Sinner

  “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.