Сара Пинскер - A Song for a New Day

I did odd jobs in the long gaps between shows, washing dishes and tending bar for spending money so as not to dip too far into my remaining savings. The veggie oil reduced the one big expense; the other, food, couldn’t be helped. I slept in the van when I had to, or crashed on couches like I had starting out. Slow and steady, making friends as I went, doing my best to win invitations back.

I spent two weeks in St. Louis after playing there, sleeping in the van and tending bar, then headed to Memphis for a show set up by a friend of a friend, a tiny dance studio that hosted acoustic shows at night. I waited around for the instructor to take a break and turn off the camera, but when she finally did, she had only bad news for me. “Sorry. The police came by a couple of nights ago. We have to lie low for a while.”

She didn’t say StageHolo had instigated the raid, possibly didn’t know, but I knew.

It was only midday, and I had nothing to do, so I drove out to Graceland, parking on the empty shoulder of the empty road. There was razor wire on the fence, and through the shuttered gate I saw drones darting around the grounds, letting Elvis into hearts and Hoodies through the magic of some StageHolo subsidiary or another. They were getting a better show than those who had made the pilgrimage in person Before; their tours ended with a real live Elvis holo show, decade of choice. Interesting to see how they integrated the new into the old.

Elvis died before I was born; I had no beef with Elvis. I’d left Baltimore angry, driven angry, played angry, but I wasn’t even sure where to place it. Angry with StageHolo for being the actual force of destruction, for shutting something vital down while they shuttled people around this ancient shrine, and with Rosemary, the conduit. With myself, for not finding a way to protect what I had. With myself, for driving from city to city holding this in, when I could be using it, channeling it into song.

I grabbed my guitar out of the van and stood in front of the gate again. Played the first two lines of “Suspicious Minds,” the only Elvis song I knew, because the songwriter got that one right, about the trap we can’t escape. Just substitute fear for love.

A couple of drones turned toward the sound. I gave them the finger, even though that wasn’t fair, it wasn’t the Elvis fans I was mad at. A few more gathered.

“We’re still here,” I said to them. “We’re still playing music in real life. Come find us. Music is a living thing. Fuck StageHolo.”

That felt better. “Fuck StageHolo. Don’t give them your money. Learn an instrument. Go see a real band play. Get this place reopened and walk around it in real life. Everybody is afraid; it’s what you do when you’re afraid that counts. The world isn’t over yet.” That “everybody is afraid” bit sounded like it wanted to be a song. No, it was one; a fragment of something I’d written a long time ago and hidden away behind a hotel dresser. That’s how songs always happened: it might take years to come right, but if I sat on a line or a rhythm long enough, it revealed what it wanted to be. I was writing my way back into it in real time, for a bunch of Elvis drones.

“The world isn’t over yet. We don’t need to keep all the old things, but we need something new. Borrow a guitar and learn how to use it. If that isn’t your thing, figure out what is. Invent your own genre. Carve your initials into something. Brand them, paint them, shoot them, transpose them, change them entirely and sculpt yourself out of a new medium. Instrument and tool are synonyms: we can still construct ways to belong. Our song is a work in progress.”

Elvis fans were not the ones I needed to reach, but it helped me focus to say it out loud. I grabbed my guitar’s neck and started playing, looking for the chords and melody that would make me feel complete in the moment.

A siren wailed in the distance. When I looked up, the drones had multiplied. An army of drones, all waiting for my next move. One of them, or maybe the static security camera, must have called the police. I hadn’t trespassed, but they could probably get me on disturbing the peace or illegal parking or something.

“Good night, Memphis!” I waved to the airborne crowd, then cased my guitar and took off before they could find some reason to arrest me. I wasn’t really sure which direction I was heading until I hit a park on the banks of the Mississippi.

I saw a small cluster of people leaning against the railing. From a distance, I couldn’t tell what they were doing, but as I got closer I heard a familiar murmur, and I saw someone toss something into the water. I didn’t know the exact dates of the holidays this year, but it was the right season for this to be Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year. They were here for tashlich, casting their sins into the river. I dug in my backpack for a granola bar, ate most of it, then followed their lead, emptying the crumbs over the edge. Opening my hand, releasing.

I didn’t remember if there was a prayer I was supposed to say. My memories of doing the same at the East River as a kid were hazy at best. Still, it was a ritual I understood. It’s hard to hold a grudge standing beside a river. A river says move on, move on, move on. Flood your banks, alter your borders. I tossed away my anger at Rosemary and my anger at myself, though I kept the resentment of StageHolo. To my mind, that was a righteous fight.

I sat there for the whole afternoon, watching the sun set in blue and gold, then pink and purple. I wrote “Leaving Town” sitting beside the Mississippi, thinking of Rosemary’s unclenched fist, opening my hands, letting go. Then the start of “Manifest Independence,” incorporating the stuff I’d shouted at the Graceland gates.

In the morning, I headed to Nashville.

If a hood backdrop existed for “Mountains as Far as the Eye Can See,” Rosemary had never known to look for it. Roads that rolled and turned on a hairpin, trees thick with summer, vistas stretching from one state into another. She alternated between clearview, capturing the scenery as it was, and a map overlay displaying the names of mountains and valleys: Fancy Gap, Meadows of Dan, Rocky Knob, Fairy Stone, Woolwine. She loved the names, loved the ways the peaks layered green to blue to purple in the distance. Some turns made her stomach flip, made her brace against her compartment’s sides, but she tried to turn it into a game. A long, long, roller coaster sim with an impressive view, leading into the small city of Asheville, North Carolina, which hadn’t been visited by a recruiter in two years. For a few minutes, riding a bus around mountains, she regained some of the excited anticipation she’d had on her first trip. If they had taken away her illusion that she was doing some good in her job, at least she could still appreciate the places it allowed her to see.

She’d figured out that Logistics gave new recruiters the fanciest hotels to make them feel they owed the company from the start. This time, she’d asked for lodgings that let her fit in better, and Logistics had said, “If that’s what you really want…” They’d found her a tiny apartment above a convenience store, the type of place somebody moving to town might realistically afford. It could benefit from a Veneer: it had stained carpet, burned-bottom pots, a hot plate, a microwave crusty with other people’s culinary disasters, sour-smelling minifridge, box fan in the window. Maybe this was their attempt to show her she’d overcorrected, but it felt right. She didn’t deserve better after what she’d done.

In the store downstairs, she bought a Micky’s-2-Go microwave mac ’n’ cheese, almost as good as the real thing, and then settled onto the sagging bed. The bus still rattled through her. When she finally fell asleep, she dreamed that Luce had ridden into Asheville on top of her bus, playing guitar to the mountains, shouting down to Rosemary that nobody had to hide anymore.