First Life
PRE-SHOW
The ring light has three settings and Theo has tried all of them twice.
He stands behind it in the penthouse living room with the remote in one hand and his phone in the other, and the phone is on speaker, and the voice coming out of it belongs to Marcus Whitfield, Vice President of Artist Relations, who has been talking for eleven minutes without taking what Theo would call a breath.
"I want it on record that this is a terrible idea. Theo. Are you there? I want it on record."
"I'm here," Theo says. "It's on record."
"We had a studio booked. We had a teleprompter. We had a three-camera setup and a lighting guy who did the Pope." A pause. "Not the Pope himself. The Pope's thing. The visit. Point is, we had it controlled. Morgana. Are you listening to me?"
"I'm listening, Marcus," Morgana says.
She is sitting on the arm of the big purple sofa, in a black knit jumper with the sleeves pulled down over her hands and her hair swept over to one side, and she is not smoking. Theo has noticed this three times in the last hour. The old Morgana could not sit through a phone call with the label without a cigarette going in each hand. This one is holding a glass of water and looking out of the glass wall at the harbour, as if she has all the time in the world.
"Live is chaos," Marcus says. "Live is twenty thousand people asking you about the video. Live is someone asking about the films. Live is you saying one wrong thing and it's clipped and on every feed by breakfast."
"I know."
"Then why?"
She takes a moment before she answers. Theo watches her take it. She does that now, too. She takes a moment.
"Because they'll believe it more," she says. "If it's me. In my house. On my channel. If it's in a studio with the Pope's lighting guy, it's a press release with a face on it. If it's here, it's me telling them."
Marcus does not say anything for nearly two seconds, which for Marcus is a long time.
"You read it word for word," he says finally. "Every word. You don't improvise. You don't add. You read the statement exactly as Legal wrote it, and then, I am begging you, you say goodnight."
"I'll read it word for word," Morgana says. "Exactly as written. I promise."
"And then goodnight."
She looks at Theo across the room. There is something in her face he cannot read.
"And then I'll see," she says.
Marcus starts to say something, and she reaches over and gently takes the phone out of Theo's hand and ends the call, and gives it back to him.
"He's going to call back," Theo says.
"I know." She stands, and sets the water down, and goes to sit in the chair they've put in front of the ring light, with the city behind her through the glass. "Turn it to the warm one. The second setting. The first makes me look dead."
He turns it to the second setting. She is right. It does.
Then he sits down at the little desk off to the side, where the laptop is open on the moderation dashboard, and puts on his headphones, and looks at the countdown on the screen.
"Thirty seconds," he says.
She nods. She folds her hands in her lap. She looks at the camera lens the way the old Morgana used to look at the edge of a stage before she walked onto it, and then, for a second, she closes her eyes, and her lips move very slightly, and Theo does not know what she is saying.
The light on the camera goes red.
LIVE 00:00:14 · 31.204 watching
The number is moving before she says a word.
Morgana watches it out of the corner of her eye on the monitor beside the camera, the small white figures in the corner of the screen ticking upward, and beside it the chat, already a waterfall. She has seen this before. Morgana's memory has seen it hundreds of times. It knows how this goes: the first rush in the opening minutes, the slow climb after, the shape of a good night and a bad one.
Naru has never seen it at all.
She can feel them.
It is not like the bathroom floor. There is no ocean of wanting pouring into her from every direction; the body is too small for that now, too narrow, and these people are not here. They are scattered across a whole continent, in bedrooms and buses and break rooms, holding small glowing rectangles in their hands. She cannot reach them. But the words come up the chat, line after line, too fast to read, and every one of them carries a little of the person who wrote it, the way a letter carries the smell of the house it was written in. Each line is a thread. Faint. Thin. But when she looks at the chat, she does not only see the letters. She feels the pull behind them.
Worry. Anger. Glee. Grief. Longing. Hunger for gossip, hunger for blood, hunger for her. Somebody, somewhere, alone in a dark kitchen, wanting very badly for her to be all right.
Thirty thousand small currents pulling at her.
Her temple, she thinks. Full.
"Hi," she says to the camera. Her voice comes out low and a little rough, and the roughness is real; her throat has not quite healed. "Thank you for being here. I know a lot of you have been worried. Some of you have been other things. That's okay too."
The chat moves faster.
"I'm going to read something first," she says, "because I owe you an explanation, and I want it to come from me."
She picks up the sheet of paper from the little table beside the chair. She does not need to look at it. The woman's memory read it four times this afternoon and has it by heart. But she holds it anyway, because holding it is part of the performance, and she knows exactly how the paper should tremble, just slightly, between her fingers.
The statement is two hundred and eighty-one words long.
She reads it the way the woman would have read it on her best day. Warm. Steady. A little ashamed in the right places, never too much. She reads about exhaustion and a demanding schedule, and about a reaction to a prescription medication she had been taking for anxiety, and about how grateful she is to the medical staff who cared for her, and how she is taking time to rest and recover, and asks for privacy for her family. She looks up from the paper at exactly the moments a person would look up if they were telling the truth and it was hard. She lets her voice catch once, near the end, on the word family, and holds it just long enough.
None of it is true.
Morgana's memory knows how to do this. It has done it all its life. It lied to its mother at fourteen and to a casting agent at seventeen and to a reporter last year. It lies the way a dancer moves, without thinking where the feet go.
Naru lets it. She sits inside the lie and watches it go out through the camera into thirty thousand rooms, and she feels the threads change as it reaches them. The anger softens in some of them. The grief eases. The hunger for blood goes sour and disappointed. Here and there, thinner, sharper, something that does not believe a word of it, and does not care, and will be posting about the sink full of pills by morning.
She had expected to mind. The first lie in this voice. She had thought there would be something to mind.
There is not. The words are only words. The lie is a thing the woman built, and Naru is living in it the way she lives in the penthouse: carefully, gratefully, without pretending it is hers.
What she minds, a little, is how much she likes the way the threads move when she does it well.
She folds the paper in half, then in half again, and sets it on the table.
"That's it," she says. "That's what happened."
The number in the corner says 48.917.
LIVE 00:11:40 · 74.880 watching
She does not say goodnight.
On the side of the room, behind the desk, Theo's head comes up from the laptop. She feels it without looking. A small sharp spike of alarm. She looks over at him, just for a second, and gives the smallest shake of her head, and he puts his head back down.
"I'm going to stay a bit," she tells the camera. "If that's okay. I've been in a hospital bed for four days with a television that only got the weather channel. I'd like to talk to some people."
The chat goes up like a flock of birds.
She reads it. She does read it. The body's eyes run down the scrolling text the way they always have, picking out a name here, a phrase there. But the letters are only half of it. The other half arrives underneath them, the pull of the person behind each line, and the pull is faster than the eye.
your eyes look different??
She knew that one was coming. She had felt it coming for four minutes, gathering, dozens of small threads all leaning the same way like grass in a wind. eyes. eyes. what's up with her eyes. is that a filter. they were brown. omg her EYES
She laughs. It comes out real.
"Okay. Yes. The eyes." She leans a little toward the camera and points at her own face, the way you point at a new haircut. "Contacts. I know. They're ridiculous. They cost more than my first car, and I'm not telling you how much my first car cost because it's embarrassing."
The chat laughs. She feels it laugh.
"Honestly? My eyesight's been getting worse for about a year. I've been squinting at setlists. I can't read the teleprompter at award shows. And I tried glasses." She makes a face. "I look like a substitute geography teacher in glasses. A sad one. So, contacts. The doctor said I could pick a colour, and I thought, if I'm going to wear something in my eyes every day for the rest of my life, I'm not picking brown."
LMAO SUBSTITUTE GEOGRAPHY TEACHER
you'd still be hot in glasses
they suit you so much
what brand??
i KNEW it was contacts my sister said filter
She does not look away from the lens while she says any of it. She does not need to. It is the cleanest lie she has told yet, because every piece of it sounds exactly like her, and the threads pulling at her across the continent take it and settle, satisfied, like water closing over a stone.
They believe me, she thinks. Of course they believe me. Nobody believes in anything.
That is the whole point.
LIVE 00:31:02 · 104.517 watching
Theo has given up on the slur filter.
He had a system, at the start. He always has a system. He has moderated her streams for four years and he knows the shape of them, the regulars, the trolls, the words to block and the ones to let through. Tonight the system lasted nineteen minutes. After that the chat became something he could only stand in front of, like weather.
A hundred thousand people. It is the biggest stream she has ever done. The chat is not a column of messages any more, it is a blur, a vertical smear of colour and fragments that moves too fast for his eyes to land on. He catches pieces. A name. Half a sentence. A heart emoji. A string of capital letters. He bans what he can see and lets the rest wash over him and does not even try to read.
Morgana is talking about the hospital food. Something about a jelly so green it was probably a crime. She is very funny. She is funnier than he has ever seen her on a stream, and gentler, and he keeps waiting for the turn, the moment four years have taught him to wait for, when the mood goes sharp and she says something cruel to somebody in chat and he has to spend the next hour cleaning up the clips. It does not come.
"Oh," she says, in the middle of the jelly story, and stops, and her face changes. "Hang on. Marrowandmoth. I saw you."
Theo looks up.
She is looking at the chat monitor, but not the way you look at a scrolling list. She is looking at one particular empty place in it, as if the message were still sitting there.
"Your mom died in March," she says, more quietly. "And the second album was the only thing you could listen to in the car afterwards. Because it was too loud to think over." She is quiet for a moment. "I'm so sorry. I'm glad it was loud enough. I wrote most of that album angry. It's nice to know it was good for something else."
The chat surges. Hearts. omg she saw. marrow i'm so sorry. she reads everything wtf.
Theo looks back at the laptop.
He did not see that message. He has been staring at the chat for half an hour and he did not see anything about anybody's mother.
He pauses the moderation feed, which he has never once done during a live stream, and opens the full log in another window, and searches the username.
There it is. One message. my mom died in march and the second album was the only thing i could listen to in the car after. it was loud enough that i didnt have to think. anyway i'm really glad youre ok
No caps. No emojis. A grey username with zero followers, nothing that would make it stand out in the flood.
Timestamp: 00:16:48.
Fourteen minutes ago.
In the fourteen minutes since, the chat has posted, by the counter on the log, a little over nine thousand messages. That one would have been on screen for perhaps half a second before the next forty pushed it away.
Theo sits back in his chair.
She scrolled back, he thinks. She must have scrolled back. On the other monitor. In a pause. Some time.
He has been watching her the whole stream. She has not touched the other monitor once.
"Lil_corvid," Morgana says, behind him, in the same quiet voice. "No. It wasn't your fault. Nobody who loves someone that much is the reason they leave. Go to bed. Call her in the morning."
He searches it. 00:22:15. A message he never saw. Three lines, about a sister and an argument, ending in i think i ruined it.
He searches the next one when she answers it. And the next. 00:24:41. 00:27:12. 00:04:03, from the first five minutes, before she had even finished reading the statement. They are never the loud ones. Never the ones with capital letters or emojis or a dozen exclamation marks. They are always the quiet ones, buried, the ones from people who did not really expect to be seen.
He looks up from the laptop at the woman in the chair in front of the ring light.
She is laughing at something in the chat. She is tucking her hair behind her ear. She is exactly as warm and beautiful and familiar as she has been every night of the four years he has worked for her, and for a moment, looking at her, Theo feels the skin on the back of his neck go very cold.
He does not turn moderation back on.
He watches.
LIVE 00:52:19 · 118.660 watching
The temple is full, and she is hungry.
She had not expected the hunger. She should have. It has been with her since the bathroom floor, since before that, since the deep, but the woman's life has been lying over it like earth over a grave and she had stopped noticing. Now there are a hundred and eighteen thousand threads pulling at her across the dark, and every one of them has a little warmth at the end of it, and the hunger has woken up.
She could take.
She knows how. It is not even hard. Some of these threads are not thin at all. Here and there, among the hundred thousand, there are people who already half believe. Not in demons. In her. People who have put her face on their walls and her voice in their ears every night for years, who have built a small shrine to her in some back room of themselves without ever knowing it. The woman never noticed them. Naru can feel exactly where they are. A boy in a bedroom in Ohio with the lights off. A woman on a night shift in a hospital laundry, earbuds in. A girl on a bus who has watched every stream for three years and never once typed a word.
They are open. They are leaning toward her. All it would take is a little push, a door opening an inch wider, and the warmth at the ends of those threads would come pouring up the line to her, and she would be full, for the first time since before the Fall.
At the bottom of the well, something turns over in its sleep.
Take it, the hate says. They're giving it away. They'd thank you. Look at them.
On the monitor, the chat is asking her to sing.
She looks at it. She feels them asking. Not in the letters. In the threads. The whole temple leaning toward her at once, all those small wants turning the same way, like a field of grass in a wind.
She does not open the door.
She sits very still, with her hands folded in her lap, and she lets the hunger stand there at the edge of her and look at all that warmth, and she does not move toward it. It is harder than she expected. It is harder than anything has been since she opened her eyes. It feels like standing at the edge of the pool on the terrace with her hand an inch above the water and not putting it in.
Not like this, she thinks. Not them. Not tonight. They came here to see if she was alive.
Then she smiles at the camera, a little tired, and says, "Okay. One song. Then I really do have to sleep. My doctor will kill me."
She does not reach for the guitar. She does not ask Theo for a backing track. She sings the first song from the second album, the loud one, the one somebody griefed his mother to, but she sings it slowly and very softly, with nothing under it at all. Just the voice, low and rough from the hospital, in the warm light, with the city behind her.
It is only a song. She does not put anything into it that a mortal could not. She is careful about that. She holds the deep back with both hands and lets the woman's voice do all of the work.
It is still, she thinks, the best the woman's voice has ever sounded. Because for once, the one singing knows what singing was for.
The chat stops scrolling.
It does not stop entirely. A hundred thousand people cannot all be still. But the waterfall slows to a trickle, and the trickle is almost all one thing, a single small heart, posted over and over by thousands of hands, red and red and red, scrolling up the side of the screen like blood rising in water.
LIVE 01:24:06 · 96.311 watching
She says goodnight an hour and twenty-four minutes in.
"Thank you," she says. "Really. Go to bed. Drink some water. Be nice to someone tomorrow. I'll see you soon."
She smiles. She holds the smile for exactly as long as it needs to be held. Then she reaches out of frame and taps the end button on the tablet, and the red light on the camera goes out.
The ring light is still on, very bright, very warm, with nothing to shine at.
Theo sits at the desk with his headphones round his neck and the laptop open in front of him on a full search log, forty-one usernames, forty-one timestamps, and he does not close it.
The penthouse is very quiet. The city hums far below through the glass. Somewhere, his phone is buzzing face-down on the sofa cushions, and that will be Marcus, and he does not get up to answer it.
Morgana stays in the chair. For a while she does not do anything. She sits with her hands in her lap and her eyes closed, breathing slowly, the way people breathe after running a long way. He has seen her come off a stage a hundred times. He has seen her shaking, crying, laughing, throwing a bottle at a wall. He has never seen her sit like this, perfectly still, as if she were holding something down with her whole body and waiting for it to settle.
Then she opens her eyes and looks at him across the room. Not at the camera. At him.
She knows. He can see that she knows. That he searched the log. That he found them.
She reaches over and turns off the ring light. The room goes dim, lit only by the city through the glass and the blue glow of his laptop screen.
"Sit down, Theo," she says. "Not there. Here."
She nods at the sofa across from her.
"I need to tell you something."