Home was a first-floor one-bedroom in the corner by the pool. Home was small but comfortable, furnishings pulled together piece by piece in a kinder time, an eclectic sort of mix that went for comfort over unity of style. Home had a fantastic sound system that was worth more than all the furniture combined. Home had no plants or pets, nothing to demand her affection or attention.
She let her guitar slide onto the floor, along with her purse, and shoved the grocery bags into the fridge without unpacking them. The only thing she removed was a beer.
Miranda flung herself onto the couch, the desire to wash the stale cigarette smell and sweat off her body taking second place to the desire to get wasted as quickly as possible. Her apartment, barricaded and blocked from the world through years of unvoiced prayer and desperation, was the one place she could think in silence, the one place nothing could touch her.
For how much longer?
Her eyes, so used to sticking to the ground, lifted up the wall, following a crack in the paint that had been here as long as she had. It was comforting, that crack, always there, able to tease her gaze upward, to remind her there was a world above her waist.
Not that there was much of one below her waist. Even her once-trusty vibrator, a powerful Hitachi she called Shaky, lay gathering dust beneath the bed, as day by day life contracted and the thought of ever caring about orgasms seemed laughably far away.
Cold. She was cold again. She reached sideways for the quilt that was always on the couch and pulled it around her. People who didn’t eat got cold. She should eat.
Her last boyfriend had been Mike. Five years ago. They’d met at the insurance company where she clerked while she made her halfhearted attempt at college. The university had swallowed her, her freshman class larger than her hometown, and she had gotten lost, a foreshadowing perhaps of her life now. Mike had helped her move into this very apartment, and they’d had sex on the living room floor before she bought the couch. Six months later he’d proposed. She’d said no. It wasn’t until that moment she realized she didn’t love him, and really never had. Boyfriends were like the Freshman Fifteen; you were supposed to obtain them in college. She’d gained the fifteen, too, but those pounds were long gone. She looked a bit gaunt now, even more so than her mystery guy at the grocery store—
She shuddered. Blue eyes and a raven’s feathers.
He hadn’t been gaunt, though. Really quite nicely built, just—
She drank the rest of the beer without tasting it and immediately opened another. By the time she fell asleep on the couch, still fully clothed with her shoes on, she’d had four, and her mind was blissfully numb.
She was famous, and she was insane.
Her voice soared out over the audience, holding them spellbound and enraptured, delivering their hopes and fears tangled in chords and rhythm. They called her an angel, her voice a gift.
She was famous, and she was a liar.
They had no idea where her talent came from—critics and journalists and experts of the industry postulated that she’d had a musical family, that she’d started in a gospel choir, that she had taught herself to sing. They were all stupid and blind.
Her extraordinary talent, as they called it, depended on them . . . and it was killing her.
Miranda had been playing guitar for only six years, but she had taken to it as if she’d been born with one in her hands, and it came as naturally as breathing. She taught herself out of books and a drive to do something, anything useful with her life. A friend of a friend had been dicked over by his roommates, left holding a three-bedroom apartment and a lease, so he’d sold off all their possessions. She’d bought a pair of speakers, and he’d thrown in the guitar for free just so he didn’t have to look at it anymore.
In less than a month she hadn’t wanted to look at it either. It was a piece of shit suited for a rank amateur. She gave it up on Craigslist and took an entire paycheck down to Strait Music for something real. When she told the salesman how long she’d been playing, he blinked at her as if she were speaking Farsi. She’d picked up a five-thousand-dollar Martin and shown him she was very, very serious.
Then, while he was ringing up her (considerably less expensive) purchase, out of curiosity she’d sat down at a piano.
“Are you sure you’ve never played before?” the salesman kept asking.
Oh, she hadn’t been an instant virtuoso, but she’d made her way through the sheet music on display slowly, with only a few mistakes. The arcane notations on the page made sense to her in a way nothing else ever had. The second time through she played it perfectly.
Now she had a fairly sophisticated digital keyboard; her apartment was too small for a piano. She sat down one night with YouTube and drank in performance videos, staring at hands on keys, and after that it was easy.
All of that might have frightened her, but soon she had far more pressing concerns.
One night, back when she was still with Mike and had a social life, she was sitting outside Austin Java practicing playing and singing at the same time. She was sad—she spent a lot of time sad, so she couldn’t remember now what particular sorrow had haunted her that night—and she sang quietly, not wanting to disturb the other patrons. The place was crowded with students poring over their textbooks.
At one point she paused and looked up. Every single person there was crying.
A little scared but fascinated, she’d repeated the situation on another night, in another place, with a different song, to the same effect. Whatever emotion she wanted to call up, all she had to do was put it in the music, and everyone around her felt it. She could take a happy song and use it to make people weep, or have everyone dancing a jig through the most emo crap she could think of.
It didn’t take long to figure out there was more to it than that. If she concentrated, stretched out toward the people around her, she could feel hints of what they were feeling. She could take that, and amplify it, or change it. Once she knew what they were feeling, it was a lot easier to influence them.
At first it was fantastic. She played on the street for tips, and her cup overflowed with dollar bills. Then a guy who owned a bar downtown, Mel, offered her a paid gig on Wednesdays. The crowds had been minuscule at first, but after everyone walked out high as kites on the happiness she pumped into them, they came back, and they brought friends. Soon she was seeing her name in the Austin Chronicle, and Mel recommended she get an agent.
And if she had her doubts, if she wondered how ethical it might be to manipulate people’s emotions so willfully with this funny little talent of hers, she quickly forgot those doubts in the glare of the stage lights and the adoration of the crowd.
Slowly, as the months went by, she noticed her control was slipping. More and more emotion seemed to flow through her head whether she wanted it to or not. She kept picking up on people’s feelings at random, and sometimes they were so horrible it left her weeping—despair, fear, hatred, violence, rage, all tore through her when she least expected them. She started to know things about people she didn’t want to know, and she couldn’t stop it.
It was worst when she looked people in the eye. People held all their secrets in their eyes. They could smile and laugh like they hadn’t a care in the world, but one look into their eyes and she knew . . . she knew. She could feel their guilt, their longing, their loss—emotions were clearer than speech if you knew how to listen. The weight of their heart’s memories bore down on her own.
She knew the preacher on the corner had fucked his nephew. She knew the homeless man on the bus was a Vietnam vet who’d saved ten men and had his leg blown off for his trouble. She knew the crazy cat lady three doors down still talked to her dead husband’s photo as if he were there. She knew the gangbanger passing her on the street had nightmares about his childhood dog.
All those secrets were in her head. Emotions, and memories bound up in emotions, filled up all the space inside her. If she touched someone, she learned more than whether they had sweaty palms. She learned of the deepest darkness inside them, and it made her want to scream and hide.
The only time she could control it was when she played. Then she could moderate the flow of emotions and work with them. Otherwise it was just her and the creeping madness that was eating her alive.
The one perk, she supposed, was that going batshit insane paid well. She had her two nights a week at Mel’s, and a Monday night at a local café, and among them the shows netted her enough to live on, especially since she was hardly eating and had no social life. She’d been able to quit the endless round of clerical jobs filing in windowless rooms—no more pantyhose, no more burnt coffee smell and paper cuts. There had been a time when the prospect of leaving the nine-to-five world would have thrilled her.