Isabel —

My pulse suddenly surged through my body’s crumpling infrastructure.

My thoughts vanished with my human skin.

Chapter Seven

· isabel ·

That night I lay in my soulless bedroom with my laptop on my stomach and I watched early videos of Cole performing with NARKOTIKA. In these, he looked young and bright and on fire with something so volatile that it ignited everyone in the audience. His smile was the most brilliant thing in the place.

As the videos got newer, Cole changed. His eyes deadened.

It was a model of Cole, thrown up onto the stage, propped behind the keyboard, a rock-star-shaped sack of meat. Sometimes you could actually see him shaking with the ferocity of whatever he’d taken before the show. Destroying himself like he’d destroyed the crowd in those early shows, all the fire turned inside.

I knew this was what Baby North wanted out of him. She knew how to pick them, the sure bets, the certain losers.

Aunt Lauren’s cat jumped on the end of my bed. I hissed at her. She jumped down, but she didn’t look upset. She’d been here long enough that all of her feelings had been replaced with high-end linoleum. As I let her out of my room and started to shut the door, I heard the front door open: my mother back from her shift. She had just enough time for a little HBO and maybe some brief weeping over her dead son and estranged husband.

Here’s a secret, though: Crying doesn’t bring back the dead or the missing.

I quickly closed my bedroom door.

I sank back onto the bed and found videos of Cole’s last show as NARKOTIKA. The one where he fell down and didn’t get back up. A thousand unblinking camera phones had captured the wail of his synthesizer as he grabbed for it and missed on his way down. No one was close enough to catch him. In the end, the only thing that stopped his fall was the ground.

He was terrible to look at in this video. Not in a chic, slick way. In a sweaty, singed, rotting way. I kept playing it over and over again, every time I thought about how much I wanted to call him.

He wasn’t here for just me. And this was who he had been.

This was who he might be again. But I didn’t know if that mattered.

Enough to stop me, that is.

I hated crying.

I hit play again. This time I watched his bandmates, hovering at the edges of the video screen. Jeremy, mouth parted in concern. Victor, withering.

Like, not again.

Through my thin bedroom wall, I heard my mother fighting with my father on the telephone.

my mother, overheard: My permission? You want my permission to come see me? If you had really wanted to see me, you’ d already be here. Don’t play games.

my father, assumed: Teresa, games are for children.

We are not children. We are educated professionals. We both attended decades of schooling to ensure we never had to play games again.

my mother, overheard: It is my work, Tom. I can’t change my schedule. You could at least move clients.

my father, assumed: Moving clients sounds a lot like a game, and you and I both know my feelings on that, Teresa, as I just said them.

my mother, overheard: Act like you heard what I just said.

my father, assumed: Act like you heard what I just said.

my mother, overheard: This is what I heard: “LaLaLa The Tom Culpeper Life Story Is About Him.” Do you think you’re the only one with feelings?

my father, assumed: Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t have feelings. Feelings are for wimmin and children.

my mother, overheard: You’re such an asshole.

my father, assumed: Are you crying again? God, I thought they sold out of tears at Crate & Barrel. Are you ordering them online again? We’re not made of money.

my mother, overheard: This was the best decision I ever made.

She hung up.

This place. What a hole. I could feel it tugging at the edges of my soul, trying to worry a piece free.

I pressed play on the video of Cole passing out on the stage of Club Josephine.

Then I called him.

At once he picked up. “Da?”

My cruel and hating heart beat faster. On my laptop, Cole’s eyes vacated. The music faltered, but you could only really tell that after you’d watched it forty times.

“Are you still on Minnesota time?” I asked.

“I am on whatever time makes this call last longer,” he said.

“What’s the next meal from now?”

Cole in the video grabbed for the keyboard. His fingers slid from the keys.

“Breakfast, I think. That’s the first one, right? The morning one?”

In the video, his face hit the ground. He was utterly still.

I was so tired of the missing and the dead.

I wouldn’t get in too deep. I wasn’t going to fall in love with him again. I could always walk away again.

“Let’s do that one.”

Chapter Eight

· cole ·

Everything was all right after Isabel called.

I ordered delivery falafel and sat in the apartment and watched music videos in my underwear. Someone had once asked me after a show, “Don’t you think music videos are dead?”

There is no way for music videos to die. As long as there is a song and a person left alive, someone will sing it, and as long as there is a song and two people left alive, one person will sing it and the other will film it.

The music video will die when we all go blind, and music will never die, because even when you can’t hear it, you can feel it.

Now that I was alone and washed out with relief and a far way away from anything like home, it felt like the only thing that could fill me back up was music. I started with bands I knew, and then I let comments and referrals and Wikipedia pages guide me down endless sonic wormholes. I listened to Swedish folk rock and Elvis and Austropop and Krautrock and dubstep and things they hadn’t invented names for.

Back before I was anyone, back when I was just a kid with a keyboard and a strange last name, this had been my drug.

I was a shapeshifter.

I lay back in my bed with my headphones on and the window open, and as the moon rose and striped over my eyes and car lights made a metronome pattern on the ceiling and the California smells washed over my remade wolf nostrils, I fell into song after song. The chords buoyed and buffered me.

Down below was the crappy world full of insubstantial people, but here in this sound was nothing but perfection.