Chapter One of VAGUELY HUMAN FIGURES

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Copyright © 2025 by Jina Jeon. All rights reserved.

Months before I lost everything, I was an esteemed musician.

My fate was not specific to my occupation. Rather, it was likely to be a consequence of the circumstances to which I had been born, a destiny assigned by whatever cruel deity ruled over me. Had I assumed any other job, it’s safe to assume the condition would have followed. It clung to me like starved leeches, sucking on my essence, and by the end of the winter, I’d dug myself into a hole far too deep to let in even the smallest dose of clarity.

Before I continue, let me get one thing straight: none of this was meant to happen. I wasn’t supposed to be a successful musician. I wasn’t supposed to live in a penthouse overlooking Chicago, and I wasn’t supposed to receive a six-figure grant to orchestrate one of the biggest musicals the state had yet to see. I’m not saying this with any degree of humility; I wasn’t meant to suffer the way I did in the name of success. It strapped me into a plow and lashed my back, working me to the ground until my feet hardened into nubs.

By the time I regained some stability, the crest of the winter had peeled away, leaving but mere inches of snow over Chicago. It covered the city’s blemishes in a creamy white haze and left my extremities numb whenever I stepped outside, not that I did much of that. The spring’s low-hanging clouds were sparse enough to let scraps of sunlight through, which ignited the snow until it glowed a blinding white. That was the type of weather that inspired twinkling preludes and dazzling waltzes, and indeed, my winters were spent indoors bent over a piano, escaping the chill and taking refuge in my art.

My story, however, begins before the snow, before the chill, and before I checked myself into the North Chicago Rehabilitation Center. It starts before I made half a million dollars, before I became an esteemed artist, and most importantly, before I met most of the people I’d love or let down or lose.

It was April. A cigarette dangled from the side of my mouth. My head ached from my routine Saturday morning hangover, and my throat assumed a dry, abrasive quality that foreshadowed a cold. Calluses covered my fingers that throbbed from days of restless work, and my spine ached from perpetually poor posture.

In contrast to my fatigue, the Hotel Ex Machina’s rooms were delightfully well-crafted due to the hefty price tag and formidable reputation it had curated in fifty-eight years since taking up the center of River North. The condition of my room, however, decidedly depreciated its value. Used cups left dirty rings across the coffee table, and reams of paper smeared the rug. My scores were covered in blotchy black ink that spelled out the work I’d produced while locked up in my room.

Sonata in F-sharp made tough company after two days spent awake on energy drinks and coffee. My forearm rested atop the keys as I scratched out and replaced the notes, testing them against the piano I’d begged the hotel to bring me. It was a ratty upright Yamaha with a broken damper pedal, but I didn’t mind it—once, I’d composed a song on a receipt while sitting in the back of a car. Moments of inspiration were imminent, and I was lucky if they found me while I had tools at my disposal.

My cigarette burned down to a stub. I reached into my pocket for a new one, but my fingers only met the cheap linen of my shirt.

With a sigh, I rolled my head back and rubbed my eyes. I eased my project under a Contemporary Classics songbook and staggered onto my feet.

I crossed my suite and its connected bathroom and headed toward the neighboring room. Soft burgundy wallpaper lined the space in between, laced with golden threads that emulated vines. Fresh vacuum lines cut the carpet below me into three congruent pieces, and bronze frames held paintings of seasides and lush bayous against the wall. Weeks ago, I wouldn’t have dreamed of staying in a hotel like that, much less in its penthouse. But weeks ago, I hadn’t yet met Jameson Ford.

Ford and I hadn’t the most traditional introduction. He’d approached me in a cocktail bar three blocks down from the hotel called the Mother of Pearl, a high-end establishment packed with people who liked the taste of mimosas and spelled “theatre” with the “r” before the “e” even though they were American. I wouldn’t typically incline toward such a place, but it had struck me with an unexpected pang of nostalgia as I walked by it that night.

Years ago, I attended Dupont Music School in New York, which I’d enrolled in and graduated from four years earlier than my peers. After completing my degree at eighteen, I’d taken to the streets, composing melodies for wealthy clients and occasionally stopping by bars to let loose on the pianos there. Among the four instruments I was proficient in, the piano was undeniably my favorite. It was a one-man orchestra, a tangle of bass and treble notes that spoke to me in half-steps and triads. The Mother of Pearl reminded me of my college years, and I ached to play for its patrons.

I stepped up to the window and slipped past the door. Customers draped in fine silks and three-pieces lounged against velveteen chairs, and bartenders behind an island counter mixed cocktails with practiced professionalism. The interior had been crafted to resemble the inside of an oyster, its sleek black walls threaded with a rainbow undercurrent that glinted under passing headlights. I imagined the bar might’ve been a theater at one point, reserved for burlesques and sketch comedy shows, though most of the room had been redesigned to match its new purpose. The only remnant of its potential history was an elevated platform in the back of the room that supported an abandoned piano.

Few spared me their attention as I stepped onto the stage. I sat before the piano as I’d done thousands of times before, folded the dust cloth off to the side, and began to play.

My first piece was a nocturne I’d composed recently, inspired by Fauré and Poulenc and the undulating rhythms of the sea. The notes rolled off my fingers and I immersed myself in the melodies, tracing the progression of the chords and accidentals in my head. Rapid eighths melted into soothing half-notes, and the damper pedal smudged them together. With each bar, the world peeled further away. When the ten-minute song drew to a close, I let the final cadence resonate.

The first song had stirred a few bar goers, and their scattered attention narrowed onto me. A hush fell over the tables nearest the stage—the visitors there watched me with eager eyes, cradling half-finished drinks.

Inspired by their attentiveness, I returned to the keys and played another song. The piece was a waltz I’d developed years ago, a compound of flats and thirds that oozed onto the keys and out the top of the piano. The right-hand part glimmered with sixth-octave notes while the left provided booming bass frequencies, the backbone to the skittish higher ones.

After that piece, a proper burst of applause broke forth from the crowd, and I glanced around the room to meet dozens of eyes glimmering with passionate interest. A man turned down the record player, and a woman with a pile of auburn hair watched me with an indicative spark in her eyes.

My heart jolted at the influx of attention. I reeled back in a daze.

“Hey!” a man called from the back of the bar. “Play us another, won’t you?”

A few voices muttered their agreement. The shock melted into an overwhelming balloon of pride, and I enthusiastically agreed.

The third piece turned into a fourth followed by a fifth. At the end of each song, the crowd erupted into ecstatic applause that warmed my chest and kicked my pulse up a few notches. I motioned to the bartender for a drink, eager to chase a proper buzz.

Five more songs and three drinks later, I stumbled off the stage in search of a cigarette. My first resort was the woman who had been gazing at me. Up close, her beauty glimmered with intensified fervor, tendrils of reddish hair lightly caressing her collarbone with each shift of her head. As I approached her, I ran a hand through my hair and hoped my curls would do their job.

“Excuse me, miss,” I said, lightly placing a hand on the back of her chair. “You got a cigarette?”

She looked up from her drink, and so did the guy beside her. Her boyfriend? No, her brother. They shared the same dainty, bird-like facial structure and brown eyes, rich as a cut of diamond.

“Of course.” She drew a wrinkled pack of Lucky Strikes out of an embroidered reticule and thumbed open the top. “You’re a talented player, by the way. My brother Nathan and I are impressed.”

“Thank you, miss,” I said as I lit the end. Her voice was husky, woven with a dark undertone that scattered my heart rate into irregularity. I struggled with compliments, unsure where to draw the line between humility and underplaying my abilities. That, in conjunction with the beautiful woman the words were coming from, made me embarrassingly nervous, blanking on the next clever thing to say.

“Please join me,” she offered, moving her bag from the seat beside her. “Remind me of your name again?”

“Oh, I’m—”

A chubby hand fell upon my shoulder and hampered the rest of my sentence.

Startled, I turned to face a stout, middle-aged man with the ruddy complexion of a sunburnt jelly bean.

“Excuse me. May I have a word with you?” he asked. He’d wormed through the thickening crowd, and his face now shone with perspiration and drink.

I inspected the man closely—his pin-striped blazer and black brogues glimmered with cost, as did the leather belt that matched the shoes. Behind his browline glasses lay obvious wisdom, contrasting the rest of his haphazard appearance.

I turned to the girl, who peered at me with curious eyes.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” I told her. “Don’t go anywhere.”

She smiled and touched my arm with white manicured fingertips. “Make it a promise.”

Then I followed the strange man, his head tilted toward me as he pulled me through the crowd.

“I’m sorry to interrupt your conversation back there, but I’d like to know the titles of the pieces you’ve played tonight,” he began.

“Most of them are untitled,” I explained, skirting around a waiter. “They’re works in progress, except the second nocturne and the minuet.”

The man’s gait stalled. “Works in progress?”

“Yes, sir. They’re original pieces.”

He turned. His eyes widened with a cold shock that didn’t suit the pudgy gravity of his face.

“Original?” he marveled, studying me with an air of wonder that was more curious than critical. “What’s your name, boy?”

Not one to gamble with privacy, I rarely told strangers my full name. Bouncing between temporary living arrangements had taught me better than that. This man, however, failed to set off my preconceived alarms; his pressed suit and groomed beard painted a picture of reliability that eased the truth out with little restraint.

“Matteo Harvey, sir,” I said, “with two t’s.”

“Italian?”

“No, my parents just didn’t know how to spell.”

The man gave a hearty chuckle and then abruptly grasped me by the arm, the ring on his finger digging into my skin.

“I’d like to talk to you for a minute,” he said as he dragged me to a side table. “Why don’t you have a seat?”

Startled and tipsy my body bent to his strength, and I crumbled onto a bar stool. Beside me was the exit, and through the ajar window trickled cold air that licked the sweat from my face. Bugs slammed into the flickering gas lamp beside it, and a starless night peered into the enlivened bar.

He moved into the seat in front of me and steepled his hands.

“My apologies if I came off too strong,” he began. The dim overhead lights melted his round features into murky shadows. “I don’t believe I’ve formally introduced myself. My name is Jameson Ford of Ford Artist Management.”

He poked around in his pockets and pulled out a business card. His name, phone number, and address were printed across the front alongside a red logo that resembled a treble clef if I squinted at it for long enough. The edges were lightly gilt with gold foil shaved into a flourish.

“Your talents have truly astounded me tonight, Mr. Harvey,” he said as I surveyed the card. “I’ve seen my fair share of skilled musicians during my twenty years in the business, but it’s far from commonplace to run into talent like yours. Your music is utterly captivating.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said, then took another sip of my drink, heart hammering against my ribs. My gaze faltered, failing to meet him, and I dropped it to his shirt instead. Its wrinkled collar stuck out haphazardly against his jacket’s lapel like an injured limb and battered his chest with each influx of wind.

“Have you ever thought about music school?” he was asking when I refocused my attention to the room.

“I finished Dupont’s composition program three years ago,” I said. “I attended it early. I’m twenty-one now.”

“Why, you’re barely old enough to be here. What are you doing in a place like this on a weekday?”

I thought long and hard, my memory dashed by the chemicals clouding my mind. I kept smoking my cigarette, nervously glancing toward the front of the stage to check if the girl was still there. To my right, inconsequential insects continued to slam themselves against the gas lamp. Crickets chirped against the polite jazz someone had put on after I’d abandoned the stage, and I stared at Ford with blank enough of a stare to dodge the question.

“Well, as you can see—” he pointed to the card “—I’m an A&R manager and a patron of the arts, and I’d like to offer you a deal with a theater if you’d be interested.”

I paused, blinked, and exhaled a stream of smoke that narrowly missed his face.

“Excuse me?”

He tilted his head back into a raucous laugh.

“Don’t play humble with me, boy. You’re as brilliant as they come.” He extended a finger to the window, beyond which a dark building peeked from behind a cascade of shorter ones. “Do you know what that is?”

“The Black Swan Theater,” I said.

Anyone who’d dipped their toes into the music business knew of it. The Theater housed well-established performers and fresh talent alike, and every singer I’d met at Dupont had aspired to take on a role there. The Theater had rejected me from a cleaning job a few years back, and I had spitefully cut it out of my head space altogether. Ford’s insinuations were as lost on me as the flashes of color around me, furniture and people blurring into one.

“Listen closely, Mr. Harvey,” he said. “How about I offer you a deal?”

“A deal?”

“You write me a musical, and I sell it to the Theater and give you half the royalties. Of course, I will offer some payment upfront, and you’ll receive the rest after submitting your work.”

I motioned to a passing waiter for another drink. If I wasn’t already drunk, I was well on my way.

“For how much?” I asked, mostly to humor him. I wondered if he was playing a cruel joke on me, a calculated prank designed to raise a struggling artist’s spirits.

“Typically, it depends on the artist. The more promising you are, the more I offer. You, my boy, are an exception.” A flame danced behind his eyes. “Five hundred grand. How about it?”

My heart stopped. My cigarette nearly toppled from my mouth.

“What?” I said incredulously, but he only continued.

“It is, of course, completely up to you. I’ll admit it—there are risks to every creative endeavor. Not every show is bound to be a sensation. But the Black Swan Theater has requested I find fresh talent for their next musical, and your pieces mimic those of history’s greatest composers. I’ve never felt such certainty as I do now.”

“Well, you see,” I trailed off, wondering if it was all a joke or if he truly was offering the opportunity of several lifetimes. In my inebriated state, I couldn’t process much more than the hypothetical money he’d laid down and the phantom touch of his impatient hand on my shoulder.

As my silence extended, he cut in again.

“Why don’t you think about it? We can call later tonight if you need some time,” he offered, but in my mind, that was him slipping away, the ghost of his hand dissolving off my shoulder in a cartoonish poof.

“Oh, yes, definitely,” I responded quickly, scrambling to reassemble my mind. “You can reach me tonight at the Solstice Inn on Fifth. Room 210.”

“Excellent. Expect a call, Mr. Harvey. You are a one-of-a-kind artist.”

The rest of the night was hazy. The audience showered me with drinks and praise, and a few begged for an encore. I stumbled through a couple more songs, both original and not, my fingers recalling the music even when my brain didn’t. Around midnight, I shifted genres from classical to jazz. A vivacious cheer filled the bar, and a bartender brought his saxophone on stage to play along to a rendition of Velvet. A woman joined in, yelling the lyrics to Crescent City. I downed a couple of shots, then a couple more. Smoked too many cigarettes. Brought the girl with diamond eyes back to my hotel.

Following our initial interaction, Jameson Ford and his proposition entirely slipped my mind. I was caught up in the thrumming melodies and warm bodies around me, and by the time I returned to my hotel, our conversation took on the hazy quality of a dream. There was no way Ford wanted a guy with no money or resume; I must’ve hallucinated it, or at the very least, he had forgotten about me. That had to be it.

At three in the morning, however, the telephone rang and shook me from my repose. I patted the bedside table and grabbed the receiver on the last ring.

Ford’s voice cut through the line, asking if I’d made my mind up yet. Frazzled, I disclosed my concerns over whether I could coordinate with the Theater given my lack of experience. He promptly waved my worries away and said he would handle the communication. So, in a drunken stupor and postcoital folly, I agreed. Yes, I would sign with his agency. Yes, I would compose a musical for the Theater. Yes, I would accept his initial payment to support myself while I worked.

A pen scratched against a sheet of paper before the connection split, and I passed out on the spot. The next morning, I woke up alone with a headache. I hadn’t even asked the girl what her name was.

And that was how I became Jameson Ford’s next investment. The news exploded in the following week—Ford, a seasoned music patron, had signed a six-figure deal with a twenty-one-year-old nobody he’d run into at the Mother of Pearl. Editors across tabloids shared a puzzled tone, and speculation of nepotism and bribery were among the tamer guesses. A handful of clandestine interviews later, WHO IS MATTEO HARVEY? found its way onto the front of Drive Time Magazine. Reporters called me everything from a nerdy music prodigy to a mysterious, cigarette-smoking heartthrob with a “stylishly worn-down” appearance, which was a media-friendly way of calling me bedraggled.

All of that caught me severely off-guard. I had anticipated Ford to be a slightly seedy, egocentric promoter who’d had a few too many drinks, not the Goliath of a social figure he was. Only after I researched him via journals and newspapers did I realize his notable status and concluded that our meeting at the bar hadn’t been a fluke. He was notorious for seeking young talent and paving them a path to a shining career.

What the journals were confused about, though, was how quickly he’d offered me the deal. Every headline about me included the phrase “half a million.” Patrons and representatives typically needed more proof of an artist’s abilities before taking them in, and my performance at the Pearl was comparatively brief. In my suitcase, I carried an arsenal of compositions including a fifty-minute, four-act symphony I’d slaved over during my final year at Dupont. He hadn’t asked to see any of it. Nevertheless, Ford waved away my questions, telling me I was “music’s next big thing,” and that my deal with the Black Swan Theater would serve us both well.

“Whatever soundtrack you create, boy, I’m assured of its success,” he said weeks later, his voice garbled by an old lobby telephone. “You’re the most promising composer I’ve met in decades, and I completely trust your skills.”

Even so, I found that turn of events exceedingly difficult to believe. I was a nobody. I hadn’t even worked for a local theater yet, and my most impressive stint so far had been ghostwriting a love song for the daughter of an oil tycoon. Regardless, within my disbelief lay a smidgen of pride. My ego grinned and purred as his words stroked its spines. I’d be crazy to back out of the offer.

I spent the next month in the Hotel Ex Machina’s penthouse suite, writing when I wasn’t playing and playing when I wasn’t sleeping and sleeping only when unmanageable exhaustion knocked me out across my work. I woke up every morning with piano keys printed against my face. My room quickly filled up with wrinkled, discarded works. I rapidly lost weight, and I only ate regularly when chunks of my hair began falling out. By the end of April, I’d produced thirty scores, only two of which I found salvageable.

Now, as I rose from my seat to venture into the adjacent room, sharp pains stilted my movement and forced me into an awkward limp. My muscles burned from lack of regular use, and my lower back ached from hunching over for days, but I was used to it. Since signing with Ford, fatigue had become my most natural state.

I knocked on the door adjacent to mine. The man who occupied it was an artist by the name of Elijah Awad, and he was staying at the hotel while police investigated his home for drug possession. Since he’d checked in two days ago we had grown close, drinking at the rooftop bar when we weren’t working on our corresponding projects.

Eli opened the door upon the second knock. He wore an unbuttoned silk shirt and linen pants that looked like he slept in them. His lips spread into a charismatic smile that lit him up from the inside out.

“Hey, Wolfgang. What’s up?”

I peered past him into the room, where a six-foot-long canvas dominated the floor. Paint stained its ivory skin with depressive blue hues. It seemed he’d decided to do a Picasso-inspired work after all, opting for the blue-era theme over the Beksiński duplicates he’d considered before.

“You got a cigarette?” I asked.

Eli laughed. He had a nice laugh, the kind that younger women and older men fawned over.

“I haven’t seen you all day, and that’s how you greet me?”

I sighed. “I’m sorry, Eli, I’ve been busy. I’m working on a new song, and—”

“Yeah, the musical. I know.” He didn’t say that with annoyance but with pride, like I was his brother and not a single-use acquaintance who lived next door. He passed me a pack of Parliaments, and I let the delicious smoke defile my lungs. “How’s it going, by the way? Any breakthroughs yet?”

“Do you want me to explain it all out here?”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” He opened the door wider. “Come in and don’t step on the painting.”

Eli’s room resembled mine. Instead of a piano and unruly sheaves of staff paper, however, he kept a stack of canvases and a plastic sheet encircled in paint jugs. Crusty brushes leaned into paint tins, color dribbling down the handle like juice from an overripe fruit.

Eli cleared his source material off the couch and motioned for me to sit.

“Can I get you anything to drink?” he offered.

“I’ll just have water, thanks.”

“You got it, my liege.” Dimples formed at the edges of his smile. He slid me a glass of water that felt like an exorcism going down my throat.

“So tell me about your brilliant, show-stopping, genre-defying musical,” he said as he slumped onto the couch. “What’s going on?”

The yellow lights in Eli’s room did little to ease the headache festering in my skull. I rubbed the exhaustion out of my eyes with the backs of my hands.

“Not much, unfortunately. I can’t write for shit. I’ve been reverting to the same patterns for days, and nothing I write sounds good.”

Eli cocked his head to the side. “Really?”

“I mean, I have no clue what Ford wants from me. He didn’t specify a genre or a story line or anything like that. I mean, I’m a composer, not a novelist. How the hell am I supposed to write a whole musical without any plot?”

“Well, how do you normally write a song?”

“They come to me. I hear them when I’m going about my daily life.”

“So wait for that to happen.” He shrugged. “You can’t force inspiration to hit you.”

I cast a blank stare toward the wall behind him, and his features softened in sympathy.

“If it offers any consolation, I’ve repainted this canvas a dozen times.” He gestured to an abandoned canvas leaning against the kitchen wall, superimposed with so many hues that it was brown. “A banker commissioned me for ten thousand dollars, and I’m about to give him this shit stain.”

“Don’t worry. The rich folks love things like that. I’ve seen a guy buy a green square for half a million.”

“The rich folks?” Eli smiled. “As if you’re not one yourself?”

“I’m here on Ford’s money. If I can’t write this musical, it’s over for me.” I sighed, glanced at Eli’s face, then again at the floor.

My head spun from days of restless work, and I undoubtedly smelled like sweat. Grease matted my hair into a flat, lifeless iteration of its typical form. Eli, on the other hand, looked as put-together as always, the waves of his chestnut hair falling into his eyes. He was so naturally attractive that his time outside of art was spent modeling, which provided the majority of his income.

“I believe in you, man,” Eli said, diffusing his cigarette. “I’ve never seen anyone play like you. You make me want to learn the piano, and I hate classical music.”

“It’s not all classical. I write jazz and some new age. Musicals, now, I guess.”

The issue with modern musicals was their lack of the classical piano, my weapon of choice. I was proficient in the violin, cello, and clarinet, but they didn’t obey my fingers like the piano did. I intended to write the basic melodies on the keys, split the high and low notes, and assign them to various sounds, but none of that would work if I couldn’t pen a decent song in the first place. I’d spent hours listening to musicals and operas from which I could draw inspiration—The Marriage of Figaro, L’Orfeo, La Boheme, even a shitty self-released record some guy had left in a thrift store—but to no avail.

The issue, I concluded, was that I hadn’t thought of a story. I had no idea where to place the highs and lows, which beats to draw out, and which cut short. Without a plot, I headed with full steam toward an unidentified destination.

“Eli?” I asked.

He lifted his head. “Yessir?”

“You used to write stories, right?”

His well-groomed eyebrows drew closer together. “I mean, if you consider my awful undergrad assignments ‘stories,’ then, yeah, I did.”

“Do you think you could come up with a plot for me? Any generic one will do. I can flesh it out from there.”

He fell silent, thinking. He reached for an open bottle of wine and wrapped his fingers around its neck.

“Okay, listen to this,” he said, and I leaned forward in anticipation. “There’s this guy. Young. Poor. Scraggly-looking. He’s your typical struggling musician, a few years out of college, and he’s on the streets. He hasn’t accomplished much career-wise, and he spends most of his time getting fucked up and sleeping with random girls he meets at the bar. One day, he gets a call from a mysterious guy who offers him a six-figure contract to write a musical. He decides to seek help from his extremely talented and sexy artist friend who’s six-foot-three with a six-pack and a sharp jawline and—”

I groaned. “Damn it, Eli, this is serious business.”

He chuckled. “I don’t know, man. I’m a visual artist. If I could write a musical, trust me, I would’ve done it already. All the writers I know are insane. You’re insane for agreeing to do this.”

“I didn’t have much of a choice,” I argued. “Ford said he wanted me to write something for the Black Swan Theater, and they exclusively do operas and musicals. I wasn’t about to pass up the offer.”

“Yeah, I get it. I would do anything for half a million, too, but have you ever been to the Theater?”

I laughed. “I’m a composer, Eli. Of course, I’ve been there. That’s like asking if you’ve ever been to the Art Institute.”

He shrugged. “Sorry for asking.”

He downed a few hearty gulps of wine. His pupils had yet to dilate, which was a good sign. I could hardly have a serious conversation with him sober.

“You’d better ruminate on it for a couple of days,” he continued. “Hemingway said that when you don’t know what to write, you should start with one true sentence. Think about what that is for you.”

It was easy to forget he had an English degree from Yale. It was even harder to believe he’d quit writing altogether and ditched his promising future at a publishing house to become an alcoholic abstract artist who did racy photo shoots on the side.

As the evening melted into night, I returned to my room, my head swimming with too much stress to make room for ideas. One true sentence. What the hell could that be?

At the moment, my truest sentence was “I’m fucked,” or more specifically, “I’ll be fucked if I can’t come up with a musical within the time Jameson Ford has allotted to the completion of our deal.” Each day without an idea was another day wasted. Each minute was precious, and every second I spent staring dumbly at the keys was a second closer to failing to keep my end of the deal. Failing to live up to the composer that all those people at the bar had thought I was.

That night, I went to sleep early for the first time in weeks. I could have easily gone to the club with Eli, but I was too high-strung for recreation. I hadn’t visited a bar, taken pills, or had throwaway hookups since I’d met Ford. Without the heavy haze of my favorite vices, the world was a muted, lifeless version of itself, stripped of the head-throbbing, heart-pounding beauty it would have otherwise. Sobriety exposed every imperfection on my face, every shadow in my room, and every last word of that one true sentence.

Come on, I urged myself, think of something.

Eli had once told me that the moment before one fell asleep was when the subconscious mind was most impressionable. Hypnotists deliberately knocked their patients out to take advantage of that film of time to reprogram their brains. I wondered if I could hypnotize myself into waking up with musical revelations, but as I lay in bed that night, my mind remained painfully empty. It seemed the more effort I put into coming up with an idea, the less likely one was to surface, and the cruel irony only tormented me until sleep shied away altogether.

When the sun roused, I faced the morning with a tightened coil of self-resentment and the desperate hope that that day might be the day I break through. Otherwise, the deal would have been a mistake, and every article made it abundantly clear that Ford didn’t make mistakes. That meant it was up to me to ensure that I embodied the musician he had seen in me. The musician I had now sold him the promise of.

VAGUELY HUMAN FIGURES is out now!

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