A Song for a New Day

by Sarah Pinsker

  She was grateful to have a wall at her back, and oriented herself to be the nearest of her group to the door, even if her view was now blocked. Way too many people. How did they all stand being in the same room? The heat of them, the air they displaced, somebody’s cologne, somebody else’s sweat, unless it was her own. Even in the packed Bloom Bar show, she hadn’t felt so crowded, though of course that hadn’t been real. Concentrate on the tech, she told herself. Find something to take your mind off it.

  Jeannie whispered, “That bay over there is sound mixing.” She pointed to a man in headphones behind a large screen filled with dancing meters, green cresting to yellow tips then falling back again.

  An identical bay, with a young woman at the controls. “The one next to him is another mixing bay, for in-ear monitors, making sure the musicians hear what they need to hear. And that whole section is cameras.” She pointed to the vast monitor bank covering two walls. “Some for the actual camera feed, some for what the audience sees, some for knitting it all together. The holo camera rig is automated, but we keep people at the controls in case anything needs a human touch. They’re watching carefully during this particular set because there’s a chance some camera may not follow the updated path for the new set list. Anytime you make last-minute changes you increase the likelihood things will go wrong. Remember that, kids.”

  Some monitors showed Magritte, some showed her brother, but the vast majority showed the two together. On a raised platform at the room’s center, overhead projectors conjured a life-sized, living, breathing holo of the two performers without backdrop, knit seamlessly into one image.

  Rosemary’s jaw dropped. “How do they do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Put them in one room together when they’re not!”

  Her eyes understood how. Each performer had their own camera array, with their own fake stage set behind them matching the others. The two were combined in studio. “How?” wasn’t the question she wanted answered, though it was the first that had come out of her mouth. Not “Why?” either, since why was obvious: to make each performer look three-dimensional, they needed to be shot from all angles, with nobody else blocking them.

  The question was a different “How?”—it was, How do those performers act as if they’re interacting with each other when they’re isolated? Patent Medicine must have been in booths like these as well. Those songs that had so moved her, the performance that had reached out and spoken to her; it had all been an elaborate ruse.

  The musicians in the booths started a new song. The guitar had an effect on it that made it tremble. Magritte sang a line in some other language, something intense, with a dark turn at the end. The guitar echoed her, in her own voice, trembling, snarling. She looked at her brother, locked eyes with him. Cut him with another line, which his guitar tossed back at her. Their faces drew closer to each other. Inches apart.

  Rosemary tore her eyes away from the holographic combined image to look at the individual monitors again. They were still in the same positions they had been in in the three-dimensional version, but now she internalized the isolation again.

  “Can they see each other?” she asked, hoping it was a less naive question.

  “Sometimes. They can’t see much beyond the lights, but they have marks to show where they expect each other to be, and they do have visual monitors in their floors. We can correct if they’re off by a few inches.”

  It was amazing. If either missed their mark, they’d look ridiculous. One singing to the other’s nose, or playing guitar at nobody. Instead, this was a performance built in two halves, a relationship carried out by two people with complete faith that the other was where they were supposed to be.

  The song ended, but the guitar continued into another song. The image flickered, jumped, then crumpled the two performers’ images like paper. The holo in the room’s center spun them into prismatic arcs, flattened Picasso figures given flesh: jaws elongated, limbs twisted, impossibly long shards of arm and body and guitar wound together.

  “Fuck!” somebody shouted. “Nobody said they’d segue from ‘Carajo’ to ‘Contagious.’ Those were supposed to be hard stops.”

  “Cameras are three seconds behind cues.”

  “Jump forward.”

  “We’ll miss a few seconds. There’ll be a gap.”

  “Better than the paper dolls we have now.” The paper dolls were creepy, distorted versions of the people in the booths. Rosemary slipped around her group to get a look at a console running code.

  “On my mark, jump to the thirty-second cue for ‘Contagious.’ Five. Four. Three. Two. One.”

  The real-time monitors stayed on the performers. The holo took a stomach-churning leap to match up, then they were restored to three-dimensionality. It was a strange relief, an escape from an uncanny valley.

  Magritte and her brother never lost a beat. If any control room stress had reached their earpieces, they showed no sign. The woman was a mesmerizing performer. It wasn’t a matter of losing herself in the songs; she was part of the music, but she controlled it, used it. Something about the way she addressed the cameras said, “I am putting on this show for you.” Not warmth, not connection. Power. Even in a setting this clinical, that much came through. Even in a playful song like the next one, or a quiet song like the one after that.

  “And we’re offline,” announced someone in the room as the last song came to an end.

  The holo faded out of existence, but the artists on monitor in the booths did not.

  “What was that?” asked Magritte, looking straight into a camera as if she was about to reach through it. “That shouldn’t have happened. Who missed the cue?”

  Her brother lifted his guitar strap over his head, placed the guitar on a stand. Sweat shone on his face, dripping down his neck and into his collar. “Mags. It was our fault. My fault. We told them to cut a song, not to stitch the empty space.”

  She turned her glare on him. “If anybody complains, you can refund them yourself.”

  “Yes, yes.” He waved a hand at her. “Now, can we please leave these sauna boxes and argue off camera?”

  “Yes. Or the eavesdropping ghouls behind the cameras and mics could turn them off, since we’re not talking to them anymore at this point.”

  Somebody shut the cameras off.

  Jeannie turned to her tour group. “That’s it, start to finish. Y’all will go off and learn the specifics of your jobs through online training modules. Then some of you’ll recruit and you’ll send people here, and then some will dress them and paint them and make them pretty, and the rest will mix them and film them and send them out to their fans. You’ve got the best gigs in the world. Have fun, learn your jobs well, and as you’ve seen tonight, don’t ever let it be your fault something went wrong.”

  She said the last bit with a grin, but Rosemary couldn’t tell if she was serious or not.

  9

  LUCE

  Rip

  Whatever April had hit three of my roommates over the next week, and whatever it was, it was bad. Started with chills and fever, same as April. I kept to myself, afraid to catch it, afraid I was the vector, afraid to infect the fourth, Jaspreet, the teacher-filmmaker.

  She laughed when I told her as much. “I teach third grade, Luce. I have the immune system of a . . . what has a good immune system? Anyway, half my kids are out, too, and some had it before you went to New York. You’re not Patient Zero. If anyone brought it into the house, it was me.”

  I allowed myself to be somewhat reassured, until the next day, when she fell down the stairs. I heard the crash from my room.

  “I got dizzy,” she said.

  When I reached to help her up, she screamed like I’d hurt her. For a minute I thought she had injured herself falling, but then she tugged her sleeve back: her arm was covered with welts.

  I drove her to the emergency room
in her car, since I didn’t have one. The ER was full. Every seat was occupied by someone in a state similar to Jaspreet’s. Flushed, sweating, shivering, moaning. Some tore at spots like hers, screaming like they were being stabbed or burned.

  “I can call a friend,” Jaspreet kept saying, but she didn’t protest when I joined her on the floor of the waiting room.

  “I’ll stay until they show up.” We weren’t friends, but I regretted leaving April to her asshole roommates; I still hadn’t heard from her. If I couldn’t have been more helpful to April, the least I could do was stay here with Jaspreet until her friends came.

  Nobody came. Hours passed. I read headlines on my phone. The president called for people to stay home, for health and safety. Schools closed again. Something something legislation something something. It all made me uneasy.

  I glanced over to check on Jaspreet, who had her eyes closed and her head leaned back against the wall. “Um, you’ve got new spots. On your neck.”

  “I know. They feel like fucking cigarette burns.” She tried to turn on her phone, but her hands shook. She thumbed it unlocked and then handed it to me. “Document this for me. I’ll give you a producer credit if this turns out to be film-worthy.”

  I took the offered phone and panned over her spots as she displayed them. Recorded as they pulled her into a vestibule to get her blood pressure and temperature, both through the roof.

  The nurse had obviously had a night of it already, but she mugged for the camera. “The good news is, your stats have won you a bump to the front of the triage line. Highest fever we’ve seen all night. The bad news is that we don’t have enough beds. There’s a chair in a hallway and a nice IV of fluids waiting for you.”

  “What is it?” Jaspreet asked. “I swear I had chicken pox, and I’ve had the measles vaccine. What else causes spots?”

  The nurse shook her head. “We’re not sure yet, but we’re full of it tonight, whatever it is.”

  I waited with Jaspreet for another three hours. She slept. I watched a game show on an overhead TV with the sound off and tried my best not to touch surfaces. Whatever this was, I didn’t want it.

  The doctor who attended her—for all of two minutes—seemed more interested in cataloging and mitigating symptoms. Pill for the fever, fluids for dehydration, shot for the pain, cream to stop the itching if it started.

  “And then I can go home?” Jaspreet asked. She considered the place we lived home, my distracted brain noticed.

  The doctor shook her head. “And then we admit you. You’re not going anywhere until your fever drops out of the danger zone.”

  “Can you say ‘danger zone’ again for my camera?” she asked, but the doctor had already left.

  She turned to me. “You might as well go home. Thanks so much for hanging out all night and distracting me. It was nice getting to know you a little. I think this was the most we’ve ever chatted.”

  It was true. I gave her back her phone and told her to call if she needed anything, then returned to the house. Back to the moans of two other sick roommates and the place they considered a home but I didn’t.

  It had been midafternoon when I drove Jaspreet to the hospital, and it was nearly eleven now. Eight hours of hospital hum had exhausted me, but there was still one thing I wanted to do, since April’s phone kept ringing through and I didn’t know her roommates. We weren’t even connected on any social media platforms, so I couldn’t look to see who else knew her who I knew.

  The plaque on the amp’s back had read “Nico Lectrics,” which was easy enough to search online. I’d hoped for a phone number, but settled for an email address. I dashed off a short message. “Hi, April Mennin loaned me one of your amps the other night—it was amazing, and I’d like to talk to you about buying one sometime—but mostly I wondered if you’d heard from April in the last few days or if you had any way of checking on her. She wasn’t feeling well when I left.” I closed with my name and phone number.

  There. That was something, at least.

  * * *

  —

  The phone woke me in the morning. I leaped from the bed, catching my feet in the sheet and tumbling to the floor, then scrambling to extricate it from my jeans pocket before the fourth ring. A New York number I didn’t recognize.

  “April?” I rubbed my bashed knee.

  “Ah, shit, I’m so sorry.”

  “Sorry?” I repeated. “Who is this?”

  “My name is Nico. You emailed me. I, uh, fuck. There’s no good way to say this. April died five days ago.”

  I dropped the phone as if it had burned me. A spiderweb crack spread across the screen from one corner.

  “Hello?” Came a muffled voice from the floor. “Luce? Hello?”

  I stared at the crack until the screen lit to tell me the call had disconnected. Kept staring. It rang again, but I didn’t answer. If I pretended I hadn’t heard, if I didn’t answer, it wouldn’t be true. She’d died five days ago. Alive for me, dead for anyone who knew. Five days. I’d been home for a week. She’d died two days after I’d left New York.

  I sat down on the floor. Retrieved the phone, traced the crack in its facade, hit redial. He answered on the third ring.

  “Sorry,” I said. “You took me by surprise . . . What happened?”

  “It’s this thing that’s going around. She got a real bad case.”

  “Did she—did she go to the hospital?” I pictured her tossing and turning the night I’d spent on her floor. I should have tried harder to get her to a doctor.

  “She wouldn’t go. Said she couldn’t afford it. One of her roommates called 911 on Tuesday when they found her in the bathroom. She’d passed out and hit her head. She was in the hospital for a day after that, but none of her friends knew. She was unconscious the whole time, anyway.”

  “I should have made her go to the hospital.”

  “You know she wasn’t someone you could force. It’s not your fault. Who dies of the flu? I thought that was old people and babies.”

  “Is that what it is? The flu?”

  “No,” he said. “Or, anyway, I have no idea. All they’re saying is wash your hands and go to an emergency room if you get spots or a bad fever.”

  I nodded, then realized he couldn’t see me. “Everyone here has that, too. Everyone but me.”

  “Yeah, I’m still okay, but it feels like a matter of time.”

  “Is there a funeral?” I didn’t know if this was the right question to ask. I’d never known anyone near my own age who’d died before.

  “In Nebraska or Arkansas or wherever it is she’s from. Her parents claimed her body, I guess.” From the sound of it, he was new at this, too. “Anyway, we wanted to have a memorial, but the newspapers say to avoid big gatherings right now, so I guess we’ll do it . . . whenever this flu runs its course? Do you want me to let you know?”

  I told him I’d appreciate it. I did want to buy one of his amps, too, but now wasn’t the time. Guilt hit me that I was thinking about amps instead of April. I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea, so my brain took me elsewhere. I sat on the floor and traced the crack in my phone, over and over again. It was readable, but fractured. Fitting. What wasn’t broken at this point?

  I called my aunt, who said she was fine, thanks for asking; she’d called an ambulance for a neighbor the day before. She hadn’t heard from my family, but they didn’t talk to her any more than they talked to me. My parents’ number had never been in my phone, but I still knew it by heart. It rang eighteen times before I disconnected. I pictured the Hatzolah ambulances running themselves ragged shuttling people to hospitals, and feverish mothers tending to feverish children by the dozen. I didn’t know what I would have said if they’d answered.

  I fought the urge to chuck the phone across the room. What did it do for me anyway? It was a way for people to reach me with bad news at this point, noth
ing more. No more touring. No more April. Another way for me to lock myself in my room and avoid getting to know my roommates, and who knew if they were going to survive, either.

  Ten a.m., and I’d left Jaspreet at eleven p.m. I searched for her number in my cracked phone and realized I didn’t even have it. We weren’t friends. I’d told her to call if she needed anything, but I didn’t remember leaving my number. I called the hospital and asked them to connect me to her room. Waited to hear that she hadn’t survived the night.

  “Hello?”

  I released a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. “Hey, Jaspreet, this is Luce. I’m just checking you’re okay. You’re okay?”

  “Tired as fuck. They wake me every two hours for one thing or another. Blood, temperature. But yeah, otherwise okay. The fever is lower, and they have me on something for the nerve pain. The spots itch.”

  “I’m so glad.” She couldn’t have understood the relief in my voice, and I wasn’t about to tell her. “Glad the fever is down, I mean, not the itchy spots. Listen, I realize I said last night for you to call me, but I didn’t leave you my number, so I thought I’d give it to you. For anything.”

  “Sure. My brother is coming in a little bit, but thank you. I appreciate it. And thank you for bringing me in last night when nobody else could.”

  “No problem.”

  I hung on the line for a few more seconds, then said I had to go.

  April and I had mostly spoken on the phone or in person. Our only text messages consisted of my last several attempts to reach her. I scrolled through the tour pictures on my phone; there weren’t many. A couple from the backseat of the van to the front, a couple from the front seat to the back. One in a diner where she posed with an enormous banana split. She had her sticks in her hands in every picture, even with the ice cream.

  She wasn’t the best drummer I’d auditioned. Second best, but I’d liked her more, and I’d decided compatibility mattered more than perfection. We roomed together for eight months with no complaint, and I’d still held her at arm’s length. Why?