Anyway, I sat at the bar, back turned to hangers-on and revelers, and the stools in my orbit were empty. I was achy and buzzed. My ears rang, and the post-show melancholy I was addicted to kicked in hard so I ordered another beer I didn’t need, but it would extend the night a little. After all the practice and preparation and the days of what-if-the-place-is-empty/what-if-the-place-is-jammed worries and the want-to-puke nerves moments before playing and the manic don’t-fuck-it-up euphoria/panic (new word: euphoranic) while playing, the show was over so quickly. They were all over so quickly.

There was a tap on my shoulder; more intimate than a hey-you and more secretive, momentarily protecting the unseen tapper’s identity from the unsuspecting tappee. I could go on describing the tap (its rhythm and level of pressure communicating both insouciance and urgency, and the maddening wonder of who might be attached to the digits knocking on my shoulder as though it were a speakeasy’s door), but I won’t.

I swiveled my stool into a nebula flash. Vulnerable and overexposed, I mashed the backs of my hands into blinking, malfunctioning eyes, and oh that Polaroid’s goddamn Trent Reznorian whir. I hadn’t heard her camera in almost twenty years, but I recognized its industrial tones instantly.

Polaroid like a hole.

“Hey, want a photo of a rock star?” Mercy held up the back of the picture toward my face.

I blinked dumbly (I never have figured out how to blink smartly, consideredly) and I laughed, mainly at myself, and I laughed at how we had arrived at this time and place. I was a drunk’s happy to see her, and I said, “Yeah, okay.”

She pulled the photo away. “Five bucks.”

I held up surrender hands. “I don’t have any money. I’m with the band.”

She smirked. Hell, she might’ve even smiled. Her face had always looked like it had just finished and discarded a smile, and you were then forced to share in the dawning sadness over the end of that smile. She said, “I saw that.”

“And? What’d you think?”

Mercy glanced at the photo and slipped it into a pocket of her green army jacket. Was it the same coat from twenty years ago? I doubted it, but it could’ve been. “I dug it. You looked like you belonged up there. Your guitar sound is super fuzzed-out, very Hüsker Dü, of course.”

I blushed because I was seen, flattered, and found out, and despite it being a hoary teen-angst sentiment, it was all I ever wanted to hear and hear from her (even if it wasn’t true): You looked like you belonged. “Aw shucks. That’s very nice of you to say. Hell, you look the same. Exactly the same. How’s that possible? Except shorter.”

“I eat right. But I haven’t gotten shorter. You, however, do not look the same.”