The Rock Star Lost His Voice, and Now He Lip-Syncs to Mine novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Well
Yuna sings the world's biggest rock star's voice from a booth under the stage, refuses her manager's voice-for-life contract and walks into the rain, where the silent star catches her wrist and writes STAY across her palm. Her manager answers by playing her a song she never sang.
Twenty thousand people were singing my voice back to a man who wasn't singing.
I stood in the dark under the stage with one hand flat on the foam wall, and I could feel them through the floor.
The Well is a padded booth the size of a coat closet, bolted into the steel under whatever arena we're in.
It holds a stool, a microphone, a cooler of honey water and a little monitor that shows the mouth of Fraser MacFarlane.
For fourteen months I had been the voice of the most famous man in rock.
I had never been in a room with him.
"Chorus in four," Bev said in my headphones.
She runs the board two feet outside my door.
She has never once told me I was good, which is how I know I am.
Above my head the band hit the downbeat of "Salt Road," and the floor shook with a kick drum the size of a refrigerator.
I opened my mouth and sang.
My voice went into the mic and through Bev's board, then into a plug-in the crew calls the Gravel.
The Gravel scuffs a voice up, adding a smoker's heavy rasp.
By the time it reached the speakers it was Fraser's.
Everyone in Chicago believed it was his.
On my little monitor his mouth moved on the beat, big and sure, and the crowd howled every word back.
Then Vaughn Pellam's voice slid into my left ear, soft as a hand on the back of my neck.
"Cut the bridge, Yuna."
I kept singing through the second chorus.
"We're four minutes over," he said. "Nobody comes for the bridge."
The bridge was the best thing I had ever written, and nobody knew that, either.
"The bridge is the song," I said into the dead air between lines.
"The bridge is plumbing, sweetheart. Plumbing doesn't edit."
I took a breath.
Then I sang the bridge, every word, as loud as I have ever sung anything.
Nobody's coming to carry you, so carry yourself and sing.
Twenty thousand people held a lighter, a phone or a stranger's hand, and I heard them do it through the floor.
For three minutes I was not a pipe.
Afterward Vaughn had me called to his office, which was a dressing room with a leather couch and a bowl of green apples nobody ate.
He sat with his legs crossed, in a black overcoat he never took off indoors, with a pen laid across a stack of pages.
"Five thousand for the bridge," he said. "Two more for the breath pop in verse two."
"That's seven thousand dollars out of my pay."
"It's a fine. Fines are how we say we noticed."
He slid the pages across the coffee table.
"And you'll sign this. It's an addendum."
I read the first page standing up.
I read it twice.
It gave the label my voice and likeness, in perpetuity, in all media and by any technology now known or later invented.
"What's later invented?" I said.
"Boilerplate."
"Say it in your own words, Vaughn. What are you going to invent with my voice?"
He looked at me over his rimless glasses with pity.
"You are a pipe, Yuna. Pipes don't read the plumbing code."
My hand had curled into a fist around the paper.
"Your car leaves in ten minutes," he said.
"From tonight you stay at the airport hotel, and you come in by the freight door."
"The voice and the face mustn't meet. It breeds leaks."
I looked at the pen.
I thought about my mother's dry-cleaning shop in Tacoma.
I thought about the sixty-eight dollars in my checking account the week he found me, and the thirty-eight thousand a month since.
I put the pages down on the apples.
"Find another pipe," I said.
I walked out through the freight door with my duffel on my shoulder, and the Chicago rain hit my face.
The tour bus sat idling at the dock with its lights low, a black coach as long as a street.
A man stood on the bottom step, bareheaded, in a T-shirt soaked through to the skin.
I had watched his mouth on a screen for nine months, and I had never seen the rest of him.
He was taller than I'd pictured, lean and broad through the chest.
He had a shaved head and a red-gold beard, and ink ran from his knuckles up his neck to his jaw.
Fraser MacFarlane had green eyes that didn't blink.
He came down off the step into the rain and caught my wrist.
His hand was big and warm and rough, and it closed all the way around me.
Something went up my arm.
He pulled a black Sharpie from behind his ear, turned my palm over, and wrote across it in capital letters.
STAY.
The ink was cold, and his thumb lay against my pulse the whole time.
"You could have just said it," I said.
"I did," he whispered.
His voice was a dry scrape, a match dragged along a wall, and it never broke once.
"That's a pen."
He looked at the word on my skin, and at me.
"Please," he whispered.
Fourteen months, and the first thing the man had ever said to me was please.
I didn't pull my hand back.
Behind me the freight door banged, and Vaughn came out under an umbrella with two security men and the envelope.
"Fraser. Inside. This is a contract matter."
Fraser took the envelope out of Vaughn's hand.
He tore the addendum in half, and in half again, and let the rain have it.
"You can't speak, Fraser," Vaughn said, very evenly. "You cannot negotiate."
"Thursday. Detroit." The whisper carried anyway. "Twenty thousand seats. She rides my bus, or I don't walk out."
Nobody on that dock breathed.
"Fine," Vaughn said at last, with a smile as thin as the pages.
He stepped close and put his mouth beside my ear.
"You've been so productive," he said, and held up his phone.
A woman started to sing out of its little speaker, the second verse of "Salt Road," in my voice.
It was my voice to the grain, with the breath in the wrong place.
"I never sang that," I said.
Vaughn smiled again.
"Not yet."
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