listening to Summer’s vortex playlist today. I keep putting it off because something else comes up. It’s this thing the Players do—”
“Oh, I know all about the vortex playlist thing. I have my own.”
He blinked at me. “Really?”
“I mean… I’ve been working on it for a while. Okay, almost a year,” I confessed. “I think it’s almost done, though.”
His mouth twitched a little in amusement. “Well, I can send the band’s playlists to you, if you want to hear them.”
“I’d love that. I’ve heard Ash’s. Danica made one, too. But I haven’t heard the others.”
“I’ll send them your way.” He turned his attention to his laptop.
“Can I hear yours?” I asked him.
He stopped what he was doing, and I wondered if I’d overstepped a line there.
Oops?
His eyes locked with mine. “I didn’t make one.”
“You should,” I said. Because obviously, he should.
“I’m not in the band.”
“Neither am I.”
He studied me for a lingering moment. Then he said, “I want to hear yours,” in that bossy way of his.
“Is that a requirement of my employment?”
“It is now,” he said, deadpan, going back to his laptop.
I turned to mine. Without looking at him, I said, “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”
He said nothing.
When I couldn’t stand it anymore, I glanced over. He was looking at me.
“Deal,” he said.
“And you better not take a year to put it together.”
“Of course not,” he said mildly. “Only a weirdo would do that.”
The rest of the workday was pretty damn ordinary. I reached out to Cary’s studio manager, Merritt, over at Little Black Hole and she hooked me up with an official LBH email address. Then I spent most of the day getting organized, figuring out Cary’s systems, or in some case, lack of systems, for everything.
For someone who said he’d spent the last week getting organized, I could barely make heads or tails of his workflow.
His house looked neatfreakish, but his office area was another story. His email and his desktop were a mess. His phone, from what he told me, seemed to be a dark hole where correspondence went to die. And I had no idea how he navigated the filing system on his laptops and in his cloud, because it was a fucking labyrinth of files and folders with no naming convention and very little discernible rhyme or reason.
Maybe I could improve that for him.
At lunch I headed out to the poolhouse to make the same lunch I ate pretty much every day of my life, just like I told him: sandwich with chips and Coke. It was my indulgence. I took it outside and ate by the pool, while Cary ate whatever he ate in his studio kitchen, standing, while talking on the phone to someone about a microphone that wasn’t working or something. I found him like that when I came back into the studio after my break.
I worked the whole day in the control room/office, and most of the day, Cary sat a few feet away from me. He had his headphones on a lot, and he didn’t really share with me whatever he was doing, moment-to-moment. Not that I expected him to.
I didn’t pry. I had enough to try to bite off and chew just getting the lay of the land. And whenever I asked questions, he answered them patiently.
When it was nearing five o’clock, I looked up from my laptop. He hadn’t asked me to stay late today, so my workday was almost done.
I decided to broach the subject, quickly and directly, before taking off.
“Hey Cary, can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.” He glanced over, pushing off his headphones, but like his head was still deep in whatever he was doing on his laptop.
I took a breath and plunged.
“What is it like being agoraphobic?”
He seemed to bring me into focus, forgetting whatever he’d been doing on his computer. But he didn’t answer me.
“I looked it up a bit,” I added quickly, “because I’d really like to understand. I don’t mean to pry.”
He sat back in his chair a bit. “Who said I was agoraphobic?”
Well. That was one way to shut the conversation down.
He probably knew I wasn’t about to answer that. I either told him This, that, and the other of your friends said it, or I read it online, or Nobody, I just assumed. None of which was a great answer to that question. Not to mention that his question to answer my question neither confirmed nor denied that he was agoraphobic, so I had