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That was the day I borrowed Melanie’s blaze-orange Datsun pickup and went back to the apartment for the last of my things.

We made multiple trips in Cheeto that week. I cut Melanie in at ten percent on items she dared to model for Craigslist and the stuff we couldn't sell went to Saint Vinnie’s. Anything worth keeping went to storage at a creepy outfit near that tan titty-dome megachurch off Highway 99.

Now I was after the rest of my makeup. Any paperwork or mail in my name, the power and MIDI cables for my microKORG. My amp and my passport, a final pull of drawers and one last look around for anything I left behind.

I’d been sleeping on a trundle bed in the spare room where Melanie made her jewelry. The walls of her Southtown home were thick with unsold inventory from abandoned Etsy ventures. Smartass KEEP CALM placards advocating naps, kittens or cake. Inspirational phrases condensed to three verbs stenciled on salvaged planks, hung among framed photos of Melanie glowing in a backless dress at her sister’s outdoor wedding. Kayaking on the Rogue River, throwing up devil horns on the teacup ride at Disneyland. Mimicking the “Charlie’s Angels” pose with friends in gowns and mortarboards.

Like uninvited vampires prohibited from entry, the attentive retinue of doubt and worry that normally stood over my bed could not follow me to Melanie’s house.

I went to work early the next afternoon. Met with Barb in Human Resources and cashed in some leave “for reasons personal and emergent”. Freed from a night-shift schedule my body clock snapped back to the diurnal routine of a day-walker.

Now my brain powered down and unplugged properly, without compulsive ambush-audits of my life’s course and content. Each night I curled up under all-caps instructions to DANCE DARE DREAM and lost consciousness within minutes instead of pacing off the growing distance between the life I was living and the one I’d always imagined for myself on the wide side > of Greater Than.

I woke to finches and chickadees fussing in the birdfeeder outside my window. Felt the warm weight of Bagheera purring, tangled in my hair. Living with Melanie and getting eight hours of sleep each night left me truly rested. Reset and renewed. I’ll even say healed, I don’t care how Oprah that sounds.

I spent my last morning at Melanie’s house playing in bed with Bagheera. Got up to feed her and spoiled her with much too much. Made coffee, sat on the windowsill and watched the neighborhood wake up. Took ten deep breaths. Pushed each one against my ribs until I thought they might crack. Saw the reflection of myself smiling in the glass and didn’t stop to brand that woman a fool for feeling healthy enough to experience and express a little bit of joy while nobody was looking.

Have you ever shut down your whole go-go me-me mechanism long enough to bring it back online with a fresh assessment of your potential? It doesn’t take a meditative state to move outside yourself and scout for new prospects and perspectives.

Ten deep breaths can change your fucking life.

I stripped the bed and stuffed the sheets in the wash with my laundry. I was totally fanclub for Melanie but this appliance was the place where my appreciation for her cosmic good works turned hard and sharp, pierced the limit of healthy envy and let rancid jealousy leak in. There’s a certain deficit of dignity that results from not having your own washing machine and I get extremely defensive about it. I won’t lie, it really fucking stings and it’s one of the first civil seams to split when I find myself coming undone due to a lack of modern amenities.

I took clean sheets from the hall closet. Shooed Bagheera from the mattress and made the bed, stowed it away for the final time.

Melanie left a spare set of Cheeto’s keys on the kitchen counter beside a plate of cookies and a Post-it note:

breathe

set yourself free

and a smiley face.

She’d gotten up ugly-early and gone to class. Melanie was wrapping up her master’s in accounting. Had trained in Krav Maga, served in the Peace Corps. This was a woman living life with her head up and her arms wide open. Reaching with both hands to grab anything she wanted. Tending to herself through wisely crafted connections and shrewd investments of time that made the rhythms of her days rich and full.

One week ago Melanie was hardly on my radar, barely a familiar face at work. Now I was living under her roof and using her only vehicle to manage the logistical fallout of my failed relationship while she rode the bus to school, and to top it all off the bitch was leaving motivational notes for me and baking ketogenic n’oatmeal cookies.

I popped my suitcase open. Folded my clothing into sloppy squares and wondered out loud:

Who the fuck goes around with a heart like this anymore?

Melanie and I worked nights together for almost a year, proofing bank transactions in the same pool without saying much more to each other than Cute shoes, Have a good weekend, that kind of thing.

The night I left Vincent was also Claire’s last shift before retirement. Someone sent a card with a collection envelope around the office and Melanie brought it across the aisle to my cubicle.

I found room to write We’ll miss you! in one corner. Dug my bike-riding sneakers out of my bag to get at my pocketbook and chipped in $3.50 for Claire’s card, cake and flowers.

Melanie opened a book of receipts, tucked a carbon behind a fresh form and noted my contribution. The job wasn’t Bletchley Park but we were paid to track debits and credits down to the penny and that doesn’t happen without a paper trail.

"So we’re hauling Claire out for karaoke and shots?"

I meant this as a joke. Claire was so fucking old she probably bought beer for Jesus.

Melanie patted her pigtail braids, ducked her head near my ear and whispered:

"The managers and suckups and most of the observant Somali girls are taking Claire to Lyons for pie and coffee. The rest of us are going for drinks at Darrell’s to celebrate."

She rapped her knuckles over my bicycle helmet.

"If you need a ride I’m driving."

Melanie stood up straight, tore away my copy of the receipt and click-clacked back to her cubicle. We were the only women in the proof pool who worked nights in heels.

I adored her low-key vintage style, admired the way she moved through the office like a polar icebreaker, completely unafraid to own space while getting where she was going. The girl didn’t hug the wall or chant sorry over and over when passing someone in the narrow hallway to the restroom. She just smiled and kept on stepping.

Melanie’s lean but powerful body described the shape of a capable creature. A woman I could picture punching rivets and building a World War Two bomber or looking over a bare shoulder, posing to be painted on the nose of one.

I returned to my endless batch work with zero effective focus. Made an error and repeated it. Repeated it again and realized I was holding my breath. Exhaled and acknowledged a prickly feeling of real delight at being categorized as a subversive insider, invited to convene in secret at The Amber Room at Darrell’s Restaurant.

Melanie and I played eight-ball and came out of the closet to each other about our OCD while racking. Spent more money on the jukebox than on drinks. Sang along loudly with every track and split two baskets of crinkle-cut fries. Teamed up against Maryam and Sandra, talked trash when they ran the table and squealed in triumph when they scratched on the eight. Yeah, I squealed. So what?

Sometimes all you need is one good friend.

I’d left my Cinderella sneakers behind at work. Melanie waited on the curb outside my building while I dashed upstairs to change into suitable bicycle-carrying shoes and fetch a book of keto recipes for her to borrow.

I returned with the cookbook and a backpack, stooped under a sagging duffel full of clothes. I wanted to explain what had happened in the casual tone of someone who’s only missed a bus. Did my best to sound like anyone but a woman who just ended a fifteen-year relationship without leaving a note, without saying goodbye.

I was shaking, certainly in shock. Still standing in my heels.

My voice sounded like a recording from a tin box stitched deep inside a doll when I asked Melanie to drop me off at the Holiday Lodge.

"Yeah, you’re not staying there," she said. "Yelp that shit, I did the research when my family came to town for the eclipse."

"Melanie, I can’t-"

"No. No way, not some grody motel. You’re coming with me."

Her elbows rose defensively, hands gripping the wheel between tight fists as if we were about to wrestle for control of Cheeto.

I held the cookbook on my lap and looked out the window. Carole King’s “It’s Too Late” came on the radio but we didn’t sing along with that one.

My mind hummed and ticked, unable to index any instinct or experience that could serve as a reference to explain where I had landed, guide the way I should behave. The way I ought to feel now and next.

I was angered by the good fortune of every mundane element around me. Each normally invisible detail now seemed somehow significant, even perfect and I hated those things for being uncomplicated yet wholly successful in their place and purpose. For belonging without trying. The streetlights, the traffic signs, the stripes on the pavement were born into natural states of order and utility.

I heard a voice inside me tell Melanie how I was twelve, thirteen and all I wanted was to be Carole King. Let my curly hair grow wild and live barefoot in a house with hardwood floors and a cozy spot by the window for me and my cat like the cover of “Tapestry”.

Bagheera wailed underfoot and I ate a cookie. Took the plate with me and sat at Melanie’s grandmother’s upright piano. Bagheera leapt onto the keys and wandered through a scale a quatre main in lazy steps toward the high end, then ran at a pounding gallop over the low notes.

The sheet music for “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” was open before me, tagged with another Post-it:

Today’s homework!

and a smiley face.

On my second night at Melanie’s we went back to the apartment after work. She wore fingerless gloves, pulled a black watch cap down to her perfect tarantula-leg brows.

My eyes grew wide when I saw her get in the cab with a Worth aluminum bat wrapped in dirty athletic tape.

Melanie rummaged behind the seats. Held up a softball glove and a ball.

"If you bring a bat, at least bring a ball," she said. "Makes it hard to argue we brought this along with the premeditated intent to use it as a weapon."

She blacked out the headlights as we made the block. Gave me a thumbs-up and kept Cheeto’s motor running while I went upstairs. If Vincent was home, if things got weird I would flick the apartment lights off and on. Melanie knew which window to watch and she held the bat across her lap, stuck her chin out over the dashboard and looked up to the third floor.

When I returned with my microKORG cradled in my arms Melanie went absolutely flaming bananas, honking the horn, flashing the lights and cheering as I climbed into the cab.

We talked about Glass Candy, Joanna Newsom, Depeche Mode. Bruce Hornsby, Brad Mehldau, Captain and Tennille. Bought wine on the way home and got up to our tits in Shiraz and Spotify.

Melanie removed her gloves and tuned her guitar and we sang “Landslide” twice. I’d left the power cable for my microKORG at the apartment so I accompanied Melanie on her piano while she sang in Russian.

She twisted the cork from a second bottle with her Swiss Army knife. Squeak and a pop and she said:

"You can stay here as long as you like but now I’ve got one condition."

Melanie filled my glass past the point I could pick it up.

"You’ve got to play. Like that, at least once a day, okay? And teach me how to sample something on your micro-borg."

I nodded. Leaned over the coffee table and slurped my wine with pouting lips, neck stretched like a tipsy Bambi drinking from a stream.

"I mean it. If I’m not around you play for the cat, open the window, dedicate something to the neighbors but bitch you have to make music if you wanna stay here. Okay? I need to have some fuckin’ creativity happening around me. Call it homework."

I wiped my chin, lifted Bagheera from my laptop. Showed Melanie a video of me and Vincent opening for Turner Cody a million years ago when my microKORG was new.

She sat beside me on the couch, maxed the volume and ran the clip again. Gripped my arms with terrifying strength and played the track over.

"This is your song?"

"Mostly," I said. "So the music’s me and Vincent wrote the lyrics but he lifted verses from a Wilfred Owen poem. He got a letter about that, from some society in Britain."

"Yeah? Well good for Wilfred Owen and fuck Vincent but seriously oh my god, you are really good girl. Really fucking good. Send this to me?"

I did.

So that was Monday, Melanie’s night off and the final day of my life-crisis vacation from work. Now it was Friday and Monday seemed so far back in time I remembered it without sound, saw it in flickering black and white as Melanie sat at her grandmother’s piano, teaching herself the chords to “Owen” while I sang along.

I leaned away from the keys, ate another cookie and dusted the crumbs from my fingers. Pointed at Bagheera:

"This one’s going out to you Baghs."

I warmed up, rolled through short choppy chords like Morse Code, improvised a jazz intro. Broke into the piece running and made it too big, then slowed it down. Brought it back to Elton’s original and deviated with a loud finish I couldn’t quite land.

Did my homework once as written, note perfect. Then a discordant bouncing klezmer nightmare cover with a runaway tempo.

I played "Owen", singing Vincent’s parts. Realized I was still ready to suit up, go out and do business. I was thrilled to have this power restored, the ability to make myself and make other people feel something real by creating music from thin air.

I gasped for breath and scared the cat. Almost began to cry as a feeling of actual physical relief multiplied and moved through each of my limbs with its own creeping heat, a blushing full-body brush fire.

My field of vision stretched wide and every shape and color seemed to reset itself with sharpened focus, new hues and highlights enriched and glowing. Spread on the stand before me Elton’s musical notation bristled with foreign symbols, black bug-leg clefs, buckshot crotchets and owl-eyed whole notes. The warps and waves of the piano’s wood grain stood proud in impossible dimensions of carved contour and relief.

The resonance of that moment overwhelmed me as I calculated all that I had lost. Then my internal abacus carried the one and reminded me that I’d stumbled across a truly priceless second chance. Been allowed to run back into a burning building and dash past my wasted years with Vincent to rescue this single simple thing I loved deeply, truly couldn’t live without.

When the dryer buzzed I cleaned the lint trap and finished packing. Scrubbed Bagheera’s fur just above her tail until she twisted back and scratched my knuckle bloody. I kept her corralled in the house with my suitcase and backed onto the porch. Slowly closed the door in her face and started to cry.

I got behind the wheel and buckled up, started the engine and sucked the blood from my knuckle. Then I really let go. Messy tears and screaming.

This is not a collapse, I told myself, but a release.

I forced deep breaths through my system until I felt dizzy. Blew my nose, rubbed it raw with papery fast-food napkins and when I could see well enough to drive I got Cheeto on the road.

The apartment was Grinch-bare now, spotless. Fridge cleared and cleaned, freezer defrosted. Vincent must have had some help getting things moved out. I think he still knew people here from high school, a couple of guys from his band who’d never left town.

The night I came back for my microKORG all the money from the bedroom floor was on the coffee table under a scented candle. I checked the fan of bills for a note but refused to take Vincent’s cash.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Now the money was rolled up and tucked inside a Mason jar in the center of the floor.

I took the cash, aimed all the presidents’ heads in one direction and counted. After a second count to confirm I put the money in my purse and looked down at the jar. Still no note.

Vincent hadn’t made a single attempt to contact me. No tearful drunken apology, no absurd semi-sober explanation filled with lies and science-fiction.

He had an established history of losing phones but I knew for damn sure he had my number. It was written in Sharpie on the inside of his belt, a habit he adopted in the days before cell phones to supplement his poor memory for numbers.

A few months after we moved in together I brought home a bottle of wine on a Friday night and we split it to celebrate our pidgin anniversary. Vincent announced he would make dinner, took my debit card and left the apartment in our car. He phoned two hours later, drunk and nearly unintelligible, wanting a ride home. I took a cab and found him passed out on top of a crushed grocery bag of salmon, lemon, new potatoes and pesto in the bottom of a phone booth at the Beacon Hill Red Apple Market. He was still clutching one end of his belt, our home phone number visible like a clue prised from the hand of a dead man in a French Noir film. That incident marked the beginning of the end of Vincent’s Golden Age of drinking. Ushered in a period of steep decline where it became increasingly difficult for me to watch him wave a red flag in my face and still see that shit as funny or cute.

The last time he did this I wrote a letter. An intervention was never an option because Vincent had no family, didn’t have any real friends or a proper job to lose like a normal alcoholic. I did my best to diplomatically depict my situation and illustrate the contrast between the way Vincent was living and the life I wanted to create with him. I leveraged my rage, my happiness, my faith in our relationship. I marketed myself as a fun buddy. A supportive partner, a matter-of-fact nurse, a strict prison matron. A worried mommy, some kind of martyr.

I wasn’t accustomed to having a boundary hold with Vincent. What had I written in that last letter? I felt like an absent-minded witch who’d struggled a thousand times to perfect a spell but didn’t pay attention to the final, successful formula.

I used the apartment bathroom for the last time. Remembered kicking Vincent when I found him face-down on the floor. Recalled how I gagged at the smell of alcohol on him, fuming from him, and how I kicked him again. Stepped over him to use the toilet.

He mumbled, rolled like a seal, said something about bears. Rifles?

I hated his face then, checkered like chickenwire from the hexagonal tile floor. Watched the alcohol drag him back down, a poisoned dumb animal growling then unconscious at my feet. I jabbed a heel hard into his hip when I reached for the toilet paper and found a bare brown tube.

Now I hiked my skirt and gathered it in a rumpled bouquet against my waist. Sat knock-kneed and peed beside a fluffy new roll of tissue, overhanging end folded to a point like the tip of a two-ply necktie. I looked around the beautiful bathroom, pristine and empty, warm with light. I had always loved the tile work in here.

My remaining possessions were arranged on the bedroom floor in an evenly spaced mosaic of folded clothes, coiled sound cables, books and periodicals stacked according to size. My amp and my makeup sat on the hardcase for my microKORG. A Ziploc freezer bag full of vital documents and financial records with my passport on top. Everything was staged in short piles and sub-collections laid at right angles. Components of a full-scale model ready for assembly.

These squared property crop circles were hallmarks of Vincent’s brief periods of relative sobriety. Anomalous blue-moon windows of time when he cut out alcohol completely and “detoxed” by only smoking pot, only taking pills, nodding off over spiral notebooks filled with obscure lists and cave-painting diagrams.

He would inevitably find himself feeling cooped up. Without household chores, creative pursuits or wild goose chases to occupy the non-stop hamsterwheel throwing sparks between his ears, Vincent would get weirdly meta and dissect and display the contents of a chaotic space, a congested closet or a cluttered kitchen drawer. The junk in the center console of our car, back when we had a car.

These behaviors also marked the only times I could manage to get a song out of him. I’m talking a complete and thoughtful original work, not just a clever chorus or a catchy verse or two. It was impossible to enjoy these collaborations entirely, knowing from experience each would never be more than a temporary genesis. A one-off at best.

We used to succeed often enough, as creative partners and a couple, to compensate for the times we didn’t work at all. When I sat down with Vincent and we connected words to music I could remember all the things we used to have. Anticipate things that felt like they were in reach. See evidence of the life I imagined we would be living by this time, back when I thought we were on track and growing like something solid and healthy. Vonnegut’s Nation of Two in “Mother Night”, but without the whole Nazi thing.

I ran a fingertip over the window and door sills. Vincent definitely was not drinking on the day this detailed cleaning went down.

Observing a wise and prudent protocol of suspicion I reminded myself of all the other times I came home to a Marine Corps-clean house, and fast-forwarded to the end of each instance. That familiar pattern began with a sense of fun or adventure lasting a day or two, a week at most. Then things would start slipping from splinters to cracks to total duck-and-cover collapse.

This progressive-disaster phase furnished a fresh new nightmare every day. I’d bounce a check and find our account drawn down or in overdraft, justified by one of Vincent’s manic mission statements about new creative goals. Weird friends coming around. Wads of Post-its scribbled full of schemes for ventures involving solar panels. A triple-digit library fine for language DVDs and K-Pop albums gone MIA during the research phase of his business plan to publish new songs in Korean.

Being pounced awake to do an acoustic mash-up of Paul Simon and Ke$ha at three. Meeting the downstairs neighbors at the door at four a.m., speaking to the police at five.

Surrendering our laundry room keys to the building manager after Vincent made friends with some homeless guys claiming to be fellow veterans and invited them to wash their clothes in the basement. He gave them laundry soap, brought a bottle down from the apartment and recorded their oral histories until he passed out and woke to find those bums had stolen his equipment and defecated in one of the washing machines.

The next morning, always another maybe. Another apology, another corner up ahead he was scouting today, plotting to turn tomorrow. Another promise for me to believe, shiny enough to appear genuine and new and sneak past my better judgment. A wish-list mirage packaged just right to become the latest poor fucking decision I’d make, sinking once again up to my neck in a mess I’d soon spend long nights dissecting with my jaw clenched, backstroking through endless cold regret.

And now we were here. Like this. Again. I took a deep breath and refused to believe I was witnessing anything but a temporary display. I knew this now. I would be truly and certifiably stupid to pretend I didn’t know exactly how and why me and Vincent had to end.

I loaded the things I wanted to keep and walked through the apartment one last time. Checked the status of my flight out of Eugene and went to get Melanie from class.

She insisted on driving. We stopped for gas on the way to the airport and I paid for the fill-up with Vincent’s cash. Felt the oddly changed energy now, seated on the passenger side looking at Melanie, unable to find a good station on the radio. She was dragging ass, exhausted after staying up all night finalizing administrative details with me and then riding the Loop Bus to class.

"You’re super quiet," I said.

Melanie shrugged, signaled. Pulled south onto 99. Her gorgeous hair was strangled with a scrunchy and haystacked in a sprung shitbun on top of her head.

"I’m excited for you," she said. "And I’m honestly really goddamned worried."

"Mel. Don’t worry. Please. I did my homework today, you made cookies. I thought you were good with this."

She turned and looked at me. Deeply and for real, like she definitely knew.

We had discussed this the night before, so I said again what I’d said then. I said it firmly now, maybe a little too loud but I needed to remind myself, and I wanted to establish one specific fact just for Melanie’s information:

"I will not take him back. This is business."

Melanie’s eyes returned to the road.

I took ten deep breaths and remembered who I was talking to. Carefully reset my personal volume and said:

"Thank you."

She nodded again.

"Melanie. Hey."

"What?"

"Thank you, okay? For everything. None of this would be happening if you hadn’t. You know. Opened this crazy fucking door for me."

She tilted her head, sort of shrugged again and I wondered: Why is this so hard?

"You’re welcome," Melanie said. "Thank you for the amp. All the books and stuff."

"We’re gonna be in touch Mel. Ten percent. Right?"

Melanie hung onto the steering wheel, elbows out, face slack. Cheeto’s tires scuffed the curb in front of the terminal.

"Well. I guess, be careful. Don’t forget to breathe."

The pressure inside the pickup cab dropped as a vast distance opened between us. I took the envelope from my purse and put it on the dashboard.

"What’s this?"

"Open it," I said.

"What is it?"

"It’s a thank-you card."

"You just thanked me like, twice."

"Yeah but this is a card. A proper thank-you card. I’m formally saying thanks for your hospitality, all your fucking generosity. And for agreeing to manage Citizen Samurai. I signed it love and everything. So check it out."

I stepped out of Cheeto, hoisted my bag and my microKORG in its touring case to the curb. Melanie ragged the envelope open with one thumb and read the card. I poked my head into the cab.

"Oral hygiene and thank-you cards are the only things that separate us from the animals Mel."

She rolled her eyes and pitched my card onto the empty passenger seat. I held my breath, shut the door and put up a hand. Said a hushed goodbye to my new band manager.

Melanie pulled away from the terminal and her physical subtraction from me was complete. I felt like a three-stage rocket dropping its first booster now, truly awake and aware of being human. Hungry, picking up speed. Worthy of taking up my own space and going for this thing I wanted. Desperately ready to make something real happen.

I checked my bag and case and used the last of Vincent’s cash to buy gum mints and trashy magazines full of surveys, numbered lists of allegedly crucial sex tips.

I was circling answers to a pop quiz about my vagina when Vincent sat beside me, fresh haircut, shaved clean for the first time in months, smelling like chewed Altoids and a few too many beers. His old suit fit him well.

"Can you believe this?" he asked. He’d already drank enough to be loud and was well on his way to being annoying.

"Years of nothing okay? Years of shit and now your fuckin’ friend hooks us up with another shot. It’s like a movie."

He squeezed my arm, much too hard, handled me way too familiar.

I twisted away, checked my volume. Glared and selected the right tone to remind him we were over.

"Vincent. You need to shut the fuck up right now."

He shrank from me theatrically, smiled and whispered:

"I got recognized. Here at the bar. Guy taps me on the shoulder and he’s sitting right next to me playing “Owen” on his phone. Says his wife forwarded our song to him, he just flew in from Denver. He took a picture with me, bought me a beer and then the bartender played it and now she’s a fan."

I put down my magazine, looked him in the eye. Saw the cranks and levers going, confirmed the other Vincent was loose in there like a coked-up squirrel running laps inside a hot tumble dryer.

What the fuck was I thinking? This experience was going to feed and inflate everything about Vincent. Hang an exponent over his unknown sums, good and bad. I vowed on the spot that I was not going to ride shotgun into this adventure. Win or lose I was damn sure going to drive starting right fucking now.

He rolled on babbling as I nodded and stood. I took his hand and led him from the seating area to a private corner. Pushed him with my fingertips into a quaking pane of glass and felt thunder from burning jet engines blasting against the terminal through his ribs, into my arms, up the backs of my legs.

Anger compressed my eyes to dry diamond points and I let him know:

"You absolutely have to understand this Vincent. We’ll never share a room. We’re not even sitting together on this flight."

I shuttled my hands across the space between us, fanning a cloud of exhaled alcohol and peppermint and I reminded him:

"This? Us? Performing together? The only way it’s going to last, the only successful model we can follow is to run this like a business okay? Okay. So this is a business decision. We’re co-workers and that’s it. Colleagues. Nothing more."

He looked at me, affect flat. His gaze transmitted bloodshot blue-eyed static.

I reached up and put my hand around the base of his throat. Saw a torn-open DHL courier envelope stuffed inside his jacket pocket, identical to the one that delivered our E.U. work permits and my own per-diem debit card from the promoter that morning.

I was pleased he’d made it here on his own, arrived early in fact. He still had his new phone and the screen wasn’t broken yet. These were good signs but I had to know I was getting through to him.

I pressed the web of my left hand against Vincent’s throat and leaned in. Stood taller on my toes and pushed harder.

Vincent’s eyes went red, ran wet. When I had his full attention I said:

"Can we do business, Vincent? Get out of debt, make some cash on top of that and get ahead? Behave like professional artists, maybe make some connections? Can you grow the fuck up and keep your shit together for sixty-five days and do business with me?"

He nodded. Smiled like maybe he understood.

I stood down and let him breathe while I pulled my contract from my purse. I pressed the stapled pages into his chest.

Now he leered.

"I’m not signing this without read-"

I shoved him, bounced the back of his head off the tempered glass. I wanted to squeeze his throat again, pinch and probe until I found some part of Vincent healthy enough for me to hurt. Discover any remaining afferent systems still reliably wired and kept up to code.

"So go sit down and read it, Vincent."

I went back for my carry-on and magazine. Moved to a seat between two families and counted off ten deep breaths. Finished my quiz, grateful to disengage my brain from the week I’d just endured.

When I returned to work with Melanie on Wednesday I had no idea she’d uploaded the clip of me and Vincent performing “Owen”.

One of Melanie’s friends forwarded the link to her brother, some guy named Stephen.

Stephen liked the video. He played it over and over at work and his boss saw it. Stephen’s the touring guitar tech for Brady Miles from the British boy band Five Ways.

Brady and his bandmates loved our music. Their comeback-tour promoter told Stephen to reach out for the name of our representation, and Stephen’s sister got in touch with Melanie.

On Monday I’d stayed up ’til my old bedtime of dawn, a cruel exercise meant to pervert my sleep schedule back to the night shift but I hardly slept Tuesday, tumbling from side to side between fifteen-minute slices of almost-rest while Bagheera scratched and drummed at the door. When I went to work I was absolutely useless.

I ate half of my lunch, took a pen and an ancient People Magazine and did the celebrity crossword puzzle on the tiny sofa in the women’s restroom. Nodded off while trying to remember the name of that cowboy Jewel married. I woke up as Melanie dragged me to my feet.

"Check your phone. Check your phone!"

I’d left my phone in the breakroom.

Melanie swung the bathroom door open and pushed me into the hallway, aggressively gesturing with stabbing motions of her phone, a lunatic woman with a remote control trying to turn my muted energy up to match her frenzy.

"Check your e-mail, check it now, right now!"

Melanie ran beside me. Grabbed my wrist and ran faster, dragging me behind her as she passed me. The hammering of our heels brought alarmed faces to the doorway of HR as we dashed to the breakroom at the end of the hall.

She slid to a stop, snatched my phone and thrust it into my hands.  Drummed her palms on my back while I read a message from the booking agent in charge of talent for a musical festival touring Europe and the U.K.

I read it four times without understanding anything. I sat down and read it again. One of the opening acts for Five Ways had fallen through. Their lead singer was taking time out for reflection and seeking treatment after he made racist comments online.

Melanie squeezed my shoulders as I braced my elbows against the breakroom table, trembled and pecked out a reply to the booking agent. He replied immediately to ask for the name of my band’s representation and I panicked. Slid to my knees in front of the trash can and threw up my sorrygirl sadlunch of baby carrots and Top Ramen. Begged Melanie for a yes and cried a little when she replied to the booker directly with her contact information.

We shook hands to seal the deal and I threw up again while Melanie ordered a copy of “Talent Management For Dummies” off Prime.

Then we jumped and danced, muffled squeals and screams through gritted teeth. I rinsed the taste of vomit out of my mouth with warm water and a pinch of salt before Melanie and I composed ourselves, shared a final hug and returned to work.

Melanie put her lips beside my ear on the way to her desk. Whispered:

"You should quit. You know you want to, you dirty bitch."

I finished my final proof batch. Traded ridiculous sidelong glances with Melanie as we stretched the tension across the aisle between us, drunk with the rush of planning and dreaming, giddy over new secrets.

I looked around the office for the last time. Saw nothing I would miss. Gave several people the finger in my mind. Cleaned out my desk while I ran out the clock and left my sneakers in the bottom drawer, laces tied.

At the end of my shift I dropped by Barb’s office. Submitted a crisp letter of resignation and a separate note authorizing Melanie to pick up my final check. She was my manager now.

Melanie beamed as we drove home.

"I won’t take ten percent of that check," she said. "Those earnings predate our agreement and I know exactly how low you had to stoop to earn that money."

Her face hardened when I sat down on my borrowed bed and started making calls to locate Vincent. At the apartment he’d left behind a shoebox full of paper scraps, business cards and strange notes. Some of those artifacts bore legible digits.

Melanie went still, stood silent in the doorway, her eyes on anything but me.

"Mel. We’re a duo and he’s written nearly all the lyrics. There’s no Citizen Samurai without Vincent."

She lifted Bagheera from my laptop, cradled her close and left the room.

I smoothed the corners of a pocket-origami Post-it and began my descent into the broken-adult couch-surfing community of Benton County, dialing stoners and dimwits, chasing ancient leads to dead ends in an attempt to track down the man I used to picture performing beside me onstage at a stadium venue, standing back-to-back with me in a pompous pose on the cover of a Rolling Stone. A failed American-male prototype raised on 1980s prime-time programming. A charming and alarming ratio of idiot to savant whose ability to fuck and talent for wrestling with the English language were among the few things in this world that made me feel joyous, made me feel grateful for the psycho-chemical burn of real feelings when our music unlocked all the things that mattered, the things without names.

I found a torn flag of paper that had once been in contact with a staple and some fryer grease, loopy bubbles of grade-school penmanship and a number:

JENNY CELL

Jenny had a deep voice. She became guarded when I asked how I could reach Vincent, copped an attitude and asked me:

"May I ask who is calling?"

A barbed red spike of raw jealousy rose inside me as I groomed, saddled and mounted the perfect tone to tell this Jenny exactly who I was and where the fuck I figured among the prominent celestial mechanics of Vincent’s sad little spinning world.

She came back with a tone of her own:

"PapaTaco policy prohibits me from releasing personal information about employees past or present. I am in touch with Vincent and I’d be happy to pass on a message. Is there a number you’d like to-"

I hate being old enough to remember the positive feeling of hanging up a real telephone in anger. Modern technology has robbed the world of a very satisfying sense-memory: Allowing negative emotion to boil over into a physical outburst that ends a phone call and cuts the line. An angry hang-up is a powerful and therapeutic experience that now only exists in the theater as a one-sided pantomime.

I imagined a warm vat of acid for Jenny and saved her as a contact. Unpacked a crumpled cocktail napkin and moved on to the next shaky lead.

Half my battery life and a long night of “Cagney and Lacey” detective work led to a couple of sources who gave me the name, then the address for some guy named Carl.

Melanie refused to come help me stake out the house so I went solo, sat in Cheeto with a tall coffee and traded e-mail with the booker’s assistant in London, watching windows until I saw Vincent walk past one.

I stopped for another large coffee on my way to print up the tour promoter’s contract at Kinko’s. Signed and initialed all my paperwork, wrote the day, month and year in all the right places. Picked up a different pen at the counter and forged a second set of documents on Vincent’s behalf. Scanned and uploaded the whole mess to DropBox for the booker, sent them an e-mail and CC’d Melanie.

I put an official-looking black report cover on a third copy of the tour contract for Vincent, a harmless ego placebo dripping with SIGN HERE stickers to make him feel important while indicating his agreement to hold harmless, defend and indemnify Canzano Promotions International for any sleep, sheep or shekels lost directly or indirectly due to War, Social Unrest or Political Instability, Foreign or Domestic Terrorism and Acts of God, or lack of earnings if any performance dates were cancelled due to rain.

Then I printed my contract for Vincent, the one I wrote for him that morning. Shot a staple through the corner and folded it in thirds. Put it in my purse and wondered if he’d be sober enough to read anything by the time I found him.

I met with the building manager to negotiate a return of as much of the deposit as possible. He was impressed by Vincent’s detailed cleaning and the lack of nail holes in the plaster. I looked to the four corners of the front room and considered how few things had happened here that were worth remembering, let alone photographing. Never mind fucking framing.

Vincent stood with my contract rolled tightly behind his back and watched the planes, his silhouette stamped against the glass overlooking the runway. I studied my balding Holden Caufield in a black suit, ready to conquer the world with a public-school education and zero understanding of social media. A crazy-wise heart and a bard’s uncanny instinct for expressing an uncomfortable inventory of emotion. An author of love songs for the angry and lonely also-rans.

That’s where his greatest beauty shone brightest to me, when Vincent attempted to climb something tall but fell and came up short. His gracious acceptance of senseless self-defeat. His knack for popping up again and immediately getting busy with the process of rebuilding. The man was at his best when he was chasing a dream out of reach.

I took two of my favorite pills and checked YouTube.

Half a million hits and counting.

I gasped for air and passed it off as a cough when people looked. Smiled like I was grateful for their unsolicited concern. Paged to the back of the magazine and graded my vagina quiz.

I burned the time until boarding on my phone. Went looking for some pictures of this fucking swamp bitch Jenny and found images of angry women with shaved eyebrows crouched at the base of a chain-link fence throwing up gang signs, wearing Oregon prison blues at Coffee Creek.

I blocked Jenny as a contact and checked my gut. Felt around for feathery signals that the drugs were kicking in and looked up to see Vincent walking across the departure lounge with my contract clutched behind his back, lunging in goofy John Cleese strides and stepping only on the carpet’s blue diamonds.