Back in her room, she pulled up her SHL Hoodie—they’d offered to issue her another new one, but she didn’t see anything wrong with using the one that had been sent to her for the Bloom Bar. Aran had given her his number, and she found herself pinging him into an empty chat room.
He spawned into the empty space, glanced around, and with a quick swipe, conjured a woodsy background. “For old times’ sake! I get nervous in empty rooms.”
He had an expensive, photo-realistic av. His band did well enough for him to afford it, or maybe SHL gave talent high-end looks to keep up appearances. Either way, she felt shoddy in comparison.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“I have no idea what I’m doing. I’ve spent the whole day searching this stupid town trying to find musicians, and as far as I can tell there aren’t any. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do short of inspecting every barn and garage in the county for amps and drum kits.”
He laughed. “That’d be some good detective work, but it does sound time-consuming. How big is the town you’re in?”
“I don’t know. Small.” “I don’t know” was a lie. Four hundred and ninety-three people within the town’s outer limits. She didn’t want to admit she’d gone home.
“Okay, if you’re in a small town, you’ve got two options. If you think there’s something to find, then hang around longer. Win trust. Watch people. Listen. It might take weeks.”
Weeks. How long would they give her? “Or?”
“Or give up on that town and go somewhere else. You said you’re from a farm, right? You know there are some places nothing grows, no matter how hard you try.”
“Just give up? They won’t be mad I wasted their money?”
“Not if you leave because you’re following a lead.”
“I don’t have any leads.”
“You do, because your buddy Aran is giving you one.”
The background blanked out, then morphed into a cityscape she didn’t recognize. She’d known sooner or later it would come to this. If she wanted to keep the job, if she wanted to get out of this town and this house, she had to leap. Somewhere out there, somebody waited for her to connect their dream of a life in music with the dream enablers at SHL. She had a mission to fulfill.
14
LUCE
Leather Jacket
The next royalty check was big enough that I called an accountant for advice. He told me to put a third of it away for taxes and pretend it didn’t exist, to invest a third, and to use a third for living expenses or spending, however I saw fit.
That made as much sense as anything. I didn’t feel bad taking money I’d earned, but I had mixed feelings about this particular windfall. People listening to my music again? Great. People only listening to that one song? That frustrated me. I wanted them to hear the other stuff, too, but most of all I still wanted to play. It wasn’t fair that one old song kept rattling around like a dying echo of everything before, and I couldn’t reach its listeners to introduce them to any of my other, better songs. Not in person, anyway.
My first thought was to buy a used van and hit the road again. But to where? There was still no place to tour. I missed music as sustenance, music as contact, music as currency; I had no idea how to make that happen again. I’d burned the bridge at my old label, so there’d be no help from them. My searches for open venues had come up blank. Anything that existed was flying under the radar, which meant there was no way to tour and capitalize on my new fame. Places would open again soon, I was sure, when people stopped accepting the government-fueled paranoia as normal.
Another thing had started bothering me, too. How many stories had I heard of musicians who achieved success and used their earnings to buy their parents a home or a car? I didn’t even know if my family was still alive after the pox had swept the country. They were unsearchable, unconnected to the world outside their community. I sometimes rang the house to listen to my father’s voice mail message, but nobody ever picked up the phone. Caller ID or nobody left to answer? There was only one way to know for sure.
I got to the bus early out of old habit, even though I had left my guitar home for once. I needn’t have bothered; there were only four other people in line. They stood with oceans of space between them, so far from each other it could barely be called a line at all. I couldn’t stand the suspicion in everyone’s eyes, like the other travelers were there to kill them or infect them or both.
The day was supposed to get unseasonably warm for March, but it started out as a chilly morning. I’d dressed for my destination in a sweater and borrowed ankle-length skirt. The only part of my outfit that still felt like me was my combat boots, which I figured nobody would notice. Now I shivered and wished I’d worn my leather jacket, too.
“Coffee’s on me,” I said to the four others, pointing to the vending machine. “Then I can say I bought for the whole bus.”
Nobody responded. I wondered if this was just the way things were these days, if I was violating some new travel protocol. I felt awkward, out of sorts; partly nerves from the trip I was embarking on, and partly the long skirt and cardigan, which made me feel like I was wearing a costume of the person I would have been if I’d never left Brooklyn. Were they all looking at me and thinking they knew something about me? They didn’t. I bought a cup of bitter vending machine coffee for myself; it made a good hand warmer.
The bus arrived twenty minutes late. A sign on the side read THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE WHILE WE IMPROVE OUR FLEET. There were a few people already on board, each in a separate row except for one couple and another pair that looked like a mother and child. Everyone else sat as far from each other as possible.
It was the quietest trip up I-95 I’d ever experienced. Nobody said a word, and if anyone was listening to headphones, they kept them at levels I couldn’t perceive. All that silence made me want to scream, but I settled for looking out the window and willing a new song into existence. It didn’t happen.
The corner where the bus dropped us normally bustled. There were still people out and about, and they still moved with proper New York speed and conviction, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that this place, too, was diminished. I walked two blocks crosstown toward the train I wanted, noticing presences and absences: more police, no street vendors, shuttered stores, delivery bikes traveling in vast pelotons. No tourists as far as I could tell, though these weren’t tourist-heavy blocks. It wasn’t until I approached the subway entrance that I encountered a crowd.
“What’s going on?” I asked a man standing at the group’s edge.
He shrugged. “Same old.”
“I haven’t been in the city for a couple of years. What’s ‘same old’?”
“They meter the stations now, y’know? There’s a bag scanner and a body scanner, and they only let a certain number of people down there at a time.”
“That must take forever!”
Another shrug. “It’s not so bad, as long as the weather’s okay. It moves faster than you’d think. There’ll be another wave in a second.”
I didn’t see how that could possibly work, but two minutes later, we moved forward. My backpack set off the scanner, and after I passed through the metal detector I had to argue that the wire cutter I used to clip new strings wasn’t meant to cause trouble. I didn’t even know why it was in my backpack instead of my gig bag where it belonged, but it had somehow hitched a ride. None of which swayed the officer, who confiscated it anyway.