Chapter 13
Knowing I’d be seeing Micah (and he’d be seeing me), I got home from work as soon as possible to kick off my street clothes, shower, shave, and change into something more alluring, hoping I might get him to see past the camera lens. I picked out a flirty skirt that would show off my long legs and settled on a loose-fitting blouse with a low neckline to flash a little cleavage. I tried on a pair of sling-back heels that would put me at eye level with Micah, but considering how long we’d be on our feet, I went with my Roman sandals. When I started fixing my makeup, Zion barged in on me and asked if he could borrow my mascara.
Neither Zion nor I wanted to sit through an opening act we’d never heard of, so we didn’t get to the venue until much later than the doors opened. Outside the theater, nobody waited in line or hovered near the doors. Loud but muted music pulsed through the walls. I could almost feel it more than hear it. The ticket windows were eerily quiet. The man behind the speak hole had no trouble finding our names and slid us an envelope with Wilder written on it in black sharpie.
I peeked in to verify it held a pair of backstage passes and press credentials. “How cool is this?”
We handed our tickets to another portly man on a stool right inside the doors. He scanned them and handed them back. Another checker had me open my bag to make sure I wasn’t carrying a camera. Of course I had one, but I flashed him my press pass.
He pointed out a plastic baggie filled with small cookies. “Can’t carry food into the venue.” He indicated a trash can. “There’s food available in the concessions.” He sounded bored like he was repeating a script from rote. He didn’t even make eye contact.
“This is emergency food. I’m type 1 diabetic.” I said as sweetly as I could muster.
He lifted his eyes, and I could see him processing me as a human for the first time. He tilted his head toward the lobby like it made no difference to him. “Go on in.”
“Thanks,” I called from several feet away as Zion shoved me inside.
The lobby bustled with people milling about, buying tiny clear plastic cups of beer or wine. We found the main doors, showed our tickets again, and entered another world.
What struck me at first was the fluidity of the crowd. We had assigned seats, but nobody sat. Some people stood in the aisle, not entering or exiting, just dancing. We located our seats near the front and slid across to occupy them. I fell into mine, and nearly fell back out. The seat was broken and stopped about two inches below level. I jumped up. Zion did the same and complained that his seat was crooked.
I started to put my pocketbook on the floor, but my feet stuck to some syrupy glue. I wrapped it over my neck the opposite direction as my camera strap. I immediately hunted for something to eat. This experience promised to be far more draining than an evening with Eden Sinclair.
The theater was dark, but spotlights crisscrossed on the stage. The music coming from the speakers had a distant quality. Maybe the sound system sucked, or maybe the band did. A mass of black bangs obscured the lead singer’s eyes, and he sang with his mouth crushed against the microphone so that his lyrics came out muffled. Every so often, he’d bounce and spring in sharp angular motions. The rest of the band concentrated on their so-called craft. I couldn’t make out a melody at all.
When those sounds came to a stuttering halt and the audience applauded, the lead announced that they had one song left. He must have spoken the title or else people knew what to expect, but they started the next song to a roar. After a few bars, I realized the song sounded vaguely familiar.
“Who is this?” I yelled at Zion.
He reached into his back pocket and produced our tickets. “Halcyon?”
I’d definitely heard the song somewhere. It sounded awful live, and I wondered if all their music sounded better in a studio. I had low expectations for Micah’s band.
As the lead singer waved and ran off stage, a red curtain dropped, and the lights came up. I had a chance to take in the theater. After the last performance, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find a burned-out shell of a hole in the wall. But in fact, the place was old school classy, with a focus on old. The seats were all red velvet but less posh and more scary. A pair of once shiny gold balconies peered down on us, now dull and decaying. I wouldn’t have trusted my life to the stability of those structures. The crowd in the venue would have looked more at home on a field at a festival. And they smelled like it, too.
After another fifteen minutes or so, the lights double flashed, and the people to either side of us pushed out of the row and into the aisle. At first, I thought they were taking advantage of intermission or maybe leaving before the show even started, but they moved forward, jamming in with others who now pressed against the stage. Security ineffectually directed people to move back. The crowd amassing in the aisles had to be a safety hazard.
“Don’t shout ‘fire.’ ” I whispered to Zion.
“No shit. What’s going on?”
I shrugged. My experience with rock concerts was practically nonexistent. My mom would never have let me blow out my eardrums and brain cells on rock music. Once, in an act of rebellion, I went with some friends to see a Nine Inch Nails concert, but I didn’t know their music and regretted the decision. We left after three songs. I had a suspicion tonight might be a repeat.
The lights dropped. A moment later, loud music broke out through the speakers at the same time the red curtain opened. Micah stood at the mic, wearing a ridiculous pair of bright blue pants and a ratty T-shirt. Somehow they’d fixed whatever technical issues had plagued the first band. The sound system functioned perfectly. Micah’s vocals came through clear.
I sucked in my breath at the sight of him. It was one thing to sit beside him while he was just some other guy, but seeing him onstage, lit from above, in complete control of his audience made me want him in a weird, visceral way. I wondered if that was the feeling other people got when they went to church. It was nearly spiritual, and Micah was the cult leader.
And the mystery of the crowd behavior resolved itself as Micah grabbed his mic out of the stand and walked to the edge of the stage, touching all the outstretched hands and then pulling one person up on stage with him. This guy immediately fell backward off the stage into the waiting arms of the fans, who carried him on a wave all the way to the back of the group. When it happened a second time, I noticed Micah wasn’t pulling people on stage. He would give a tug, and whatever guy climbed up on his own. But every time someone had surfed to the middle of the crowd, Micah would choose the next volunteer victim.
“You should go up there,” Zion yelled.
“Hell, no. You go.”
It was a moot point. When the song ended, many people in the crowd returned to their seats. Clearly this was an insider first-song-only stunt. But when the second song started, an inflated ball appeared out of nowhere. I craned my neck up to the balcony and watched as another dropped into the audience.
Micah’s band was living up to its name: Theater of the Absurd. I remembered my press pass and slung my camera around to start shooting. The show went on, half rock concert, half performance piece, with more crowd interaction. Zion followed me as I moved around the venue, trying to get the best angles. I almost considered testing out the structural integrity of the balconies but decided I didn’t need to risk my life if I wasn’t getting paid.
When Micah announced the last song of the night, people moved up to the stage, and Zion and I returned to our once-upon-a-time seats. I expected more of the same crowd surfing, but they all jumped up and down in time with the music—until Micah started into his last verse. At that point, he fell backward into his sea of fans, completely trusting them to catch him and deliver him unharmed to the back of the theater. And he continued to sing. When he finally landed on his feet again, he said, “Good night!” and walked out the door.
The band stopped playing without winding down or fading out. They just stopped and walked off stage. Then the theater erupted in a chorus of “Encore.”
Zion leaned over. “Is that the same guy who sang with Eden last week?”
“That is a guy who does whatever he wants.”
“Probably a guy who gets whatever he wants, too.”
It took me a minute to process what we’d just seen. Now I understood why Micah had asked me if I’d ever seen him perform after I told him I loved theater. His band had taken a page from some of the musicals I’d seen where the stage actors moved through the crowd or where they came in and exited from the back of the theater rather than the stage. What I’d interpreted as a non sequitur so he could talk about himself made sense now. He knew I’d appreciate his show. And I did.
The band came out and wrapped up with a few more songs. He’d saved his radio hit for the encore. Everyone in the crowd sang along. Me included. It felt like a communal event. I wanted to hug the strangers around me.
And then the show ended, and the lights came up. People left the theater, laughing and singing. Normally, leaving a theater had an anticlimactic, returning-to-normal isolation to it. But I overheard people talking to each other, already reliving their favorite parts of the night. I’d noticed the crowd consisted mostly of guys, but there were a handful of girls, giggling together over how hot Micah was and trying to figure out if they’d be able to catch the next show.
I smiled, smug in my knowledge that I had backstage passes and feeling so special until one girl said, “Do you have the backstage passes?”
Zion nudged me to keep walking since I’d come to a complete halt to eavesdrop, but the girls were moving with the crowd.
“Yup. I’m gonna go for Noah.”
“Not Micah?”
“As if.”
Their voices drifted away, and the crowd swallowed them up. A surge of adrenaline had left a strange metallic taste in my mouth. The girls had triggered some kind of competitive drive in me. I had an overwhelming urge to rush backstage and stake a claim on Micah to show those girls up. And I didn’t even know what they looked like. They were a pair of voices.
“Remind me not to get involved with a rock musician,” I said to Zion.
“As if,” he giggled.
The laughter helped diffuse the pent-up nervous energy. “Maybe we should just leave.”
“And miss this weird experience? No way.” As we merged into the lobby, he tucked a hand under my elbow and navigated the crush of exiting people.
“Where are we going?”
“Following those girls.”
Then I saw them. They both had two-toned blond hair and wore interchangeable clothes. They might as well have worn T-shirts that said “Sleep with me.” I glanced down at my skin-baring outfit and wondered if I looked any less obvious.
We followed them through a plain red door and down a narrow hallway to another door covered in peeling black paint. Through this door, we were confronted by a member of the theater staff who studied our backstage passes and handed them back to us.
“Vince, take these two to the visitor room.”
We eventually entered a kind of surreal cocktail party where groups of people clumped together around band members like they were planetary objects. I scanned the room for Micah, but since he didn’t seem to be there, Zion and I hung back to figure out the dynamic.
A pair of friends would slowly circle up to a band member, who stayed fixed in one place, chatting, signing things, taking photos with fans, and then chatting some more. The pair of friends would awkwardly attempt to engage in conversation, but only a few people managed to get the band member into an interesting discussion. Most of the talk seemed kind of lame. The pair of friends would then move around to another band member.
Others, like me and Zion, stood off to the side like wallflowers, waiting for the action to come our way. But it clearly wouldn’t.
“I wonder if we’re allowed to feed the animals,” Zion whispered.
I chortled. “And on your right, you’ll see homo musica in his natural habitat.”
Zion laughed out loud. “Please keep your hands to yourself at all times.”
“I hope not at all times,” a voice said in my ear from behind me. I turned and discovered Micah had snuck up on me. He’d changed into a different T-shirt, but his hair glistened either from sweat or the world’s worst shower. His scent hit me a second later—musk, smoke, Tide, and something indefinable. Something that made me breathe in deep and tremble.
Before I could formulate a response, all the people in the room siphoned off whichever band member they’d been trying to approach and encircled Micah.
He completely ignored the press of people and kept his eyes on me, a true professional. He clearly knew how to handle a mob.
“No camera?” he asked, looking down at my pocketbook.
“Right here.” I sighed, swinging it out from behind my back.
“Oh, right. I loved the pictures you took of Eden’s show.” He touched my elbow. “Can you hang out here a little while? I’d love to look at them, but I’ve got some people to meet first.”
That was an understatement. I swallowed the disappointment at his obvious interest in my photos and agreed. Maybe I should have bared more cleavage. But I couldn’t say no to spending another ten minutes shoulder to shoulder with him. And while I waited, I shot a few more pictures of him talking with his fans. It made me happy when he signed autographs for a couple of girls, chatted with them, and then turned to the next waiting pair of fans without any hint of flirtation or interest in meeting later.
One of the girls we’d followed backstage approached me. “Are you with Micah?”
That was a tricky question. “With Micah?”
She lifted her hand to her hip. “Are you his girlfriend?”
“No. Just a friend.”
She took a step back and ran her eyes from my head to my feet and then half smiled, like she’d won some imaginary contest only she was aware of. “Then if you don’t mind, I’m going to try my luck with him.”
As if he was an overstuffed toy at a carnival. “Step right up! Win yourself a Micah Sinclair.”
I usually tucked my Georgian upbringing away, hiding it from New Yorkers who mistook it for rank ignorance. But the only thing I could think to say to this girl was, “Well, bless your heart.”
She relaxed as if I’d just given her my approval, but Zion had a wicked grin on his face.
Encouraged by our apparent bumpkin-ness, she went on. “I’ve hooked up with even bigger musicians.”
Zion said, “How nice for you!”
I thought I might burst out laughing. I feared she’d go into graphic detail, so I pointed out, “The line’s gotten shorter. Here’s your chance!”
She fluffed her hair and readjusted her bustline. Then she threw me the shittiest expression of superiority I’d seen since high school.
My dad had taught me to reserve displays of arrogance until after I’d achieved a victory, but this girl had obviously never gotten that lesson. In fact, I got the impression she was putting on a show for my benefit. I’d given her no reason to think I’d be jealous, and I wasn’t. Maybe she lived in a world with a different currency than mine.
Zion asked, “You got any popcorn?” and nudged me forward so we could hear the entire exchange.
As she moved closer, I checked my own smug arrogance. I’d forgotten that Micah’s last three girlfriends had been groupies. Maybe this was how it had started. The realization made me feel queasy. I laid my fingers on my wrist to check my pulse and make sure the queasiness wasn’t a sign of imminent danger. My pulse hammered. I slipped a cookie out of my pocketbook and handed another to Zion. Nibbling cookies while intent on the unfolding drama, we looked like we were watching a TV show.
At last, the girl had her moment. “Hi, Micah. My name’s Kendall. I’m a big fan of your music. Great show tonight.”
“Thank you, Kendall. It’s great to meet you.”
I had to hand it to Micah. He didn’t show any signs of exhaustion or boredom. Every smile seemed real. He engaged 100 percent with whomever he talked to. And each of them had to feel special. I knew how it made me feel when he focused that charm on me.
Kendall went on. “I’m only in town for the night and wondered if you’d like some company. Maybe you could give me a personal tour of the city?”
I nearly groaned out loud. I wondered if that had ever worked for her. She could have just as easily said, “I’m available for free sex, no strings attached.” Though I supposed it would have been more awkward to turn that down.
As it was, Micah put a hand on her shoulder. I’d noticed he did that frequently. A little tap on the arm or a handshake that lingered. He seemed to make a concerted effort to touch every single person he spoke to. And most of them weren’t even aware he was doing it. I tried to recall if he’d done the same with me, suppressing a chill as I pictured all those little moments when he’d touched my hair or tapped my shoulder. Or wrapped his arms around my waist.
I suddenly wished this meet and greet would end and I could find a way to get Micah alone. Maybe I could ask him for a personal tour of the city.
“That’s very generous of you, Kendall. Unfortunately, I’ve already got plans for the night.” He lifted his eyes in my direction and winked. Right at that moment, I empathized with Kendall, fervently wanting to tell him I was free for an evening of no strings sex. One night with him was all I was asking.
She flipped her hair. I supposed that was her signature move. “I don’t mind waiting.”
“Oh, no. I wouldn’t want you spending your only night in the city waiting around. But thank you. Would you like an autograph or a picture?”
And just like that, he’d reduced her from potential hookup to fawning admirer. She politely declined and turned toward another band member, perhaps hoping to have better luck. She never again glanced my way. I tried to muster up some sympathy, but the well had run dry.
Eventually, the band members began to leave the room. Micah successfully extricated himself from the last fan and made his way over to me and Zion. “Ready?”
“For?” I asked.
“Come on. I told someone I had plans with friends tonight. Don’t make me a liar.” He held out his hand. I stared at it unsure what he expected. I took a chance and placed my hand in his. He closed his fingers over mine and began moving toward the door. He led us down the hall to an exit. It hit me as I trotted along that he’d never stopped to see my photos—like he’d completely forgotten about them.
As the door opened to bursts of light, I had this horrible fear that Wally would be standing on the other side. I took advantage of the transition from inside the nearly deserted backstage and the eruption of sound and light outside to twist my hand free from Micah’s. The last thing I needed was to be featured in a news story pitting me as Micah’s next conquest.
As generous as Micah had been with his time in the visitor room, he barely acknowledged the fans waiting outside the venue. A handshake here and a flash of a smile there. But he didn’t stop moving until we reached an idling car. He opened the door and waited for Zion and me to climb in. He slid in next to me and shut the door on the clamoring horde.
There was no possible way I wouldn’t end up in tomorrow’s paper.