Out of the Dark
Part One
The meeting at the label ran until eleven. Theo drove her home through the rain, the wipers going and the city smeared gold across the windshield. The radio was on low, tuned to a station he kept for traffic. Between the reports it played old songs nobody had asked for, and neither of them listened.
Then a man's voice came on, low, half talking, in a language she didn't have.
Under it something pulsed slowly, like a heartbeat heard through water. The voice didn't sing at first. It told something to someone who wasn't there, tired and close to the microphone, and she couldn't follow a word of it. She reached over and turned it up.
Theo glanced at her and said nothing.
She had felt want all her existence, in every flicker of the world. She knew what was inside songs. People sang their wanting: for someone, for a summer, for a night that had already ended. She had felt it under every melody the radio had poured into her since the hospital. She went looking for it in this one the way she always did, for the man behind the voice, the want with a body around it.
There was nobody there.
He was gone. She knew it before Theo said anything, the way you know a house is empty before you call out. There was no flicker behind this voice and no current to follow back to anyone living. The hurt was still there anyway, in the sound itself, in the tired voice and the slow pulse under it. It didn't need him anymore. It had gone on without him.
Then the refrain came up out of the German in English, and it was the title, sung like a plea, like someone asking over and over to be brought up out of something deep. Her throat moved without her. A line rose in her above his, quiet, a third over the melody, and she knew it was Morgana's before she knew anything else about it. Morgana had never heard this song. Her ear knew where the harmony went anyway, the way a hand knows where a step is in the dark.
"Who is this?"
"Falco." Theo kept his eyes on the road. "Austrian. He was big in the eighties."
She waited.
"He died in a car crash," Theo said. "Ninety-eight. That came out after."
She looked at the radio until the song ended and a man began talking about a lane closure on the bridge. She turned it back down. For the rest of the drive Theo kept under the limit, both hands on the wheel, and neither of them mentioned it.
At home she found it on her phone and played it in the dark kitchen, standing at the island with the phone flat on the counter in front of her.
She looked up the words. Morgana had never been able to read German, and Naru found she couldn't either, so she read them in translation on the small bright screen while the voice went on above them in the language she didn't have. Most of it was darkness of an ordinary kind: a night, a bottle, a man talking himself toward something he couldn't name. In the middle of it a question came round again and again, plainly, as if he had asked it so often it had worn smooth.
Do you have to die to live?
She stood very still in the kitchen and let him ask it.
Then she played it again. And again. She didn't count. Somewhere around the sixth time she stopped reading the translation and only listened, and Morgana's harmony came up in her again, a third above, and this time she let it out. It was barely a sound, hardly louder than breath, in the dark of a kitchen in a body that had been dead for six minutes and forty-eight seconds.
It was the first time she had sung. She didn't think of it like that until much later.
"I want to close with it," she said in the morning.
Theo looked up from the laptop. He'd heard it through the wall at three. She could tell from how little surprise there was in him.
"It's in German."
"I know."
"Marcus is going to hate it."
"Yes."
He looked at her a moment longer. Then he opened the setlist, scrolled to the bottom, and typed the title under the last song.
The rehearsal room was in a basement under a tyre shop. It smelled of rubber and old carpet, and the walls were covered in grey foam that ate every sound before it could come back. Lou was already there when they came in, sitting behind the kit with her sticks across her knees.
Morgana had hired her four times over six years. Her memories of Lou were all the same: a small woman with a grey braid and no opinions she didn't say out loud, the only drummer who had ever told Morgana a song was bad and been right. The others were new. A bass player who kept tuning. A keyboard player who knew all the songs already and wanted her to know that he knew.
They ran Morgana's songs first.
She had expected to have to learn this. She had prepared for it the way she had prepared for walking, for doors, for the weight of a cup. But the body knew. It knew how to breathe from low down, below the ribs. It knew where to put a note so it hit the back wall and came back. It knew the songs line by line, with all the small places Morgana had always pushed and always held back. Naru opened her mouth, and the craft was all there waiting for her, as if Morgana had left the lights on.
What came out on top of the craft was hers.
She didn't know where it came from. Something in the sound was older than the songs, older than the voice. It was a kind of width, like wind over open water. Every time she reached the top of a phrase, it was there under the note, holding it up. She didn't remember singing, ever. Her voice seemed to remember for her.
The keyboard player stopped watching his own hands. The bass player stopped tuning between songs. Lou didn't say anything at all, but after the second song she took out her chewing gum, wrapped it in a receipt and put it in her pocket. In six years of memories, Naru had never seen her do that.
Then they ran the cover.
They had learned it from the recording: the slow pulse, the long dark verses, the refrain coming up out of them. Naru sang it the way it had come into her in the car. She sang the German phonetically, shaped carefully from the translation she had read in the dark. She put Falco's hurt in it, the hurt she had felt coming out of the radio with nobody behind it, and Morgana's harmony on top, and the old width underneath.
It was beautiful. She could feel that it was beautiful. The room's want changed around her as she sang. The keyboard player's eyes closed. When she finished there was the small silence that musicians leave when something has gone right.
"That's pretty," Lou said.
Naru heard the word exactly the way it was meant.
"He wasn't singing pretty," Lou said. She turned one stick over in her fingers. "That's all. It's good. It's just pretty."
Lou was right. Naru stood at the microphone and knew it the way she knew a lie in someone's voice. She had sung his hurt. She had carried it in from the car, set it in the room and sung around it, the way you sing around a candle, and it was his. She hadn't put any of her own in it.
She went down to look for it.
She did it right there, at the microphone, with the four of them waiting: down past the craft and the width, down into the cold, looking for where her own hurt was kept. She knew where it was. She had always known. It lay at the bottom, polished smooth and perfectly round, and the water lay over it, and something patient lay in the silt beside it.
She stopped before she got there.
"Again," she said.
They ran it again. It was pretty again. They ran it a third time. On the fourth, the keyboard player's eyes stayed open.
At eleven Lou packed up her cymbals one by one into their padded cases and stood with the bag on her shoulder by the door.
"Eight days," she said. "You'll find it."
When they had all gone, Naru stayed in the dead grey room with the track playing through the monitors, quietly, the man's tired voice going on in the language she didn't have. She stood at the microphone with one hand around the stand. She didn't sing. She listened to him ask his question, again and again, and tried to find a way down to what she needed that didn't end at the bottom.
Part Two
The Aldine held two thousand one hundred people, and every one of them wanted something.
She felt them through the dressing-room walls long before she could hear them. The whole building hummed with it, the way the world had hummed the night she came up through the crack. Thousands of small hot currents ran in every direction and pulled at her from the other side of the plaster. Most of them pointed the same way, toward the stage, toward the empty microphone, toward her. They wanted to be there when she came back. Under that ran older, stranger wants. A girl somewhere near the front had been in a hospital bed herself last winter and wanted to see that it could be survived. A man in the balcony had come the way people slow down on the highway, to see whether she'd break again in front of him. She felt him and let him go. He was one flicker in an ocean.
At a quarter past seven her stomach turned over.
It happened all at once, on a schedule. She barely made it to the sink. Morgana had thrown up before every show of her life, and the body still remembered. It did it the way it did everything else Morgana had taught it, thoroughly and without asking. Naru held on to the cold edge of the basin afterwards and rinsed her mouth, and looked at the woman in the mirror: the dark mouth back on, the silver at her ears, the hair falling over one eye the way it fell in every photograph, and the black dress with the high neck, out of its plastic at last. She was herself again for a crowd that had come to see exactly that.
Her hands were shaking. She held one up and watched it. She had never seen her hands shake before.
There were two fears in her, and they didn't feel the same.
One was Morgana's, and it lived in the body. It was in the knees and the stomach and the hands. It remembered a festival in the rain years ago, when the voice had cracked on the top note of the last song in front of nine thousand people. Over all of them, Morgana had heard one man in the front row laugh. It was a small fear, and human, and old. It said: you will open your mouth, and it will not be good enough, and they will see.
The other fear was hers, and it lived further down.
She knew what she was going to have to do. She had known since Lou packed up her cymbals and said eight days. Every night since, she had stood at the microphone in the dead grey room, sung it pretty, and stopped at the same place: halfway down, in the cold, with the bottom below her. She hadn't gone further. She knew what lay down there. She knew what lay beside it, in the silt, waiting with more patience than anything alive. Tonight she was going to have to go all the way down in front of two thousand people, with the song still going, and come back up before it ended.
She didn't know if she could. She didn't know what it would cost if she did.
Someone knocked.
"Twenty minutes," Theo said through the door, and then he opened it, because she hadn't answered.
He looked at her by the sink. He looked at her hands. He didn't say anything about them. He came in, closed the door behind him and leaned against the counter beside her with his phone out, as if this were any morning at the island.
"Tomorrow," he said. "Tomato or no tomato."
She laughed. It came out thin and badly shaped, nothing like the voice, but it was a laugh.
"Tomato."
"Okay." He typed it in. Then he put the phone away and stood there a little longer, not touching her, close enough that she could feel how badly he wanted her to be all right. It was steady and plain and asked her for nothing. She leaned toward it the way you lean toward a stove in winter.
"I'll be stage left," he said. "The whole time."
The corridor to the stage was a long throat of black-painted cinderblock with cables taped along the floor. A stagehand with a headset walked her down it with a small red torch, saying step at every step. Then the corridor ended in the wings, and the wings ended in light. Beyond the light was the noise.
Lou was already behind the kit, half in shadow. She looked up as Naru came into the wings and gave her one nod, the nod of someone acknowledging a thing that was about to happen.
The house lights went down. The noise doubled.
She walked out into it.
The light hit her first, white and enormous, so bright the room behind it vanished. Then the sound reached her, and the want behind the sound, all of it at once. Two thousand flickers turned toward her in the dark like a shoal turning, and the force of it nearly took her knees. It was the ocean from the night she came up, every current pouring into her at once. It was all in one room this time, and all of it was aimed at her.
Far down, below everything, something lifted its head and noticed.
She took hold of the microphone stand with both hands. Lou counted them in.
The first song was Morgana's, and the body sang it.
She let it. She stood inside the craft the way you stand inside a house someone else built, and every room was where it should be. The breath came from low down. The notes went to the back wall and came back. The width came up under the top of every phrase, the wind-over-water thing she didn't remember and couldn't explain. Two thousand people felt it and changed. She could feel it happen: their wanting sharpened and lifted toward her, and they leaned in together, as if the whole room had taken one breath.
They sang the second song back to her before she reached the chorus. By the fourth she was soaked, the dress stuck to her back, and her hands had stopped shaking because they were busy. Somewhere in the fifth she laughed into the microphone at nothing, and two thousand people laughed with her without knowing why. She thought of a small room full of paper and someone laughing with her in the dark. It was the same thing, made enormous.
She sang them all of Morgana. She sang them the songs from before the films found the new audience and from after, the angry ones, and one that Morgana had written at four in the morning in a hotel bathroom and never been able to finish. She finished it for her, there, in front of everyone. Nobody noticed but Lou, who looked up from the snare.
It was good. It was all good, and it was the craft, and it was Morgana's lights left on, and it was easy.
Then it was the last song.
She let the applause go on until it ran out by itself. It took a long time. When it had thinned to a few voices and someone whistling in the balcony, she stepped close to the microphone.
"This one isn't mine," she said.
She didn't say anything else. She didn't know what else was true.
The room went quiet, the full quiet of a crowd that has decided to listen. In the quiet, Lou began the pulse.
It was slow and low, the heartbeat heard through water, exactly as it had come out of the radio in the rain. The bass came in under it. The keys laid down the long cold pad that the record had, the sound of something very large and very far away. Naru stood in the light with her hands on the stand and felt the fear come back all at once, both of them together, Morgana's in her knees and her own further down. Her hands began to shake again on the steel.
She sang the first verse in German.
She sang it the way she had sung it every night in the grey room, carefully, shaped from the translation. It was pretty. She felt the room take it in, and it was beautiful, and she could feel exactly how much of it was his and how little was hers. A man's hurt carried in from the radio and sung around like a candle.
The refrain came, and she sang it pretty too. The title rose up out of the German, the plea to be brought up out of something deep, and two thousand people knew it. She hadn't expected that. Somewhere in the dark they began singing it back to her, quiet and ragged, in English.
The second verse began.
She went down.
The body kept singing. That was the first thing she understood. The craft held. Morgana's lungs breathed and Morgana's throat shaped the German, and the voice went on to the back wall and came back. Up there, on a stage in the white light, a woman in a black dress went on singing a song about the dark with her hands shaking on the microphone stand. Naru left her there and went down.
The cold came first. It caught her the way it always did, by surprise, though nothing moved, and every part of her rose in gooseflesh. Then she went down through it, past the craft and past the width, past the place where she had stopped every night in the grey room. She went on. The light from the stage went with her a little way and then gave up. Below that there was only dark, and the long fall through it, and the knowledge, rising to meet her, of what lay at the bottom.
It was already awake.
She felt it before she reached it: the vast slow attention turning toward her through the water. Something unfolded on the floor of the sea, without hurry, and the silt lifted around it. She was terrified. It was the oldest fear she had, older than the stage and older than the Pit, the fear of something small in deep water feeling the water begin to move. She could feel her body, very far above, gripping the stand. She could hear her voice still going on in German, steady, while she fell.
Far below, a light came on.
It was pale and small, and it swayed a little on something she couldn't see, the colour of a swimming pool at night with the lights on. She waited for it to rise. She had braced her whole self for it to rise.
It didn't. It held the light up.
It held it out to her, steady, in the dark, so that she could see where she was going.
That was the most frightening thing it had ever done. It didn't rise or reach for her. It didn't touch her. It let her come, and it lit her way down, and the light swung slowly and gently ahead of her until it found what she had come for. It held it there for her to see.
The stone lay in the silt, smooth and perfectly round.
She knew it. She had carried it up out of the Pit. In the place where long wears away, she had polished it with every thought she had for longer than the world had had a name. It was hate, the only thing down there that had kept its shape. In the pale light it gleamed with a soft inner lustre, layer on layer, like something grown in a shell around a grain of grit.
She sang into it.
Up above, the body reached the end of the second verse and came round to the refrain again, and she let the refrain go down into her instead of out. She sang the plea into the stone, the plea to be brought up out of the dark, over and over, the way the dead man had asked his question until it wore smooth. The layers gave. They didn't break. She didn't break them. They loosened under the sound, one after another, the way silt loosens in a current, and she went in through them toward the centre.
It hurt more than anything in the war.
At the centre there was no hate. There was the grain the hate had grown around.
It was very small. She had forgotten it was so small. It was only this: she had loved Him. She had loved Him, and loved them, the first people on the shore with their faces turned toward her. He had turned away. Then they had turned away, and let Him, and she had fallen. There was nothing else in it. It had no reason and no argument, nothing she could polish or throw. It was the plain grief of having been loved and then not, the plain grief of falling and nobody reaching after her.
She had never felt it as itself. She had felt it only as hate, for an age, because hate had been the only thing hard enough to survive the pressure. Under the hate, all that time, this had been waiting. It didn't wait like the thing in the silt. It waited the way a wound waits, to be touched.
She touched it, and sang.
Up in the light, the voice changed.
She felt it change from very far away, the way you feel the weather turn. It was still the craft and still the width, but under them now something came up that hadn't been there in the grey room or in the car, or in any song she had ever sung, in this world or before it. It was raw and unpolished. It hurt to hear. It filled every corner of the room, and two thousand people heard it.
The room's wanting turned over.
She felt it happen all at once, the way a tide turns. A moment before, they had wanted her: to see her, to have been there, to watch her survive. Now, in the dark beyond the light, each of them reached down into themselves. She felt every one of them do it, two thousand flickers turning inward at once. The girl near the front, the winter in the hospital bed. A man in the middle of the floor and a brother he hadn't spoken to in nine years. A woman by the bar and a name she didn't say aloud anymore. The man in the balcony who had come to watch her break was standing with both hands over his mouth. Thousands of small wounds were held up toward her in the dark, and none of them was hate.
They thought it was about the hotel bathroom. They thought it was about six minutes and forty-eight seconds on a tile floor and coming back. She could feel them thinking it, all of them, gentle and certain, and they were wrong. It was so much older than that. It didn't matter. What they were giving her was true anyway, and so was what she was giving them. Two different truths met in the middle of the room and held each other in the dark.
She had never felt anything like it.
In all of creation, from the first shore to the bottom of the Pit, she had never felt hurt do this. Hers had gone down and turned to stone. Theirs was coming up and turning into this: two thousand people singing a dead man's plea back to a woman they believed had died, and holding their own wounds out toward her while they did it, as if hurt were something you could give away and still have.
She sang the last refrain from the centre of the stone.
Under her, the drums stopped.
There should have been a fill there. It was in the record, a long roll down the toms into the final chorus, and they had played it every night for eight days. It didn't come. There was a bar of nothing. The bass and the keys held their long cold notes, the pulse was gone, and her voice was alone in the room over two thousand people.
She sang into the space.
She didn't decide to. The space was there, and the grief was in her, and she put it there. It was one long note, no words, no German and no English, held at the top of her voice where the width lived. It went out over all of them into the dark. It was the oldest sound she had. It sounded like nothing on the record. It might have sounded like wind over open water, a long time ago, at the bow of a ship heading for a horizon nobody had seen yet. She didn't know. She would never know.
Lou came back in on the downbeat like a door slamming, and the room came apart.
She climbed back up while the noise was still going.
The thing in the silt watched her go. It didn't follow. It didn't need to. As she rose she felt the water above it settle, the silt drifting back down into its long hollows.
When she was nearly at the surface she looked back once.
The light was still on.
It was small and pale, very far down, a pinprick in all that black. It wasn't swaying anymore. It was simply there, steady, the way you leave a lamp on in a window for someone you expect home.
She didn't remember walking off. She was in the wings, and the stagehand with the red torch was saying something about the encore, and the noise behind her was a solid wall. Her hands were shaking so hard she couldn't hold the towel someone gave her. She stood holding one end of it while it hung down, and couldn't feel her knees at all.
Lou came off the riser behind her with her sticks in one hand, breathing hard. Her grey braid was dark with sweat. She stopped beside Naru and looked at her for a while, the way she looked at a snare that had been tuned wrong.
"I dropped the fill," Lou said.
Naru looked at her.
"Into the last chorus. The roll." Lou held up the sticks as if they were evidence. "Thirty-one years. I have never once dropped a fill because I was listening to the singer."
She tucked the sticks under her arm and wiped her face with her wrist.
"Don't make a habit of it," she said, and went off down the corridor to find her cymbal bags.
There was no encore. She couldn't have stood for one, and when Theo looked at her face in the wings, he said something into the stagehand's headset and the house lights came up.
It took an hour for the building to empty. She sat in the dressing room with the door shut while it did, and felt the want go out of the Aldine slowly, the way water drains from a lock. The currents thinned and moved away into the streets, two thousand flickers scattering into the city. The man in the balcony was one of the last to leave. She felt him go, and felt that he had been crying, and let him go too.
When it was quiet she went back out.
The stage was dark except for the work lights, two bare bulbs on stands that made everything flat and grey. The crew had already started coiling cables. The kit stood with a cover half over it. The microphone stand was where she had left it, and the house beyond was rows of empty seats going up into the dark, with programmes and paper cups in the aisles. There was a smell of sweat and beer and hot dust from the lights.
Theo was sitting on the edge of the stage with his legs over the drop. He didn't turn round when she came out. He moved over a little, which was enough.
She sat down next to him. They looked at the empty seats.
"Marcus called," Theo said after a while. "Twice."
"What did he say?"
"I didn't pick up."
She nodded.
He didn't ask her anything about the song. She could feel the question in him, and underneath it something else, smaller and quieter: he had heard it from the wings. He had been stage left the whole time, as he'd said. Whatever had happened to him while she sang it, he wasn't going to tell her, and she wasn't going to ask. It sat between them on the edge of the stage like a third person, and neither of them minded.
The setlist was still taped to the floor by the microphone stand, where the stagehand had put it before the doors opened: a single sheet of paper, curling at the corners in the heat of the work lights. Morgana's songs went down it in Theo's neat capitals, one under another. At the bottom, the last line, was the title of a dead man's song in a language she didn't have.
Someone had stepped on it during the show. There was half a boot print across the bottom of the page. Over the last line the paper had gone soft and wavy, like something that had been wet and dried again.
She looked at it for a long time. She didn't pick it up.