The Man in the Good Suit

You fall asleep somewhere outside Medford with the phone still in your hand.

When you wake up, the bus is parked, the curtains are glowing gold, and the thread is still there on the screen. You scroll up through it once, slowly, in daylight. It looks different with the sun on it. Stranger. More dangerous. You don't know what you were expecting a rock star to text at three in the morning, but it wasn't that.

You're smiling. You notice because your face hurts.

"Who's that?" Daria asks.

She's in the front lounge with her laptop, a bagel in her teeth, the San Francisco day sheet half printed on the tiny printer bolted to the wall. She takes the bagel out of her mouth. "You're doing the face."

"There's no face."

"There's a face. You did it for a month when we first met." She says it lightly. Her eyes don't stay light. "Never mind. Not my business. Load-in at one, Golden Ward Theater, it's got a freight elevator from 1911 and the stage manager says if we break it we buy it."

"Daria."

"I'm fine," she says, and turns back to the laptop, and types something with a little more force than typing needs.

The Golden Ward is all red velvet and gold leaf and ghosts. The freight elevator works if you hold the door with your foot and pray. Ksenia insists on riding it alone with her amp "for the drama."

At three in the afternoon, a man in a good suit walks into the theater like he's been invited to all of it.

You notice him because the room notices him. The crew stands a little straighter. Grigor, the production manager, takes his headset off for the first time in four days. The man is maybe fifty, silver hair swept back, tanned, a navy suit that fits like it was poured, no tie. He shakes hands with people whose names he obviously knows. He laughs at something the lighting director says, and it's a great laugh, warm and easy.

"Who's that?" you ask Darragh, who is eating a banana on a road case.

Darragh's face does something that isn't a smile. "That's Jago Mulgrew. Crowfoot Records. He signed us."

"He seems nice."

"He seems," Darragh agrees, and takes a very large bite of banana.

Ravn is at the lip of the stage, tuning an acoustic, cross-legged, hair in his eyes. When Jago's voice carries across the room, his hands stop on the strings. Just for a second. Then he keeps tuning, but differently. Too carefully. His shoulders have gone up an inch and stayed there.

Jago makes his way down the aisle. He stops in front of you.

"You're the bass player," he says. "Velvet Static."

"Ethan." You shake his hand. His grip is dry and exact.

"I heard 'Night Bus' on a college station in Ann Arbor three months ago and I've been waiting to see you live. You have something. A real thing." He holds onto your hand for one extra second. "Let's talk. Soon. Not here. Somewhere with better chairs."

"Sure," you say, because what else do you say to the vice president of a label at the start of your first real tour?

Jago smiles, pats your shoulder, and turns toward the stage.

"Ravn," he calls. "My favorite problem."

Ravn doesn't look up. "Jago. You flew in."

"I always fly in for San Francisco." Jago climbs the stage stairs. He crouches next to Ravn and says something you can't hear, low and friendly, and puts his hand on the back of Ravn's neck, the way an uncle might. Ravn sits completely still under it. His ringed fingers are white on the guitar neck.

Then Jago laughs, stands, and walks off toward the green rooms, already on his phone.

Ravn plays one hard, ugly chord and puts the guitar down.

You catch his eye across the theater. He looks at you for one second. It's not a look you've seen on him before. Not cocky. Not bored.

Then Cassia is beside him, saying something, and he's laughing too loudly at it, and the look is gone.

There's a woman in the third row of the empty theater with a notebook on her knee and a camera on the seat beside her. Short black hair, a men's blazer, red lipstick, the posture of someone who has sat through a thousand soundchecks and found every one of them interesting.

She stands when Velvet Static comes offstage.

"Inés Holtz," she says, holding out a hand. "Amplifier. I'm on the tour for the next two weeks, writing the cover piece. The label calls it a 'tour diary.' I call it a cover story. Mind if I grab a couple of quotes from the opener?"

Ksenia, who has a framed Amplifier cover in her bathroom at home, makes a small noise like air leaving a tire.

Inés asks good questions. How you met. Why you named the band after the sound an old amp makes when it's warming up. What "Night Bus" is about. She writes fast and doesn't look at the page. She laughs at Haruto's six-word answers like they're the best thing she's heard all week. She's very easy to talk to, which you know means you should be careful.

"And the cover piece?" Ksenia asks. "What's the angle?"

Inés taps her pen on the notebook. "Honestly? The thing everybody wants to know." She turns the notebook around. On the first page, underlined twice, a headline in block capitals:

WHO IS THE FERRIS WHEEL GIRL?

"Best-selling single of the year," Inés says. "And Ravn Drummore has never said one word about who it's about. Not one. The label sends the video model to premieres and lets people assume. I don't buy it." She shrugs. "I like a mystery."

You feel Ksenia glance at you. You don't glance back.

"Good luck," you say. "He doesn't strike me as a sharer."

"No," Inés says. "He doesn't."

She thanks the band, writes Ksenia's number down, promises Haruto she'll spell his name right. Ksenia and Haruto drift toward catering. You're unplugging your tuner when Inés steps closer, notebook closed now, voice lower.

"Off the record," she says. "Can I ask you something, Ethan?"

"Sure."

"Did you play Driftwood? Two years ago. The Oregon coast. The year of the storm."

Your hands stop on the cable.

Inés is watching your face the way you watch a drummer's hands to see where the beat is going.

"Because I've been going through every photo anyone posted from that weekend," she says pleasantly. "And I'm almost sure you're in one of mine."