Chapter 5
Nobody had made him go back. That was the part he could not explain to the version of himself that had packed the bag.
He had done it once, on his own feet, and then he was simply here again, and the door he had walked back through had closed so quietly behind him that he could almost believe it had never opened.
Jude woke on the eleventh floor with Rand’s arm heavy across him and the city white and cold through the glass, and for one merciful second he did not remember.
Then he did. The duffel was unpacked. His meds were back in the bathroom cabinet, his laptop back on the desk, the hard drive back in its drawer, fifteen months of work returned to the apartment it had nearly left.
He had done that himself last night, quietly, while Rand slept, because leaving it packed felt like a lie he was telling a man who was watching him for lies.
He lay still and let Rand’s arm stay where it was. Moving woke him, and a Rand woken before he chose to wake was a Rand who started the day owed something.
Three days at the safehouse had been a country with different weather.
. He turned the memory over once, pressing on it the way he pressed a bruise to see if it still hurt, and put it away, because he was here now and the rules here were different and the worst thing he could do to himself was carry the safehouse rules into this house.
His phone was on the nightstand, face-down where he had left it. He had read Nate’s reply once, in the bathroom, with the door locked.
No clock on it. He had read it four times and then made himself stop, because every time he read it the wanting came up in him so hard he was afraid Rand would see it on his face at breakfast, and that was somehing he could not afford.
Nate was being kind. Nate was always kind.
Kindness was not a door. It was a window.
He had spent his life at windows, looking at an outside he was never going to be let into.
Rand stirred. His arm tightened, and then his voice came warm and thick against the back of Jude’s neck. “Morning, baby.”
“Morning,” Jude said.
It started fine. It always started fine.
It was the coffee that turned it.
Jude made it the way Rand liked it and brought it to him at the kitchen island, and Rand took a sip and set it down and looked at it, and Jude felt the temperature of the room change before a word was said, the way he always felt it, a barometric drop he had no name for and no defense against.
“You used the cheap beans,” Rand said.
“They were the ones in the-”
“I bought the good ones Tuesday. They’re right there.
” Rand did not raise his voice. He never raised his voice anymore; he had learned, somewhere in the last year, that he did not need to, that a flat quiet did more to Jude than shouting ever had.
“I work all day to keep the good coffee in this house and you can’t be bothered to find the bag. It’s fine. It’s fine, Jude. Forget it.”
It was not fine, and forget it did not mean forget it.
It meant the rest of the morning would be paid for in small increments, a coldness here, a sigh there, a door shut a little too hard, until Jude had apologized enough times in enough ways to buy the temperature back up.
Jude knew the whole sequence. He had it memorized the way he had the building’s fire exits memorized, and he started paying early, because paying early was cheaper.
“I’m sorry. I’ll get the good ones out. I wasn’t thinking.”
“You weren’t thinking.” Rand said it gently, like he was agreeing with something sad and true that Jude had volunteered, and that was the worst part, that he could make Jude’s own words come back wearing his meaning instead of Jude’s. “It’s okay. You’ve got a lot going on in there. I know.”
Jude got the good beans out and started the coffee over and did not say that the good beans had not been bought Tuesday, that there had been no Tuesday coffee run, that he had watched the cheap bag come into the house himself.
He did not say it because saying it was a door, and he had learned what happened when he walked through such doors, and he was so tired this morning, tired in his soul
He had read once, in one of Dr. Aronson’s pamphlets, the phrase reality is negotiated.
He had thought at the time it sounded like nonsense.
He did not think it sounded like nonsense anymore.
He lived in a house where reality was negotiated every single day and he always lost. He had started, somewhere he could not pinpoint, to suspect that the cheap beans really had been his fault.
The grip came two days later, over nothing, the way they always came over nothing.
Jude had said the wrong thing about the set list. That was all.
He could not even reconstruct it afterward, what he had said, only that he had said it in front of Kit at rehearsal and it had made Rand look small for half a second, and Rand didn’t forgive being made small.
He waited until they were home. He waited until the door was shut.
And then his hand closed around Jude’s upper arm, high, where a sleeve would cover it, and he held on while he explained in his flat quiet voice exactly how Jude had embarrassed him, and the grip got tighter with each clause until Jude’s eyes went hot and his arm went white under the fingers, and then Rand let go and stepped back and looked almost surprised, the way he always did, as though his hand had acted without him.
“I didn’t mean to grab you that hard,” Rand said. He sounded like he believed it. “You just- you make me crazy, you know that? Look what you do to me.”
Look what you do to me. As though the bruise were something Jude had built on his own arm to spite him.
In the bathroom Jude pushed the sleeve up and looked at it.
Four ovals and a wider one, his own arm wearing the negative of a hand, already going from red toward the deep plum it would settle into by morning.
He had a stupid clear thought, standing there: that it was almost a relief to have a mark.
That feelings were arguable and a bruise was not.
That if he ever did try to say the unsayable thing out loud to someone, here, finally, was a sentence in a language nobody could negotiate him out of.
Then he heard Rand moving in the next room, and the thought went where all the others went.
He had a show in two days. He got the concealer out of the drawer.
He was good at this. He had been good at it before he ever needed it for this.
The makeup had started as armor for the stage, back when stepping into the lights meant being looked at by a thousand strangers and he had needed a face he could hide the real one behind.
Eyeliner so his eyes did not look frightened.
Glitter on the cheekbones to catch the light and pull the focus up and out, away from whatever his mouth was doing.
He had learned the whole grammar of it young, learned it for the crowd, and the crowd had no idea that the same set of skills worked just as well in a bathroom on an arm.
He worked the concealer over the bruise in thin layers, the way he had learned, color-correcting first because a bruise was not one color and pale cover laid straight over it only went grey and obvious.
He warmed the green of it down with peach, the way the videos taught, and built the cover in coats, and set it, and pulled the sleeve down over it and pushed the sleeve up again to check, and in the mirror his arm was just his arm. Clean. Unmarked. A frontman’s arm.
That was the thing nobody understood about what he did onstage.
They thought the makeup made him more. It did not make him more.
It made him coverable. The bright smear of color the crowd screamed for was the same trick as the peach over the plum: it was a surface arranged so that no one looked underneath.
He had been painting the bright thing over the hidden thing for so long that he no longer felt the seam between the stage and the bathroom.
It was all one skill. It had only ever been one skill.
Make the outside a thing people wanted to look at, so they would not look at the rest.
He looked at himself in the glass, finished, armored, unreadable.
He looked, if he was honest, about nine.
The phone call came through the wall on the night before the show.
Jude was not listening. He had stopped listening to Rand’s calls a long time ago, because they were always the same call, Rand charming someone or owing someone or being owed something, the producer’s grandson working an angle the way other people breathed.
But this one had a different shape. The voice on Rand’s end had lost its charm somewhere in the middle of it, gone low and fast and almost frightened, and frightened was not a color Jude had ever heard in Rand, and so he found himself standing very still in the dark of the bedroom with the door cracked, listening to words he did not understand.
“-not my problem when they move it, that wasn’t the deal,” Rand was saying.
“No. No. I said I’d have it and I’ll have it, I just need- okay.
Okay. I hear you. Tell him I hear you.” A silence.
Then, lower, in a voice Jude had never heard him use: “You don’t have to say that.
I know what they are. I know what they do. I’m not stupid.”
I know what they are. I know what they do.
Jude stood in the dark and turned the words over and could not make them fit anything.
A number had been said, a big one, the kind of number that did not belong to a band that played biker parties and all-ages shows.
He filed it where he filed everything about Rand’s money, which was somewhere sealed off and not his business, because the one time he had asked to see the band’s books Rand had laughed and said baby, you can’t even read a bank statement without a panic attack, let me worry about it, and Jude had let him, the way he let him do everything, because being managed was so close to being cared for that he had stopped being able to feel the line.
Whatever it was, it was Rand’s drama. Rand always had drama. Jude got back into bed before the call ended and lay with his eyes shut and his heart going too fast for a reason he could not name, and told himself it was the show.
The show was where it finally broke.
He knew within the first song that it was not going to come.
He climbed up onto the stage to find what he always found there: the wall of light, the room going soft and far, the place where his hands stopped shaking and the next line was always waiting.
It did not come. He stood in the heat of the lights and they were only lights.
The crowd was only a crowd, a hundred faces too close, and the song came out of him technically correct and completely empty, and he heard it happen, heard his own voice making the shapes of the words with nothing underneath them, and the panic he had spent his whole life outrunning by climbing up here had finally followed him up the stairs and into the light, into the one room it had never once been able to find him in.
The medicine had not failed. He had taken it.
He took it every day, religiously, the small reliable chemistry that kept the floor under him.
But the medicine was built to hold a normal weight, and what he was carrying now was not a normal weight, it was a bruise under his sleeve and a number through a wall and three days of a different country he was not allowed to go back to, and the medicine bent under it and did not break and did not hold either, and he stood up there in the bright and the loud with the one thing that had never failed him, now failing him in front of nine hundred people.
He got through it. He always got through it. He gave them the bright thing, the smear of color over the hidden thing, and they screamed for it the way they always did, and not one of them could tell that the man making the sound had left the building.
Afterward, in the dark of the wing, Kit found him. Kit did not say anything for a moment. He just looked at Jude with that soft careful face, the dog-is-sick face, and then he said, quietly, so Rand would not hear, “Hey. You good?”
And Jude, who had a bruise under his sleeve in the exact shape of the truth, who had heard a number through a wall, who had just lost the only room he had ever been safe in, looked at his oldest friend in the band and gave him the only thing he had ever known how to give.
“Yeah,” Jude said, and smiled the bright smile, the one with the most coverage. “Just tired.”