Sinner

“Special guests,” I replied.

She said, “Every guest is special,” but halfheartedly.

Then Leon’s passengers stepped in: the two cops from the first episode. In uniform. One of them, I knew, had actually ended her shift a half hour before arriving here, but had agreed to come in uniform to improve the general appearance of the shot. I wasn’t an idiot. I knew no one would recognize them without the uniforms.

I hoped Baby was impressed by my sheer cunning. Surely she had to realize just how no-holds-barred brilliant it was to bring the cops back. I had really wanted to ask Leon to be in it as well, but I knew he would say yes to make me happy and then would hate it when he was recognized in the grocery store.

So I hadn’t asked him, even though, in my head, Leon would make a great recurring character on the show. Everybody’s dad/

brother/uncle/guy.

But I wanted Leon to be happy. That was the mission. Well, one of them.

I exchanged pleasantries with the cops, just polite introductory things like asking them if they had ever gone skydiving or petted a hairless dog. Then we got down to business.

The trick was that I had to find parts for the cops that they could perform in the studio without any particular skill. Sure, the one cop could play the bass badly, but that wasn’t going to cut it for a studio track. They could do percussion, though. It would get in the way of the drums, but really, anything that irritated Leyla was a bonus.

I got the cops all set up on the stomp-clap routine, and it turned out the girl-cop (Darla? Diana?) had opera training, so we went a bit wild with that. Dante had no concept of how to use a mixing board, or maybe he just had no idea of how to mix us, but that was all right, because someone whose name sounded like mine was a wizard with a synth and could run a voice through there like no one’s business.

It was turning into something quite good. It wasn’t a single, but it was beginning to sound like one of those off-thewall tracks some fans got religious over, the cult classics that somehow managed to get played long after the big ones had burned everyone else’s speakers out. A few hours in and I was feeling pretty good about life. This was not quite the point — Isabel was the point — but it was a subpoint, and it was working well.

Then the power went out.

In the false darkness, Jeremy and I looked at each other.

Girl opera cop swore, just one short, filthy word, sort of like a scream. Someone sighed. I thought it was Leon.

To the darkness, I said, “Tell me you had this on autosave, Dante.”

Dante did not reply, because he couldn’t hear me. Without any power, he was just a guy behind a glass wall.

Leyla took a drink of her kombucha — I heard her do it, and it infuriated me. Jeremy tucked a piece of hair behind his ear.

Then the power came back on.

The headphones still weren’t working, so I ripped them off and charged into the engineering room. Every computer was beeping and whirring as it came back to life.

“Give me good news,” I said.

Dante looked at me. There was a thin rim of white all the way around his pupils. He shook his head.

“Any of it?”

He said, “The drum track?”

It took a long moment for the truth to sink in: Everything weird and one-of-a-kind we had just done was gone. We could redo it, but it would sound like we had redone it. It was like today had never happened. Like someone had just taken my time and thrown it away. Like the pressing deadline that was always there had been shoved closer.

“And it didn’t occur to you to save along the way,” I said.

“You’re working with a six-figure project, and you didn’t think at some point after the drum track, I will hit these buttons here on this fancy machine and save it?”

“I did save,” Dante insisted. “The power cutting off has messed things up. Like, it’s corrupted stuff. That machine won’t even start back up again.”

I wasn’t even certain which machine he was pointing at. I was certain that Baby had done this. I was also certain that she had done it to get me to implode on camera. I was even more certain that she was going to get what she wanted.

“Show me,” I said. “Show me the corrupted files.”

Dante scrolled through a bunch of empty screens. “It’s gone, man. I don’t know. . . .”

“That is the most obvious thing you have said all day. Is this your job? Have you seen one of these things before? Tell me how it is that we still have a drum track.”

If he had been in on the plan, he was doing a good job of looking shell-shocked now. He fumbled through some more screens and muttered, “That’s, like, the last save that it paid attention to; I don’t know, I don’t know. . . .”

I gestured toward T, who stood at my shoulder. “I hope you’re happy that your total incompetence is being broadcasted to the planet.”

I stormed out. In the recording room, Jeremy was packing away his bass because he knew me, and Leyla was still sitting behind her drums because she didn’t.

“We could redo it,” the bass cop suggested.

Girl opera cop shook her head. She knew.

Leon clapped his hand on my shoulder and then got his car keys.

“It was meant to be,” Leyla said. She didn’t look surprised, but it was hard to tell if that was because she was in on Baby’s plan, or because she was baked, or because she really did believe that it was meant to be.

“I know that you’re trying to get me to kick your drum set in,” I warned her, “but I’m onto you.”

Jeremy told the cops how glad he was that they had come and that at least the cameras had caught their contributions. He made sure that he had their telephone numbers. He shook Leon’s hand. He closed the door behind them all. He was good at this.

I called Baby. “This is not the way to get me on your good side.”

Baby said, “What?”

“Oh, come on.”

“I’m not a mind reader.”

“I know you want drama. But you mess with the album again,” I said, “and —” I stopped because I couldn’t think of what to end the sentence with. I didn’t have half an ounce of leverage.

I was right back where I’d started. I’d thought I’d been so clever to circumvent the system, to make an album without a label as overlord, and here I was again, just merchandise.

I thought about how she’d been so concerned at the beginning.

I kicked over one of the microphone stands. It barely made a sound in this pointless, generic studio. This wasn’t a place to make music. It was a place to record commercials for music.