Chapter 2: Sounds in the dark

April 2002, Costa Mesa, California

Success was still a long way off.

Endless club shows, rehearsals, drives, and always the same question: how do they make it to next week. Somehow the money always came together. They tried to hold on to their regular jobs too, but during a touring stretch that was more or less impossible. What was left were the odd jobs. It nearly broke them, but it always brought in enough to eat, to put gas in the van, and now and then to cover a night they had no business affording.

Their last two jobs paid unusually well, and with a bit of flirting Roxy and Cayde even managed to push the tips up. Nova would have torn her own face off before stooping to that, so she loaded, hauled, drove a forklift, or did whatever else was paying that day. And whenever there was a lull, they begged their way back into their regular jobs.

They did everything they could to stay alive. And they took every show they could get.

Ever since Eli came into the picture, there was always a gig. They only ever missed one, and afterwards they always called it the same thing: the night of Nova the Destroyer.

Now they were going round in circles about what to do at this show. Their name was on the flyer. They were supposed to hit hard, if they really wanted to make noise. Which meant showing something new.

Except they didn't agree on it.

They were the kind of band that had always just walked onstage and given everything. They didn't know how to be more than that. And maybe they didn't want to be. That was the hard part. They could feel that something had to change, and none of them wanted to head off in some direction that wasn't theirs.

Somebody floated the idea of a stunt. A scandal, something insane, something they'd be remembered for.

Then they dropped it, together.

That wasn't them.

They could have staged some kind of scene, but it would have come out fake. That sort of thing doesn't just happen. You can't force it.

In the end they settled on doing exactly what they always did.

Only better.

That was it.

Then came that night.

They were halfway through All Night All In. Cayde had pushed himself up so loud that all that came back through the monitor was a roar, and Roxy was hitting so hard that Vex felt the kick drum in his chest instead of hearing it. That was the good part. When the PA takes over for your heartbeat and you don't need to know where you are.

Then something outside went off with a bang, and every sound in the room disappeared.

It didn't fade. It vanished.

The next line came out of Vex's throat and nobody heard it, including him. The ringing stayed in his ears, and underneath it the room went suddenly empty, like a room with the furniture carried out.

And it was dark. Completely.

Somewhere by the entrance the owner was already swearing. People started moving, lighters snapped open, nervous faces flashed in the half-light. Someone at the bar switched on a flashlight, then someone else.

"That's it, the fuse is gone! There's no power!" the owner shouted.

The crowd groaned.

"So that's it?"

"You've got to be kidding!"

Vex stood there with a dead microphone in his hand that had suddenly stopped being anything but a piece of metal.

Then, from behind the drums, two clicks. Roxy tapped her sticks together, the way she did at rehearsal.

It wasn't loud. It didn't need to be.

A cable slid across the concrete on the left. Nova moved first. Then Cayde's shoe knocked against the stage on the right. Vex put the microphone back on the stand and walked out to the edge of the stage. Two steps, and there was nothing between them anymore.

Roxy shouted first, from the back, behind the kit.

"Hey!"

Vex answered from the edge of the stage.

"Hey!"

His own voice came back at him off the wall. Thin, stripped bare. That was what it sounded like with no amplification. Smaller than he'd thought.

Cayde, from the right.

"Hey!"

Nova, from the left.

"Hey!"

Roxy counted them in. Three, twenty-one. Then she hit the drum. Cayde and Nova started playing, but the strings barely carried past the third row. Vex went into My Board Is My World. His voice cracked on the opening line, and he kept going anyway, and halfway through he couldn't properly hear his own words.

Someone shouted from the back.

"WE CAN'T HEAR SHIT!"

That was the moment where it could have gone wrong. Shouting. Forcing it. Yelling into nothing until his voice gave out, then stopping, and afterwards saying, well, what could we do.

Vex didn't do anything. He just stopped, and shouted back into the dark.

"I can't hear myself either!"

Somewhere up front, people laughed.

The front row moved. Not many of them, ten, fifteen, the ones who'd been standing there since the first note of the set. They stepped in under the stage, close enough that Vex could hear their shoes shifting on the concrete.

One of them turned and called back to the rest.

"Come on. And shut up."

Then someone else. It ran through the room, row by row, like a wave going backwards. The glasses went quiet at the bar. Someone caught the door so it wouldn't slam.

The bar side emptied out. They weren't going out. They were coming in. Whoever had been standing at the bar with their back to the room came in now and stopped at the edge of the crowd, wherever there was still space. Vex had never seen that before. At a gig people leak out. Here they leaked in.

Half a minute later there was a silence in that club that nobody in it had ever heard.

The room became their amplification. A hundred people decided to barely breathe so that four people could be heard, four people whose name none of them had ever heard before.

From then on Vex could hear his own breathing between the lines. He could hear where Roxy was hitting the rim instead of the head, because the head would have been too much. He could hear somebody's shoe squeak on the concrete in the third row, and a beer bottle wandering aimlessly between people's feet on the floor.

At the end of the first song, from behind the stage, the usual noise started. Cases clicking shut. Somebody calling back to bring the van around.

Small lighter flames came up in the dark and went out again, always somewhere new, as fingers got bored or too hot. Two flashlights aimed at them from the bar, at an angle.

On the second song, on the chorus of I Live My Way, somebody in the crowd joined in.

Then somebody else.

Then the left side.

Then most of the room.

Vex stopped singing for two bars. Just to hear them. Just to be sure it was really happening.

Somewhere around the third song the back door opened. Outside an engine started up and faded off toward Harbor. In that silence you could hear that clearly too.

Nobody turned to look.

Vex didn't stop either.

They went through all of it. All seven songs. In the dark, with no amplification, at full intensity.

His voice started to go on the fifth. By the sixth the room was carrying half of it. That was fine too.

The last one was Angel of Divinity.

Hardly anyone knew that one yet. And still, when Vex let go of the final line and nothing came after it — no amp hum, no guitar stand knocking over, no applause — the silence didn't break.

It held.

Four seconds. Maybe five. Vex went back to it many times afterwards, and it always got longer.

A hundred people stood in a dark room and not one of them did anything.

Then the applause started.

When they got backstage the door was standing open, and inside somebody had set a flashlight on the floor, pointed at the ceiling, and its light spread out across the room.

A folding table. Three empty water bottles. Strips of gaffer tape on the floor, and clean rectangles in the dust where the cases had been. A setlist pinned to the wall. Nobody had come back for it.

After they packed up, Vex went back to the bar for the demos.

There wasn't one left.