Sinner

Those extra episodes were always when her subject melted down.

I wasn’t going to do those.

The recording studio, close and gray and soulless, was unfamiliar to me, but known to Leyla, who gripped hands with the sound engineer when we arrived, and then immediately sourced kombucha from a fridge. Joan and T lurked with their cameras.

“Hello, man,” said the sound engineer. “I’m Dante. How’s it hanging?”

Jeremy and I exchanged a look.

“A little to the left,” I replied. “How much time do we have?”

Both Leyla and Dante looked insulted at the immediate introduction of business talk, but here was the truth: Studios made me anxious. It wasn’t that I didn’t like being in one; it was just that for as long as I’d been in music, I’d always been on deadline in one. It didn’t matter how big NARKOTIKA got; in the end it was always a new album squeezed into a set number of studio hours before I was scheduled to go back on tour again.

There was never enough time to get the songs like I wanted them. Nothing had ever gone out as a disaster, but it had come close. Close enough that I never forgot what the stakes were.

Also, it was freezing cold in the studio. Like a systems test on my wolf-strained nerves.

“Do you want to, like, get to know the equipment?” Dante asked. “I mean —”

“What I’d like,” I said, “is to put down my gear and have those two people over there start hooking in to your equipment while you pull up your Wikipedia page so I can tell who else you’ve recorded and I can see if we’re going to be best friends or mortal enemies by the end of this session.”

Dante looked at me. Leyla looked at me. The cameras looked at me. Jeremy set down his case and flipped open the snaps to get his bass out.

No one was moving.

Jeremy looked up. He said, very pleasant and surprised, “Oh. Didn’t you know? Cole doesn’t do small talk.”

Sometimes I can be an ass**le. Sometimes I don’t care.

Everyone went to do what I said.

“Also,” I added, “can we have it warmer in here? I can’t feel my goddamn fingers.”

Jeremy stood up and adjusted the strap of his bass. He played a soporific bass riff and paused to tune. “Just like old days.”

“Almost,” I said. I didn’t say Victor, but I was thinking it.

My eyes were on Leyla as she messed around with the drum kit.

“Which of those things are we doing?” Jeremy asked. He meant the files I’d sent. “I fooled around with a few of them.”

“Which are you feeling?”

Jeremy glanced at the cameras. He glanced back at me. In a low, casual voice, he asked, “Depends. What’s the way?”

God, I loved smart people.

“Special guests,” I said, turning my phone so he could see.

“So, noisy,” Jeremy confirmed. “That third one, then. It does this?”

He played a little snatch of tune until I could tell which one he meant.

“Do you hear that?” I said to Leyla, who looked up with dislike on her face. “That’s the one we’re doing. Put your thinking cap on.”

I didn’t know if a thinking cap would fit over her dreads.

“Cole?” David — Derek — Damon — Dante? asked from overhead, his voice coming from everywhere. Behind a glass panel, I saw him moving behind an array of boards and computer screens. “Can you guys hear me in there?”

“Da.”

“My guys are bringing out your headphones. Let me know about the levels in your ears, and then we’ll do some levels in here. We’re all hooked up. What’s the working title for this track?”

“ ‘Gasoline Love,’ ” I replied.

Dante typed it in. “Nice.”

“Predictable,” replied Leyla from behind the kit.

I bristled. “There is nothing predictable about either gasoline or love, comrade. Why don’t you go back to not caring what tomorrow brings?”

Leyla shrugged and played a bit of drums.

It wasn’t bad. But —

I want Victor

I want Victor

I want Victor

I let myself think it for just a second, and then I shivered and turned to my keyboard. Misgiving still hung inside me. I thought about Isabel’s open mouth on mine, back at the pie shop.

Then we got to work.

Recording in a studio is nothing like playing live. Live is everything all at once. There’s no redos, no problem solving, just powering through. In a studio, though, everything becomes a puzzle. It’s easier if you do the edges first, but sometimes you can’t even tell what the edges are. Sometimes the hardest part is telling which track to lay down first — which track is going to be the skeleton to pack flesh onto. The vocals? But what if they’re not on the beat or if they drop out for measures and measures? The drums, then. But that left you with a track so spare that you might as well start with nothing, or just a click track. The keyboard, then, establishing the chords and the tone. It would have to be rerecorded, but at least it was something.

Mostly I liked it to start and end with me, anyway.

We worked for an hour, during which I hated Leyla more and more. There was nothing wrong with her drumming. It was fine. But Victor had been the best instrumentalist of us all.

Other bands had always tried to poach him from us. Magic hands. Leyla was just a person with a drum set.

How stupid I’d been to think I could just go into a studio with any other musicians and come out with something that sounded even vaguely like NARKOTIKA. Not stupid. Cocky.

NARKOTIKA was me, but it had also been Jeremy and Victor.

After an hour, “Gasoline Love” was sounding more like “Turpentine Disinterest.”

I was in a pretty bad mood by the time my guest stars arrived.

“I thought about bringing coffee,” Leon said as he stepped in. The shocked cameras swung to him — impotently, because Leon hadn’t signed a release, and wouldn’t. “But I thought that kids these days probably drank these newfangled things instead.”

He offered me an energy drink. I was unreasonably glad to see him.

“Leon, I love you,” I said, accepting the can. “Marry me and make an honest man of me.”

“Oh, well,” Leon said. He offered another one to Jeremy, who shook his head but said, “Thanks anyway, man.” He’d brought a mason jar of green tea.

Leyla sniffed and took a drag of her kombucha. “Who’s this?”