We play the show that night anyway. There’s no reason not to. It’s not like I can get on a plane before the morning and I don’t even know what the fuck I’m flying back to. I know fuck-all about what to do when someone dies and I know fuck-all about how to bury my little brother, so for the next couple of hours I just want to do what I fucking know how to.

It’s probably the worst show we’ve ever played. I’m barely there, playing mechanically. Every time I look up I’m surprised to see where we are, mentally a thousand miles away.

Gavin, Darcy, and Joan keep looking over at me every thirty seconds like I’m made of glass or some shit. The entire time I just wish they’d fucking stop. I wish I were invisible, because I don’t want to be here, in front of a few thousand people, trying to pretend that I’m having a good time.

I don’t want to be anywhere.

We play one encore, and going back on stage is like pulling teeth. The audience can tell that we’re having an off-night, and I can tell that they can tell, but I don’t care. Afterward I leave my guitar on the stage, walk off, and leave the theater through the alley in the back. The door closes behind me and I lean against the cool brick wall between a dumpster and a stack of pallets four feet high, an oily puddle in the middle of the pockmarked asphalt.

It’s as close as I can get to nowhere, at least for now.

My brain keeps spinning and stopping, spinning and stopping. Like a turntable with a broken motor, a wheel with a slipping gear. I’ll replay the last time we spoke, the night he called me and wanted money, the time before that, hearing his flat voice, and then my mind will go blank.

The last time I saw him, buying him peanut M&Ms from the vending machine, sitting across the wobbly table from him in that white cinderblock room. Mom, next to me, asking for the third time how much longer he was going to be there, then blankness.

I have to tell Mom. I’ll have to tell her thirteen times, a broken fucking record. I’ll have to get him buried or maybe cremated, I’ll have to figure out where and how, I’ll have to pick a fucking coffin and hire someone to say something nice at the service...

Then blank.

I don’t know how long I stand there. I think it’s a long fucking time, but it’s quiet and it’s dark and even though it smells like hot garbage, I can’t stand the thought of being anywhere else.

After a while I shove myself off the wall. I walk to the street at the end of the alleyway, out onto the one-in-the-morning sidewalk filled with the muted splashes of flickering streetlights and drunk people weaving their way home. A taxi goes by, slowly, and without knowing what I’m doing I flag it down.

“Where to?” the driver asks.

I stare at him like he’s speaking Russian. My brain refuses to process it for a long time, and once it does, I’ve got no idea where I want to go. Just somewhere else, but I know I can’t fucking drive around Boston in the back of a cab for the rest of the night.

“Hey. Buddy. You back there?”

No.

“Marriott,” I finally say.

“You’re gonna have to be more specific.”

“The closest one.”

He shrugs and starts the meter. I’m just guessing that the closest one is where we’re staying, but it seems like a good guess.

While we on stage, I got a voicemail from a number I don’t know, but it’s got a 661 area code and I know where that is.

“This message is for Eli Ryder’s next of kin,” a woman’s voice says. “I’m calling with information on the process that the California Correctional System uses for deceased inmates...”

I remember Eli, the first time he got out of prison, standing outside the gates at eight in the morning. Street clothes and a plastic bag in his hand, age twenty, still young enough to fidget. We hugged when I pulled up, quick and hard and perfunctory, but we were still doing that then.

I remember my eyes stung because they were burning the fields in the valley, and because I hadn’t slept since I got off work at two that morning.

The voicemail finishes. I barely heard a fucking word, so I hit play again, hold it up to my ear.

“This is for Eli Ryder’s next of kin...”