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.