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.”