A Song for a New Day

by Sarah Pinsker

  Maybe she’d find a way to make it up to them, she told herself as she walked through the maps again, as she chose a new city, as she resigned herself to being disappointed in herself no matter what she chose.

  27

  LUCE

  Sixteen-Bar Solo

  The basement series in Cleveland charged admission. Ten dollars cash a head, fifty-three people, three acts to divide the $530 between. The homeowner didn’t keep a dime, and the two local bands were sweet enough to offer me their shares, which I turned down. I’d never have found the place if it wasn’t for the barista in Pittsburgh, and the homeowner gave me a note that would open doors if I headed to Columbus. Notes and passwords and names to buy entrance: after what happened with the 2020, I understood.

  * * *

  —

  The road had changed since I’d been on it last. Most freeways had lanes reserved for self-driving cars; in some places, as I’d already seen, entire highways were closed to Daisy the Diesel, part of the reason I’d gotten her so cheap. I got an unwanted police escort through some towns that weren’t big on strangers. Ate dinner in chain restaurant isolation booths when I couldn’t find anyplace local and slept in the van in parking lots when there were no motels. Only the smallest motels had avoided shuttering over anticongregation laws, those and the big chains that made the necessary renovations. I kept my old road atlas next to me, the one we had bought on tour Before, and started taking notes in it again: which towns were safe to pass through, where I found a decent meal. Circle marked the venue, hopefully not to be crossed out by SHL before I passed through again.

  There was an odd déjà vu in entering cities I’d toured through long before and seeing them so changed. Sometimes the bones of the places I remembered were still there, signage fading and drooping, parking lots gone grassy. I never minded seeing a Superwally or one of the other big-box stores reclaimed by nature, but the little places made me sad. I told myself that if I knew these cities like I knew Baltimore, I might see the secret life hidden under the decaying surfaces.

  I did odd jobs in the long gaps between shows, washing dishes and tending bar for spending money so as not to dip too far into my remaining savings. The veggie oil reduced the one big expense; the other, food, couldn’t be helped. I slept in the van when I had to, or crashed on couches like I had starting out. Slow and steady, making friends as I went, doing my best to win invitations back.

  * * *

  —

  I spent two weeks in St. Louis after playing there, sleeping in the van and tending bar, then headed to Memphis for a show set up by a friend of a friend, a tiny dance studio that hosted acoustic shows at night. I waited around for the instructor to take a break and turn off the camera, but when she finally did, she had only bad news for me. “Sorry. The police came by a couple of nights ago. We have to lie low for a while.”

  She didn’t say StageHolo had instigated the raid, possibly didn’t know, but I knew.

  It was only midday, and I had nothing to do, so I drove out to Graceland, parking on the empty shoulder of the empty road. There was razor wire on the fence, and through the shuttered gate I saw drones darting around the grounds, letting Elvis into hearts and Hoodies through the magic of some StageHolo subsidiary or another. They were getting a better show than those who had made the pilgrimage in person Before; their tours ended with a real live Elvis holo show, decade of choice. Interesting to see how they integrated the new into the old.

  Elvis died before I was born; I had no beef with Elvis. I’d left Baltimore angry, driven angry, played angry, but I wasn’t even sure where to place it. Angry with StageHolo for being the actual force of destruction, for shutting something vital down while they shuttled people around this ancient shrine, and with Rosemary, the conduit. With myself, for not finding a way to protect what I had. With myself, for driving from city to city holding this in, when I could be using it, channeling it into song.

  I grabbed my guitar out of the van and stood in front of the gate again. Played the first two lines of “Suspicious Minds,” the only Elvis song I knew, because the songwriter got that one right, about the trap we can’t escape. Just substitute fear for love.

  A couple of drones turned toward the sound. I gave them the finger, even though that wasn’t fair, it wasn’t the Elvis fans I was mad at. A few more gathered.

  “We’re still here,” I said to them. “We’re still playing music in real life. Come find us. Music is a living thing. Fuck StageHolo.”

  That felt better. “Fuck StageHolo. Don’t give them your money. Learn an instrument. Go see a real band play. Get this place reopened and walk around it in real life. Everybody is afraid; it’s what you do when you’re afraid that counts. The world isn’t over yet.” That “everybody is afraid” bit sounded like it wanted to be a song. No, it was one; a fragment of something I’d written a long time ago and hidden away behind a hotel dresser. That’s how songs always happened: it might take years to come right, but if I sat on a line or a rhythm long enough, it revealed what it wanted to be. I was writing my way back into it in real time, for a bunch of Elvis drones.

  “The world isn’t over yet. We don’t need to keep all the old things, but we need something new. Borrow a guitar and learn how to use it. If that isn’t your thing, figure out what is. Invent your own genre. Carve your initials into something. Brand them, paint them, shoot them, transpose them, change them entirely and sculpt yourself out of a new medium. Instrument and tool are synonyms: we can still construct ways to belong. Our song is a work in progress.”

  Elvis fans were not the ones I needed to reach, but it helped me focus to say it out loud. I grabbed my guitar’s neck and started playing, looking for the chords and melody that would make me feel complete in the moment.

  A siren wailed in the distance. When I looked up, the drones had multiplied. An army of drones, all waiting for my next move. One of them, or maybe the static security camera, must have called the police. I hadn’t trespassed, but they could probably get me on disturbing the peace or illegal parking or something.

  “Good night, Memphis!” I waved to the airborne crowd, then cased my guitar and took off before they could find some reason to arrest me. I wasn’t really sure which direction I was heading until I hit a park on the banks of the Mississippi.

  I saw a small cluster of people leaning against the railing. From a distance, I couldn’t tell what they were doing, but as I got closer I heard a familiar murmur, and I saw someone toss something into the water. I didn’t know the exact dates of the holidays this year, but it was the right season for this to be Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year. They were here for tashlich, casting their sins into the river. I dug in my backpack for a granola bar, ate most of it, then followed their lead, emptying the crumbs over the edge. Opening my hand, releasing.

  I didn’t remember if there was a prayer I was supposed to say. My memories of doing the same at the East River as a kid were hazy at best. Still, it was a ritual I understood. It’s hard to hold a grudge standing beside a river. A river says move on, move on, move on. Flood your banks, alter your borders. I tossed away my anger at Rosemary and my anger at myself, though I kept the resentment of StageHolo. To my mind, that was a righteous fight.

  I sat there for the whole afternoon, watching the sun set in blue and gold, then pink and purple. I wrote “Leaving Town” sitting beside the Mississippi, thinking of Rosemary’s unclenched fist, opening my hands, letting go. Then the start of “Manifest Independence,” incorporating the stuff I’d shouted at the Graceland gates.

  In the morning, I headed to Nashville.

  28

  ROSEMARY

  More Rock, More Talk

  If a hood backdrop existed for “Mountains as Far as the Eye Can See,” Rosemary had never known to look for it. Roads that rolled and turned on a hairpin, trees thick with summer, vistas stretching from one state into another. She alternated between clearview, capt
uring the scenery as it was, and a map overlay displaying the names of mountains and valleys: Fancy Gap, Meadows of Dan, Rocky Knob, Fairy Stone, Woolwine. She loved the names, loved the ways the peaks layered green to blue to purple in the distance. Some turns made her stomach flip, made her brace against her compartment’s sides, but she tried to turn it into a game. A long, long, roller coaster sim with an impressive view, leading into the small city of Asheville, North Carolina, which hadn’t been visited by a recruiter in two years. For a few minutes, riding a bus around mountains, she regained some of the excited anticipation she’d had on her first trip. If they had taken away her illusion that she was doing some good in her job, at least she could still appreciate the places it allowed her to see.

  She’d figured out that Logistics gave new recruiters the fanciest hotels to make them feel they owed the company from the start. This time, she’d asked for lodgings that let her fit in better, and Logistics had said, “If that’s what you really want . . .” They’d found her a tiny apartment above a convenience store, the type of place somebody moving to town might realistically afford. It could benefit from a Veneer: it had stained carpet, burned-bottom pots, a hot plate, a microwave crusty with other people’s culinary disasters, sour-smelling minifridge, box fan in the window. Maybe this was their attempt to show her she’d overcorrected, but it felt right. She didn’t deserve better after what she’d done.

  In the store downstairs, she bought a Micky’s-2-Go microwave mac ’n’ cheese, almost as good as the real thing, and then settled onto the sagging bed. The bus still rattled through her. When she finally fell asleep, she dreamed that Luce had ridden into Asheville on top of her bus, playing guitar to the mountains, shouting down to Rosemary that nobody had to hide anymore.

  She woke to sun and music streaming through the unshaded window. The old overeager Rosemary would have rushed out to find the source, but she took her time dressing. Two doorways down, a tall black man with long dreadlocks played a fiddle, his instrument case open before him, as if it was legal to play on the street. People walking past tossed change in the case or nodded at the VCash code taped to the lid, doing the same in hoodspace.

  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 c
ouldn’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.”