I had been on I-70 for five miles when I saw flashing lights behind me in the side mirror. I pulled over with a sigh, unsure what I’d done wrong. Both hands on the wheel, mentally reviewing the locations of wallet, phone, registration.
After determining that my van was mine and I was me, the trooper returned to my window.
“Do you know why I pulled you over?” he asked.
I resisted the urge to catalog all the possible reasons. “No, sir.”
“Did you notice anything about the other cars around you?”
“No, sir. There’ve barely been any.”
“This highway is restricted to self-driving vehicles.”
“I had no idea,” I said, in all honesty.
“It’s been restricted for eight years.”
Oh. “Officer, I haven’t been anywhere in ten. You can see how new my registration is.”
He sighed. “I think I actually believe you, but I have to write this ticket.”
He took a few minutes writing it up, long enough that I worried that he might have seen something to do with the venue and decided to cause me more trouble, but eventually he returned to my window. I stuffed the ticket into the glove compartment; I wasn’t planning on returning to Maryland anytime soon.
The trooper thoughtfully provided me with a personal escort to the next exit. I waved him a cheery goodbye and pulled into the first parking lot to look at my ancient atlas. I drew several X marks on I-70. An updated online map would have been helpful in investigating alternate routes, but I was stubborn. Roads might change, but the basics of A to B were still the same.
The old pike that ran parallel still existed; maybe it was good for me to be on a smaller road. It would let me see how people like Rosemary lived, instead of bypassing the small towns. Prove that farms were still farms, fields were still fields. Until, near Frederick, an enormous building rose out of the flatness. The biggest building I’d ever seen. An airplane hangar? A server center? No: Superwally distribution. As I got closer, I saw that what I’d assumed were starlings or sparrows were in fact drones, rising in a stream, a flock, a cloud, to head to points unknown. Self-driving trucks, drone delivery. No jobs for the humans, other than consumption, which was itself a full-time occupation.
What a weird world we’d created. As I drove through Frederick’s empty downtown to pick up my next small road, I was struck by the reasonableness of it all. The transaction we’d made. Of course it made sense to trade company for safety. To trade jobs as makers for jobs as consumers, consuming from the comfort of our homes. We’d set ourselves up.
Maybe I was stupid for pushing back against this system, still looking for a place for myself. Stubborn in this, just as I was stubborn about my atlas or buying a van that needed a human behind the wheel. Left behind. Nothing to do for it now but keep going and get left behind somewhere new.
* * *
—
Pittsburgh welcomed me with signs saying to smile for the cameras. I slept in the van behind an abandoned-looking church, and spent the next few days haunting the streets. Took tiny notes in the tiny inset map in my atlas: this bar is smaller on the inside than the outside, maybe has a secret room; this place where I changed my bike chain has a raised platform in the back, for no discernible reason.
My third week of morning coffee at a coffeehouse playing the Shondes over speakers, I complimented the music. Was rewarded with, “Come back tonight after we close.” I returned that evening to blackout curtains and an unlocked side door and a succession of solo musicians. It was a weekly series.
On my second week in the audience, somebody asked me if I played. By the end of the night I had an invitation to do a set the following week. Nerves gnawed at me; I hadn’t played a solo show in years, not since that night with April in New York. I had always preferred the safety of numbers. Not just the actual physical security of having people on the road with me. With a band, if nobody came we’d still have a good time. We could treat it as a glorified practice; we still had each other. If someone messed up, they could hide behind the others. What I had forgotten: on your own, nobody needed to know you messed up. There’s no chord to make your note dissonant. Nobody to look askance when you forget a verse and go straight to chorus.
I told myself the Pittsburgh crowds were hungry for new music, the same as I’d been when I started the 2020, the same as I was playing in the same space with the same bands cycling through, week after week. I loved all my bands, don’t get me wrong. I loved the way they pushed themselves—the way we pushed ourselves—the way we pushed each other—to bring something fresh to each show. To make sure the audience had a reason to come and listen. Still, hearing a band you know and love play something new is not the same thrill as falling in love with a band you’ve never heard before. It’s a tamer joy.
* * *
—
I framed that from the audience’s perspective. The truth for me was that every time I stood in front of our 2020 crowd, I was challenged to dig deeper into myself, to find words I hadn’t already said in all the weeks and months and years before. That, too, provided a different challenge from the one of facing a new audience and knowing I had one song, at most two, to convince them I was worth their time. They didn’t know me; when I stood on the stage in Pittsburgh for the first time, I gave a chord-by-chord introduction.
Nerves punched my chest from the inside and made my legs shake. I played bare-bones versions of the songs we had played full band in Baltimore, which calmed me somewhat, and “Don’t Even Think About It,” the only song from Before that I still tolerated. No one booed.
I sold fifteen album codes and five T-shirts that night. Three kids asked for records, which I hadn’t brought. Made enough to cover the coffees I had bought over the previous weeks.
“Will you play again next week?” the barista asked.
I shook my head. “I want to see what’s going on in other cities.”
“Come back anytime. I’ve got a friend with a basement house concert in Cleveland, if you want me to tell them you’re coming.”
I hadn’t decided which way to go yet.
“Perfect,” I said.
26
ROSEMARY
Bridge
The sign read OUT OF ORDER, like the bridge was an elevator or an automatic teller. Do Not Trespass would have made more sense, or Authorized Access Only, or even a simple Danger, or Keep Out. “Out of Order” wasn’t intimidating at all. Beneath it, someone had scrawled Ce n’est pas un pont.
Rosemary scaled the chain-link fence, careful where she placed her feet, remembering the last fence she had climbed. She made it over this one with her feet below her head where they belonged. On the other side, stone steps crumbled, the mortar between shifting slabs gritty underfoot. Easy to see why they didn’t want people trespassing in this area of the SHL compound. Out of order, out of time. It didn’t even span water anymore. This bridge had been here long before SHL, long before congregation laws, long before an After had been made by a Before.
She knew this wasn’t the smartest idea, hiking into parts unknown without telling anyone where she’d gone, but she didn’t know her destination, other than someplace to pretend she was unreachable. She knew people now who lived their entire lives noncomm or semi-noncomm, people who might never speak to her again. Luce, Joni. They had only been in her life a few weeks, but their absence still stung, as did her part in it.
She’d omitted that from her debriefing. Omitted the fact that she’d caught movement in the upstairs window when she knocked on the door at 2020, that for one moment she’d glimpsed Luce behind the curtain and thought maybe she hadn’t broken everything. She had. She knew now that it was all on her.
They had brought her back to the campus, back to a room identical to the room she’d stayed in the previous time, but on the compound’s far side, a small building called the Retreat Center. She was the
sole inhabitant, with food droned in from the other side. It wasn’t a prison, but it matched her mood: she was a part of nothing, and better left where she couldn’t taint everything she touched.
Management met with her in hood, in a virtual replica of an office in the building across campus, complete with meadow and woods out the window. Their avatar sat in a leather office chair, a massive oak desk between them and Rosemary. The furniture and the avatar were overlarge, so slightly as to be almost imperceptible, obviously meant to leave her feeling small.
“Why do you do that?” she asked Generic Management—Male (1 of 5). “Why are we meeting in hood when the real me is here, and the real you is here? It’s a nice day outside.”
“I’m at a different compound. Washington State.”
Oh. “Then why bring me back here at all? We could be having this conversation anywhere.”
The fake breeze through the fake window rustled in his fake hair. “Best practices dictate bringing recruiters back to decompress after their first successful acquisition. We can send you home if you’d like, too, but that tends to be trickier emotionally.”
“A little vacation while we struggle with our consciences? What percentage of us come back?”
“Sixty percent.”
Enough to justify their ridiculous policies. Enough turnover to teach them they shouldn’t waste too much time on training. A perfect system. “At this moment I’m wondering why anyone keeps this job.”
“Most don’t actually see a venue shut down on their first assignment—it’s not supposed to happen until after you’re gone. The reaction is less visceral if you hear about it from afar. Anyway, it’s a good job, and you know it. Money, travel, expense account, excitement, music. We’d like you to stay. You didn’t disappoint.”
“How could I disappoint?” Rosemary dug her fingers into her palms; her av echoed the motion, though it was too cheap to bleed. “You only hired me because I liked music and I looked naive enough to lead you straight to a venue for you to close.”
“We hired you because you were competent in your old job, in a way that usually translates to competence in this one. Which it did. We got two promising new acts from you, and would have gotten more if it hadn’t been for our own screwup.”
At least they acknowledged their screwup, even if their apology had to do with timing, rather than the act itself. And she’d connected SHL with the Handsome Mosquitoes and Kurtz, both of whom wanted the connection. “They both passed the audition?”
“Yes. We’re signing Kurtz and Josh diSouza. They both show tremendous star potential.”
One of her nails broke skin. “Josh diSouza—not the Handsome Mosquitoes?”
“He’s the whole package. Looks, voice, presence. He’s a little tall for the cameras, but we can make adjustments.”
“But the band wrote the songs. The band is amazing.”
“If he can’t write, we’ll get someone to write for him. The band was sharp, but they had bad optics.” Management held up his thumbs and forefingers to form a box, squinted at it. “He’s the real find.”
“Did he fight for them?”
“A little, but we told him he’d go further without them, and he saw reason. He was beyond excited, really.”
“I need to finish this debrief later.” She tried to control her voice.
He gave an oblivious wave. “I’ll be here all day. Buzz me when you’re ready to finish.”
* * *
—
Rosemary studied the map and then headed off through the woods in the opposite direction of the manicured walking trails, into the unmapped areas, which was how she found the old, unmarked path, and then the cordoned-off bridge.
She stood on the bridge and peered over. The width and height suggested it had spanned a decent-sized body of water in the past, but the river was at this point nothing more than dried mud. Maybe it came back after rainfall. Or maybe it was like so much else she’d encountered, forever diminished.
At least this wasn’t her fault. She pictured the looks on the faces of the Handsome Mosquitoes when they were told their singer had signed on without them again. Did they blame her? Would they go back to Baltimore and keep playing? Not that they had a place to play anymore. She kicked the bridge, then again, harder, until her toes protested.
Her phone buzzed, surprising her since she’d had no reception last she checked. She expected it to be Management, telling her she had strayed too far, telling her to make a decision, to stay and accept what she’d need to become, or go home and try to forget all the destruction she’d caused. It was her mother.
She wasn’t ready to talk to her mother yet, either, to put her complicity into words, so she ignored it. Kept the phone in her hand as she leaned on her elbows. She contemplated tossing it off the bridge, watching it smash on the rocks, running away into the forest to live on tubers and berries. The Ghost of the SHL Woods.
It was as reasonable an alternative as any, and at least she wouldn’t be able to cause any more trouble. SHL would hire somebody to take her place. She’d haunt their windows at night, whispering warnings, so they knew what they were committing to, so they’d go to their first assignment with their eyes open, or quit before going at all.
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.
A Song for a New Day Page 27