April moaned and tossed, obviously exhausted but not sleeping. I felt helpless. She needed a doctor, but I couldn’t make her go. I sanitized the bathroom and kitchen sinks and all the doorknobs, scrubbed my hands raw with soap and hot water, and managed to fall into a half sleep until one of her roommates walked in around four. I got up to talk to them, but the other bedroom door closed before I got there, and nobody answered when I knocked. Back to the sleeping bag.
“Go home,” April whispered not long after the sun rose. “I’ll be fine.”
“Like hell. I’m not leaving until you go to a doctor or one of your roommates says they’ll keep an eye on you.”
“Don’t count on that. They’re assholes.”
“How about a clinic, at least? Finite cost. I’ll pay if you don’t have the cash.” I knew I shouldn’t have said that the second it was out of my mouth.
“Go home, Luce. I’ll go to a clinic later if I’m not feeling better. I promise.”
I’d stepped over a line. We weren’t really friends. I’d been her employer, sort of. We’d been in a band, sort of. Her pride was never going to let me help more than I’d helped already. I went online to switch my tickets to an earlier bus.
“Feel better. Thanks for the gig and the awesome amp and the place to stay…” My voice trailed off.
She propped herself on one elbow. “The amp? It made it back here, right?”
I pointed to the corner, and she leaned back again. “Thanks.”
“You’re sure I can’t do anything else?”
She waved me away. I would have preferred to tell a roommate how sick she was, but I didn’t see anyone, and she had said they were assholes. I showed myself out.
I bought a coffee and a sourdough bagel on the way to the subway, both of which I regretted when I realized it was rush hour. Even with all the closings, rush hour in New York still strained the system. I had to swing my guitar off my back and hold it in front of me to protect it, while the other elbow hooked the pole, keeping my coffee from my face. I distracted myself by people-watching, but even that was less fun than usual with the bad night’s sleep setting in. It might have been my imagination, but everyone looked drawn, lessened. By the time I got off the train, my coffee had gone cold. I tossed it in the nearest wastebasket.
The morning bus back to Baltimore wasn’t as crowded as the one I’d taken the day before. Nobody fussed over the guitar’s seat, and there were enough windows for everyone. I took a seat on the top level to see Manhattan as we drove away; New York always looked majestic from New Jersey. After the island’s southern tip dipped from view, I turned my attention to the thought I’d been avoiding.
What to do next? I’d hoped playing a show would buoy me, but a single show’s high faded too fast. It had been a temporary distraction at best. I needed something real and lasting, and nothing I thought of fit the bill.
What was the new site the guy with the glasses had mentioned after my set? At least researching and setting myself up on a new platform might eat some time and make me feel productive. He’d called it Super Hollow. No. Stage Hollow? I searched on my phone until I found it: StageHolo. Not the catchiest brand name.
The bus braked hard and I braced against the seat in front of me, arm across my guitar to keep it from shifting. I looked out on a sea of brake lights. A little odd heading away from the city at this time of morning.
I turned back to the StageHolo site. It looked like they were offering private shows through proprietary hardware, at a fee. “No parking, no puking. Like a live show, but better.” Their taglines needed work, and they didn’t seem to have an artist sign-up link. It looked a little rough.
The bus still hadn’t moved. I stood to look through the front window. Others did the same.
“Can you see what’s the delay?” I asked a man who looked like he’d been paying attention.
“Nah. An ambulance pulled up on the other side of the highway, way in front. I think they tried to get through on this side but the shoulder was too narrow.”
I went back to my seat to wait. Another twenty minutes passed. The bus lurched forward, and eventually passed a tow truck trying to extricate a car from the guardrail. Once we got past, the highway emptied out again, as if there’d never been a problem.
We made it as far as the Thomas Edison rest stop. This was supposed to be an express from New York to Baltimore, but the loudspeaker crackled and the driver announced, “We’re making a quick stop to disembark a sick passenger. Stay on the bus and we’ll be back on our way momentarily.”
The doors were on the opposite side from where I was sitting, so I had to crane my neck to see. An ambulance waited for us at the rest stop, and we all watched as a passenger I didn’t remember from the line made his way to it with the help of two paramedics. There hadn’t been much noise from downstairs; I assumed if something dramatic had happened, we would have heard it upstairs.
I checked the time. Eleven a.m. already. Late enough to text April without feeling too guilty if I woke her.
How u doing? I wrote. No response.
The bus started again. The rest of the ride was uneventful. I texted April a couple more times then gave up, hoping she was sleeping it off. If she didn’t answer, I didn’t have any other way of reaching her.
Trudging from the bus back to the house reinforced the letdown. A single show was not a tour. It wasn’t even enough of a rush to get me through a day. I let myself in to the house I lived in, a house that still didn’t feel like a home. Not that there was anything homey about a tour’s worth of hotel rooms, but at least that carried some payoff. Home was the road, the gig, the music.
There was nobody in the living room. Nobody in the kitchen. A cat I’d never seen before mewled a greeting, but when I stooped to pet it my gig bag swung off my shoulder and it skittered away. Back in my room, I leaned the guitar against a wall and collapsed on the bed in an exact replay of every day previous to the day before. Playing a single show hadn’t changed anything, and I still didn’t know what would.
8
ROSEMARY
Little Boxes
The farm truck hadn’t been allowed on highways since the phaseout, so Rosemary had to hire a single-cell cab to drive her to the StageHoloLive orientation. She’d never been in a single-cell before. A nice bench seat to herself, and if she kept her hands in her lap she didn’t have to contemplate the other people who’d sat here and touched the surfaces. She didn’t have to touch anything other than her own phone and the door handles, and there was no driver to force awkward conversation, the way they did in her parents’ old shows.
She was glad she hadn’t driven the farm truck; she’d be stuck watching the road ahead and listening to the misfiring engine, which roared too loud for her to bother with music. In the truck she’d be stuck on the rutted county roads, since Rattlebang wasn’t allowed on this smooth new automated highway. This way she got to look out the windows at everything she’d missed for the last dozen years stuck in Jory. Not that she could see much from the highway, but she caught glimpses: shopping centers turned detention centers turned Superwally distribution centers; barns with winter-bare oaks thrusting through caved-in roofs; the skeletal spines of roller coasters in an abandoned amusement park; a motel captured in time; a cinema, where total strangers used to gather in large groups to watch movies. Everywhere, the ghosts of a past she was old enough to remember, barely, but not to remember well. Her parents’ world, not hers.