?” A couple of musicians tossed glares in our direction. I hadn’t meant to raise my voice.

“You’ve given up on ninety-nine percent of the people out there, Luce. You’re playing to the people who know to come find you. You would’ve missed me entirely. Or I would have missed you. I don’t even know which it is. Forget it. If you can’t understand this doesn’t have to make you compromise yourself, I don’t know how to explain.”

She unclenched her fists and walked away. I thought of her making that same gesture as I watched her from my window at the 2020. She was letting me go again.

I didn’t see her again that evening. She must’ve been somewhere around, since her friends hadn’t left the jam, but she didn’t come near me again.

Our plan had been to sleep in the van, then drive back in daylight. At one a.m., having driven all day and played a show, I slipped out. The ground between the barn and the van’s side door was getting muddy, and I kicked my boots off under the bed before crawling into the backseat bed, hoping the others would do the same. Marcia appeared not long after, and we made out until Silva climbed into the front passenger seat a little while later, reclining it as far as it would go. The fiddlers were still playing, but it was a distant sound, a lovely soundtrack for sleep. One thing was for sure, they had more stamina than I’d ever had; my fingers would’ve fallen off hours before. I made a silent toast to musicians of all stripes before passing out.

I woke before the others. It wasn’t physically possible to get out without climbing over Marcia. I tried to wait out my bladder, but that wasn’t physically possible, either.

“Sorry…” I threw a leg over, searching on the floor for my boots, then reaching for the door handle. I slid out backward, feet first, into at least five inches of mud. It filled my low boots even as they sank. When I tried to step out of it, my left boot stayed behind.

“Ack.” There was no place for my foot to go, and it was already covered in muck. I tried to find my boot with my toes, with no luck. At least it seemed to be mud run down the unpaved driveway, not manure. I gave up and settled my foot down into it.

The passenger door opened. “Don’t step out,” I said, too late.

“Well, that’s fun.” Silva lifted one muddy foot then the other, squelching. His sneakers had stayed on better than my boots.

“Getting out of here is going to be even more fun.” The van was hubcap-deep. Had it been that muddy the night before? I didn’t think so. I looked up the hill. “It looks like the entire road washed out down here.”

When I slid the barn’s side door open, the mud followed at a slow ooze. It had already made its way under the door and a few feet in. I used the bathroom, then investigated what remained of the evening’s potluck: chips, a bowl of apples and oranges, chocolate chip cookies; all of those looked safer than the potato salad. I chose an apple and a hamburger roll.

“That’s a good look,” Marcia said, pointing at my feet. Hers were covered in mud, too, but her shoes had stayed on.

“Everybody’s a critic,” I muttered.

She joined me in snacking, then we busied ourselves looking for the tools to get the van out of the mud. She found some lumber behind the stage. I found a spade. I wasn’t sure where Silva had disappeared to, so I got to work digging, starting with the spot where I’d lost my boot. I found it after a few minutes, though the digging itself felt Sisyphean. Every spadeful replaced itself. It didn’t help that the rain hadn’t stopped.

“I chose this life,” I repeated to myself. A mantra. “This is my journey.”

Marcia had joined me with a rake. Neither of us seemed to be getting anywhere. The lumber would help under the wheels, maybe, but I didn’t want to try moving before Silva returned.

About twenty minutes later, he came around the side of the barn, followed by a young man on a tractor, a long-haired blond farm boy out of central casting. The kid’s eyes went wide. “I’ve seen you!” he said. In this setting, after the biblical rains, I half expected him to say my ghost was roaming the hilltops.

“You’re famous,” he said next, still staring. He turned off his tractor.

“That song was a long time ago.”

I started to say more, but he shook his head, dismissing my protest.

“You’re, like, everywhere famous.” He motioned at his Hoodie. The video. “My dad said I’d like the music for once, but I didn’t bother to come down the hill. He usually has fiddle jams. Did you play last night?”

“We did…” I almost apologized, then wondered what I was apologizing for. His fault he missed us, not mine.

“Can you say all that stuff from the vid again for me to record? So I can say you were here?”

That felt odd. Performative. “Let me think about how best to do that. I wouldn’t want to get this place in any trouble.”

“What if you bought eggs from me up at the farm stand and I recognized you?”

That seemed reasonable. “Okay, but after we get the van out of the mud.”

His tractor made short work of the problem of our stuck van. We followed him up the hill at tractor’s pace.

“What exactly are we doing right now?” Marcia asked.

I scraped at the mud on my boot. “I’m not entirely clear on that myself.”

The eggs he was selling at the top of the hill were multicolored, heirloom. He handed me a carton and I stared at them while he filmed me, wondering what I was supposed to say. It felt weird trying to repeat whatever I’d said on the video; profundities on demand were not my wheelhouse. I put down the eggs and grabbed my guitar.

“This is a work in progress,” I said, launching into “Manifest Independence,” the half-finished song I’d started writing by the Mississippi. I still didn’t know how it ended.

The kid thanked me and promised to wait until the next day to post the video, so we’d have time to make our getaway.

“So you’re in the prophet business now?” Silva asked from behind the wheel as I got back in the van. “What’s the deal?”

“Not prophecy. I’m taking advantage of a platform. Time-honored tradition.”

“If you say so. That boy was ready to follow you anywhere.”

I’d gotten the same feeling. I turned an imaginary mic on myself, trying to turn it into a joke. “‘Ms. Cannon, you’ve just found out that ones, if not tens, of modern youths found a video of you making a fool of yourself. How does that make you feel?’ ‘I’m glad you asked, Bob.’”

“You can joke, but why? This might be a good thing.”

“Hey, if I finish this song, do you want to record it sometime soon?” I asked to change the subject.

Silva and Marcia both responded enthusiastically, and we spent the drive home discussing album concepts—in between the flashing lights, pull over, rinse, repeat.

36 ROSEMARY ^{Remember Who You Are}

The second she stepped out of the barn, Rosemary realized her error. She hadn’t needed to leave. She could’ve sat with the musicians. She could’ve asked Nolan for his keys, or asked him to leave, though she’d have felt bad doing that when he looked so happy. She could’ve coolly approached the buffet and loaded a plate. Instead, she’d flounced out into the downpour.

Her pride kept her from turning around, and her pride was not waterproof; she was drenched in seconds. The roof overhang didn’t help when rain came down sideways. Not just that; the floodlights outside the barn showed the entire road washing out down toward them in muddy cataracts. Not just that; this rain was cold.

Her healing ankle complained as she followed a pipe railing uphill to an empty dairy barn. The smell was a familiar one if not one she particularly liked: she’d grown up with three milk cows. One produced more than enough milk for their family—they bartered the excess milk with neighbors or turned it into cheese and butter—but her parents believed that cows were herd animals and deserved a herd; funny how they didn’t apply the same logic to children.

From the dry doorway, she watched the lower barn’s lights flicker as people moved around. The sound didn’t carry. Here she was again, watching community happen from afar, unable to take part. She didn’t play an instrument. Everybody said that didn’t matter. They said things like, “Not everyone needs to play—we need an audience, too!” But how did that jibe with Luce’s carve something/play something speech? Was that screed only about music, or did it apply to other things, too? Maybe she was still getting it wrong, and that was why Luce wouldn’t listen to her.

A big orange cat approached from the barn’s interior, and let her stroke his back before stalking away with his tail held high. She missed the farm more than she had in a while. Missing it somehow made her resolve stronger. She had to figure out what her life was supposed to be. Some combination of these things that she loved.

Headlights appeared down below, then another pair, and she realized the jam must be breaking up. What time was it? She had no device to tell her. Late, anyhow.

Three a.m., according to Nolan’s car. He had to manually drive it the first fifteen minutes, thanks to an error message with the navigation system, which kept telling them to find the road to proceed. It left her time to rant at him and Sadie about her conversation.

“What’s so bad about working within the system, anyhow? The system pays us, and keeps our cars from crashing, and delivers groceries to people who can’t leave their houses. Sure, it needs a little subverting here and there, but that improves the system. What does she want me to do? I can’t do anything to help if I quit. The only power I have is in this job.”

“Why do you want to please her so much anyway? Do you have a thing for her?”

Sadie looked unusually interested in Rosemary’s answer to Nolan’s question. “No! I… I want to help her, and I want her to help me. I think if we work together, we can make bigger things happen. And anyway, she makes me want to be better. I’m not even sure if she’s as good a person as the image she projects, but when she sings she makes me want to fix the things she says are broken.”

“Well, that’s a powerful gift, to make somebody want all that.”

“You heard her, too. Did you feel it?”

“Sure, a little. The band was a little raggedy, which makes sense since it was one of their first shows together, but I can see what you mean about her charisma. Hey! The car figured out where we are!”

He turned to her as the car took over driving. “So what’s your plan?”

“I don’t know. My plan hinged on getting her to agree to play. Without her, I’ve got nothing but what I’ve already been doing.”

Sadie said, “That’s not so bad, though. You get to listen to music and plan some fun shows and keep people out of trouble. That’s not nothing.”

“It’s nothing if it goes on that way forever.”

“You don’t have to be the change all by yourself. You need to find people to help you.”

“Like you guys did.”

“That, and more. You need people who will call legislators, and people who will run for office, and people who will write articles and—”

“What you’re talking about will take forever!”

“Maybe, maybe not. But I’ll bet you somebody out there is already working on it, and could use whatever boost you give.”

Rosemary wasn’t convinced.

They rolled in late, and Rosemary slept most of the day away on Sadie’s couch while Sadie dragged herself off to the coffee shop. When she woke in the evening, there was a text message on her phone from an unknown number.

Look I’ve been thinking. U said a 1 time show maybe I can do 1 time, my way

It could only be Luce. The time stamp said it had arrived two hours before. She immediately texted a response. I’m interested—tell me more!

“I’ll tell Luce.” It must have been a bandmate’s phone.

“You look excited about something,” Sadie said, coming through the door.

“I don’t know yet.”

“You don’t know if you’re excited?”

“I don’t want to get my hopes up.”

Rosemary spent the next day waiting for the call and trying to decide where to go. She didn’t have to stay in North Carolina any longer—the cop hadn’t shown up and her charges had been dismissed—but she wasn’t sure where to go with the whole country in front of her. She couldn’t stay on Sadie’s couch much longer.

The bus took the better part of a day, giving Rosemary time to listen to Wilmington bands. Logistics took her new plans in stride. She asked for a room on the ocean and, after looking at maps, picked an area called Carolina Beach because it had “beach” in the name.

“It’s, like, fifteen miles away from Wilmington,” they warned. “There’s not much out there.”

“You let me go to my hometown without telling me it was too far from anything. Maybe I have a lead.” She didn’t, but that was beside the point.

“Do you know it’s hurricane season?”

“Of course,” she lied. She pulled up a weather map. “I don’t plan on being there long, and there’s nothing brewing.”

From the bus drop-off, she called a single-cell to take her to the motel Logistics had booked. When she stepped out of the vehicle, the sun felt hotter on her skin than it had in weeks, brighter, and the air tasted like salt.

The Silver Bell Motel was two stories tall, with the first floor on stilts ten feet above ground level and rooms that opened directly to the outdoor walkway, unlike her fortress-like hotel in Baltimore. It was possible she was the only guest; the parking lot was empty and the whole area looked deserted.

She found the beach across the street and over a small dune from the motel. Found. It hadn’t been lost. You couldn’t lose an ocean. She climbed the dune and caught her breath. How had she not expected it to be this big?

She pulled up her Hoodie and looked for an ocean backdrop she’d played before, just for reference, then dropped it again. There was no comparison. They’d gotten the horizon right, the colors, the sky. She remembered walking along the simulated beach, getting points for finding fancy shells and treasures washed in by the tide, listening to the waves lapping the shore.

What they’d missed: the wind, strong enough to freeze-frame the gulls as they took off and landed; the volume; the sand she kicked into her shoes within the first three steps, so that she had to take them off, then her socks, which she stuffed into the shoes to carry; the frigid water; the irregularity of the shells and other debris, when she’d always imagined each one perfect; the way the sea came closer, then receded, leaving her feet to sink in the muck. The multiple textures of sand: the dry dunes, the gritty debris that marked higher tides, the velvet damp closer in, if she braved getting wave-hit, which she did. The weight of the ocean. In the distance, the remains of houses on stilts, collapsed into themselves. Here was a thing that people had sullied, but you couldn’t tell it if you didn’t look that way. From where she stood, looking outward, the ocean won.

What was she doing here? That was the question of the hour. She’d arrived to find bands and to destroy their scene, or to fake the same. Was it such a bad future? Not if she could travel to places like this.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket, and when she looked, there was a message from the same mystery number giving a download code for one of the sites she could only access outside the Superwally/StageHolo networks. She entered the code, shielding her screen in the bright sun.

“Cassis Fire—Manifest Independence” appeared. The beach was empty, so she turned the volume up and played the song to the ocean.

When the last chord rang, she played it again. And again. And again, and again, until a low battery warning appeared. It didn’t matter; the song was part of her now. She would never hear it without thinking of the beach, the gulls, and the absolute, boundless joy that started at her chest and expanded outward to fill her entirely when a song connected perfectly with a moment.

The lyrics were taken from the things Luce had said at Graceland, or else the things she said had been taken from the lyrics. It was instructive without being pedantic: an invitation, a challenge, a call.

Her phone died. She hadn’t even responded yet. Hopefully Luce wouldn’t think that was rude. She knew she should head back and charge her phone so she could write back, but the ocean was too much for her. She zipped her jacket up to her neck and lowered herself to the sand.

Rosemary requested a meeting with Management the next morning. Something big, she’d said, trying to see if she could rustle up a nongeneric manager in the process, if such a person actually existed. They didn’t; not today, at least. Generic Management—Male (1 of 5) met her in the nonintimidating, regular-office setting.

“That was fast! You’ve only been in”—he paused before continuing—“Wilmington one night.”

“It’s not about here,” she said.

“Oh? The message said you had something. We figured—”

“Luce Cannon.”

“You found her again? In Wilmington?”

“I said it wasn’t about here. I know where she is.”

“And she’s willing to sign?”

“She’s willing to do one big show, then gone again.”

His gears were clearly turning. “Luce Cannon: One Night Only. We do a special on that big song, maybe make up something forensic about tracking her down, lead it all up to a show… What was the name of that famous article? ‘The Last Power Chord’? We call the concert the Last Last Power Chord, or the Next Power Chord, something like that, that she’s coming out of retirement for one show only…”

“She’ll be fine with all of that.” They’d had this talk and figured it would go this way. Luce was not a fan of the coming-out-of-retirement angle, but it fed into the fiction of the thing. “She does have some specific guidelines for how it has to go down, though.”

“The money, you mean? We’ll have Contracts make her a good offer.”

“No. She’ll only do it under certain conditions.”

“We’ll see what Legal says.”

Rosemary continued. “There has to be a live audience—”

Generic Management Man sighed. “Of course there does. Why should it matter if that’s illegal?”

“—and she wants to choose the location.”

“You mean which campus will host? That’s not a problem.”

“She doesn’t want to do it on a campus. She wants to do it at a real venue.” Those were Luce’s words, real venue. “Nonnegotiable.”

“We can’t do that.”

“Sure we can. We can do all of that. Patent Medicine did a ‘music festival’ on campus with an audience. It shouldn’t be impossible to transport a camera rig somewhere.”

“We have to apply for waivers from the state and federal government every time we do something like that. It’s not simple.”

“Who said anything about simple? This is going to be a logistical bear, and we’re going to do it because this concert is going to make us a ton of money.” She was careful to say us, not you. Rosemary Laws, Model Employee.

“Anything else?”

“We’ll own the concert recording, but we point song links to her own site.”

“Legal will never agree to that.”

“They can hash it out, then, and see if she walks, but she’ll probably give up merchandising if we give her that much.”

He sighed again. “You’re still on our side, right? It almost sounds like you’re working for her.”

“I’m not working for her. Let me know what you decide.”

She disconnected and dropped her Hoodie. The ocean greeted her with a roar.

37 LUCE ^{Manifest Independence}

The marquee from that last night Before still had my name on it. Of all the changes and incongruities and instances of past overlying present, I’d never once considered that one. It made perfect sense. The last show before we collectively gave up on trusting each other in proximity, captured in time. A memorial plaque for who we used to be.

“Oh, man,” said Silva, and I realized whatever I was feeling as we approached must be even stranger for him, since he had worked there. He would have been the one waiting every day for the go-ahead to change the sign during that hellish upheaval.

The C and H from the name had fallen or been stolen, leaving THE PEA. Grackles nested in the remaining letters and most of the bulbs surrounding the sign looked like they’d been shot out. Somehow, nobody had stolen the movable letters that read TONIGHT: LUCE CANNON.

Looking closer, we saw the marquee was propped up by a couple of new-looking jacks. The posters were gone, the glass ticket booth boarded up, the sidewalk cracked. Time was a bastard on the best of days.

“This poor old girl.” Silva shook his head as we turned down the alley.

Marcia watched us both with curiosity. “Why is it always ‘she’? I don’t think I’ve heard someone call a building she before, but ships and guitars…”

Silva shrugged. “I have no idea, but if the outside looks this bad, I’m a little nervous about the inside.”

“They would have taken any opportunity to move us to their campus if it wasn’t possible to play here,” I said, though I was wondering the same thing. I had pictured the place frozen in time, perfectly preserved. Stupid. Preservation is an action, not a state.

We turned another corner, and I was surprised to see that the back was as busy as the front was deserted. A dozen trucks and vans crowded the loading dock. We had to block one of them in, but it was reasonable to think they wouldn’t be leaving before us.

I shouldered my guitar and looked at the others. “Last chance to turn around.”

“This was your idea, not ours,” Marcia said. “That’s completely your call.”

“Silva?”

“I want to see what she looks like inside.”

Backstage bustled with activity. Nobody gave us a second glance; if we were there, we belonged. Some of them were assembling camera rigs, others trying to raise a new curtain, others loading more equipment in through a side door halfway down the room. We walked past and onto the proscenium.

“Oh, man,” Silva repeated.

The seats were gone. Paint hung from the walls in long strips, and the place carried a vague smell of—water? Trash? There was a stain in the shape of Australia on the ceiling above the balcony. A couple of workers snaked wires off the stage and around the wall to a corner in the back, where they’d set up a makeshift control booth.

Still, it was beautiful. The wall sconces, the stage, the elegant balcony molding, the chandeliers. A thought crossed my mind that if someone had been using it as a secret venue, I might have ruined everything for them by choosing to play here when I could have picked anyplace. I could have made them film me at the 2020. Why had I chosen this? Because, I told myself, you wanted to show them a past that didn’t have to be past. Or something like that.

“You made it! And you were right: this place is beautiful! I’ve never seen anything like it.”

I turned to see Rosemary approaching from the wing. Funny how I always heard her before I saw her. You had to give the kid this: she was enthusiastic. I felt a pang of sympathy for her “never seen anything like it.” It had been a beautiful room, but not unique in its day.

“Is everything going okay?” I asked.

“Yeah. It’s all working out pretty well. The city owns the building, and they had no problem turning on the electricity as long as we were willing to pay to get everything inspected. It mostly needed a good cleaning. The company liked that the chairs were gone. Said it’ll be easier to film. All the sound equipment was sold off a long time ago, but we would’ve brought ours in either way. And you should’ve seen how excited they were about that marquee with your name on it. It was like they’d discovered an intact dinosaur fossil. Um, you’re not the fossil in that scenario. The marquee is.”

I sighed. More nostalgia. Maybe I brought it on myself by picking this place, this format.

“So, um, thank you for telling them to make me your artist liaison for this gig. I don’t really know what that entails, since it isn’t part of my normal job, but tell me what you need from me and I’ll do it.”

It wasn’t like we’d ever had an artist liaison for anything before. A host supplied by the enemy. I didn’t really know what to ask for, but scrambled for something to make her feel useful. “Could you rustle up some people to get our gear inside? It’s faster with help.”

She saluted and disappeared, returning with two burly guys and a burlier woman.

“Minions! Excellent!” Marcia led them out the door. I followed, but they picked up two more people along the way, and I didn’t end up needing to carry anything. One trip, and everything was in for us to assemble.

“Closer to the front,” I said to Marcia as she unrolled the rug that kept her drums from moving. “I want us all tight and intimate if we’re playing for cameras.”

She saluted and dragged her rug closer to me. Techs began to circle us, taping marks onto the wooden floor.

“Hi, I’m Luce,” I said to the guy miking my amp.

“Hey,” he said without introducing himself.

It took a while for them to get the sound under control, the speakers emitting earsplitting crackles and squeals like creatures that didn’t want to be tamed. The challenge would be creating a mix that worked both for their recording and for the live space. I was more worried about the latter.

“Rosemary, how many tickets did you sell?” I asked the question into the mic and she appeared in front of me instantly.

She gestured out into the empty room. “They gave away ten pairs of tickets in a contest, along with transportation to get here.”

Ten pairs. “What was the contest?”

“They had to say where they first heard ‘Blood and Diamonds.’ I know that’s not what you would have wanted, but Promotions insisted that was the best way. There were a lot of entries, for what it’s worth.”

This was the first I was hearing about it, but the contest was a distraction. “What I’m trying to say is it’s going to sound awfully boomy in here with no seats and no bodies to absorb the sound. Twenty is nothing in a room this size.”

“Maybe it’ll work itself out?” She looked away again.

“Twenty isn’t what I had in mind when I told you I needed a live audience.”

“I know, but it’s all I could get them to agree to. Better than none, right?”

“I guess it is what it is. We’ll make it work.” Not much choice.

We eventually came to a point where I was satisfied with the live sound and the nameless soundperson adjusting levels didn’t seem to be fiddling anymore. Then we went through it again for the recording rigs and the lights. Beneath it all, I heard the grumbling of the techs as they repositioned their equipment. “What the fuck are we doing here?” one of them muttered to another, and I wondered the same. What was the point of my insisting we do this here if there wasn’t any audience? No, twenty wasn’t nothing. I’d play for ten or five or two if they were into it. I’d just have to convince these contest winners that the recent stuff was as good as the song they knew.

When the techs were finally done, I asked into the mic if I could have a minute to play.

“Sorry,” came the voice I’d started thinking of as the Director, since he hadn’t bothered to introduce himself. “No time.”

I remembered standing on this stage, playing for myself and nobody, in the last minutes before the world changed. This was the problem with trying to re-create a memory: the overwrite took the memory down with it.

The Director himself approached from the booth, carrying a printed set list with times for our songs, and a stack of lyric sheets. I’d submitted it all two weeks before. “This is all still good, right? No changes?”

“No changes, unless you’ll let me drop ‘Blood and Diamonds,’” I said. It sat there at the end of the set, taunting me. The one thing SHL wouldn’t budge on: no show unless I closed with it.

He opened his mouth.

“I’m kidding,” I said, before he could tell me what I already knew. “I wouldn’t dream of dropping the big finale.”

Maybe because of my joke, he insisted we go over details for every song in the set; by the time that was over, it was almost time for the doors to open. For all twenty people.

A nice spread awaited us in the green room, every single item from the ancient rider I’d sent them. Rosemary’s doing, I was pretty sure. The room looked the same except the pictures were gone. I looked around the space remembering other people, another time, the last minutes Before. When I sat on the couch, a cloud of dust rose up around me. “Tell me one more time why we’re here?”

“Dude,” Silva said. “You keep asking that like this wasn’t your doing. I have no problem with it, and I hope it goes down like you’re planning, but maybe it’s time to own it either way.”

“I know. I know. It’ll be worth it. It’s not selling out.”

“It’s kind of selling out,” Marcia said, “but that term needs redefining anyhow. This is temporary selling out for a good cause. It’s not a permanent state.”

“That helps a lot,” I told her, sticking out my tongue. “Hey, Silva, what happened to the eight-by-tens?”

He surveyed the bare nails on the walls, then turned and winked at me. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m sure nobody who worked here would have taken them home for safekeeping.”

Somebody knocked on the door, and my stomach flipped. This is not a conjuring, I told myself. It goes down differently.

Marcia said, “Come in,” and Rosemary entered. She looked nervous, but not upset. I waited for her to tell us to turn on the news. “Do you need anything?”

Relief washed over me. “An audience.”

“There are twenty very excited contest winners on their way.”

“You know that wasn’t what I meant.”

“I’m doing what I can, Luce. And I did the other thing! Everyone who shared the Harriet video knows that’s you now. I’ve been gearing them up for this for weeks. I said if they waited for the end of the show they wouldn’t be disappointed.”

I kept forgetting the audience I couldn’t see.

“SHL is kind of confused about the numbers, to be honest,” she said, as if she’d heard my thought. “Way more first-time viewers than they expected, and the demographics are wild in every category.”

Huh.

She ducked out of the room again, and I squeezed into the bathroom to change. Nobody had cleaned the toilet in years.

“Isn’t that a little on the nose?” Marcia asked, pointing at my shirt when I emerged. I’d painted “Is this real?” on the front and “This is not real” on the back.

“You should’ve seen the runners-up.” I’d made and discarded “Fuck StageHolo,” “Burn yr Hoodie,” “Ask me about my corporate overlords,” and “You are a wholly owned subsidiary” before deciding they might blur those out.

Another knock on the door. Another moment where I steeled myself for bad news, but it was only a tech giving a five-minute warning. Silva left the room to tune his bass and my guitar one more time, so they’d be ready when we stepped out. Marcia and I followed.

The last time I’d been here, the last time I’d looked out from this same wing, I’d wondered how to perform at all on such a broken night. I didn’t know how to address the crowd. I remembered every single song I’d played that evening, every word I’d said. That audience and I, we’d needed each other.

The room had looked empty with so few seats filled that night; I’d called them all forward. Now it was far emptier. Two people sat in metal folding chairs near the room’s center. The rest—eighteen of them, I presumed—had scattered in pairs in such a way that they were near the barrier but nowhere near each other. A phalanx of cameras filled the space between the barrier and the stage.

“How are we supposed to play to that?” I asked. “They won’t even come near the front.”

“They’re fans, Luce,” Marcia said. “Even if they only know the one song. Even if they’ve never been to a show. Don’t judge them.”

She was right.

“Here we go,” said the Director’s voice in my in-ear monitors.

The house lights dimmed. Three spotlights waited for us, ringed by cameras. When we walked out, they shifted to make a path for us, then shifted again to close the route behind us.

We were greeted with a scattering of applause from the scattered audience.

The Director spoke in my ears. “Don’t worry, we’re beefing up the crowd noise for the simulcast.”

I hoped we weren’t going to have to listen to him through the whole show.

“The second you step to the mic, you’re on,” the Director said. He’d told me twice earlier. I wanted to tell him to shut up and leave me alone in my head.

I lingered outside the light. I couldn’t see the empty room, but there was no mistaking the silence; a full house could never be this quiet. I had to pretend. Pretend this was a 2020 show, or one of the dozens of tiny spaces I’d played alone or with the new band. Those places were sometimes empty, too. It wasn’t lack of audience wigging me out; it was lack of response. The moment I started playing, we’d be beamed to millions of Hoodies expecting me to pretend I was playing directly to them. I needed to feel them, and there was no way to do that.

The techs had taped a square where they wanted me to stand except for the times they’d scheduled movement. Taped down my set list. Taped exact channels where I was allowed to roam to interact with Marcia and Silva at the specified moments. Lots of shows were choreographed, I reminded myself, even if mine never had been. I’d agreed to all of this. Why?

Without triggering the cameras, I called to the room off mic. “Come closer. Please.”

Nobody moved. I gave Silva and Marcia a panicked look over my shoulder, which they didn’t return.

“Treat it as a practice,” Silva said. “We can just have fun.”

“Luuuuuuuuuuuuuce!” came a ragged shout from nearby. I shielded my eyes and spotted Rosemary standing front and center. Play to Rosemary. She had to be the one person in the room who was there to hear me, rather than the ghost of who I used to be. Play to Rosemary. Play.

I stepped forward.

The first song on the set list was “172 Ways,” which I’d written specifically for this new trio. Before I could think myself into another corner, I kicked into the opening riff. The band joined me after four repetitions, Silva matching my guitar two octaves lower. We ripped through the song. I relaxed a little. The sound boomed through the room, but it didn’t sound awful. Play it to Rosemary; maybe she’d be excited to hear something she hadn’t heard before.

We let the last chord ring, and Marcia drummed through the transition between songs, as planned, seamlessly switching beats. No surprises. She counted off, and we moved from “172 Ways” into “Don’t Even Think About It.” A 2020 audience would have screamed at that point, but I didn’t hear anybody, even Rosemary. No applause in the transition, either. In a real live show, we might throw a few extra bars in here to build, but we’d been warned not to do that. Stick to the plan.

I tried to force myself into the moment. The second song was always the one that mattered. First song, some people still aren’t paying attention, and you’re still feeling out the room and getting comfortable. The second song is where you win them over.

A light appeared in the back of the house, a single bright spot in the darkness. Interesting, but playing to a guide took concentration, so I put it out of my mind. Another change in the darkness halfway down the room, on my left. We kept going. The chorus came around, and this time I heard a couple of voices singing along. Rosemary, maybe, and maybe one of the contest winners had actually seen me play before? This song had been around a long time. It was possible.

The edges of the dark changed. Something was happening just beyond my vision. I wanted to know what it was, but there was no good way to find out. People were coming closer; that was it. Bodies filled the space beyond the barrier.

The song ended with a build and a sudden drop-off, stopping on the IV chord, no resolution. This time, the applause was far more robust than it had been when we walked out; much louder than I’d expected twenty people could be, but maybe their clapping carried in the empty space. Maybe they’d reached some kind of acoustic sweet spot.

Except that wasn’t it, because they kept cheering, and it was more noise than twenty people could make.

“Next song needs to start,” said the voice in my ears.

Next song was “Look, a Gift Horse,” four to the floor, pulsing like a disco. It had a long enough intro for me to look around, long enough to take a few permitted steps toward Silva. I was supposed to stay with the spotlight, or move slowly enough for it to stay with me, but I deliberately zagged forward before turning, so I could see into the house.

“You’re off track,” said the voice in my ears.

I crossed the stage to Silva, as I was supposed to. Leaned over to play guitar to guitar, and whispered to him, “There are people out there.”

Lots of them. From the stage’s edge, where really, I should be allowed to play, I’d seen them. Two doors were open, one at the back and one on the side, and a steady stream of people poured in.

I made my way back to my mic, mind buzzing. What was going on? The Director in-ear hadn’t said anything yet, but his focus was probably on what his monitors showed, not the actual theater. We were part of a fiction he was creating, which didn’t have any room in it for the reality of the situation.

Whoever they were, I felt their presence. The room’s sound changed, and so did the energy, which was to say energy existed now that hadn’t minutes before. Shapes writhed, shifted, danced. Silva and Marcia felt it, too, or else they felt the change in me and responded. I hadn’t realized how lackluster the beginning must have been.

I’d approached this show as an obligation, something I’d promised without fully committing myself. Body, but not heart, the concert an orchestrated necessity leading up to an orchestrated action. Not once had I considered it to be a real show, of the kind I gave night after night for audiences small and smaller, even though I’d picked the venue deliberately.

I’d lied to myself about not wanting a conjuring. Somewhere out there, in their Hoodies, thousands watched and listened. Some of them because of StageHoloLive and “Blood and Diamonds” and this silly comeback feature, but some because they’d seen a video that made them think I might have something worthwhile to say. Why did I have to keep learning that there was never a moment to phone it in?

I turned my brain off, then. Turned off the part of me that debated where I should be on the stage, and what I should say next, and what song came next, and who was out there listening, remotely or in person. Play for all of them. Play to reach just one of them. Play.

When the song ended, the cheers were definitely louder than they’d been at the beginning. I still couldn’t tell how many people were out there, but they were into it. I wanted to greet them, but we’d been given no permission to talk until the second-to-last song. We launched “Ricochet,” then “Noise on Noise,” then “Light Me Up.” Brought it down for “Leaving Town”; I couldn’t see Rosemary anymore, but she was there in the song. Then “A Minor Second,” and everyone was there in my head, and I sang to April and my family and Alice and the 2020 and all the people who’d passed through my life, or who’d let me pass through theirs. With no filler, we sped forward through the set, barreling toward the one moment I’d truly been waiting for, until we were there.

The space we’d left for “sixteen-bar band introduction” came just before the song. They wouldn’t cut me off at this point, not when we hadn’t played “Blood and Diamonds” yet.

I turned to Marcia and Silva. “Watch me for the changes,” I said, though we’d discussed it already and it didn’t need to be said. They rolled into the groove we’d chosen, ready to follow. The underpinning to disguise my intent, to make it harder for editors to clip any of this out for their on-demand video after the fact.

I shielded my eyes with my hand to see beyond the spotlight. In a normal show, I’d ask to turn the house lights up, but I knew that wasn’t allowed in this in-between space. Still, I could tell they were out there.

“Hi,” I said. “I suppose you’re all wondering why I gathered you here today.”

Don’t be silly, I told myself. You have sixteen bars to do this. You know what you want to say.

I told them about the last show here and why we’d played that night. I told them about the parking lot the night before. And the nights after, waiting to be told we could tour again. About April getting sick, the fear, the protests, the list on my collective’s wall of all the things we lost.

The Director’s voice hit my ears. “That’s sixteen bars. Launch the song.”

I pulled the monitors from my ears and kept going. “I used to own this club called the 2020. Not Before; up until pretty recently. I tried my best to make it a home base for every musical weirdo looking for community outside of hoodspace, and we made some pretty good music there. It isn’t that hard to carve a space like that if you’re willing to break the law, but there’s no reason for it to be illegal anymore. We need to take community back ourselves—nobody’s going to give it to us.”

I told them about the 2020, and how they could do the same or similar for art or storytelling or theater if music wasn’t their thing. Hoping this wasn’t the moment they cut us off, I told them what StageHolo did to venues, and what I thought they needed to do, the little actions and the big ones.

“I think enough time has passed. It’s okay to be afraid, but we don’t have to let it rule us. We’re all afraid; it’s what we do when we’re afraid that matters. People are a risk worth taking. Let’s create something new together.”

That was the cue Silva and Marcia and I had worked out to kick the song for real. Without monitors, I didn’t know if we were still on the air, if the Director was shouting at me or had given up on us entirely, but I didn’t care anymore.

“Manifest Independence.” The glowing lyrics hidden behind a dresser in a hotel in this very town. The second draft, played years later to a bunch of drones at Graceland. Revised again until it became actual song, rather than screed, then revised again, until it said everything I needed it to say. An instruction manual, a guide, a call to action.

Without monitors, I couldn’t hear my guitar or my vocals, but I had the beat behind me, the anchor of Silva’s bass. I bashed at my guitar. My cuticles split and bled. My voice was full, guitar strong: we were all one living organism. “Manifest Independence” was a seismic shimmer, a drumbassguitar wall of noise; sound made physical, tangible, breathable. A benediction. All my hopes for a new After to strive for together, a new and better Now, however long it took to build. Everything that mattered in the moment.

I broke a string, then another. Pulled a third off to get it out of the way. Silva and Marcia were right there with me, following as I repeated the chorus, echoed it with the strings I had left, the voice I had left, the last of my energy. I didn’t want it to end. We finally brought it to a clattering stop, but it was hard to tell, because the room was just as loud when we hit the last chord, full and screaming. I didn’t know where this audience had come from, if I had drawn them from my mind, but I was willing to believe in them for as long as they believed in me, as long as they spread the good contagion, the one that answered our song in one voice, saying we’re with you, we’re here, we did this thing together.

“Blood and Diamonds” was an afterthought. I switched to my acoustic because the electric was out of strings, and stuck the monitors back in my ears. How did StageHoloLive bands handle broken strings, given their strict timing? A question for another time.

“This is for the contest winners,” I said in the smallest act of appeasement ever. I didn’t hate the contest winners. I hoped they weren’t too put out by the mystery crowd, if the mystery crowd was even real.

I didn’t hate “Blood and Diamonds,” either. Wouldn’t have played it given the choice, but I didn’t hate it. I knew it had gotten me here. It wasn’t the song I needed anymore for me; if it still spoke to others, reminded them of a place or time where it mattered to them, that was okay, too. I played it like it mattered, like my nineteen-year-old self had meant it.

The song ended, met with extended applause. I wiped my sweaty face with my equally sweaty arm. “Thank you,” I said, meaning it.

“Hold still for three… two… one,” the Director counted down, “and we’re clear.”

The house lights came on. The space was full of people, still cheering, even as they edged toward the doors.

“What the fuck?” asked the Director. As if they’d heard, the crowd emptied out. Not frantically, not crushing each other, just a steady stream toward the exits. A moment later, twenty confused contest winners stood scattered around an otherwise empty room.

38 ROSEMARY ^Coda

Rosemary’s instructions to the people she’d invited were clear. One thing she’d learned in her diversion shows: give everyone a way to get in and out safely—don’t withhold any information. Some had already been through this with her a couple of times and knew how it went. Some of the audience had been through real raids, like everyone she’d convinced to come from Baltimore. The riskiest were the ones she’d reached out to in hoodspace and invited to experience the real thing after they’d raved about the Graceland video.

It had gone as well as she’d hoped. She’d unlocked all the doors before the show started, and they waited until after the first song to start slipping in. StageHolo hadn’t bothered with security for twenty contest winners. Any managers or executives who were watching watched remotely, and the cameras were all pointed at the stage, not the audience. The camera operators and sound engineers all had jobs to do and singular focus. The company would hesitate to risk calling the cops and interrupting the show for all the SHL viewers. Ironic that this might prove to be the safest gig of all.

Luce’s energy changed as the space filled. She needed that audience. Once she could feel them in the room with her, she relaxed and played like she had at the 2020. The kind of show you had to be there to experience fully.

The 2020 people were used to proximity and crowded close, as did the others Rosemary had met at shows. They led the way for those who had ventured out of hoodspace for the first time at her invitation, people who hadn’t gone looking for secret venues, or hadn’t known they were out there to seek, like Rosemary in her own personal Before. Their body language interested her: the ones who had done this long ago and let memory dictate their behavior; the ones who were clearly trying to conjure their own invisible bubbles of space. She wanted to tell them all they would be okay, that this was a first step, that it would get easier. A few had Hoodies up. Recording, she hoped, so there would be a second record of this show, one that included the full audience, and couldn’t be edited by the company.

She entered hoodspace once herself, partway through the set, to see what the SHL viewers saw. She could’ve spawned directly into the show, but she chose to enter from outside. They’d rendered the marquee as it was meant to be, all letters whole and lit. Inside, a vast, crowded space, made to look like the Peach but more generic. She found a path through and approached the front. Luce’s eyes were open, roving the crowd she couldn’t see, an act of faith Rosemary had never credited before. She looked worn but happy. Her angles were sharper than Rosemary remembered, her arms ropy and muscular and bone thin.

Leaving the concert playing in the background, she opened a staff chat to see what the techs were saying; they were frantic and overwhelmed. They’d had to mirror the show dozens more times than they’d expected to accommodate for all the extra traffic. She wasn’t really supposed to be there, but it had been easy enough to get access to their channels.

Almost as easy as the other tiny tweak she’d made: the one where she’d sneaked into the back end of the SHL site and created a free guest code for the show, a code which she’d distributed far and wide through an anonymous account. SHL would still make bank. If a few thousand people had happened upon a discount code, well, that was nobody’s fault. A glitch in the system.

When Rosemary dropped her Hoodie again, she felt a momentary dislocation; her actual position was ten feet left of where she’d been standing in the virtual space. Luce was a smaller figure onstage than in hood, but the music hit in a different way. It surrounded Rosemary fully, emanating from the amplifiers, pulsing from the speakers, and up from the floor, and from the people around her, dancing and singing along. She joined them.

Luce had told her she’d be using the penultimate song to talk to the audience, wherever they were, and when the time came, Rosemary listened along with them. She was them. It was everything she’d thought it could be: a call to action, short term and long term. If it spoke to the rest of them the way it spoke to her, it would work.

“Let’s create something new together,” Luce said, and then, by some invisible cue, the song that had been building behind her exploded. Rosemary could go to shows every night for the rest of her life and she’d never cease to be amazed at the way musicians spoke to each other onstage without speaking. Rosemary shot a grin at Sadie and Nolan, standing a few feet to her right, and they both returned her smile. This was what she had promised them. The same band from the barn show, but not the same performance, not the same songs.

This was the song from the Graceland gates, the song she’d been sent at the beach, but bigger, more fully realized. As big as the ocean. She dropped any thoughts of the company, the job, the people she’d brought in, the trouble, the room, her body, the bodies around her. Luce was a giant, she was the whole room as she attacked her guitar, but Luce didn’t matter anymore, either. Only the song, the moment, the song, the moment, the moment, the moment she was in and already past, looking past, saying I am here, I am here, I will always have been here, everyone here is marked by their presence.

And then it ended. Luce stood onstage again, a human-sized person above them, staring out as if she couldn’t quite see them but she knew they were there. Strings dangled from her guitar in all directions. One of the strings must have sliced her when it snapped: a thin line of blood trickled down her forehead, which she wiped away as if it were sweat.

Rosemary had told people to leave during “Blood and Diamonds” or right after, before SHL could figure out what to do about them. She knew she should be helping clear the room, but she couldn’t resist stopping to listen to “Blood and Diamonds.” No matter how many times she saw Luce in the future, she knew she’d never hear her play that song again.

It sounded different with this trio, different with the years on Luce’s voice. Not in a bad way, but in the way of something welcome and familiar and changed. She wasn’t a kid in a hospital anymore, either; she could hold on to the memory of the song’s reassurance without being called back there. She clapped and cheered as hard as she could to make up for the dwindling crowd.

The lights came on, leaving Luce and her band looking mystified. Her bassist whispered in her ear, and she handed him her guitar and climbed down to chat with the contest winners, who looked equally confused, but satisfied.

Rosemary took a moment to pop back into hoodspace to see whether people were talking about the show. When she ventured into the discussion forums, they were full of people trying to figure out what to do to answer Luce’s call. A law student offering to start a group to take on congregation laws, someone else saying they wanted to host a show in their basement, someone else talking about running for office on a pro-congregation platform. Good.

Luce was chatting with a contest winner. An artist liaison should probably check if the artist needed anything, but Rosemary was suddenly afraid to approach; afraid she hadn’t done enough, or that she’d gone over the top, that she still might not be forgiven. Then Luce spotted her, and she smiled, and Rosemary knew that her terrible past actions might not entirely be past, but she’d been given another chance.

Rosemary tried to make herself unobtrusive, hoping the SHL employees who had seen the crowd wouldn’t associate it with her. They all seemed to be pretending it hadn’t happened, since they couldn’t explain it. A few contest winners stood chatting with each other, still energized, buzzing with excitement. They hadn’t left yet even though the concert had been over long enough for the equipment to all be packed away. Canned music played over the loudspeakers, and two women danced by the exit.

“Thank you.” Luce appeared beside Rosemary, holding out her arms. Her back was soaked with sweat, her forehead smeared with blood, but it didn’t matter. When they hugged, it felt familiar. “Do you want to take a walk? I wouldn’t mind a walk.”

Rosemary recognized Luce’s mood, the way she’d always surrounded herself with people after a show. She nodded. They exited through the front doors, still unlocked. Across the street, past the parked cars, there was an overgrown path down into a small park, broken-branched trees lining either side. The path led them to a tiny footbridge, where they leaned on their elbows and looked down at a stream, shallow but fast moving.

“I thought that went really well,” Rosemary said.

“Great, really. Sound could’ve been better, but we couldn’t have asked for a more perfect evening.” Her eyes shone, the same postshow glow Rosemary remembered. She’d seen it in other performers, too, but few fed on live music the way Luce did.

“You were amazing.”

“Thanks. Uh, was I hallucinating, or were there a few more people in there for part of the show? Or is that part of the StageHolo experience? I could’ve sworn…”

“I might’ve invited a few people. I’d heard you wanted an audience.”

“Nice, kid. Was that company-approved?”

Rosemary shook her head, trying to underplay her pride. “Not approved. We’ll see whether I get in trouble, or if they’re still happy with me for bringing you in.”

“So you’re going to keep working for them?”

“I don’t know what to do anymore. You’re right that I’m perpetuating the system, not changing it, but I keep feeling like if I stayed long enough, maybe I could get them to see these are stupid policies.”

“Maybe,” Luce said. “I guess there’s something in helping them see there’s room for us to exist.”

They both grew quiet, watching the stream run beneath the bridge. There was movement in the trees, and an owl darted out of the darkness to skim the water. It came away with a small silver fish writhing in its talons, then disappeared back into the woods.

“Huh.” The look on Luce’s face was pure amazement.

Rosemary was surprised, too. “I’ve seen hawks attack package drones. And mice in the fields. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an owl hunt before.”

“I grew up in Brooklyn. Pigeons and parrots.”

Rosemary had never seen a single interview where Luce mentioned Brooklyn or her childhood. She decided not to call attention to it. “Hey, Luce, do you know if Joni is playing somewhere else now? I got her to talk to me once, but then she wouldn’t respond after that.”

“I think she’s involved with a warehouse series. Outsider art and music and theater, all interwoven. Don’t send your goons, please.”

“I wouldn’t! I’m trying to stop them from doing that, I really am. It’s just going to take time.” If she stayed, people she liked would always be saying that. That was her choice: stay and try to change things from the inside, or find another path. She was surer that other paths existed now than she had been.

Luce shrugged. “I should probably get back. We’re driving tonight.”

“You’re still my favorite performer.” Rosemary hadn’t meant to say that out loud; it hung in the air.

“You need to get out more.”

“Ha. Well, have a safe drive. See you down the road.”

“Coming soon to a town near you. Look, if you ever want another option, maybe we could use you as a tour manager for a little while. Or booking agent. Or both. It would be way easier to arrange shows if we had someone more… plugged in… on our team. The money would be crap, and you’d have to get used to sleeping in very tight quarters, but it’s an alternative.”

“For real?”

“For real. Find me when you’re ready.” Luce turned to walk away.

“So you’re just going to keep doing those little shows?” Rosemary called after her.

Luce stopped and looked back. “It’s a decent way to spend forever.”

Rosemary recognized the lyric from “These Turning Hands,” but she didn’t doubt that was exactly what would happen if Luce wanted it. She had a way of making things turn out. She was a small figure walking back toward the Peach now, shoulders uneven, gait hitched like someone balancing on a boat deck. She rounded a curve in the path and vanished from sight.

There were other things Rosemary would have liked to say to her. How she had learned to stand her ground in a crowd, as Luce had taught her; how the idea of a crowd had gradually become less terrifying. How the job she had invented for herself, her secret subversion, had brought SHL inches closer to what she had originally believed it to be. How she thought she might build a career trying to right her biggest wrong, and she still wasn’t sure it would be enough.

Luce had once told Rosemary how you grabbed on to a single note and, if it sounded good, you played it until you were ready to pick a new one. And the thing she hadn’t said, but Rosemary had learned from her, later: that in any given moment, there’s no such thing as a wrong note. Any note can be played over any chord, and any chord can be played over any single note. That it’s possible to be a note nestled into a chord, off but right, in the moment before the song moves on around you.