Line Check
Remy
The fourth monitor engineer Jax Holloway had fired this year was still packing his headphones when I walked into monitor world.
He was a big, gray-bearded man named Gordon who had mixed for people whose posters I’d had on my wall at fourteen, and he was coiling a cable over his elbow with the slow, insulted care of a man who wanted the whole stadium to know he wasn’t in a hurry. He looked me up and down. Black jeans, black T-shirt, belt pack, a roll of white gaff tape on my wrist like a bracelet, a Sharpie behind my ear. My curls were twisted up and stabbed through with a pencil because I’d lost my last hair tie somewhere over Ohio.
“You’re the replacement,” he said.
“I’m Remy.”
“Castellanos.” He nodded like the name tasted of something. “I heard you were good.”
“I am good.”
That got half a laugh out of him. He slung his bag over his shoulder and tipped his head toward the console, a wide black desk under a little tent of blackout cloth, glowing with faders and meters, set in the wings at stage left where I’d be able to see the side of the stage and nothing else. “He’ll tell you it’s wrong,” Gordon said. “Whatever you give him. It’ll be wrong. He hears things that aren’t there, and then he blames you for not putting them there.”
“Okay.”
“I’m serious, kid.”
I was thirty years old, I had mixed monitors for three world tours and a festival run where it rained on us for nineteen straight days, and I had once rebuilt a wireless receiver in a Belgian parking lot with a soldering iron I’d borrowed from a man selling waffles. I was not a kid. But Gordon was walking away from the biggest tour of the summer with his pride in a cable bag, so I let him have it.
“Thanks for the warning,” I said.
He paused at the bottom of the ramp, under the work lights. “He’s going to talk to you,” he said. “During the show. You’ll see what I mean.”
Then he was gone, and the console was mine.
The final North American leg of the Halloway Ruin stadium tour had eight weeks, twenty-two shows, and a rumor attached to it. The rumor was that Jax Holloway was impossible.
Not drunk. That was the old rumor, the one from six or seven years ago, when the band was all over the tabloid sites and he’d fallen off a stage in Glasgow and kept singing from the barricade with blood running into his collar. That Jax was gone. Everybody in the business knew he’d gotten sober; four years now, the press releases said, like the number was a product feature. The new rumor was quieter and spread among crew in catering lines and hotel lobbies: he couldn’t keep a monitor engineer. He’d burned through four since January. He heard everything. He trusted nobody. He’d walked offstage in Phoenix in the middle of a song because his own voice in his ears sounded, he said, like it belonged to someone else.
The tour manager who’d called me was a woman named Odette Price who chewed nicotine gum like it owed her money and had a voice like a gravel driveway. “Eight weeks,” she’d said. “Starting Thursday in Philadelphia. I’ll pay you what you’re worth, which is a lot, and you’ll earn it, which is the part nobody tells you.”
“Why me?”
“Because you’re the best in the business and you’re between tours. And because somebody told me you don’t flinch.”
I hadn’t asked who. I’d flown out of Tucson the next morning.
Now Dette was standing at the edge of monitor world with a radio on her hip and a clipboard she never looked at. Fifty-something, silver crop, reading glasses pushed up into her hair. “You meet him yet?”
“Not yet.”
“He’ll be out for line check in twenty. Band first, then him. He likes to come out last so he can hear the room before anybody tells him how it sounds.” She chewed. “You eat?”
“I’ll eat after.”
“Eat now. After is a lie.” She pulled a granola bar out of her jacket and set it on the corner of my console, right next to the fader for the drummer’s kick. “One more thing.”
“There’s always one more thing.”
“He’s going to try you. Don’t take it personal. He’s not cruel. He’s scared, and he doesn’t know it, and it comes out sideways.” She looked out toward the stage, where techs in black were taping down cable runs across the vast gray deck. Beyond it, past the lip, sixty thousand empty seats rose up into a white Pennsylvania sky. “The ears are where he lives now. You understand? When he’s out there, you’re the only thing he can hear. Gordon never got that.”
I didn’t say anything. I knew what she meant better than she could have guessed.
Monitor engineers are the invisible half of a live show. The front-of-house engineer mixes for the audience, out in the middle of the stadium on a platform with a perfect view. We mix for the band. We sit in the wings, out of sight, and we build each musician a private world of sound and pipe it directly into their heads through custom molded in-ear monitors, earpieces shaped to the inside of each person’s ear canals so precisely that they seal out almost everything else. Sixty thousand people screaming, and inside those little shells it’s quiet enough to hear the singer breathe. Whatever the band hears, they hear because I decided they would. Their own voices. The click. The kick drum. How much crowd. How much of each other.
It’s intimate in a way nobody outside the job really understands. You learn what makes a guitarist panic and what makes a drummer feel like a god. You learn the sound of somebody’s fear. And they learn the sound of you, because the monitor engineer has a talkback microphone that goes straight into their ears. Count-ins, cues, warnings. Watch the wedge, it’s slick. Two minutes. You’re good. You’re the voice in the dark.
I’d been the voice in the dark for nine years. I’d made one mistake in all that time. Just the one.
I unwrapped the granola bar and ate it standing up, and then I sat down at the desk and went to work.
Gordon’s show file was a mess. Not a bad engineer’s mess; a frightened one’s. There were three versions of every scene and snapshots named things like JAX FIX 2 and JAX REAL and DONT TOUCH. His vocal chain had so much processing on it that when I soloed it in my headphones, it sounded like a man singing through a beautiful, expensive pillow. Compression stacked on compression, a de-esser fighting a high shelf, reverb that had been turned down so many times it was mostly an argument.
I started pulling things off.
My tech, a lanky twenty-six-year-old named Benji Tran who ran the wireless systems and had a habit of narrating his own work under his breath, rolled his chair next to mine and watched with growing horror.
“You’re stripping his vocal,” he said.
“I’m cleaning it.”
“Gordon spent three weeks on that.”
“I know. You can hear every one of them.”
Benji opened his mouth, closed it, and went back to scanning radio frequencies. The band came out at four: a drummer built like a refrigerator with a gap-toothed grin, a tall Swedish guitarist with a white-blond buzz cut, a bassist in a fishing hat who said nothing at all. Teddy Okafor, Mags Lindqvist, Sully Baptiste. I’d studied the band roster the way I studied a stage plot. They were easy. Teddy wanted his kick loud enough to rearrange his organs. Mags wanted her guitar, the click, and nothing else. Sully just gave me a thumbs-up after every adjustment, a little like a man approving a sandwich.
“New girl’s fast,” Teddy called across the stage, into his mic.
I hit my talkback. “New girl has a name.”
He laughed, a huge, delighted sound in my headphones. “Yeah? What is it?”
“Remy.”
“Remy, you just made my kick sound like a car crash. I love you. Marry me.”
“Stand in line,” I said, and let the button go.
Then the stage went quiet. One of the backline techs walked to center stage and set a handheld wireless microphone in the stand, and the stage manager said, “Jax is walking,” on the radio, and something in the air changed. Even the riggers up in the steel looked down.
He came up the stairs from under the stage, from the dark, and walked out into the work lights like they’d been put there for somebody else.
I’d seen him on television. Everybody had. The hair, black and too long and pushed back with his fingers, the wide mouth, the tattoos crawling up out of his collar. Thirty-four years old and still built like a nineteen-year-old who’d never stopped running. In person he was taller than I expected and quieter. He wore a gray T-shirt that had been washed into softness and black jeans with a hole at one knee, and he walked to the mic stand without looking at anyone, put his in-ears in, one and then the other, pressing them into place with two fingers, and stood there with his head down.
I watched him on the little screen that showed me center stage. He didn’t say hello. He wrapped his hand around the mic and spoke into it, low, and his voice came into my headphones like weather.
“Okay. Let’s hear it.”
I pushed his vocal up in his mix. Clean. Dry. A little warmth in the low mids, enough air on top that he could hear the shape of his own consonants. Click under it, quiet. A whisper of the stadium’s ambient mics so he’d feel the room around him instead of a vacuum.
He sang four bars of something. A cappella, no band. Just a few lines of a song I didn’t recognize, half under his breath, and then he stopped.
Silence. Across the stage, Teddy looked toward my position in the wings, then back at Jax.
“Who’s on monitors?” Jax said into the mic.
I pressed my talkback. “Remy Castellanos.”
His head came up. He didn’t look at me, he couldn’t have seen me through the blackout cloth from where he stood, but he looked toward the wing, toward the sound of my voice in his head, and my stomach did a slow, unprofessional roll.
“Remy,” he said. Like he was testing whether the name would hold weight. “What did you do to it?”
“I took things off.”
“What things?”
“Most things.”
A pause. On the screen, I watched him tip his head to one side and sing another line, quieter. His voice was a wrecked baritone with a clean high edge on it, like a bottle broken so it caught the light. “Gordon had a lot of things on it,” he said.
“Gordon was trying to fix you,” I said. “I’m not. You don’t need fixing. You need to hear yourself.”
Benji made a tiny noise beside me, the noise of a man watching someone step onto a frozen lake.
Jax stood very still. Then he said, into the mic, in a voice that went into my headphones and absolutely nowhere else in the stadium, “Say that again.”
I let go of the talkback. My thumb was hovering. My pulse was doing something stupid.
I pressed it. “You need to hear yourself.”
He sang again. A whole verse this time. Teddy came in under him on the kick, and Mags found the chord, and Sully drifted in, and for about forty seconds Halloway Ruin played to sixty thousand empty seats while I rode Jax Holloway’s vocal with two fingers on a fader and the other hand flat on the desk like I could feel him through it.
When the song ended he took one in-ear out and looked at it in his palm, like it had told him a secret.
“Okay,” he said, out loud, to nobody. And then, into the mic: “Don’t change it.”
He walked off.
Benji stared at me. “He’s never said okay,” he whispered. “Not once. Not to Gordon. Not to the guy before Gordon.”
“Scan your frequencies, Benji.”
“I’m going to tell my mom about this.”
I had one rule, and I had gotten it the hard way.
At twenty-five I’d mixed monitors for a country-rock singer named Wade Corrigan, a big golden smiling man with a voice like warm whiskey and a habit of telling everyone they were the only one who understood him. I’d believed him. That was the whole of my crime: I believed a singer who told me I was the only one who understood him, and for four months on a summer tour I went from monitor world to his bunk and back again and told myself nobody knew.
Everybody knew. And when Wade got bored, which he did, he didn’t tell me. He told the tour manager that he and I “didn’t have the chemistry anymore” and that he needed a new monitor engineer to “reset the energy.” I found out in a parking lot in Omaha, from a man with a clipboard who wouldn’t look me in the eye. The fans can replace talent, he’d said, almost kindly. But talent can always replace crew. Don’t forget which one you are.
I’d never forgotten. Five years, three world tours, and not one musician had gotten closer to me than the inside of their own ear. I didn’t drink on tour, either, not since Omaha; somebody has to be the clear head at the end of the line. It wasn’t a sacrifice. I liked knowing that whatever went wrong at two in the morning, I’d be awake for it.
Never sleep with talent. That was the rule. It wasn’t complicated, and it had worked.
So it didn’t matter at all that I could still hear the way Jax Holloway had said Say that again.
At 8:52 that night the stadium lights went out, and sixty thousand people made a sound I felt in my teeth.
I had my headphones on, one cup on my right ear and one pushed back so I could hear the stage. The intro tape rolled, a low synth drone that made the deck buzz under my boots. Benji was beside me with a spare wireless pack in each hand, eyes on his receivers. The stage manager counted down on the radio, and Teddy hit the first downbeat of the show like he was trying to break the planet in half, and the lights came up white, and Jax walked out into it.
From my chair I could see a slice of him: shoulder, arm, the side of his face. The crowd noise came through the stage like surf. In his ears, I’d built him the whole band and a little of that surf, just enough to feel the sixty thousand without drowning in them.
He opened his mouth and the first line went out over the stadium, and in my headphones I heard it the way he heard it. Close. Raw. Perfect.
First song, no notes. Second song, he signaled for a little more Mags, and I gave it to him before his hand dropped. Third song, he turned upstage toward Teddy during the bridge, laughing, and I heard the laugh through his mic before it vanished under the guitars. By the fifth song, I’d stopped waiting for him to tell me it was wrong.
Then, in the gap between songs six and seven, while the crowd was roaring and the lights were down for a change and the techs were swapping Mags’s guitar, his voice came into my headphones.
Not through the PA. Not out to sixty thousand people. Just to me.
Jax’s handheld had a switch on the body, a little momentary button his tech had wired in for Gordon, years ago, so the singer could talk to his monitor engineer without the audience hearing. Press it and his mic disappeared from the front-of-house mix and went only to my cue. A talkback line in reverse. Singers used it for complaints, mostly. More me. Less guitar. What the hell happened in that chorus. Gordon’s warning, finally, made sense.
“Remy.” His voice was low and slightly out of breath and so close it felt like he was standing behind my chair. “You there?”
I pressed my own talkback. “I’m here.”
“You’re very good at your job.”
“I know.”
He laughed. I heard it, dry and low, under sixty thousand people screaming his name. On my little screen, he’d turned his back to the crowd, his mouth near the mic, one hand cupped over it. “Gordon used to make me feel like I was singing in a closet,” he said. “With a blanket over my head. And somebody standing outside the door telling me I was fine.”
“You are fine.”
“I don’t want to be fine.” The lights were coming back up. Mags was hitting the opening riff of the next song. He had maybe three seconds. “I want to be heard. Whoever you are.” A breath. “Don’t you dare leave.”
The button clicked off. The spotlight found him. He turned around, raised the mic to his mouth, and sang the first line of “Glass Hours” to sixty thousand people as if nothing had happened at all.
I sat very still with my hand on his fader.
“What’d he say?” Benji asked, leaning in. “Was it bad? It looked bad. He was covering his mouth.”
“Nothing,” I said. “He wanted more guitar.”
I’d been the voice in the dark for nine years. In all that time, nobody had ever talked back to me like he was asking me to stay.
I pushed his vocal up a hair, just so he’d know I’d heard him, and I didn’t let myself think about why.
Sixty Thousand Empty Seats
Jax
Here is a thing nobody tells you about getting sober: the quiet is the worst part.
Not the shakes, not the sweats, not the first year of birthdays and weddings and award shows where everybody hands you a glass and then remembers and takes it back with a face like they’ve stepped on your dog. Those are bad. But the quiet is worse. For fifteen years there had been a noise running underneath everything I did, a warm loud hum that said more and later and who cares, and when it stopped, what was left was a silence so big I could hear my own blood in it.
I’d spent four years learning to live in that silence. Meetings in church basements in every city we played. A sponsor named Lou, a retired longshoreman in Baltimore who answered the phone at three in the morning with “What’re we doing, kid,” like I’d called to ask about the weather. A chip in my pocket I didn’t look at. Running at dawn. Black coffee. A lot of honesty I hadn’t asked for.
And in-ear monitors.
That was the part I couldn’t explain to anybody, not even Lou. When I put those molds in my ears, the world went away. The crowd, the stage, the lights, all of it turned into a faraway roar like the ocean through a wall. What was left was whatever the monitor engineer gave me. My own voice, my band, the click. If it was right, I could stand inside the song like a house I’d built. If it was wrong, I was alone in a sealed box with my own head, and my head had been trying to kill me for a long time.
Gordon had given me a box. So had the three before him. Good engineers, every one of them. They just kept trying to make me sound better, smoother, safer, and every time they did, I heard a stranger singing in my ears and the old panic came up my throat like water.
Then a woman with a voice like a struck match told me I didn’t need fixing, and for the first time in a year, I heard myself.
I’d lain awake in the hotel in Philadelphia thinking about it. About the dry, unbothered way she’d said I’m here. Like it was a fact she was willing to stand behind.
I wasn’t proud of how long I’d lain awake.
Pittsburgh was a day off with a soundcheck, which meant the whole crew loaded into the stadium by the river and spent ten hours tuning a machine that wouldn’t be switched on until the next night. I didn’t have to be there until four. I got there at two.
The stadium was empty. Gray seats climbing up into a sky the color of a nickel, the river behind it, gulls wheeling over the upper deck. Sixty thousand chairs and nobody in them. I liked empty stadiums. They were the only places where I could hear what the building was going to do to the sound before people filled it up with screaming.
I walked out to center stage. A tech handed me a mic. I put my ears in.
Silence. Then a little hiss as the system came alive, and then, close and clear and unimpressed:
“You’re early.”
I turned toward stage left without thinking. The blackout cloth over monitor world hung still. I couldn’t see her. I’d only seen her once, really, for about four seconds after the Philly show, walking past the production office with a road case and a pencil stuck through a knot of dark curls, and she hadn’t looked at me. I’d stood there with a towel around my neck like an idiot while she disappeared down a corridor.
I pressed the button on the mic. “How do you know I’m early?”
“Because it’s two-fifteen,” she said, “and your call is four.”
“Maybe I’m dedicated.”
“Maybe you’re a control freak.”
Teddy, who’d wandered out to his kit to adjust a cymbal stand, looked at me and raised both eyebrows. He couldn’t hear her. Nobody could hear her but me, unless she chose. I turned my back on him.
“I like to hear the room,” I said. “Before it’s full.”
“I know,” she said. “Dette told me.” A pause. “So listen.”
And she gave me the room. Not my voice, not the band. She opened up the ambient mics hung around the stage and the stadium and put them in my ears, and I stood there and listened to the building breathe. Wind over the upper deck. Gulls. Somewhere a forklift beeping in reverse. A rigger humming under his breath, sixty feet up. The river, maybe, or maybe I just wanted it to be the river.
I closed my eyes.
Nobody had ever done that before. Every engineer I’d had wanted to show me what they could do. She was just letting me listen.
“Okay,” she said after a minute, softer. “Now sing something.”
We worked for an hour. She’d change something, I’d sing, I’d tell her what I heard. Not what I wanted, what I heard. She seemed to understand the difference. When I said my voice sounded “a little forward, like it’s leaning on me,” she knew what that meant and fixed it before I finished the sentence. When I said the click felt “nervous,” she laughed in my ears, a low warm sound, and moved it two notches back in the mix and asked, “Better?” and it was.
“You’re weird,” I told her.
“You described a metronome as nervous.”
“It was nervous.”
“It’s a beep, Jax.”
She’d never said my name before. It went into my head and down my spine and settled somewhere low that had no business being involved in a soundcheck.
I cleared my throat. “What happened to ‘Mr. Holloway’?”
“Nobody’s ever called you Mr. Holloway.”
“My accountant does.”
“I’m not your accountant.” I could hear the smile. “I’m the only person on this tour who’s literally inside your head. I think we can skip the formalities.”
Teddy had given up pretending to adjust his kit and was just watching me now, arms crossed over his chest, grinning his big gap-toothed grin. Mags had come out too, and she was standing next to him with her guitar, and they were both watching me talk to a piece of black cloth.
I pressed the button. “My band’s staring at me.”
“Your band can’t hear me.”
“That’s the problem. I look like I’m talking to God.”
“Well.” A pause, perfectly timed. “Close.”
I laughed into the mic. Actually laughed, out loud, in the middle of an empty stadium, and Teddy’s eyebrows went somewhere up near his hairline, because Teddy had known me since we were nineteen and playing bars in Akron for gas money, and Teddy knew exactly how long it had been since I’d laughed during a soundcheck.
I didn’t see her again until catering.
Production catering on a stadium tour is a long white tent full of folding tables and chafing dishes and a hundred crew people eating like they’ll never see food again, because some days they won’t. I usually ate in my dressing room. Today I walked through the tent with a plate in my hand like a man looking for someone, which I was.
She was sitting at the end of a table with Benji, her tech, and two of the lighting guys. She had a notebook open beside her plate and was writing in it with the pencil from her hair, so her curls had come half down around her shoulders. Up close she had a scatter of freckles across her nose and dark eyes with a kind of permanent skepticism in them, like she’d checked the math on the world and found errors. Her mouth was full and unpainted. She was the least decorated woman I’d seen in years and I couldn’t stop looking at her.
The lighting guys saw me and went silent. Benji dropped his fork.
Remy looked up. Her face did nothing at all.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi.”
“Mind if I—” I gestured with my plate.
There was a beat in which I watched her decide. Then she moved her notebook. I sat down across from her. The lighting guys picked up their trays and evaporated. Benji stayed, frozen, a piece of chicken halfway to his mouth.
“Benji,” Remy said.
“Yeah?”
“Go check the spare packs.”
“I checked them.”
“Check them again.”
He went. It was just the two of us at the end of the table, with the noise of the tent around us.
Her drink was a plastic cup of club soda with a lime in it. Mine was the same. She noticed at the same moment I did. I watched her eyes go from my cup to hers and back, and I braced for it, the little flinch people did, the oh, right, the careful look.
She didn’t do it. She just said, “I like the limes they get here. They’re actually ripe.”
“You don’t drink?”
“Not on tour.” She shrugged. “Somebody’s got to be the one who remembers everything at two in the morning. And I’m the one in your ears. I’d like to be all the way there when I’m in them.”
It was the most natural thing anyone had said to me about not drinking in four years. No speech. No sympathy. Just a fact about her job, the same way she’d tell me she liked the room a little drier.
“Four years,” I said. I don’t know why I said it. I never said it.
“I know. It’s in your press kit.” She tilted her head. “Is it hard?”
Nobody asked me that. People asked if I was doing okay, in a tone that meant they didn’t want an answer. Remy asked it the way she asked how the click felt, like she wanted the real information so she could do something useful with it.
“Some nights,” I said. “Not the show. The show’s easy. It’s after. Everybody’s high on it, the adrenaline’s still going, and there’s nowhere to put it.” I turned my cup around on the table. “Used to be I’d put it in a bottle. Now I put it on a treadmill at two in the morning in a hotel gym in Cleveland like a fucking insomniac accountant.”
She laughed. A real one, surprised out of her. “That’s very glamorous.”
“I’m a very glamorous man.”
“Clearly.” She was still smiling a little, looking at me, and I could see her decide not to. The smile folded away like a pocketknife. She picked up her pencil. “I have to get back. Your bassist wants to try a new pack.”
“Sully talks?”
“Sully gives thumbs-up. I’ve learned to interpret.”
She stood and gathered her tray. I didn’t want her to go, which was alarming. I said, “Remy,” and she stopped.
“Thank you,” I said. “For the room. Earlier.”
Something moved across her face. Then it was gone. “That’s the job,” she said, and walked away.
It wasn’t, and we both knew it.
Dette caught me in the hallway outside my dressing room an hour later. She had her clipboard against her chest and her gum going at a speed that meant she was about to deliver news.
“Crew bus three blew a transmission outside Harrisburg,” she said. “I’ve got six people without bunks until Thursday. I’m putting Benji with the lighting guys. I need one more bunk.”
“Okay.”
“Your bus has two empty.”
Our bus was the band bus: me, Teddy, Mags, Sully, our tour assistant Priya when she wasn’t flying ahead. Twelve bunks, a front lounge, a back lounge, a bathroom the size of a phone booth. Two empty bunks because I’d asked for them, because a year ago I couldn’t stand having strangers sleep six feet from me.
“Who?” I said, although I knew.
Dette watched me over the top of her glasses. “Castellanos. Monitor world needs to be near the band anyway for the next few load-outs, she’s got to rebuild your vocal chain on the fly. She asked me to ask you. She said if you said no, she’d sleep on a road case.”
“She would, too.”
“She would.” Dette chewed. “Is that a yes?”
“It’s a yes.”
“Jax.” She stepped closer and lowered her voice. Dette had been with us since the first tour bus, the one with the broken heater and the raccoon. She’d driven me to rehab herself, in her own car, with the radio off. “That woman is the best thing that’s happened to this tour since we got sober. You understand me? We. I’m not losing her because you get lonely.”
“I’m not going to—”
“I didn’t say you were going to do anything. I said don’t.” She tapped my chest with the clipboard. “Be good.”
She walked away. I stood in the hallway feeling like I was nineteen again and had been caught with something in my pocket.
There was a meeting at seven in the basement of a Lutheran church across the river. There’s always a meeting. Lou says that’s the one miracle nobody argues about: you can land in any city on earth, and somewhere within ten miles there’s a room with folding chairs and bad coffee and a coffee can for the rent.
I wore a ball cap and sat in the back. Nobody cared. That’s the other miracle. A retired mail carrier with a cane told us about his granddaughter’s wedding, where he’d danced for three hours and drunk eleven ginger ales and cried in the parking lot from how good it felt to remember all of it. A young woman in scrubs said she was ninety days and didn’t know who she was without the noise, and half the room nodded, and I nodded with them.
When it came around to me, I almost passed. I usually do on tour. Then I heard myself say, “I’m Jax. I’m an alcoholic.”
Hi, Jax.
“Four years in March,” I said. “I sing for a living. I wear these things in my ears when I work, and they shut everything out, and for a long time that’s been the scariest part of my job. Being alone in there. Hearing my own head.” I turned the paper cup around in my hands. “Today somebody at work turned on all the microphones in an empty stadium and just let me listen to it. Wind. Birds. A guy humming. She didn’t fix anything. She just let me hear that the room was there.” I didn’t know how to finish. “That’s all. I wanted to say it out loud somewhere. It was a good day.”
The mail carrier with the cane caught me on the stairs afterward and squeezed my arm with a hand like a bundle of sticks.
“Somebody who lets you hear the room,” he said. “That’s worth hanging on to, son.”
“She works for me,” I said. “Sort of.”
He laughed, a dry wheeze. “They all do, sort of. Keep coming back.”
I walked back across the river in the dark with the stadium lit up behind me like a ship, and I called Lou from the bridge and told him about the old man, and about the room, and not one word about the voice.
“You sound different,” Lou said.
“Different how?”
“Like a guy who’s listening.” He grunted. “Careful with that. It’s habit-forming.”
The Pittsburgh show was the next night, and it was a monster.
Sixty thousand people. The river black behind the stage. Sweat, light, noise like the inside of an engine. And through all of it, in my ears, Remy.
She was always one step ahead. I’d think a little more Teddy and it’d already be there. I’d wander out to the end of the thrust stage where the crowd noise was heaviest and she’d pull my vocal up to compensate before I’d taken three steps. Once, in the middle of a song, my pack started crackling, a tiny sharp hiss of radio dropout that used to send me into a spiral, and before I’d even turned toward the wing she was in my ears saying, low and calm, “I hear it. Benji’s on it. Keep going. You’re fine,” and by the next chorus it was gone.
I’d had people tell me I was fine my whole life. It had never once been true when they said it. When she said it, it was.
Between the seventh and eighth songs, the lights went down and I turned my back on sixty thousand people and pressed the switch on my mic.
“Castellanos.”
“Holloway.”
“You’re on my bus.”
A pause. “I’m aware.”
“Dette says you asked.”
“Dette says a lot of things.” The click was ticking in my ear under her voice, counting down to the next song. “I need to be near your vocal chain. That’s all.”
“That’s all,” I repeated.
“That’s all.”
I could hear her breathing. I don’t know how. Over the noise of the crowd and the drone of the intro to the next song, through a radio link and a console and two custom molded pieces of silicone, I could hear her breathing, and it wasn’t quite steady.
“What are you wearing back there?” I asked.
The silence that followed was so complete I thought she’d killed my talkback. Then:
“Black T-shirt. Black jeans. A belt pack with a dead battery in it I keep forgetting to change. Gaff tape on my wrist. Very sexy. You should see it.”
“I’d like to.”
“Thirty seconds, Jax.”
“You didn’t say no.”
“Twenty-five.” Her voice had gone lower, flatter, the way a voice goes when someone is holding it very carefully level. “Mags is starting. Turn around.”
I turned around. I sang the eighth song. I sang it to a stadium of strangers with her voice still in my head, and it was the best I’d sung it in two years.
Afterward, in the blackout under the stage, with the crowd still roaring for an encore and sweat running into my eyes, I stood alone at the bottom of the stairs and pressed the talkback switch one more time.
I didn’t plan it. I just heard myself say it.
“I’m going to say something I shouldn’t.”
And somewhere above me, in the wings, in the dark, Remy Castellanos pressed her button and said, very quietly, “Then don’t.”
Talkback
Remy
A tour bus at three in the morning is a submarine.
Everything hums. The engine, the generator, the air conditioning, the tires on the interstate. The curtains on the bunks are drawn, the lights are down to a strip of blue LEDs along the floor, and the whole long metal tube rocks gently through the dark like it’s moving through deep water. I’d slept on buses for nine years. I loved it. I’d never once slept on a bus with Jax Holloway twelve feet away.
I didn’t sleep.
The band bus was nicer than any crew bus I’d been on. Leather in the front lounge, a real coffee machine, a little galley with a fridge full of seltzer and cold brew and nothing else, which I noticed and didn’t mention. My bunk was the bottom one at the back of the bunk alley, across from Sully, who snored like a contented bear. Jax’s bunk was at the front, near the lounge. I knew because I’d watched him climb into it after the Pittsburgh show without looking at me, and I’d climbed into mine, and pulled my curtain, and stared at the ceiling eight inches above my face for three hours.
I’m going to say something I shouldn’t.
Then don’t.
He hadn’t. He’d come up the stairs from under the stage for the encore and sung two more songs and walked off and showered and gotten on the bus and said goodnight to Teddy and nothing to me. Which was correct. Which was exactly what I’d asked for.
At three-twenty I gave up and went to the front lounge for water.
He was there.
He was sitting on the leather bench with his back against the window and one knee pulled up, in a T-shirt and gray sweatpants, barefoot, a notebook on his thigh and a pen in his hand. The highway lights slid across his face, orange, dark, orange. He looked up when I came through the door, and neither of us said anything for a second.
“Can’t sleep?” he said.
“Bus is too nice. I’m used to crew buses. I need someone snoring above me and a smell of feet.”
“I can arrange the feet.”
“Please don’t.” I got a bottle of water from the fridge and stood there holding it. The galley was very small. He was very close. “What are you writing?”
He closed the notebook. “Nothing yet.”
“Liar.”
“It’s not done.” He tapped the pen against the cover. “Sit down, Castellanos. You’re making the bus nervous.”
I sat on the other end of the bench, as far away as the bench allowed, which was not far. I pulled my knees up. The sleeves of my sweatshirt came down over my hands. Outside, Ohio went by in the dark, or maybe it was Indiana by then. Fields and the occasional red blinking light of a radio tower.
“Can I ask you something?” he said.
“You can ask.”
“Dette said you don’t flinch. She said that’s why she hired you.” He turned his head on the window to look at me. “What happened that you had to learn not to?”
I should have said nothing. I should have said long story and gone back to my bunk. Instead I looked at the water bottle in my hands and told him about Wade Corrigan. Not all of it. The short version. The four months. The parking lot in Omaha. The man with the clipboard.
“Talent can always replace crew,” I said. “He said it like he was doing me a favor. Like he was teaching me something.” I peeled the label off the water bottle in one long strip. “I guess he was.”
Jax didn’t say anything for a while. When I finally looked up, he wasn’t looking at me with pity, which I’d have hated. He was looking at me like I’d told him a song had a bad bridge, and he was trying to figure out which chord to change.
“So that’s the rule,” he said. “Never sleep with talent.”
“How do you know I have a rule?”
“Everybody who’s good at something has a rule they learned by bleeding.” He turned the pen over in his fingers. “Mine’s don’t pick up the first one. Yours is don’t pick up the singer.”
“That’s not—” I stopped. It was, actually. “It’s not the same thing.”
“No,” he said. “Yours doesn’t keep you alive.”
“It keeps me employed.”
“Is that the same thing?”
I stood up. The bus swayed and I put my hand on the wall to steady myself and he moved, fast, his hand coming up to catch my elbow, and then it was there, his palm warm through my sweatshirt, his fingers closed around my arm. Just for a second. Just long enough for both of us to notice.
He let go.
“Goodnight, Jax,” I said.
“Goodnight, Remy.”
I went back to my bunk and lay there with my elbow burning like he’d left a handprint on it, and I listened to the bus hum, and I didn’t sleep at all.
After that, he talked to me every night.
Not during the songs. Never during the songs. He was a professional, and whatever else he was, when the music was playing he was entirely inside it. But in the gaps, in the forty seconds of dark between numbers, during the guitar changes and the costume changes and the long, swelling intro to “Saint Anything,” he turned his back on the crowd and pressed the switch on his mic, and his voice came into my headphones like he was whispering it against my neck.
Columbus, the first night after the bus.
“Castellanos.”
“Holloway.”
“You look tired. Did you sleep?”
“You can’t see me.”
“I can see the way you’re riding my fader. You’re tired. You’re a quarter-beat late.” A pause. “That’s a lie, you’re never late. I just wanted you to argue with me.”
I pushed his vocal up two decibels, just for a second, so his own voice slammed into his head like a door. On my screen, I saw him flinch, and then I heard him laugh.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. I deserved that.”
Detroit.
“Remy. That note in the bridge. The high one. Did I hit it?”
“You hit it.”
“Tell me the truth.”
“I always tell you the truth. You were a hair under on the attack and then you lifted into it. It was good.” I hesitated. Then I pressed the button again. “It was beautiful, actually.”
Silence. Then, very low: “Say that again.”
“No.”
“Please.”
I didn’t. But I didn’t stop smiling for the rest of the song, either, and Benji asked me twice if I was okay.
The second Detroit night, three days later, after a bad gig, a crowd that wouldn’t come up, a sound that kept turning to mud in the bowl of the stadium no matter what front-of-house did, I heard him breathe hard between songs and press the switch and say nothing at all for a long moment.
Then: “Talk to me.”
“About what?”
“Anything. I don’t care. I just—” A ragged breath. The click under it, counting. “It’s loud in here tonight. Not the crowd. My head. Just talk.”
So I did. I told him about my father’s radio repair shop in Tucson, how it smelled like solder and dust and old cigarettes, how I’d learned to read a schematic before I could read a novel, how my dad used to put a broken transistor radio in my hands and say find the place where it stopped singing. I talked until the lights came up and the next song started, and I kept my thumb on the talkback through the count-in, saying, quietly, “One more. You’re okay. One more. You’re with me,” and I heard him sing the first line of the song a little too fast, and then settle, and then lift.
After the show he passed me in the corridor under the stands, soaked in sweat, a towel over his shoulder, and he didn’t stop walking but he reached out as he went by and touched two fingers to the back of my hand. Just that. Then he was gone.
I stood in the corridor with my hand against my chest like an idiot.
And some nights, it was something else.
The gaps got longer. The things he said got lower.
“I can hear you breathing when you hold the button down,” he said in Indianapolis, during Mags’s guitar change, his mouth so close to the mic I could hear the faint wet sound of his lips. “You breathe like you’re trying not to. You know what that does to me? I’ve got sixty thousand people screaming my name and all I can hear is the woman in the wings trying not to breathe.”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t trust my thumb on the button.
“You’re blushing,” he said. “I can’t see it. I can hear it.”
“That’s not physically possible.”
“Tell me I’m wrong.”
I pulled his click up so loud it was practically a heartbeat in his skull and kept it there for four bars while he laughed and laughed into the dark.
Another night, before the encore, standing alone at the bottom of the stage stairs with the crowd stomping overhead: “I think about your voice when I’m in the shower. I want you to know that. I think about you saying you’re fine in that tone like it’s a court ruling. It’s the most erotic thing anyone has ever said to me, and you said it about a radio dropout.”
“Jax.”
“Yeah.”
“You can’t say things like that to me.”
“Why not? Nobody can hear me.”
“I can hear you.”
A pause. “That’s sort of the point, sweetheart.”
That night, after the show, on the bus, in my bunk with the curtain closed, I put my own hand flat over my stomach and lay very still and listened to the engine and thought about what it would sound like if he said that to me in the dark with no microphone between us at all.
I didn’t let my hand move lower. It was the closest I came to breaking my rule in five years, and it was just my own hand, and I still felt like I’d gotten away with something.
Chicago. Eighteen days into the leg. The stadium by the lake, rain earlier in the afternoon, the whole city washed clean and glittering. Two shows, a day off in between, and the label people flying in for the second night, which meant everyone was on edge.
After the first show, I stayed late to rebuild Jax’s vocal chain. It needed it; we’d been adjusting on the fly for two weeks, and the snapshots were getting cluttered, and I wanted it clean before the label heard it. The crew finished load-out of everything that wasn’t staying for the second night, and the techs drifted away, and Benji yawned until I sent him to the hotel, and by one in the morning I was the only one left in the wings, under a single work light, headphones on, in an empty stadium the size of a small town.
I didn’t hear him come up the stairs. I just heard his voice in my headphones.
“Can I show you something?”
I turned in my chair. On my little screen, center stage was empty except for one mic on a stand under one work light. And him. Gray T-shirt. Hands in his pockets. He’d come back. He’d come back to an empty stadium at one in the morning and put his ears in and picked up the mic and was standing there in the light, looking toward the wing where he couldn’t see me.
“You’re supposed to be at the hotel,” I said into my talkback.
“So are you.”
“I’m working.”
“So am I.” He took one hand out of his pocket and wrapped it around the mic. “It’s the thing I was writing. On the bus. It’s not done. But I want you to hear it. Not the band. Not the label. You.”
He didn’t wait for me to say yes. He started to sing.
No guitar. No click. Just his voice, low and rough and very close in my headphones, and around it the enormous silence of sixty thousand empty seats in the rain-washed dark. I couldn’t hear the words at first. I was too busy hearing him, the catch at the top of every phrase, the way he dropped into his chest on the low notes like falling into a bed. Then the words came through.
He was singing about a voice. A voice in the dark that told him he was fine and made it true. A voice that knew where his breath went. You’re the only thing I hear, he sang, almost spoken, when the world is screaming. You’re the one in my ear.
He stopped. The stadium swallowed the last note.
I sat in my chair with my hands flat on the desk and couldn’t move.
“Remy,” he said. “Say something.”
I didn’t press the talkback. I took my headphones off and put them on the desk and stood up and walked out of monitor world, through the blackout cloth, out onto the stage.
It was colder out there than in the wings. The work light threw a white circle around him. Past him, the stadium rose up into the dark, row after row of wet seats glittering like the inside of a geode. He turned and saw me and took one in-ear out and then the other, and let them hang from their wires over his shoulders, and watched me walk toward him without saying a word.
I stopped a foot away from him. Close enough to see the gray in his stubble. Close enough to smell him: soap and rain and a little sweat and something warm underneath, like sun on wood.
“You can’t write songs about me,” I said.
“Too late.”
“I’m serious. If anyone—” My voice cracked. I started again. “Do you know what happens to me if anyone thinks—”
“Nobody thinks anything. Nobody’s here.” He didn’t move closer. His hands were at his sides. He was letting me decide; I could see him doing it, see the effort of it in his shoulders. “It’s just you and me and sixty thousand empty chairs.”
“I have a rule.”
“I know you do.”
“It’s a good rule.”
“It’s a great rule,” he said quietly. “I hate it.”
I don’t know which of us moved. I think it was me. I’ll always think it was me, because I remember the decision: the exact second when my body went ahead without asking, when I reached up and took a fistful of his gray T-shirt and pulled, and he made a sound low in his throat, half laugh, half surrender, and bent his head, and his mouth came down on mine.
He kissed me like he sang. Slow at first, testing, a brush of his lips that was almost a question, and then, when I opened for him, falling into it, his hand coming up to the back of my neck, his fingers sliding into my curls and closing. The pencil in my hair fell out and clattered somewhere on the stage. He tasted like peppermint and coffee. His other hand found my waist and pulled me in against him and I went up on my toes and it wasn’t enough, it wasn’t nearly enough, I wanted to climb him, I wanted to get inside that voice and live there.
The in-ears hanging from his shoulders bumped against my collarbone. I could hear, faintly, tinny and far away, the hiss of my own console still feeding them. My world. His ears. Us, in the middle.
He broke the kiss first, just barely. Pressed his forehead to mine. We were both breathing like we’d run up the stadium stairs.
“Tell me to stop,” he said against my mouth.
I didn’t.
Somewhere behind us, at the back of the stage, a door banged open and a voice yelled, “Yo! Lights going down in five, whoever’s still up there!”
Security. We jumped apart like teenagers. Jax laughed, breathless, and dragged a hand over his face, and I stood there with my lips burning, staring at him in the white work light.
“Go,” I said. “Go to the hotel.”
“Remy—”
“I’ll get my headphones. I’ll get a car. Just go.”
He looked at me for a long second. Then he went.
I didn’t go to the hotel.
The hotel had a lobby full of label people who’d flown in early and a bar full of local press, and I couldn’t walk through either one with my mouth still swollen. The band bus was parked in the stadium lot, dark and empty, the driver asleep in the hotel. I had a key. Monitor world always had a key, in case of gear emergencies.
I let myself on. The air inside was cool and smelled faintly of coffee. I didn’t turn on the lights. I walked down the bunk alley in the blue glow of the floor strips, past the empty bunks with their curtains open, past mine, all the way to the back.
The back lounge was the best room on any bus. A horseshoe of leather bench seat, a TV nobody watched, a window, a door that closed. A door that locked. I went in and sat down on the bench in the dark and put my face in my hands.
I’d kissed him. In front of sixty thousand empty seats, I’d kissed the talent, and if security had come out two minutes sooner, I’d be on a plane to Tucson tomorrow with a story everyone in the industry would hear by Friday.
I was still sitting there when I heard the front door of the bus open.
Footsteps. Bare feet? No. Sneakers. Coming down the bunk alley. Slowly, as if whoever it was knew exactly where they were going and was giving me every second of warning.
He stopped in the open doorway of the back lounge. The blue light from the floor made him a silhouette: shoulders, the line of his jaw, his hand on the doorframe.
“You didn’t go to the hotel either,” he said.
“The lobby’s full of your label.”
“I know. I saw. I turned around.” He didn’t come in. “I figured you’d come here. It’s the only place in this whole city where nobody’s looking.”
My heart was going so hard I could feel it in my fingertips.
“I’m not going to come in,” he said, “unless you tell me to. I’m going to stand right here, and if you tell me to go, I’ll go back to the hotel and walk through that lobby and smile at the label, and tomorrow you’ll mix the show and I’ll sing it and we’ll never talk about tonight again. I mean that. You’ll never hear another word from me in those headphones that isn’t about the mix.” His voice dropped. “But I’m not going to pretend I don’t want to come in. I’m done pretending things with you. You’re the one person I can’t lie to. You can hear it.”
I could. I could hear everything. The rasp in his voice, the shake under it. How much he meant it.
I stood up. I walked across the back lounge in the dark. I put my hand flat on his chest, over his heart, and felt it slamming as hard as mine.
Then I took a fistful of his T-shirt again and pulled him over the threshold, and reached past him, and closed the door.
The lock clicked into place, loud as a gunshot in the quiet.
