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.”