The two uniformed men led us down the steps into the main room and handed us a couple of bottles of water. Then they took us down a pine hallway lined with photos of the Swift and every famous person you or I have ever seen on a screen or heard through a pair of headphones. At the end of the hallway another small flight of stairs led us to a thick, sealed studio door. One of the men pushed it open, and it made that whoosh sound you hear when you open a new jar of peanuts. Inside was a very small Asian engineer, sitting at a control panel, fiddling with the thousands of knobs at his disposal. Next to him, in carpenter jeans and a plain brown T-shirt, was Edgar. Out of his flashier garb, the Swift cut an even more striking figure. Light from the recesses above shined brilliantly off the cut of his jawline. He was lean—compact like a boxer. He didn’t bother to acknowledge us as we entered the room. He was far too busy scratching his goatee.
The engineer leaned back in his chair and swiveled around to face the Swift. “What do you think?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” said the Swift.
“I think it sounds like stock.”
“You think everything sounds like goddamn stock. You’re Pippi Longstocking, for shit’s sake.”
“Should I play it again?”
“No, that only makes it more confusing.” He looked my way. “You listen to a lot of hip-hop?”
“Not particularly,” I said.
“Good. Listen to this and tell me what you think.” He gestured to the engineer, and suddenly the room flooded with a staccato beat that rumbled through my core, treating my body like the tine of a tuning fork. Each measure was punctuated by a blast of horns and a single brash guitar chord mashed together. I thought about nodding along to the rhythm like any white person would, then thought better of it. The Swift cut the music. “So? What do you think?”
“I like it. It sounded like rock.”
At that, his eyes lit up. He snapped his fingers. “That’s right. Rock and roll. That’s exactly right. You see? A lot of people think hip-hop is a kind of music. It’s not. Hip-hop is
all
music. It is a population of music. And that’s why it’ll never die. That’s why it’s still here, even though most white folks thought it would be good and gone fifty years ago.”
“This is for your new album?”
“My
last
album. My final statement. No comebacks this time. That’s why it’s taken nine goddamn years to put it together. Listen to this.” He had the engineer queue up another take. Again my insides quivered. “That sound any different to you?”
“Yeah, there was a cymbal smash in with the horns.”
“You like that better or worse?” He scanned me for advance signs of my answer.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, then shit. You’re fired as my music director.” He slumped back in his swivel chair, grabbed a handful of pistachios from a nearby dish (food was everywhere), and started cracking them open. “This is a hell of a process, man. A hell of a process. I’ve been doing this my whole life, and it never gets any easier. You’re building a whole something out of nothing, with a trillion choices at your fingertips, like the one I just presented to you. I could work on it for
years
more, and I still wouldn’t know if it was worth a shit until the rest of the world heard it and gave me the validation I need. I mean, I have no clue. I could love it and think it’s the greatest song in the world, but that doesn’t mean it’ll make anyone else’s ass move. Do you two remember ‘Fun Dip’?”
“I loved that song,” Ernie said.
“Well, you know how long it took to write, record, and mix that song? Twenty goddamn minutes. Jason here found the beat, I laid down the vocals, and that was that. We’d been working fifteen days straight on another track before we stumbled on ‘Fun Dip.’ The other track was the one I thought would blow up. Instead, four months later everyone’s going around singing, ‘I got yo fuuuun dip, come on and have a lick.’ The other song didn’t even make the record. Now you tell me how that’s fair. You tell me that isn’t bullshit. Come with me.”
He stood, waved off the guards, and brought us down a second hallway that led deeper into the bowels of his wooden fortress. This time the walls were lined with drawings, marvelously detailed in richly colored ink, of superheroes of unknown origin. Bulging muscles and everything. Biceps on top of biceps. Triceps on top of triceps. The occasional octocep.
“Are these yours?” I asked.
“Yep. Drew them when I was sixteen. All the white kids at school got cars. I got a set of pens. This was how the whole Swift persona came to be. It all started on paper.”
He stopped at one of the drawings: a young black man in a blue jumpsuit who bore more than a passing resemblance to Edgar. His fists were clenched and his teeth bared. There was a giant rift at the center of his body, with an intense white light, like a halogen lamp, bursting out of it. “This is the Supernova,” he said. “Any time he gets worked up, his body bursts into white-hot light that disintegrates anything around him. That’s how I felt when I was growing up. Everything I had inside of me, I just wanted to turn loose. Felt like my heart had a nuclear reactor melting down inside of it. That’s how you feel when you’re young and you want everything.”
He continued down the hallway. I pointed to a drawing of a man made entirely of purple crystal.
“What about this guy?”
“That’s Eterno. Another superhero. His power was that he could live forever. Not so super these days, is he?”
At the end of the hall was a conference room with thirty-foothigh ceilings and a wooden table in the center. It was a slab cut from a cross section of what must have been the largest tree that ever lived. Such was its heft and diameter that you could have built a twenty-story building on top of it. He sat down and beckoned us to do likewise.
“You boys want something to eat?” he asked.
I politely waved him off. “We’re fine.”
“You sure? We’ve got red-list fish here. A piece of halibut tastes even better when you know it cost a thousand bucks.”
“We’re okay. Let’s just proceed with the interview.”
He tossed his license my way and started talking. I hit Record.
“This is really simple. I want this album to be my biggest. I want to become a legend for real. The GOAT. But I can’t be remembered as the greatest of all time unless . . . you know. I wanna be canonized, lionized, and immortalized.”
I gave his license back to him. “Why not just release it and see what happens?”
“Because no one gives a shit until you’re gone.” He put his elbows on the table and clasped his hands. “I’m no fool. I see where my career is now. The last album was downloaded by fifty thousand people. That’s it. I used to be able to move fifty thousand in an hour. I used to be able to get hundreds of thousands on their feet simply by walking out onto the stage. That’s over now. I know that. People out there are either indifferent, or they’re flat broke. Poor people in this country used to have some money, you know? And anyway, people lose the love. They get tired of your face on those records. And on the grails.”
“I almost bought one of your grails once.”
“The DX3490?”
“Yup.”
“Those things were made of shit. Like I said, people move on. Only one way to get that love back: Check out. Remind them of what they missed.”
“But you seem happy. You seem like you have everything.”
“Everything’ll be gone soon. Everything you see in this house is rented. From the furniture to the brothers manning the gate. It’ll all be gone. I don’t wanna be around for that. Hell, I wasn’t supposed to make it this far anyway. I’m playin’ with the house money. You gentlemen are my ticket into history. Okay? That’s the deal. I need you two to welcome me to the pantheon.” He made a gun with his hand and pointed it at his temple. “Know what I mean?”
“You want us to shoot you?”
“Assassinate me. For maximum impact. It’s how the top dogs go out. Any other way is for suckers.”
Ernie didn’t like shooting people. “John and I don’t do weird stuff like that,” he said. “We can give you the dose, and then you can arrange things as you see fit.”
“Not a chance. I don’t go for that SoFlo crap. There’s gotta be some blood. There’s gotta be some production value in this. Blood is a flourish. I’ll pay extra. I don’t care.”
“How exactly would this assassination take place?” I asked.
“Look, I’m not gonna have you drive up to my car and blast through the windshield. This is really simple. I’ll be asleep here tonight. You folks just camp outside for a bit. You’ll see me in my bed through the window. Just aim a rifle at my head, do what you have to do, and get the hell out.”
“That won’t work,” Ernie said. “Your interview is already public record. It’s sanctioned. We’re recording this and streaming it to the office.”
“Oh, please. I already talked to your boss about this. What was his name? Matt? Didn’t he tell you any of this?”
“Matt never tells us anything,” I said.
“He said he could do this off the cloud. Come on. It’s not that big of a deal, right? Your job is to help me, so help me! Help make the Swift number one again.” He took out a wad of hundred-dollar bills. “This is easy money. Come on now. I’ll be too drugged up to even move. Couple of shots and you’re good to go. Do it. Make me the Supernova one last time.”
I stopped the recording and excused myself. I got Matt on the WEPS and didn’t bother hiding my agitation. “You tell this guy we could do his ES off the cloud?”
“Yep,” Matt said. “I haven’t patched Containment in on this.”
“Why didn’t you tell us this beforehand?”
“I told you, John. You’re off the bunny slopes. Now piss off. I’m bidding on a boat lift and I’m winning.”
Four hours later we were perched outside the Swift’s bedroom, on a patch of grass near the lowest part of the compound wall. Our car was parked outside the gate, to provide us with a clean getaway. Ernie held the rifle in his hands. I shook as if the music in the studio had never been turned off. One of the black collectivist guards drew open the curtains and gave us a nod. Ernie brought the rifle up and offered me a look through the scope. I saw the Swift lying flat on his stomach, drooling away on a cotton pillowcase that cost more than my plug-in.
“Ernie, why did this guy hire
us
to do this?”
“I don’t know. Everything about this is skeevy.”
“The whole point of retaining an end specialist is so that everything is a matter of public record. So you get the tax rebate and all that crap. Without certification, they may as well get anyone to do this. It’s not like there’s a shortage of armed men inside that house. This is all wrong. We never should have agreed.”
Ernie took the rifle and looked. “I’ll tell you what’s even stranger. That’s not Edgar.”
“What?” I grabbed the rifle and looked through the scope. The man in the bed was lean, ropy. He had a goatee. I moved the rifle away from my eye to wipe away the sweat that was dripping down from my brow. I looked again. Moonlight reflected off the man’s drooping face. It wasn’t the Swift. It wasn’t the Swift at all. “You’re right. It’s not him. It’s not him!”
“Keep your scope trained on him,” Ernie said. “Don’t make it look like you’re hesitating.” I opened my left eye and could see Ernie surveying every window and shrub in the compound. His eyes darted around manically, looking for a scope trained back on us. He whispered to me, “Do you see the small shrub by the air conditioner, at eleven o’clock?”
I looked with my left eye. I saw the shrub but nothing obscured by it. “I see it.”
“On three, turn and fire at it. One shot. Then we run. Ready?”
“No.”
He gave me a second. “Are you ready now? Fire it.”
I turned and fired wildly at the bush. I heard someone shout an obscenity above the rustle. A countering shot rang out from the general vicinity. The man in the bedroom never moved. We booked it for the wall and scaled it with relative ease. I heard another shot, but we were already over and making for the plug-in. We saw the massive cast-iron gate begin to swing open behind us, and we drove like hell. Soon we found ourselves stuck in a blissful midnight traffic jam, close to the center of town. I’ve cursed the fast-spreading crowds for the longest time. I won’t be doing that for a while.
We got back to Falls Church and told Matt that our client tried to steal death. He didn’t care much about that. “You got his money, right?”
Ernie threw the wad of hundreds on the glass table.
“Perfect,” Matt said. “And our little newbie here smelled the rat? That’s excellent. That’s just why we brought you in, Johnny Boy. Congratulations. You get to pick up Chinese for us.”
He promised us no more off-the-cloud killing, but today still felt more like the beginning of something unwanted, not the end of it.
DATE MODIFIED:
4/1/2059, 4:23 A.M.
“You look just like me”
I hadn’t seen David in person since he was one. I’d seen him on the WEPS. Spoken to him. I remember seeing his face on my screen when he was three or four. Kids that age, they have this thing where, when they see something they really like, they open up this wide smile that employs the maximum effort from all their facial muscles. You get the feeling that if they could stretch the corners of their mouth from the West Coast to the East, they would. They’re so purely happy that their faces can’t even accommodate an expression bright enough to convey it. This usually happens in the presence of ice cream. I know no adult who can smile like that. I remember David used to be excited to see my face, regardless of the time of day or year. But gradually he grew up and his world expanded, and seeing my face beaming in from Ecuador, or wherever I was, proved more of a waste of his time than a special treat.
I followed his high school basketball career religiously (he was twice the player I was). That was my way of staying close to him—through his team’s status updates and game wraps. I didn’t see him so much as I covered him, obsessively. I happily barged in on his feed from time to time to give unsolicited advice about women or how to properly tip bartenders. Sometimes he’d reply, and the fact that he did would make my hair stand on end. Other times he’d brush it off and carry on. That’s how he was. I never resented him for it.