singer’s name had been Mark or Mike or Mack or Abel or something like that. Afterward, he’d come up to me, ferociously drunk, and told me I was his biggest influence. I could see the resemblance.
Now, a million years later, I listened to the DJ describe the single as the band’s one hit. I kept driving. I still had Sam’s phone in my pocket, and it wasn’t ringing, but for once, I didn’t care. I felt like I’d left a message for Isabel that didn’t require a callback. It was enough to have said it.
My windows were rolled down and my arm was out, the wind buffeting it, my palm moist from grabbing mist. The Minnesota landscape stretched out on either side of the two-lane road. It was all scrubby pines and flat houses and rocks stacked randomly and lakes suddenly glinting behind trees. I thought the residents of Mercy Falls must have decided to build ugly houses to make up for all the natural beauty. Keep the place from exploding, or something, from an excess of picturesque.
I kept thinking about what I’d told Isabel, about thinking of calling my family. I’d been mostly truthful. The idea of calling my parents felt impossible and unpalatable. In the Venn diagram that was me and them, the shape where our circles overlapped was empty.
But I still thought about calling Jeremy. Jeremy the resident bassist-yogi. I wondered what he was doing without me and Victor. I liked to think that he’d used his money to go backpacking across India or something. The thing about Jeremy, the thing that made me almost willing to call him and no one else, was that he and Victor had always known me better than anyone. That was what all NARKOTIKA really was: a way of knowing Cole St. Clair. Victor and Jeremy had spent years of their lives helping describe the particular pain of being me to hundreds of thousands of listeners.
They did it so often that they could do it without me. I remembered one interview where they did it so well that I never bothered to answer another interview question again. We were being interviewed in our hotel room. It was first thing in the morning because we had a flight to catch later. Victor was hungover and pissy. Jeremy was eating breakfast bars at the tiny, glass-topped desk in the room. The room had a narrow balcony with a view to nothing, and I had opened the door and was lying out there on the concrete. I had been doing sit-ups with my feet hooked on the bottom rung of the railing, but now I was just staring at jet trails in the sky. The interviewer sat cross-legged on one of the unmade beds. He was young and spiked and pressed and named Jan.
“So who does most of the songwriting?” Jan had asked. “Or is it a group thing?”
“Oh, it’s a group thing,” Jeremy said, in his slow, easy way. He’d picked up a Southern accent at the same time he’d acquired Buddhism. “Cole writes the lyrics, and then I bring him coffee, and then Cole writes the music, and Victor brings him pretzels.”
“So you do most of the writing, then, Cole?” Jan raised his voice so that I could hear him better out on the balcony. “Where do you get your inspiration?”
From my vantage point on the balcony, staring straight up, I had two viewing options: the brick sides of the buildings across the street, or one square of colorless sky above me. All cities looked the same when you were on your back.
Jeremy snapped a piece of his breakfast bar off; we could all hear the crumbs rustle across the table. From the other bed, still sounding like he was PMSing, Victor said, “He won’t answer that.”
Jan sounded genuinely puzzled, as if I was the first to refuse him. “Why?”
“He just won’t. He hates that question,” Victor said. His feet were bare; he clicked the bones in his toes. “It is kind of a stupid question, man. Life, right? That’s where we get our inspiration.”
Jan scribbled something down. He was left-handed and writing looked awkward for him, as if he were a Ken doll with parts assembled slightly wrong. I hoped he was writing down Never ask that question again. “Okay. Um. Your EP One/Or the Other just debuted in Billboard’s top ten. What are your thoughts on that incredible success?”
“I’m buying my mother a BMW,” Victor said. “No, I’m just buying