Robert tilted his chin toward the ladder and grinned. “He’s been at it since before sundown.”

“I’ll go see,” I said. “It always makes him feel better if someone asks.”

I walked to the bottom of the ladder, warily; solid objects had been known, at moments like this, to follow the stream of sound that fell from the ladder. “Hullo, Spangler. What’s it this time?”

“Oh, nothing, we just lost another fresnel, that’s all, there’s no goddamn fucking way in the world I can get it working by showtime, if ever, and the whole lighting balance is fucked at this end of the room because we’re running out of goddamn units I can fill in with.”

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

“Shows what you know.” He did, in fact, drop a crescent wrench, but on the other side of the ladder. By the time his feet were on the rungs at my eye level, my heart rate was almost back to normal.

“I take it you don’t want to say something like ‘Hi, Sparrow, how’s it been?’ ”

He jumped the last three feet to the floor and gave me a disgusted look. Spangler was not exactly the youngest crew member, but he claimed the distinction, and it would have been counterproductive to contest it. Half his brown hair was long and worn braided beneath his ear; the rest of his head, from forehead to nape of neck, was shaved clean and tattooed with Japanese carp and water lilies. Whenever the shaved part went to stubble, it looked as if the pond had an algae problem. “I know how it’s been,” he said. “Wonderful. You never have anything go wrong.”

“Not a thing. If you like, I’ll try to trip on my way upstairs.” I wasn’t in the habit of airing the details of my life here, either.

Spangler shook his head, even more disgusted. “Help me with this fucking ladder first.”

I did; then I pulled myself a beer and took the stairs behind the bar two at a time to the sound balcony.

“Robby?” Theo’s voice came around the door as I opened it.

“Nope. Me.”

“Sparrow!” he said, surprised and pleased. “What’re you doing here?”

He’d been cleaning one of the cassette decks; a stick with cotton wadded around it was in his right hand, straight up like a little torch. There was a hand-rolled cigarette balanced and glowing in one corner of his mouth, and I could smell Theo’s mixture of tobacco and marijuana. The air itself seemed to tremble, full of the light of the dozen mismatched candles that he always lit on the balcony.

“I’m watching you undo your work,” I replied.

He took the cigarette out of his mouth, looked at it, and grimaced. “Well, that’s why I’m cleaning the thing.”

“If I answered that, this conversation would get damned recursive.”

“Instead of just redundant. Glad you’re here, man. We should be able to do some groovy stuff tonight, if we get the crowd.”