A Song for a New Day

by Sarah Pinsker

  I plugged my guitar in and sent silent apologies to the other sick roommates. Cranked the gain and the distortion, turned it up until the room hummed with potential noise. I stared at the neck, waiting for something that wanted to be played. Finally, I hit an E minor chord, all six strings, a wave, a wall. Hit it again and again, noise layered on noise, until it drowned out my head. Somewhere in the middle, the downbeats started sounding like words. Nobody is coming to save you, the chord told me, over and over again. Nobody is coming to save you. Chorus and verse.

  I played until my B string snapped, slashing the meat of my right thumb, and kept playing with blood running over the pick guard. Didn’t stop until my left hand was too sore to press the strings anymore, and my right hand’s cuticles were seeping and raw. It felt good to bleed. Punishment for being the one left standing.

  When I couldn’t play anymore, I left a message for the entertainment lawyer who’d vetted the label contract for me, asking him to help me get out of the rest of the contract.

  If the big clubs were closed, I’d play small ones again. I’d busk on the street. I’d open my own club if I had to. If having a label meant sitting on my hands I didn’t want a label anymore. Whatever it took. I was a lousy friend, and I didn’t know how to sit still. If all I was good at was being a vector for noise and hope, I’d be a vector. If nobody was coming to save me, I’d have to figure out a way to save myself. If I was lucky, I could do the same for some other people along the way.

  And first, I was going to go downstairs and make a big pot of chicken soup for my sick roommates. This might have to be home for a little while.

  10

  ROSEMARY

  Who Can You Trust

  The online training modules could as easily have been done at home, but trainees were supposed to finish them on campus. Maybe so you’d still be there for them to call back in if you failed one, so they could offer you a different job or send you packing.

  Rosemary didn’t mind working in the private dorm room she’d been assigned. Instead of inspirational slogans like the ones Superwally issued, the posters depicted SHL musicians. The bed sagged, but not too badly, and the desk chair was comfortable. Nice view, too.

  They’d even provided free Veneers! She’d never tried a Veneer before, since her old Hoodie didn’t support the tech. Rosemary spent ten minutes cycling through the options for the room (monk’s cell, tropical gazebo, Versailles bedroom, a dozen more) before settling on one called “Chelsea Hotel 1967.” Now when she observed the room with her Hoodie on the next setting up from clearview, the threadbare red carpet became a scuffed hardwood floor. The plywood headboard looked like wrought iron, velvet curtains filtered the sunlight, and every surface was draped with jewel-toned scarves. Given more time, she might have found one she liked more, but six years at Superwally told her not to waste company time on it, even if they offered the option.

  Rosemary dedicated herself to doing well on her modules. She knew she’d made the right choice to take this job; now she had to prove it to them. It helped that the modules interested her, or some did, anyway, the ones that weren’t about avoiding inappropriate relationships or how to log your expenses. She learned how to read a map, how to navigate interstate buses and city buses and trains, where to find information on schedules and safety. A training on what to wear would have been nice; she still didn’t want to ask.

  They had techniques for how to approach a band, how to recognize if a band had SHL potential. That part came down to, “We hired you to know it when you see it.” There were a few suggestions about tip-offs for musicians who made bad SHL artists. They said not to waste time on alcoholics or drug addicts; now that Rosemary had seen the precision necessary to run an SHL concert, she understood the need for reliable talent. Nothing too political. Bring excitement, personality, charisma, the ability to connect with an audience, mainstream appeal, whatever that meant. Maybe it was code for some demographic? An age group, an economic class? If she had to guess, it was tied to the apolitical. They wanted excitement but not edge or danger or anything offensive.

  The rules for contact were similar to the Superwally Ethics & Values Code, but less concerned with ethics than with line crossing. You are not there to be anyone’s friend. Observe. Don’t be a stranger to them, but don’t get too involved. There’s always a temptation to sign acts because you like them. Sign them because we need them, because the world needs them, because they’re wasting their talents in that dump they’re playing. No taking money or gifts from musicians you were pursuing. No promising attention in exchange for sex or favors. She wondered how many rules were based on experience.

  Rosemary waited for them to tell her how to discover her exciting, personable, charismatic performers. When that information didn’t come, she searched for a missing module, but the only clue she found was the line in the code of conduct that said “wasting their talents in that dump they’re playing.” Where was she supposed to find that dump?

  “So . . . where do I go first?” Rosemary wrote to her new supervisors in Recruiter Management. She was too embarrassed to use the live interface. They had been sending her encouraging messages all day long, telling her no question was too basic, but this one might be.

  “Anywhere you want!” came the unhelpful reply. Slightly more helpful: “There’s a map”—a link lit on her screen—“showing where the current recruiters are. No sense duplicating their effort, but anyplace else is fair game. You let Logistics know, and they’ll book your travel. Pick wherever your favorite band is from and start there. Or start with whatever’s local to you.”

  It wasn’t the best time to mention she didn’t know any local bands. She pulled off her Hoodie, facing a momentary disorientation when she saw her room as it was instead of her scarf-draped Veneer. They had invited new employees to explore the campus if they needed a break; that sounded like as good an idea as any.

  She had been surprised from the beginning at the campus’s enormity.

  “We need it, legally, to hit the legal ratio to the number of people here,” Jeannie had explained. “But also, given how many people live and work here, the campus is considered a job perk.”

  The campus held not only the hangar and the studio wing, the offices and dorms and performer village, but also four hundred acres of pinewoods and paths. She chose the two-mile loop path marked with red circles. Two miles in brisk March air was a reasonable head-clearing distance.

  The trails were wide and well-groomed, with footing that sprang back beneath her feet. A few yards past the first marker, she encountered an exercise station with metal bars fixed at two heights. A few minutes later, she came to a wooden beam anchored a few inches above the ground. She hopped onto it and walked its length, just for fun. The third structure, a little farther into the woods, was a byzantine jumble of lumber and metal.

  “I’ve been walking past here for a year now and I can’t figure this one out, either.”

  Rosemary turned to see a man standing in the path. He wore expensive-looking workout clothes, a lopsided smile, and hair that fell across his eyes in a way that looked both messy and deliberate. Latino, maybe, or Middle Eastern? She was much better at reading ethnicity in avatars. He looked familiar, but she couldn’t quite place him. Not from her hiring group, but maybe she’d seen him in the control room or an office they’d toured through.

  “Maybe this one isn’t for exercising,” she guessed. “Maybe it’s art. I think I saw this on a museum site once.”

  He accepted the challenge. “Maybe a chin-up bar and a seesaw were spliced in a genetic experiment gone horribly awry.”

  “Maybe it’s a torture device.”

  “Aren’t all exercise machines?”

  “I wouldn’t know. This is my first—well, third if you count the others today. They seem friendly enough.”

  “Don’t let them fool you.”

  She smiled. “I’ll stay vigila
nt. Is it safe to continue toward the next one?”

  “They’re all safe compared to this one. Do you mind if I join you?”

  She was supposed to be clearing her head, but it felt rude to say she didn’t want company.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’m Aran. I should introduce myself to people before I go inviting myself along on their walks. I never run into anyone out here, so I’m forgetting my manners. I mean, I come out here to get away from the folks in there, but it’s nice to meet someone who had the same idea. That’s what you’re doing, too, yeah?”

  Rosemary didn’t know what to answer other than the last question, so she nodded. She also didn’t have any clue about the etiquette of walking with a stranger in the woods. Did you talk? Walk in companionable silence? How close did you stand, and who got to set the pace? She started moving again, to let him fill in the blanks on distance, at least.

  “You didn’t say your name.” He matched her stride, an arm’s length away.

  “Rosemary.”

  “Pretty name.”

  “Thanks. Um, my parents came up with it.” She was flustered by the sudden suspicion he was flirting with her. She had no idea how to tell someone in person she was uninterested. In hoodspace you just threw a flag. “Um, I ought to tell you I’m not really into guys.”

  He cocked his head at her. “That’s okay. I’m not often into girls, and anyway, if I was looking for somebody, this would be the worst place to look. I told you I never run into anyone out here.”

  She walked faster, embarrassed to have said anything at all.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I appreciate a person who’s clear on her intentions. Let’s go back to the part where we were just chatting. I don’t recognize you, so I assume you’re either new talent or new hire?”

  “New hire.”

  “Let me guess: I don’t think you’re wardrobe or makeup. You don’t have that look. You’re a sound tech or something behind the scenes. Uploads, downloads, interfaces.”

  Rosemary tried to relax again, pretend she was chatting in hoodspace, instead of walking through an actual real-life forest with a total stranger who made surprisingly good guesses. “That’s what I should be doing, only for some reason they gave me the artist recruiter job instead, and now I’m terrified they’ll figure out I’m clueless.”

  She realized she hadn’t asked him about his own job; that thought stopped her dead in her tracks. He was probably in office or logistics or people management, and now he’d know she was faking it. “So, um, how about you? What do you do here other than walk in the woods?”

  He stopped to wait. “I make music.”

  “Like, you write? Or you play?”

  He looked at her as if she’d missed a connection. It took her a minute. “Oh. You mean you play music for SHL? You’re Talent?” She didn’t know how she managed to put a capital T on a word as she spoke it, but that was how it sounded.

  He looked more and more familiar, and she knew so few musicians by sight. “Wait. You’re the singer for Patent Medicine!”

  She knew it was true even before he answered. “I love ‘The Crash.’ I saw you play at the Bloom Bar. It sounded even better live. That thing where you drew out the ending was cool.”

  “Thanks!” He smiled. “That’s the goal, I guess. If we make you think you’re going to get something different on SHL than the recording, you’re more likely to come to the show, yeah?”

  “I’d go to another in a second.” It was an honest answer, though she worried she sounded a little too earnest now.

  “I look forward to seeing you there.”

  He was joking, obviously, but it led her to another question. “Is it weird playing in a box? Not being able to see your audience?”

  “It took some getting used to. It closes down the conversation between performer and audience, which is a weird sensation. Like leaving a message for someone that they’re going to read in real time. Not seeing each other while we play is the harder part. We have monitors, but learning how to cue each other in that situation is tricky, and we have to practice a lot more to get to a point where we can play something that sounds fresh or improvised.”

  “So it’s not improvisation when you do something like that ending?”

  “It can be, but we have to time it carefully. Like, if you say you want two minutes to talk to the audience you have to say where you want it, and you get exactly two minutes, with countdown. Or you say you’re going to take x number of bars to solo at exactly this point. There’s no room to let somebody keep going if they’re on a roll, but I think that’s more a problem for jazz than my kind of music. There, now that you’re on the payroll, you get to hear all the trade secrets. I hope it doesn’t ruin the experience.”

  She considered. “No. Not any more than learning you play in those tiny booths.”

  They came to another piece of exercise equipment, two sets of raised footsteps on hinges, with handholds beside them. “This one is more self-explanatory.” Aran hopped onto one and began swinging his feet.

  Rosemary climbed onto the other set. The machine’s action was looser than she expected, moving her arms and legs out and away. “But why use a walking machine when you’re already on a walk?”

  “An excellent question. I don’t have an answer.”

  “Hey, Aran, do you mind if I ask you something else?”

  “Absolutely. Anything about music or exercise equipment is in my realm of expertise.”

  “My new job. I’m supposed to go someplace to look for musicians to sign, but I don’t know where to start.”

  “I think most people start with the place they’re from. A local singer you dig, maybe? Somebody flying under their radar?”

  That was what she was afraid of. “I live on a wind farm in nowhereville. There are no local singers or bands. None I know of, anyway.”

  “There’s no bar with bands playing in a secret room? No living room concerts?”

  “If there are, nobody has ever invited me. There’s only one bar. I’ve never been inside, but I can’t imagine they have room for a stage.”

  She hopped off the machine and started walking again. When she heard his footsteps behind her, she asked, “So how did you get discovered? Living room concert?”

  He laughed. “I came to them. That’s not a recommended course of action, though. Most people who show up without an invitation get booted or arrested. There are procedures.”

  “How come you didn’t get booted or arrested?”

  “I was really, really good.”

  “And modest.”

  “If I was modest, I’d still be home in Baltimore playing basement shows.”

  Baltimore. She made a mental note.

  “Well, Rosemary, it’s been nice chatting with you, but we’ve reached the end of the road.”

  She realized the path had looped back. The SHL hangar loomed on the other side of the field.

  “Thanks for keeping me company.” Rosemary gave an awkward wave. It would have gone better in hoodspace. “I suppose I need to finish my trainings.”

  “And I suppose I’d better go back to the song I was working on. Hey, I don’t know if you’re allowed in the talent residences, or if they’ve got your evening booked, but I’m having a few people over at seven tonight. You’re welcome to come. Sixth cottage on the right.”

  Once she’d made sure he wasn’t hitting on her, she had enjoyed talking with him. He was easier to make conversation with than the others in her training group. Maybe because they were all as nervous as she was. “The trainings say we’re not supposed to make friends with the talent we’re trying to sign, but that’s probably different once you’re already here?”

  “I’m sure,” he said. “But you can check over your manual or whatever, make sure it’s not against the rules. Consider it job training. You need to learn to talk with m
usicians, anyway. And how to ‘be friendly without crossing the line,’ right?”

  “That’s a good point.” Her second wave went a little smoother.

  11

  ROSEMARY

  Deep Water

  She didn’t know what you wore to a talent party, or to any real-life party, for that matter. He hadn’t said “party,” she didn’t think. He’d said “having some friends over.” Even though Aran had been wearing casual clothes in the woods, she pictured his friends lounging in their stage clothes. Magritte in her rain-colored dress and silver makeup, her brother in his impeccable suit. And would Aran’s gorgeous bassist be there? She’d intimidate Rosemary whatever she wore.

  She pulled out a pair of jeans and a new short-sleeved shirt from the Superwally SHL Social pack she’d bought before she left, “Guaranteed Cool for Any Occasion.” The shirt had spangles. She tried it on, then stuffed it back into her bag and replaced it with a work-style polo and her farm jacket. She didn’t want to stand out. Better to look less cool than like she was trying too hard. Spangles.

  The Talent Village was on the opposite side of the hangar from the woods, behind its own security gate. She gave her badge to the guard, waiting to be refused entrance, but he waved her through. Inside the fence, a neighborhood of tiny cottages on the outside ring of a giant circle, and an interior ring of larger modular dwellings with narrow porches and three or four doors on the front. An older white woman in a suit and a fedora sat on the first porch strumming a guitar. The woman waved at Rosemary when she passed, and Rosemary waved back, starstruck. She’d heard the biggest performers lived in their own private compounds and only came to SHL for shows and rehearsals, but maybe some hung out here.

  Sixth cottage on the right. The first few had painted trim, but Aran’s was basic. She knocked on the door.