Сара Пинскер - A Song for a New Day

“Complete. I like that word.” Rosemary exhaled as I continued. “I suppose that’s true… This isn’t for public consumption, okay? I don’t think I’ve ever told this to anybody here. I grew up in a huge family, with a bunch of siblings. I shared a room with three of my sisters, two older and one a year younger. I loved them more than anybody, but there was part of me that I knew I couldn’t share with them. I don’t know why I knew that. It was something I knew wasn’t allowed, and it got all tangled up in my mind.

“My first crush was on a melody—you wouldn’t know the song. It was klezmer, Phrygian, this Jewish song that still lights me up. I thought at first it was the clarinet player, and people would understand that. Then I realized it was the sounds that came out of his clarinet, mixed with the sounds from the rest of the band, and I wanted to be part of the music itself, and that was never going to be allowed, and there was so much that must be wrong with me. Then I saw a woman playing electric guitar, and I got even more confused, and it wasn’t until I figured out who I was, who I couldn’t be if I stayed, until I finally got to play guitar with a band, with all that power and noise, with people shaping the same sounds at the same time, making something together… like I’d spent my entire life in a country where everyone spoke a different language than I did, and suddenly I was home. I never put a word on it like you did, but… I hope you find it somewhere, whatever your thing is.”

I paused and looked down at my hands, which were forming chords on their own. “There used to be a musician named Neil Young—have you heard of him?”

Rosemary shook her head.

“He was this crochety old man by the time I started paying attention to music, but he used to go out on tour with this raggedy garage band called Crazy Horse. He’d play these ridiculous solos. He said to play a guitar solo all you had to do was grab the neck of the guitar and start wailing on the first note you found. If it sounded good with what the others were playing, you hung on it for a while longer. If it didn’t, slide one fret up or down. When you got bored of that note, move to another one and start the same process. I guess I’m looking at this period of my life as one extended Neil Young solo. A note that’s still working for me, for now, because it fits so well with the chord around it.” This was officially more than I’d talked to anybody about anything in a long time.

“I’m not entirely sure I understand.”

“You’re a captive audience, sorry. And really, I’m supposed to keep you talking, not the other way around, but you don’t sound impaired. I’ll chalk ‘I don’t understand’ up to a faulty metaphor, not brain injury.”

Rosemary stifled a yawn. “I still have doubts about this concussion theory.”

“No yawning! The night is still young.” I stood, stretched, and left the room to get a snack and some tea.

When I came back, she was standing, too, examining the photos on the walls. They were mostly pictures of bands playing downstairs. She stood in front of the only picture of me; my body facing the camera and my face in profile, sweaty, hair plastered to my face and arms, looking at someone just out of the shot, smiling. I wasn’t sure who I’d been smiling at, or anything about the night it was taken as different from any other night, but I liked it. It looked like the inside of my head when a song lifted off.

“Why do you hide that?” she asked when she noticed I’d returned. She pointed at the framed platinum record peeking out from behind the bookshelf.

I put down the tray I’d brought, piled with crackers and cheese and apple slices, and two mugs of tea, and climbed into my cozy couch again. “Because it’s irrelevant. I mean, I wouldn’t have this place if it weren’t for ‘Blood and Diamonds,’ but the award, the context it was given in, was a little weird. The gold record—you can’t see that one from where you’re standing—came during the tour, and I got nominated for a bunch of awards that all got canceled later that year when people started dying. The song was years old by the time it went platinum, and only because of a nostalgia piece. A journalist figured out we played the last show Before, did a big article, and the next thing you know, the song is charting again, higher than the first time. If I got half that attention for one of the new songs, like ‘Choose,’ I think I could make a real difference.”

“How?”

“It’s the best song I’ve ever written. I think it speaks to something that’s going on. The feeling that you want to create something but you don’t have the tools, you’ve lost the language.”

“Did you play it tonight before I interrupted your set?”

I nodded.

“If it was the one I’m thinking of, that song was amazing. I couldn’t stand still.”

“That’s the point! We’re all standing still, and we shouldn’t be.”

“So how do you get it out there? How do you get people to hear it?” Rosemary picked up a mug, peered into it.

“Mint tea. From my garden you fell into. And I don’t know anymore. Anyway, the best way to hear it is live. Person-to-person transmission.”

Rosemary warmed her hands on the mug, took a sip. “Like a virus.”

“Fear is a virus. Music is a virus and a vaccine and a cure.”

“Live music only?”

“No, but that shared experience is special. Being in a room with other people when something happens that will never happen the same way ever again.”

“What about StageHolo? Is that the same?” Rosemary hid her face behind the mug, breathing the steam.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve only seen Alice’s living room rig. I hear Hoodies are immersive, but I don’t know how that can replace what we do here. I guess it already has, pretty much everywhere. Doesn’t it give the opposite message, though? That people should stay isolated?”

“My first live musical experience was SHL, and it was fantastic. I felt like I was there.”

“How does it compare now that you’ve been to a real show? When a song blew your mind, did you and the person beside you turn to each other and grin because you knew what you had just shared?”

“No,” Rosemary admitted. “And the drums didn’t play in my bones the way they do here. But it beat the hell out of anything else I’d heard ’til now, and it brings music to lots of people who live in places where there isn’t any.”

“Right! But they’d have music if people hadn’t been conditioned to stay inside! If it wasn’t illegal. It’s a cycle. It’s ridiculous to still have congregation laws ten years after the guys who caused most of the trouble got put away. People are social.”

“People like being safe.”

“The two are not mutually exclusive.”

Rosemary sipped her tea. Again, I couldn’t decide if I’d been wrong about her.

By the time I let Rosemary leave, the sun was testing the edges of the drawn curtains. We stood at the front door, suddenly awkward despite the night’s conversation.

“Promise me you’ll get checked out if your head goes wonky. Blurred vision, dizziness, altered thinking, bad headache, anything like that.”

“Will do. Thank you for keeping an eye on me, I guess.”

“My pleasure. It could have been way worse. You could’ve been a total ass and I’d still have been stuck talking to you all night.”

Rosemary squinted and smiled. “Thanks, I think? Um, this might sound stupid, but am I allowed back here? After breaking in, I mean? I’ll pay the eight dollars for tonight.”

“I’ll tell Alice to take you off the blacklist. Then you only have to work on the crowd phobia.”

“Thank you!”