I looked at the keyboard, and it looked back. Neither of us was interested in the other.

In the kitchen, I investigated the cameras affixed to the edge of the counter, pointed at the floor. I crouched in front of one and said, “Hello. I’m Cole St. Clair. And this is my instrument.”

I straightened and gyrated my hips in front of it for a minute or two. The camera wasn’t a satisfying audience.

I climbed onto the counter to see if I could reach the ceiling.

I could. I kicked the toaster onto the floor to see what sort of sound it would make. Not much.

It wasn’t morning yet.

I couldn’t understand Isabel’s resistance to my irresistibility.

I could only stand being this furious with wanting her if I thought that she was somewhere wanting me, too. I longed to call her and ask her if this was the case, but even I could tell that such a phone call would violate every parameter she had set for me.

The bed was too much of a commitment, so I crouched on one of the chairs in the living room and picked at threads on the arm until I fell asleep. I dreamed of being awake in a chair that smelled like old ocean water, and I woke up alone with a crick in my neck and the moon still in my face. My heart and lungs were still eating me from the inside, so I got my things and went up to the roof deck.

This late-early night-morning Los Angeles was cool and violet. The moon was just past full, but it was still close enough to be a wide-open eye. I heard the sounds of people laughing from a bar several streets over.

I prowled the deck, running my fingers under the deck railing and the edges of the furniture and around the potted lemon trees. There were no cameras, and I was above most of Venice; all I could see were other roofs. The deck next door was vacant; I thought the entire house was, actually. A rental. And the deck on the other side of that, barely visible in the dark, was also empty.

It was safe. Probably. It was out in the open, so technically it was not bulletproof. But it was close enough. The margin of risk was not large enough for me to even pretend I cared about it. I would get away with it for five to seven to twelve minutes.

I injected and I swallowed and I waited.

When I was a wolf, the space felt smaller. My senses felt fragmented.

I kept remembering a young man with a jittering pulse and I saw the world out of his eyes, higher, and then I forgot him. I paced the edge of this space, trapped high above the hissing ground below. The leaves of the lemon trees murmured to me. The smell of nearby food was hot and sweaty. Overhead, a star smeared noisily from one side of the sky to the other.

I put my paws on the edge — sand gritted under the pads of them — and looked down below. Too far to jump. But the world stretched out invitingly nonetheless. I whistled in soft frustration.

Everything in this place called to me, but I was trapped up above.

I fell back into my human body beside the lemon tree’s decorative pot. Lying on my back, I looked up through the leaves of the captive fruit tree. My thoughts and memories slowly reassembled themselves.

Even as a wolf, I wanted more.

Chapter Sixteen

· cole ·

Here are things that never get old: the first word said into a recording studio mic, the rough cut of a song, the first play on the radio.

Here are things that do get old: me.

Whatever part of me that had been able to pull off allnighters or something close before had evidently been left behind in my ill-spent youth, or maybe just in Minnesota. I slept until the sun was high and then discovered I had nothing but an empty donut bag of bored ants for breakfast. I clearly couldn’t work under those conditions, so I went out on foot to hunt/

gather (lyric possibility? Jot in notebook)(gather/hunt more interesting as it is unexpected).

(I gather/you hunt/we both miss the trap) By the time I got back to the apartment, the sun was even higher and Baby was waiting for me.

She sat in one of the two white vinyl chairs in the vestigial sitting area, working away on her iPad. When I slid open my door, she looked up.

“You’re supposed to be working.”

I slid the door shut behind me with my elbow. “I was working.”

“What do you have there?”

I looked at my hands. I couldn’t remember everything I’d gotten. “Stuff. For things. For. Work.”

She watched me unload my arms onto the table in front of her chair: a small wicker basket that crackled very intriguingly and would probably crackle even better into a microphone, a fake ivory candelabra, a not-gently-used Hawaiian shirt in extra large, and a small purple Buddha statue as a welcome-back present for Jeremy.

“This isn’t The Bachelor,” she told me. “I don’t have the budget to stalk you. So you’re going to have to do interesting things when my cameras are there. Or call me when you’re about to do something. Meanwhile, my feelings are hurt that you fired the musicians I picked out just for you.”

I headed to the keyboard. It was a Dave Smith. Maybe my Dave Smith. I didn’t know if it had been liquidated or something when I was reported dead/missing/werewolf (lyric

possibility?)(too on the nose)(another word for werewolf ?)(beast) (unicorn)(suicide)(jot in notebook?)(nothing to see here).

I pulled out my notebook and wrote nothing to see here in it.

“Cole.”

“What? Oh. I didn’t want a guitarist, and the bass player was totally wrong.”

Baby tapped at something on her iPad. “For the record, he was chosen by users on the show’s forum before you even got here. They knew him by name. It was their way of being involved.”

This was the way I preferred my listeners to be involved: buy the album, come to my shows, know all the words.

I turned on the keyboard. Lights flared across the board.

For a moment, I rested my finger on one of the knobs. Just to feel what it was like again. It had been so long. Even though, chronologically, I had spent much more time playing my keyboard on tour than I had playing it at home, it was those early days I remembered now. My first keyboard, my bedroom, morning sun across keys, cell phone photos snapped of the settings, songs hummed with my eyes closed. It was like NARKOTIKA had never happened.

“Get out your phone,” Baby said, “and call him back. Tell him you’ve made a mistake.”

I didn’t even bother to turn around. “No.”

“This is not optional.”

I bristled inside, but I kept my face blank and my voice careless. “Is making a good album optional?”