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John Miller and I find an apartment in Bucktown, a slightly dingy place above a bar on Wabansia. When we had originally cooked up the idea of moving in together, we had envisioned our place as a sort of clubhouse/ rendezvous point, a launching pad for our great adventures; we had plans for wild nights spent carousing and conquering, for weekday mornings spent sprawled out on the couch, for gluttony and sloth and adultery and all sorts of lesser, decidedly venial sins. Instead, she is basically over every single night, cooking us dinners, watching movies, playing three-person power hours. John Miller doesn’t mind. He loves anyone who will make him a hot meal, and he especially loves someone who can handle their liquor. She can do both. They develop a rather amazing bond, like an overprotective brother and his kid sister, or one of those YouTube clips where a bear raises a kitten or something. One night, when we are all
good and drunk, when nothing seems impossible and everything is unspeakably
right,
she is dancing in the middle of the living room to some old record, and he leans over and tells me, “I kin see why you love Her.” He is my best friend. She is my girl. Our lives are simple and insular and beautiful. I don’t even worry about how John Miller is going to pay his share of the rent. It doesn’t seem all that important right now.

Of course, it can’t last forever. Our manager is leaving me messages on my phone, “checking in” on me, ending each one with the promise (threat?) of “Talk to you soon.” I never return his calls, hoping he’ll just give up and go away. Instead, he starts calling more frequently, his voice getting increasingly nervous with each message he leaves. When we do finally speak, the conversation starts with broad, friendly generalities—
How are you?
and
What have you been up to?
—as if we’re just beginning a fight and he’s feeling me out. It switches gears when he asks how the other guys are (“I don’t know,” I tell him) or if I’ve been working on any new songs (“Not really,” I sigh). He’s getting frustrated now, telling me “the people at the label” are wondering if we’re thinking of getting back into the studio anytime soon. His voice now has a corporate passive-aggressiveness. When I tell him no, he’s silent.

After a few seconds he says, “Listen, I’m not going to try and force you guys to do something you don’t want to do. But I want you to be aware of—to be cognizant of—the, uh, the—I don’t want to say
pressure
—but the, uh,
suggestions
I’m getting from the label now. They want another record. They, uh, well, they believe the time is
right, want to, uh, ‘strike while the iron is hot’ is what they’re saying, and, uh . . .”

I stop listening. I already know how this conversation is going to end. I can try to fight it, but there’s no point. They have the leverage, they have our signatures. My happiness is not in the best interest of their stockholders. We are commodities now, we are the down payment on some CEO’s waterfront property. We are making another album.

•   •   •

Against my objections, it is decided. Even though I don’t have a single thing written, we leave for LA in a week. We’ll just write the songs out there, the label seems to think (and our manager insists). What could possibly go wrong? I haven’t even thought about Ativan in a long time, but now, images of those little pills dance through my head. My brain will always get the best of my heart. Life sees to it.

The next week is morose. The skies over Chicago open up, as if someone up there is crying nickel-size tears. It rains for four days straight, and eventually even the sewers get sick of it, because they start spitting the water back out. Those who are more carefree have taken to the flooded streets and formed an armada. Her and I just stay in bed. There’s no point to doing much of anything. The city is permanently cast in a suspicious green light that’s not quite haunted, but definitely considering it.

The day of my departure draws closer, and now she and I are in my bedroom at the apartment, filling my
suitcase with clothes for my journey to the West. I never even got the chance to unpack my stuff from when I moved out of my parents’ house, so I just move clothes from one container to another. Life is just a series of containers, and ultimately, you end up in one. I am tossing old socks and T-shirts into the case, and she is removing them, folding them into neat little packages, putting them back in the case in perfect stacks. I stop for a second and watch Her work, and it makes me smile. She is just like my mother, I think to myself.

I don’t want any of this to end; I don’t want to leave Her again because I am afraid of what will happen when I do. We are eternally being pulled apart. Eventually, it becomes impossible to put things back together again. We have to trust and believe in one another, have to have faith. But she promises me that she is okay with my going to Los Angeles, understands that this is just part of life. She swears she’s not worried about us. She is being brave. She has Her brave face on now—chin jutted out, lips pursed, eyes serious—as she’s folding my underwear. She notices me watching Her and smiles.

“What are you looking at?” she asks.

What
am
I looking at? My future wife? The mother of my children? The person I was put on this earth to find? Yes. But saying any of that seems silly when she’s folding my underwear.

“Nothing, just watching you,” I say, then, after a long pause, add, “Sometimes I wish I could be invisible so I could watch you do stuff like this all day long. Observing you in your natural habitat, like on a nature show.”

“You’re going to need a longer lens, then.” She laughs. She is being brave again.

“Hey . . . you know I don’t want to do this, right? You know I don’t want to leave you, and I wish you could come out there with me—”

“I’ll fly out.” Her eyes are looking down at a shirt she is folding. “I’ll be out as soon as finals are over. Only a couple of weeks.”

“I know, but . . . I don’t want to be apart from you. And I know it isn’t fair. So I want to promise you something. I promise that this is it for me. After we make this record, I’m done. And I’m not just saying that for you, it’s for
me
too. I love you and I want to be with you forever, and I don’t want anything to get in the way. So this is the last time I’ll leave you. Do you understand?”

“Of course I do. But don’t go making promises like that. I don’t want you to,” she says, trailing off slightly. “This is a chance for you, for the band, to fulfill your dreams. To go to LA and make a record in a big studio, to have someone else pay for it. This is what you’ve been working for. And I don’t want you to give it up because I know someday you’ll regret it. So don’t make any promises.”

“You know I’d give it up for you. You know I would. In a second.”

“I know.”

In that instant, the room feels massive, like we’re standing on opposite sides of a canyon, and suddenly I can feel the anxiety creeping up my legs, wrapping its tentacles around my bones. But then she walks across the
void, Her little feet tiptoeing around the boxes, Her hips sashaying side to side, a sly smile on Her face. She pulls me toward her, tells me, “You’re sweet, you know that?” I crack a smile. Life will not tear us apart this time. Our hearts will see to it. We make love on the bed, with an audience of cardboard boxes watching intently. It is kind of sexy.

W
e’re
inmates at the Oakwood apartment complex, which our label rep lovingly refers to as “the Cokewoods.” The sign on the gate is emblazoned with the three most gorgeous words,
FULL RESORT AMENITIES
, written in a looping, regal script. But that makes the place sound much nicer than it is. Oakwood is where movie studios and record labels house “talent” whenever they’re in Los Angeles working on a project. I believe the correct term for the place is “temporary furnished and serviced apartments,” or at least it says so in the brochure. But basically, it’s where child almost-stars and has-beens-in-the-making do tons of cocaine (hence the nickname) and then fuck each other in the hot tubs. It’s a twenty-four-hour nightmare, fueled by those little white lines, full of silicone-injected blondes and men with bizarrely white teeth. And kids, C-list actors from Disney shows, most not a day over fifteen, wandering around with sadness in their eyes and white powder around their nostrils. Terrible house music is always playing by the pool. It’s brutal.

We spend every minute indoors, hiding from the zombies that prowl the place, and though we should probably be working on songs, we basically amuse ourselves by calling our rep—a nice girl named Jen-with-Two-
N
’s (that’s how she introduced herself when she picked us up at LAX, so we refer to her only as such)—and begging her to come and save us. She picks us up in an SUV, and we drive around Los Angeles, up to the top of Mulholland Drive, which probably looks a lot like the movie I never saw. The garages here are twice the size of most people’s houses. We get out of the car and marvel at the view, but Jen-with-Two-
N
’s says we can’t stay up here for long because homeless people hide in the bushes and wait for you. Imagine it: the richest homeless people in the world.

Up there at the top, you can see the smog hovering above the valley, as if it’s trapped in there and can’t get out. In the distance, the skyscrapers of downtown Los Angeles are barely visible through the yellowish haze. The suburban sprawl fans out in all directions, split-level houses clinging to the cliffs, block after block of apartment buildings, huddled together for safety. When I think about the California suburbs, it brings to mind the Mansons, not the Cleavers. Los Angeles is like hell only with more pretty people. You would think all the plastic would melt out here in the desert heat.

We tell Jen-with-Two-
N’
s that we want to see the water, so she begrudgingly takes us down to Santa Monica (a trip that, thanks to the traffic, takes roughly twenty-two hours), where we walk out to the end of the pier and watch the old men cast their reels into the Pacific.
They stand there in silence, listening to ball games on the radio, buckets full of minnows between their feet, until one of them gets a tug on his rod, then in a sudden burst of excitement, in a whirlwind of yanking and frantic reeling and cursing in Spanish, the rod bending and threatening to break in two, the old men shout instructions, and everyone holds his breath until eventually the old man is victorious, and he pulls a huge fish out of the ocean, shiny and electric and wriggling, and a great cheer goes up along the pier, and the old man accepts congratulations from his fellow fishermen, and maybe takes a drink or two, and tourists snap photos of the wide-eyed, silvery fish while the pelicans watch with hungry eyes. Everyone wants a piece of the action.

We roll up our jeans and walk on the beach, while women in Lycra sports bras jog by, pushing their babies in three-wheeled sports strollers. Men do yoga in the sand. We look ridiculously out of place, with our pegged jeans and pale skin in the early evening sun, but nobody even looks in our direction. Everyone is lost in their own little world, which is kind of the way things are out here. Los Angeles is a great place to disappear because people don’t notice anyone but themselves. Jen-with-Two-
N
’s is standing up on the boardwalk, furiously typing away on her BlackBerry. You can tell she’s getting a little annoyed with us, probably because she has to go back to her boss with daily status updates, has to say stuff like “Today they all went to Santa Monica and watched old men fish.” Ledgers are shifted, and the stockholders are getting restless. I expect a phone call from our manager any day now.

The songs are coming along, albeit slowly. Martin and I are sharing a “temporary furnished apartment” at Oakwood, and we stay up late writing lyrics and melodies, while Sodom and Gomorrah rage on outside our windows. He and I have got close again since we’ve been here, mostly because we’re the two sorest thumbs of the lot. Neither of us wants to be here, trapped inside our earnestly appointed little cell, and both of us are missing someone back home in Chicago, so we’re penning joyous little numbers about that. He has always been a sweet, good-natured guy, with kind eyes and an infectious smile. He is bringing out the best in me, which is why I don’t mind writing with him. But there is also a more selfish reason: I see in him a way out because I believe he could carry this band forward when I leave. And I’m most definitely leaving, as soon as this record is done. He doesn’t know that yet—none of the guys do—but I figure now is probably not the best time to tell him.

When I’m not writing, I’m talking to Her. So far everything is okay, our lives remaining in sync despite the distance between us. John Miller helps out, as he’s sort of become Her unofficial guardian in my absence. He is a constant in both of our lives these days. It also helps that Her and I have developed a routine, one born out of my insomnia. I am always awake at 5:00 a.m., which is 7:00 a.m. back home in Chicago, so we do a video chat, me wide-eyed and sleep-deprived, spouting all kinds of nonsense, Her laughing tiredly and getting ready for school. Eventually, I fall asleep (usually around 6:00 a.m.), when she is in class. By the time I’m awake again, she’s back
home, and we spend the next few hours sending texts to one another. Then, at around 11:00 p.m., she gets ready for bed, and we do another video chat. She brings the computer to bed with Her, and I talk to Her until she falls asleep. Some nights, she forgets to sign off, so I sit in Los Angeles and watch Her sleep in Chicago, grainy and barely visible in the dark, Her breathing mixing with the sounds of the city, in that bedroom I know so well. Eventually, our connection times out and she freezes on my computer screen, no more breathing or movement, so I swallow a few Ativans and go back to doing whatever distracts me from my loneliness . . . usually this means staring out the window at the action in the hot tubs, or maybe walking down to the vending machines for no particular reason, except that my brain is sort of humming and fuzzy and warm and it’s telling me I need to get some of that California air, to breathe it in and let it cool my system. So I stand outside in my hoodie, drinking a can of soda, my eyes swooshing around in a haze, over to the glimmering taillights on the Hollywood Freeway, across the night to the fences of Universal City, or down to the pitiful Los Angeles River. Behind me are the Hollywood Hills, all pocked and mysterious in the moonlight, and beyond that, the Forest Lawn cemetery, the final resting place of silver-screen stars. Famous ghosts in there. One night I got all freaked out because I thought I heard a coyote over in the bushes, and Jen-with-Two-
N
’s had told me that tons of them were up here, and that they kill people’s pets at night. I’m thinking of switching meds, for the record. Ativan isn’t doing it for me anymore. Or it’s doing it
too well. I’m not sure. Anyway, eventually 5:00 a.m. rolls around again and we do another video chat, I watch Her leave for school, and the process starts all over again. I’d say we spend roughly half the day talking to each other, yet we say absolutely nothing of substance. I am strangely okay with this. We are both nervous. We both see the writing on the wall. We are both choosing to ignore it.