Actually I want you 7 page

The chord grew and grew until I was imagining the album cover and the number of tracks on the back and the feeling of releasing it out into the world to sink or swim — only they always swam; it was only ever me that sank — and wondering what in the world I would call myself if I wasn’t called NARKOTIKA.

Finally, Baby said (loudly, to be heard over the biggest, fattest, meanest synth-swell this apartment had ever heard), “Here is the deal. You aren’t going to take Chip back?”

I released the chord I’d been hitting. The sound slowly trailed off. “Who the hell is Chip? Oh. No. I’m sticking with Jeremy.”

“Then here’s the deal,” she said again. “This is yours now.”

I turned. In her outstretched hand was a phone. “What’s this?”

She didn’t answer until I’d taken it, reluctantly. “Your new work phone. I just signed you up for every social media avenue on the Internet. And I told the world you’re going to be handling all those personally. You want to be able to call the shots on the band? You’re going to have to work twice as hard for it.”

I stared at the phone in my hand. “You have murdered me.”

“You would know if I’d murdered you.”

I groaned.

“Don’t even,” Baby said, standing. “Don’t act like I’m your jailer. Because we both want the same thing. This show does well, I get to do another one. This show does well, you don’t have to tour for the rest of your life. So get to work and don’t forget you have studio time booked for this afternoon.”

I got to work.

Because she was right.

“What’s the next meal?” Cole asked me.

“Lunch,” I replied. I glanced at the classroom door to make sure it stayed closed as I walked in the direction of the girls’ restroom. Bathroom breaks were the only allowed excuse to escape my CNA class, a fact that seemed to trouble only me. The other students in the class seemed genuinely engaged, a concept I could only understand if I told myself they hadn’t read the textbook closely enough to note the redundancies in their learning experiences.

In any case, Cole’s number on my vibrating phone screen was more than enough to make me play the bathroom card. In the hallway, I tried to breathe through my mouth. It takes a certain sort of intestinal fortitude to willingly enter another high school after you’d graduated from your own. The sheer smell of the hall triggered a variety of feelings, any one of which would have been a good topic for a therapy session.

Cole said, “Tell me you want me.”

I pushed into the bathroom. “I have a very short lunch break.”

“I forgot that you were being educated. Teach me something you’ve just been taught.”

“We’re working on professional courtesy. It turns out that no matter how friendly you are with the clients, you’re not supposed to call them sweetie.”

“You are going to make a great C-A-N. C-N-A. Right? Although you do have a great C-A-N.”

In the mirror, my mouth smiled. It looked mean and happy.

“Doctor,” I replied. “I am going to med school. This is just a necessary evil.” Although that wasn’t strictly true. I could probably get into a fine premed program without it. But I didn’t want fine. There was very little point to fine.

“Come get me,” Cole said piteously. “In your car. My car makes me look like a loser.”

“That’s not your car,” I said, and Cole snickered at himself. “I’ll come get you. But I’m picking the place this time.”

I hung up. I didn’t want to go back into class. I didn’t want to do my clinicals this week, either. I didn’t want to roll old people over and clean whatever was left beneath them. I didn’t want to be told by my instructor that I needed to smile when I introduced myself to clients. I didn’t want to have to put the gloves on and have that gross hand-glove feeling that happened after I pulled them off. I didn’t want to feel like I was the only person in the world who hated people.

You’re taking a class in this.

You’re going to be a doctor.

This is life.

In the mirror, I looked stark and out of place in front of the worn stall doors. I wasn’t sure if that was actually how I looked or just how I stood, with my elbows tucked so that nothing in the room would accidentally touch me. That was the rule: Nothing was to touch me.

I didn’t know why I kept letting Cole break it.

An hour later, Cole and I were headed to lunch at an obscure L.A. food establishment.

I wasn’t sure why people still got credit for “finding” obscure places to eat. Friends of your parents took you and your mother to some tiny place that made great omelets or something, and the friends preened as if they’d invented omelets, and your mother’s all, “How did you ever find this place?!” I could tell you the answer: the Internet. Five minutes, a zip code, and cursory access to the Internet would grant anyone the secrets to culinary obscurity.

It pissed me off when people called common sense a magical power. Because if it counted, I was the most magical creature I knew.

I took Cole to a place that I’d discovered with my magical powers, a hole-in-the-wall pie shop that was easy to drive by if you didn’t know where you were going. Outside, the front was painted a deep purple. Inside was L.A. at its most visually appealing. The skinny eat-in area was concrete floors, sparse white walls, and reclaimed wood benches. The air was coffee and butter. The ordering area was tiny and quaint: a cooler with interesting drinks, chalkboard menu, a pie case full of delights. I had tried them all, from the velvety citrus tarts to the salty caramel drizzle chocolate pies.

It was so far from the gross high school classroom that I’d started the day in that it felt as if one or the other must not be real.

We stood in line. I kept finding myself standing too close to Cole, close enough that my shoulder blade pressed into his chest, and then I would realize we were both inhaling and exhaling at the same time.

I didn’t want to go back. I wanted to stay here with him. Or I wanted to take him with me. I was sometimes so damn tired of being alone —

I suddenly felt strangely and unpleasantly tearful.

I took a deliberate step to one side. Without my body to anchor him, Cole restlessly turned to the drink cooler and then to the shelves of merchandise and then back to the drink cooler and then back to the shelves of merchandise.

“I’m not really a sweets person.” He fingered a T-shirt that I could already tell he wanted to buy purely because it said THE PIE HOLE on it.

I said, “Don’t be a bastard.”

“Then tell me what to get. Apple? That’s a pie.”

“Shut up. I will order for you. In fact, you’re making me crazy pacing. Go get a table out front.”

“Da,” replied Cole, and vanished.

When I came outside, I found him at a tiny metal table in dappled shade, staring at two phones he’d set on the tabletop. There were two other tables, one of which was occupied by a cheerful but very ugly woman and her beautiful but very pissy-looking little dog. The third table was occupied by a camera guy, who I gave the finger. He waved back at me with a guileless smile.

I put Cole’s coffee in front of him and sat down with my back to the camera.

“What did you order for me?” he asked, not lifting his eyes from the devices.

“I’m not going to tell you. It’ll just have to surprise you when it comes out. It’s not apple. What’s that other phone?”

Cole glumly explained Baby’s mandate.

“That’s not that bad,” I said. “So she wants you to talk to your fans?”

“I don’t want to talk to them,” he said. “All they want to talk about is whether I’ll take their virginity or write another song like ‘Villain’ or come play a show in whatever impossibly small place they live in. Did you put sugar in this?”

“No. It’s a grown-up coffee. I made it for you the grown-up way. Also, you don’t have to be one-on-one. You could just update them in general.”

“Update them! I’m being brilliant. Now I’m being amazing. How tedious that would be for them.”

“Oh, it’s tedious already. Baby knows I’m not on the show, right?”

Cole glanced up at the camera. “Legally, she can use the back of your head but not your face. All that” — he gestured to the street — “is too loud for him to pick up any audio, but — do you want to go inside?”

I thought about how there was a certain dark pleasure to anonymously marking my territory, letting the fangirls know that he already had someone. And my hair looked great from the back.

“No,” I replied. “Drink your coffee.”

Cole took another sip. He looked pained. I slid a sugar packet I had been hiding from behind my mug and he leaped upon it. As he sprinkled its contents into his absolutely already-perfect latte, I picked up the Baby phone. It was a rather nice one.

“Look at the way it sits in your hand.” Cole squinted critically at the phone in my palm. “It respects you. You could be Cole St. Clair, you know.”

I laughed, a little crueler than was strictly necessary. “Oh, I don’t think so. That position is already filled by someone incredibly overqualified.”

“I mean, you could be my voice. Try it. Say something.”

I gave him a scathing look. But the truth was, although Cole was a complicated creature, his projected self was quite simple. I opened Twitter and typed: hi hi hi world.

I hit POST.

I had to admit, it was vaguely thrilling.

“What did I say?” Cole asked.

I showed him.

“I don’t use punctuation,” he said. “I also use a lot of these things.” He cupped his hands on either side of his face to demonstrate. “Parentheses.”

“Did you even read it?”

“I did. I know. I was admiring it. Let me see it again. Yes. This is a great idea. It will free me up for all kinds of things.”

“Like lying around on your floor and firing nice people?”

“Hey, I don’t talk smack about your work. For the record, I’m going into the studio this afternoon.”

I studied his expression to see how he felt about this, but he was facing the camera, so his features were handsome and regulated and fixed into a studied, arrogant relaxation.

“You could come,” Cole said. “And be my — what is it called? Naked person. No. Muse. You could be my muse.”

I raised an eyebrow. “I have class. Maybe if you do all your homework, I’ll come by and give you a gold star.”

“Oh,” he said. “I could give you one, too. I’m all about sharing.”

“That’s big of you.”

Cole held his fingers eight inches apart, then reconsidered and made it ten.

The girl from behind the counter appeared with a tray. “Here’s your st —”

“Shh,” I said. “It’s a surprise. For him, I mean. Close your eyes, Cole.”

Cole closed his eyes. Smiling at both of us, the waitress set the plates down. She left us there, but I noticed that she waited by the other side of the door, still with the same pleased, anticipatory smile on her face. It felt strange to be the genesis of such a pleasant expression.

“Open your mouth,” I ordered Cole. I worked to create what I thought was a bite-sized forkful of strawberry graham tart. It took longer than I expected.

“It is open,” Cole said. “In case you didn’t notice.”

“Keep it that way. I didn’t tell you to close it.”

I sat there for a long minute, watching Cole fidget, waiting to see if he would lose patience, while I smirked at his closed eyes and looked at the way his neck disappeared into the collar of his T-shirt. He shifted. His eyeballs looked back and forth beneath his eyelids. Anyone wanting to torture Cole would only have to tie him to a chair and do absolutely nothing. He’d beg to have his toenails removed just for something to entertain himself.

“Culpeper,” Cole said finally, and I felt a rush of blood in my cheeks at the way he said it. “I’m going to open my eyes.”

“No, you aren’t.” I put the bite in his mouth.

He rolled the pie around for quite a while before he swallowed. He sighed deeply.

“Don’t open yet, there’s more,” I said. “Verdict?”

“Mmmm.”

“Ready for the next?”

“Is it chocolate?”

It was the chocolate-caramel crostata, crusted with sea salt. It was the best food ever, if you were in a food-eating mood. “Mostly.”

“Just a small bite, then,” he warned.

“Good. I barely want to share this much with you anyway.”

He opened his mouth obediently, and I placed a small forkful of the caramel-drizzled-chocolate in it. I reminded him, “Eyes still closed.”

Savoring the chocolate, he sighed even more deeply.

“That one,” he said, “would be the one I would happily let kill me. Eyes still closed?”

“Yes,” I said. “Open your mouth.”

I kept him waiting again, while I looked at the lines of his cheeks and his jaw and his eyebrows, all of them so purposeful and dazzling and at home here in this place of purposeful and dazzling things. Then I leaned across the table and kissed his open mouth. It still tasted of caramel. I felt him say Mmmm, the sound vibrating against my lips, and then he pressed his hand against my neck and kissed me back, earnest and certain.

My heart felt so full I thought it would explode. It was unfamiliar with pumping blood instead of ice.

I sat back. Cole wiped lipstick onto a napkin. I waited for my pulse to return to normal.

I said, “Also, here’s this.”

I pushed a Pie Hole T-shirt over to him.

Cole sighed a third time, as if this was his favorite flavor of all. He rubbed the shirt against his cheek. Then he picked up his fork and ate his pie in two bites.

I took longer to eat mine, first, because I chewed, and second, because I explored his new phone while I ate. I thumbed through various apps, all of them with Cole’s name over them. “Do you really want me to be you online?”

Cole smiled. His real smile. “I trust you.”

By the time I got to the studio with my retinue of cameramen, I had already e-mailed music concepts to both Jeremy and Leyla, and formed an idea of what the episode would look like. I figured as long as I kept them interesting, Baby wouldn’t try to make things unpleasant.

The way www.sharpt33th.com worked was this: Each “season” was six weeks long, and most of them had six to nine episodes that could appear at any time. It didn’t seem like the most logical way to run a show, but it had been running that way before I arrived and I guessed it would keep running that way after I was gone. Baby had developed a core viewing audience with the SharpT33th app installed on various devices, and those core watchers were rewarded for their dedication by being the first to see the irregularly timed episodes. The idea was that when Baby’s disastrous subject did something heinous, it could be posted immediately to the Internet, and if you were sitting by your phone, you could be the first to know. After that first blast out onto the web, the shows got archived and could be watched at any time by anybody. The ideal was once a week, but my contract specified that I could be asked to do up to two a week “if material and demand warranted.”

Those extra episodes were always when her subject melted down.

I wasn’t going to do those.

The recording studio, close and gray and soulless, was unfamiliar to me, but known to Leyla, who gripped hands with the sound engineer when we arrived, and then immediately sourced kombucha from a fridge. Joan and T lurked with their cameras.

“Hello, man,” said the sound engineer. “I’m Dante. How’s it hanging?”

Jeremy and I exchanged a look.

“A little to the left,” I replied. “How much time do we have?”

Both Leyla and Dante looked insulted at the immediate introduction of business talk, but here was the truth: Studios made me anxious. It wasn’t that I didn’t like being in one; it was just that for as long as I’d been in music, I’d always been on deadline in one. It didn’t matter how big NARKOTIKA got; in the end it was always a new album squeezed into a set number of studio hours before I was scheduled to go back on tour again. There was never enough time to get the songs like I wanted them. Nothing had ever gone out as a disaster, but it had come close. Close enough that I never forgot what the stakes were.

Also, it was freezing cold in the studio. Like a systems test on my wolf-strained nerves.

“Do you want to, like, get to know the equipment?” Dante asked. “I mean —”

“What I’d like,” I said, “is to put down my gear and have those two people over there start hooking in to your equipment while you pull up your Wikipedia page so I can tell who else you’ve recorded and I can see if we’re going to be best friends or mortal enemies by the end of this session.”

Dante looked at me. Leyla looked at me. The cameras looked at me. Jeremy set down his case and flipped open the snaps to get his bass out.

No one was moving.

Jeremy looked up. He said, very pleasant and surprised, “Oh. Didn’t you know? Cole doesn’t do small talk.”

Sometimes I can be an asshole. Sometimes I don’t care.

Everyone went to do what I said.

“Also,” I added, “can we have it warmer in here? I can’t feel my goddamn fingers.”

Jeremy stood up and adjusted the strap of his bass. He played a soporific bass riff and paused to tune. “Just like old days.”

“Almost,” I said. I didn’t say Victor, but I was thinking it. My eyes were on Leyla as she messed around with the drum kit.

“Which of those things are we doing?” Jeremy asked. He meant the files I’d sent. “I fooled around with a few of them.”

“Which are you feeling?”

Jeremy glanced at the cameras. He glanced back at me. In a low, casual voice, he asked, “Depends. What’s the way?”

God, I loved smart people.

“Special guests,” I said, turning my phone so he could see.

“So, noisy,” Jeremy confirmed. “That third one, then. It does this?”

He played a little snatch of tune until I could tell which one he meant.

“Do you hear that?” I said to Leyla, who looked up with dislike on her face. “That’s the one we’re doing. Put your thinking cap on.”

I didn’t know if a thinking cap would fit over her dreads.

“Cole?” David — Derek — Damon — Dante? asked from overhead, his voice coming from everywhere. Behind a glass panel, I saw him moving behind an array of boards and computer screens. “Can you guys hear me in there?”

“Da.”

“My guys are bringing out your headphones. Let me know about the levels in your ears, and then we’ll do some levels in here. We’re all hooked up. What’s the working title for this track?”

“ ‘Gasoline Love,’ ” I replied.

Dante typed it in. “Nice.”

“Predictable,” replied Leyla from behind the kit.

I bristled. “There is nothing predictable about either gasoline or love, comrade. Why don’t you go back to not caring what tomorrow brings?”

Leyla shrugged and played a bit of drums.

It wasn’t bad. But —

I want Victor

I want Victor

I want Victor

I let myself think it for just a second, and then I shivered and turned to my keyboard. Misgiving still hung inside me. I thought about Isabel’s open mouth on mine, back at the pie shop.

Then we got to work.

Recording in a studio is nothing like playing live. Live is everything all at once. There’s no redos, no problem solving, just powering through. In a studio, though, everything becomes a puzzle. It’s easier if you do the edges first, but sometimes you can’t even tell what the edges are. Sometimes the hardest part is telling which track to lay down first — which track is going to be the skeleton to pack flesh onto. The vocals? But what if they’re not on the beat or if they drop out for measures and measures? The drums, then. But that left you with a track so spare that you might as well start with nothing, or just a click track. The keyboard, then, establishing the chords and the tone. It would have to be rerecorded, but at least it was something.

Mostly I liked it to start and end with me, anyway.

We worked for an hour, during which I hated Leyla more and more. There was nothing wrong with her drumming. It was fine. But Victor had been the best instrumentalist of us all. Other bands had always tried to poach him from us. Magic hands. Leyla was just a person with a drum set.

How stupid I’d been to think I could just go into a studio with any other musicians and come out with something that sounded even vaguely like NARKOTIKA. Not stupid. Cocky. NARKOTIKA was me, but it had also been Jeremy and Victor.

After an hour, “Gasoline Love” was sounding more like “Turpentine Disinterest.”

I was in a pretty bad mood by the time my guest stars arrived.

“I thought about bringing coffee,” Leon said as he stepped in. The shocked cameras swung to him — impotently, because Leon hadn’t signed a release, and wouldn’t. “But I thought that kids these days probably drank these newfangled things instead.”

He offered me an energy drink. I was unreasonably glad to see him.

“Leon, I love you,” I said, accepting the can. “Marry me and make an honest man of me.”

“Oh, well,” Leon said. He offered another one to Jeremy, who shook his head but said, “Thanks anyway, man.” He’d brought a mason jar of green tea.

Leyla sniffed and took a drag of her kombucha. “Who’s this?”

“Special guests,” I replied.

She said, “Every guest is special,” but halfheartedly.

Then Leon’s passengers stepped in: the two cops from the first episode. In uniform. One of them, I knew, had actually ended her shift a half hour before arriving here, but had agreed to come in uniform to improve the general appearance of the shot. I wasn’t an idiot. I knew no one would recognize them without the uniforms.

I hoped Baby was impressed by my sheer cunning. Surely she had to realize just how no-holds-barred brilliant it was to bring the cops back. I had really wanted to ask Leon to be in it as well, but I knew he would say yes to make me happy and then would hate it when he was recognized in the grocery store. So I hadn’t asked him, even though, in my head, Leon would make a great recurring character on the show. Everybody’s dad/brother/uncle/guy.

But I wanted Leon to be happy. That was the mission. Well, one of them.

I exchanged pleasantries with the cops, just polite introductory things like asking them if they had ever gone skydiving or petted a hairless dog. Then we got down to business.

The trick was that I had to find parts for the cops that they could perform in the studio without any particular skill. Sure, the one cop could play the bass badly, but that wasn’t going to cut it for a studio track. They could do percussion, though. It would get in the way of the drums, but really, anything that irritated Leyla was a bonus.

I got the cops all set up on the stomp-clap routine, and it turned out the girl-cop (Darla? Diana?) had opera training, so we went a bit wild with that. Dante had no concept of how to use a mixing board, or maybe he just had no idea of how to mix us, but that was all right, because someone whose name sounded like mine was a wizard with a synth and could run a voice through there like no one’s business.

It was turning into something quite good. It wasn’t a single, but it was beginning to sound like one of those off-the-wall tracks some fans got religious over, the cult classics that somehow managed to get played long after the big ones had burned everyone else’s speakers out. A few hours in and I was feeling pretty good about life. This was not quite the point — Isabel was the point — but it was a subpoint, and it was working well.

Then the power went out.

In the false darkness, Jeremy and I looked at each other. Girl opera cop swore, just one short, filthy word, sort of like a scream. Someone sighed. I thought it was Leon.

To the darkness, I said, “Tell me you had this on autosave, Dante.”

Dante did not reply, because he couldn’t hear me. Without any power, he was just a guy behind a glass wall.

Leyla took a drink of her kombucha — I heard her do it, and it infuriated me. Jeremy tucked a piece of hair behind his ear.

Then the power came back on.

The headphones still weren’t working, so I ripped them off and charged into the engineering room. Every computer was beeping and whirring as it came back to life.

“Give me good news,” I said.

Dante looked at me. There was a thin rim of white all the way around his pupils. He shook his head.

“Any of it?”

He said, “The drum track?”

It took a long moment for the truth to sink in: Everything weird and one-of-a-kind we had just done was gone. We could redo it, but it would sound like we had redone it. It was like today had never happened. Like someone had just taken my time and thrown it away. Like the pressing deadline that was always there had been shoved closer.

“And it didn’t occur to you to save along the way,” I said. “You’re working with a six-figure project, and you didn’t think at some point after the drum track, I will hit these buttons here on this fancy machine and save it?”

“I did save,” Dante insisted. “The power cutting off has messed things up. Like, it’s corrupted stuff. That machine won’t even start back up again.”

I wasn’t even certain which machine he was pointing at. I was certain that Baby had done this. I was also certain that she had done it to get me to implode on camera. I was even more certain that she was going to get what she wanted.

“Show me,” I said. “Show me the corrupted files.”

Dante scrolled through a bunch of empty screens. “It’s gone, man. I don’t know….”

“That is the most obvious thing you have said all day. Is this your job? Have you seen one of these things before? Tell me how it is that we still have a drum track.”

If he had been in on the plan, he was doing a good job of looking shell-shocked now. He fumbled through some more screens and muttered, “That’s, like, the last save that it paid attention to; I don’t know, I don’t know….”

I gestured toward T, who stood at my shoulder. “I hope you’re happy that your total incompetence is being broadcasted to the planet.”

I stormed out. In the recording room, Jeremy was packing away his bass because he knew me, and Leyla was still sitting behind her drums because she didn’t.

“We could redo it,” the bass cop suggested.

Girl opera cop shook her head. She knew.

Leon clapped his hand on my shoulder and then got his car keys.

“It was meant to be,” Leyla said. She didn’t look surprised, but it was hard to tell if that was because she was in on Baby’s plan, or because she was baked, or because she really did believe that it was meant to be.

“I know that you’re trying to get me to kick your drum set in,” I warned her, “but I’m onto you.”

Jeremy told the cops how glad he was that they had come and that at least the cameras had caught their contributions. He made sure that he had their telephone numbers. He shook Leon’s hand. He closed the door behind them all. He was good at this.

I called Baby. “This is not the way to get me on your good side.”

Baby said, “What?”

“Oh, come on.”

“I’m not a mind reader.”

“I know you want drama. But you mess with the album again,” I said, “and —” I stopped because I couldn’t think of what to end the sentence with. I didn’t have half an ounce of leverage. I was right back where I’d started. I’d thought I’d been so clever to circumvent the system, to make an album without a label as overlord, and here I was again, just merchandise.

I thought about how she’d been so concerned at the beginning.

I kicked over one of the microphone stands. It barely made a sound in this pointless, generic studio. This wasn’t a place to make music. It was a place to record commercials for music.

I didn’t even know what the hell I’d been thinking.

“And what, Cole? I don’t really like being threatened, and for no reason. I’m working. I have a call on the other line. I don’t know what has happened, but I’m happy to help.”

I wanted to snarl This is war! but the fight was going out of me. I couldn’t believe the track was gone. I just couldn’t believe it. What a damn waste of everything.

“I want my Mustang,” I told her. “That’s how you can help. Get me my Mustang.”

I hung up. I felt like a toothless dog.

If Victor had been here, I would’ve turned to him and said, “Let’s go get high.”

But he wasn’t. And I was on camera. And that wasn’t me anymore. That wasn’t me anymore. That wasn’t me anymore.

I looked at Jeremy.

He said, “What are you thinking?”

I said, “I wish Victor would come through that door.”

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 567