A Song for a New Day

by Sarah Pinsker

  “No changes, unless you’ll let me drop ‘Blood and Diamonds,’” I said. It sat there at the end of the set, taunting me. The one thing SHL wouldn’t budge on: no show unless I closed with it.

  He opened his mouth.

  “I’m kidding,” I said, before he could tell me what I already knew. “I wouldn’t dream of dropping the big finale.”

  Maybe because of my joke, he insisted we go over details for every song in the set; by the time that was over, it was almost time for the doors to open. For all twenty people.

  A nice spread awaited us in the green room, every single item from the ancient rider I’d sent them. Rosemary’s doing, I was pretty sure. The room looked the same except the pictures were gone. I looked around the space remembering other people, another time, the last minutes Before. When I sat on the couch, a cloud of dust rose up around me. “Tell me one more time why we’re here?”

  “Dude,” Silva said. “You keep asking that like this wasn’t your doing. I have no problem with it, and I hope it goes down like you’re planning, but maybe it’s time to own it either way.”

  “I know. I know. It’ll be worth it. It’s not selling out.”

  “It’s kind of selling out,” Marcia said, “but that term needs redefining anyhow. This is temporary selling out for a good cause. It’s not a permanent state.”

  “That helps a lot,” I told her, sticking out my tongue. “Hey, Silva, what happened to the eight-by-tens?”

  He surveyed the bare nails on the walls, then turned and winked at me. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m sure nobody who worked here would have taken them home for safekeeping.”

  Somebody knocked on the door, and my stomach flipped. This is not a conjuring, I told myself. It goes down differently.

  Marcia said, “Come in,” and Rosemary entered. She looked nervous, but not upset. I waited for her to tell us to turn on the news. “Do you need anything?”

  Relief washed over me. “An audience.”

  “There are twenty very excited contest winners on their way.”

  “You know that wasn’t what I meant.”

  “I’m doing what I can, Luce. And I did the other thing! Everyone who shared the Harriet video knows that’s you now. I’ve been gearing them up for this for weeks. I said if they waited for the end of the show they wouldn’t be disappointed.”

  I kept forgetting the audience I couldn’t see.

  “SHL is kind of confused about the numbers, to be honest,” she said, as if she’d heard my thought. “Way more first-time viewers than they expected, and the demographics are wild in every category.”

  Huh.

  She ducked out of the room again, and I squeezed into the bathroom to change. Nobody had cleaned the toilet in years.

  “Isn’t that a little on the nose?” Marcia asked, pointing at my shirt when I emerged. I’d painted “Is this real?” on the front and “This is not real” on the back.

  “You should’ve seen the runners-up.” I’d made and discarded “Fuck StageHolo,” “Burn yr Hoodie,” “Ask me about my corporate overlords,” and “You are a wholly owned subsidiary” before deciding they might blur those out.

  Another knock on the door. Another moment where I steeled myself for bad news, but it was only a tech giving a five-minute warning. Silva left the room to tune his bass and my guitar one more time, so they’d be ready when we stepped out. Marcia and I followed.

  The last time I’d been here, the last time I’d looked out from this same wing, I’d wondered how to perform at all on such a broken night. I didn’t know how to address the crowd. I remembered every single song I’d played that evening, every word I’d said. That audience and I, we’d needed each other.

  The room had looked empty with so few seats filled that night; I’d called them all forward. Now it was far emptier. Two people sat in metal folding chairs near the room’s center. The rest—eighteen of them, I presumed—had scattered in pairs in such a way that they were near the barrier but nowhere near each other. A phalanx of cameras filled the space between the barrier and the stage.

  “How are we supposed to play to that?” I asked. “They won’t even come near the front.”

  “They’re fans, Luce,” Marcia said. “Even if they only know the one song. Even if they’ve never been to a show. Don’t judge them.”

  She was right.

  “Here we go,” said the Director’s voice in my in-ear monitors.

  The house lights dimmed. Three spotlights waited for us, ringed by cameras. When we walked out, they shifted to make a path for us, then shifted again to close the route behind us.

  We were greeted with a scattering of applause from the scattered audience.

  The Director spoke in my ears. “Don’t worry, we’re beefing up the crowd noise for the simulcast.”

  I hoped we weren’t going to have to listen to him through the whole show.

  “The second you step to the mic, you’re on,” the Director said. He’d told me twice earlier. I wanted to tell him to shut up and leave me alone in my head.

  I lingered outside the light. I couldn’t see the empty room, but there was no mistaking the silence; a full house could never be this quiet. I had to pretend. Pretend this was a 2020 show, or one of the dozens of tiny spaces I’d played alone or with the new band. Those places were sometimes empty, too. It wasn’t lack of audience wigging me out; it was lack of response. The moment I started playing, we’d be beamed to millions of Hoodies expecting me to pretend I was playing directly to them. I needed to feel them, and there was no way to do that.

  The techs had taped a square where they wanted me to stand except for the times they’d scheduled movement. Taped down my set list. Taped exact channels where I was allowed to roam to interact with Marcia and Silva at the specified moments. Lots of shows were choreographed, I reminded myself, even if mine never had been. I’d agreed to all of this. Why?

  Without triggering the cameras, I called to the room off mic. “Come closer. Please.”

  Nobody moved. I gave Silva and Marcia a panicked look over my shoulder, which they didn’t return.

  “Treat it as a practice,” Silva said. “We can just have fun.”

  “Luuuuuuuuuuuuuce!” came a ragged shout from nearby. I shielded my eyes and spotted Rosemary standing front and center. Play to Rosemary. She had to be the one person in the room who was there to hear me, rather than the ghost of who I used to be. Play to Rosemary. Play.

  I stepped forward.

  The first song on the set list was “172 Ways,” which I’d written specifically for this new trio. Before I could think myself into another corner, I kicked into the opening riff. The band joined me after four repetitions, Silva matching my guitar two octaves lower. We ripped through the song. I relaxed a little. The sound boomed through the room, but it didn’t sound awful. Play it to Rosemary; maybe she’d be excited to hear something she hadn’t heard before.

  We let the last chord ring, and Marcia drummed through the transition between songs, as planned, seamlessly switching beats. No surprises. She counted off, and we moved from “172 Ways” into “Don’t Even Think About It.” A 2020 audience would have screamed at that point, but I didn’t hear anybody, even Rosemary. No applause in the transition, either. In a real live show, we might throw a few extra bars in here to build, but we’d been warned not to do that. Stick to the plan.

  I tried to force myself into the moment. The second song was always the one that mattered. First song, some people still aren’t paying attention, and you’re still feeling out the room and getting comfortable. The second song is where you win them over.

  A light appeared in the back of the house, a single bright spot in the darkness. Interesting, but playing to a guide took concentration, so I put it out of my mind. Another change in the darkness halfway down the room, on my left. We kept going. The chorus ca
me around, and this time I heard a couple of voices singing along. Rosemary, maybe, and maybe one of the contest winners had actually seen me play before? This song had been around a long time. It was possible.

  The edges of the dark changed. Something was happening just beyond my vision. I wanted to know what it was, but there was no good way to find out. People were coming closer; that was it. Bodies filled the space beyond the barrier.

  The song ended with a build and a sudden drop-off, stopping on the IV chord, no resolution. This time, the applause was far more robust than it had been when we walked out; much louder than I’d expected twenty people could be, but maybe their clapping carried in the empty space. Maybe they’d reached some kind of acoustic sweet spot.

  Except that wasn’t it, because they kept cheering, and it was more noise than twenty people could make.

  “Next song needs to start,” said the voice in my ears.

  Next song was “Look, a Gift Horse,” four to the floor, pulsing like a disco. It had a long enough intro for me to look around, long enough to take a few permitted steps toward Silva. I was supposed to stay with the spotlight, or move slowly enough for it to stay with me, but I deliberately zagged forward before turning, so I could see into the house.

  “You’re off track,” said the voice in my ears.

  I crossed the stage to Silva, as I was supposed to. Leaned over to play guitar to guitar, and whispered to him, “There are people out there.”

  Lots of them. From the stage’s edge, where really, I should be allowed to play, I’d seen them. Two doors were open, one at the back and one on the side, and a steady stream of people poured in.

  I made my way back to my mic, mind buzzing. What was going on? The Director in-ear hadn’t said anything yet, but his focus was probably on what his monitors showed, not the actual theater. We were part of a fiction he was creating, which didn’t have any room in it for the reality of the situation.

  Whoever they were, I felt their presence. The room’s sound changed, and so did the energy, which was to say energy existed now that hadn’t minutes before. Shapes writhed, shifted, danced. Silva and Marcia felt it, too, or else they felt the change in me and responded. I hadn’t realized how lackluster the beginning must have been.

  I’d approached this show as an obligation, something I’d promised without fully committing myself. Body, but not heart, the concert an orchestrated necessity leading up to an orchestrated action. Not once had I considered it to be a real show, of the kind I gave night after night for audiences small and smaller, even though I’d picked the venue deliberately.

  I’d lied to myself about not wanting a conjuring. Somewhere out there, in their Hoodies, thousands watched and listened. Some of them because of StageHoloLive and “Blood and Diamonds” and this silly comeback feature, but some because they’d seen a video that made them think I might have something worthwhile to say. Why did I have to keep learning that there was never a moment to phone it in?

  I turned my brain off, then. Turned off the part of me that debated where I should be on the stage, and what I should say next, and what song came next, and who was out there listening, remotely or in person. Play for all of them. Play to reach just one of them. Play.

  When the song ended, the cheers were definitely louder than they’d been at the beginning. I still couldn’t tell how many people were out there, but they were into it. I wanted to greet them, but we’d been given no permission to talk until the second-to-last song. We launched “Ricochet,” then “Noise on Noise,” then “Light Me Up.” Brought it down for “Leaving Town”; I couldn’t see Rosemary anymore, but she was there in the song. Then “A Minor Second,” and everyone was there in my head, and I sang to April and my family and Alice and the 2020 and all the people who’d passed through my life, or who’d let me pass through theirs. With no filler, we sped forward through the set, barreling toward the one moment I’d truly been waiting for, until we were there.

  The space we’d left for “sixteen-bar band introduction” came just before the song. They wouldn’t cut me off at this point, not when we hadn’t played “Blood and Diamonds” yet.

  I turned to Marcia and Silva. “Watch me for the changes,” I said, though we’d discussed it already and it didn’t need to be said. They rolled into the groove we’d chosen, ready to follow. The underpinning to disguise my intent, to make it harder for editors to clip any of this out for their on-demand video after the fact.

  I shielded my eyes with my hand to see beyond the spotlight. In a normal show, I’d ask to turn the house lights up, but I knew that wasn’t allowed in this in-between space. Still, I could tell they were out there.

  “Hi,” I said. “I suppose you’re all wondering why I gathered you here today.”

  Don’t be silly, I told myself. You have sixteen bars to do this. You know what you want to say.

  I told them about the last show here and why we’d played that night. I told them about the parking lot the night before. And the nights after, waiting to be told we could tour again. About April getting sick, the fear, the protests, the list on my collective’s wall of all the things we lost.

  The Director’s voice hit my ears. “That’s sixteen bars. Launch the song.”

  I pulled the monitors from my ears and kept going. “I used to own this club called the 2020. Not Before; up until pretty recently. I tried my best to make it a home base for every musical weirdo looking for community outside of hoodspace, and we made some pretty good music there. It isn’t that hard to carve a space like that if you’re willing to break the law, but there’s no reason for it to be illegal anymore. We need to take community back ourselves—nobody’s going to give it to us.”

  I told them about the 2020, and how they could do the same or similar for art or storytelling or theater if music wasn’t their thing. Hoping this wasn’t the moment they cut us off, I told them what StageHolo did to venues, and what I thought they needed to do, the little actions and the big ones.

  “I think enough time has passed. It’s okay to be afraid, but we don’t have to let it rule us. We’re all afraid; it’s what we do when we’re afraid that matters. People are a risk worth taking. Let’s create something new together.”

  That was the cue Silva and Marcia and I had worked out to kick the song for real. Without monitors, I didn’t know if we were still on the air, if the Director was shouting at me or had given up on us entirely, but I didn’t care anymore.

  “Manifest Independence.” The glowing lyrics hidden behind a dresser in a hotel in this very town. The second draft, played years later to a bunch of drones at Graceland. Revised again until it became actual song, rather than screed, then revised again, until it said everything I needed it to say. An instruction manual, a guide, a call to action.

  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.r />
  “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.