“Are you a psychiatrist, too?” Lark asked.

“No, but I don’t need to be. This is just basic people stuff.”

Lark sighed. “It’s about pride, I guess,” he said, listlessly. “Since you read my blog, you know that before the Morgans, I did musical theater and stand-up comedy. But, what you don’t know is the reason why I turned to stand-up. Comedy was my Plan B.”

“And what was Plan A?” Jonan asked.

“Music school,” Lark said. “And not, ‘here’s a guitar, here’s your wig, now go become popular,’ music school, but serious music school. The Stamferd College of Music.”

“You got into Stamferd?” Jonan asked, somewhat amazed. Like most people, though Jonan didn’t know much about music, he knew enough to recognize the name of one of the country’s premiere musical schools.

“Affirmative action for the win,” Lark said.

“So… what happened?”

“I…” Lark paused. “I flunked out. I wanted to sing in opera, I still do. I just,” he sighed, “I couldn’t make the cut.”

“I feel like it’s a good thing that I pulled out a chair for this,” Jonan said. “Am I on the mark?”

Lark laughed. “You hit a bullseye, Doc.” The singer let out a long breath that collapsed into stuttering wheezes, like a car passing over speed bumps.

“I grew up in Tchwang,” Lark said. There was a distant look in his eyes. “Chu City. The bad part, the hairy taint of the world—not that the ‘good’ part of Chu City is all that good.”

“Otherwise known as the perineum,” Jonan said. He leaned toward the patient’s bed. “That means ‘next to the anus’,” he added, in a whisper.

Lark looked up at the lights overhead.

“My parents’ world was a dinky little apartment in this fuckin’ concrete cube. We had to boil the tap water before it was safe to drink. My Mom and Dad worked to the bone, and for the craziest reason this side of anywhere: they were saving up money for me and my brother to go to college.”

“What?” Jonan asked.

“I might have been born in the slums,” Lark said, “but my parents weren’t. They came from the less-assy part of Chu City, but they couldn’t make ends meet, so they ended up in the taint. But that wasn’t enough to discourage them, oh no. If you asked my Mom and Dad, we were never ‘poor’, we were just ‘down on our luck’, and once my brother and I became doctors or lawyers or part of some fancy-pants corporate management firm, everything would be peachy.” His expression darkened. “I think they told that to themselves because they couldn’t face the world for what it really was.”

“And what was it?” Jonan asked.

“Well… growing up, the ritziest building in my neighborhood was a second-rate strip club. It was the kind of place where the ladies padded their bahoongas with fruit rinds to make them look and smell better than they actually did. We didn’t have any playgrounds; we just found an alley that someone hadn’t recently shit in, and kept away from the druggies and the hobos.”

“Yikes,” Jonan said.

“You can say that again,” Lark quipped. “Still,” he tilted his head to the side, “it wasn’t all bad. I don’t mean that it was good, just that it wasn’t quite as awful as it could have been. I got lucky in elementary school, for instance. Got one of those inspirational teachers, the kind that usually live in movies. She kept my brother and me from being total lost causes. Then, there was the old fart who owned the strip club. He was a pervert, but a real sweet one. He was a cinephile. Had this huge collection of video disk recordings of movies, mostly old ones. His favorites were film musicals and operas. Once every other week, he’d set up a projector in the strip club’s asphalt parking lot and play movies from his collection, using the big, white thigh of the woman painted on the side of the building as the movie screen. His girls brought their kids, and would help watch over us and the other family’s kids while we all sat in broken recliners and scruffy plastic chairs and watched the classics in the heat of the muggy night, with the okay part of Chu City lit up across the harbor like fireflies havin’ a night rave. The Sound of Morning. East Side Tales. She’s the Lass for Me. You name it, he showed it. The old man said it was his duty to ‘enrich the slums’.”

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Jonan was speechless. He’d read every damn post Zongman Lark left on either of his Socialife accounts, but he’d never heard anything like this before.

“Then, when I was ten,” Lark continued, “the old geezer put on Kathaldri’s Biluše. The beginning wasn’t like anything I’d ever heard before. Then, maybe ten minutes in, this gorgeous girl parades on the screen, and then, all of a sudden, she’s singing, and the only thing you can hear is her voice and the orchestra off screen, and then…” Lark slumped back in his seat. “Fuck…” He shook his head and wept. “That song she sings, when she’s all alone, it’s…” his voice cracked, “it’s magic.” He scoffed. “And the way the melody comes back later on, all proud and alive… that’s more magic than magic. To this day, I still can’t understand how the fuck some guy from two-hundred or something years ago sat down, hunched over a desk with a gas lamp on the wall and a fuckin’ quill and ink and scritch-scratched that music onto yellowed pieces of paper, the same way you’d write a letter to your cousin. That music… it didn’t feel like it was made. It was like Gallstrom had been walking down the beach one day, and he looked at the clouds at sunset and found a piece of forever hidden inside in those colors and somehow turned that into sound. By your fucking Holy Angel, when Letty Kathaldri sang that music,” he swallowed and shook his head, “I stopped thinking about the shitty smelling water in the canals, or the way some of the whores’ kids arms were too short or their heads too big, or the police sirens that rang and rang and rang all night long, or the little voice in my head that told me maybe things would be for my family if I hadn’t been born—I mean, they’d certainly have had more money. But,” he coughed, “when that music came, all that bullshit melted away. It was a fucking miracle, and, from that moment, ten year old me knew that that was what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to be a part of that. Ms. Kathaldri showed me the way. She showed me who I could be.”

Clenching his fist, Jonan managed to find his voice. It was far softer than he’d expected it to be. “That’s… that’s a beautiful story,” he said. “Why haven’t you ever talked about it before?” he asked.

Lark shook his head one last time. “Because I wasn’t cut out for it. I didn’t live up to my dreams. And who wants to admit that?”

“So,” Jonan said, “not to be rude—seriously,” he pressed his hand to his chest, “I am honored you shared that with me, but… what does this have to do with you trying to kill yourself?”

“I was tired of the contradictions,” Lark said. He struggled to clear his throat. Then, gagging, he hawked up some awful black glop, dusted in green. It splattered over his gown and bedding.

“I couldn’t fucking take it anymore,” he said.

“What contradictions?”

“There were boatloads of them,” Lark replied. He lowered his gaze. “It would upset the fans. I couldn’t do that to them.”

“What would?” Jonan asked. “Singing opera?”

“I couldn’t sing what I wanted to sing,” Lark said.

Jonan considered himself something of an expert in the fine art of question-answering. Lark was engaging in what question-answerers referred to as evasive maneuvers. He could have spotted it from a mile away.

The singer was hiding something, just like Ani did when she tried to pull off a surprise party for his birthday.

“Dude,” Jonan said, “you’re famous. And not just that, but hella popular, too. I don’t know if the opera industry still exists—either now, or in the recent past— but, if it does, would be fucking thrilled to learn that Zongman Lark wanted to reach out to them. You could serve as an ambassador for their dying, overhyped art-form—no offense.”

“None taken,” Lark answered, “but it doesn’t matter.” He shook his head. “I didn’t complete my music studies. End of discussion.”

“Your talent and your record of proven success are better calling cards than any fancy college degree,” Jonan countered.

“You’re right about one thing,” Lark said, coughing terribly, “opera-lovers are definitely a stuck-up crowd. They’d turn their noses at someone like me, even if I was the headliner.”

Jonan wanted to tell him that that answer didn’t cut it, and was still an evasive maneuver, but he worried that might have antagonized the singer, and since that was the last thing he wanted right now, Jonan held his tongue.

At least for the time being.

“Why not release an album of you singing covers of famous opera arias,” Jonan suggested, “and if you’re worried about the publicity, you could always release it under an alternate name.”

It occurred to Jonan that releasing an album and worrying about publicity were luxuries that humanity could no longer afford, but that was beside the point. He wanted to get to the bottom of this. He cared about it, and that wasn’t something he did lightly.

“Listen, Dr. Derric,” Lark said, gruffly, “I fucking told you already, I wasn’t cut out for it!” There was anger in his voice. “I wasn’t…” He coughed; his voice broke. “I couldn’t sing what I wanted to sing. Now, drop it! I mean it!”

“But why?” Jonan pressed the point. He was close, he could feel it. He wasn’t going to back down now. Zongman was being irrational.

“It is what it is,” Lark said, flatly, “and I don’t like what it is. I never have.”

“And that’s why you killed yourself?” Jonan asked. “Because you want to sing opera, but can’t?”

Lark nodded. “Guilty as char—”

—Then the ECG screeched as a seizure rocked the singer’s body.