“So, noisy,” Jeremy confirmed. “That third one, then. It does this?”

He played a little snatch of tune until I could tell which one he meant.

“Do you hear that?” I said to Leyla, who looked up with dislike on her face. “That’s the one we’re doing. Put your thinking cap on.”

I didn’t know if a thinking cap would fit over her dreads.

“Cole?” David — Derek — Damon — Dante? asked from overhead, his voice coming from everywhere. Behind a glass panel, I saw him moving behind an array of boards and computer screens. “Can you guys hear me in there?”

“Da.”

“My guys are bringing out your headphones. Let me know about the levels in your ears, and then we’ll do some levels in here. We’re all hooked up. What’s the working title for this track?”

“ ‘Gasoline Love,’ ” I replied.

Dante typed it in. “Nice.”

“Predictable,” replied Leyla from behind the kit.

I bristled. “There is nothing predictable about either gasoline or love, comrade. Why don’t you go back to not caring what tomorrow brings?”

Leyla shrugged and played a bit of drums.

It wasn’t bad. But —

I want Victor

I want Victor

I want Victor

I let myself think it for just a second, and then I shivered and turned to my keyboard. Misgiving still hung inside me. I thought about Isabel’s open mouth on mine, back at the pie shop.

Then we got to work.

Recording in a studio is nothing like playing live. Live is everything all at once. There’s no redos, no problem solving, just powering through. In a studio, though, everything becomes a puzzle. It’s easier if you do the edges first, but sometimes you can’t even tell what the edges are. Sometimes the hardest part is telling which track to lay down first — which track is going to be the skeleton to pack flesh onto. The vocals? But what if they’re not on the beat or if they drop out for measures and measures? The drums, then. But that left you with a track so spare that you might as well start with nothing, or just a click track. The keyboard, then, establishing the chords and the tone. It would have to be rerecorded, but at least it was something.

Mostly I liked it to start and end with me, anyway.

We worked for an hour, during which I hated Leyla more and more. There was nothing wrong with her drumming. It was fine. But Victor had been the best instrumentalist of us all.

Other bands had always tried to poach him from us. Magic hands. Leyla was just a person with a drum set.

How stupid I’d been to think I could just go into a studio with any other musicians and come out with something that sounded even vaguely like NARKOTIKA. Not stupid. Cocky.

NARKOTIKA was me, but it had also been Jeremy and Victor.

After an hour, “Gasoline Love” was sounding more like “Turpentine Disinterest.”

I was in a pretty bad mood by the time my guest stars arrived.

“I thought about bringing coffee,” Leon said as he stepped in. The shocked cameras swung to him — impotently, because Leon hadn’t signed a release, and wouldn’t. “But I thought that kids these days probably drank these newfangled things instead.”

He offered me an energy drink. I was unreasonably glad to see him.

“Leon, I love you,” I said, accepting the can. “Marry me and make an honest man of me.”

“Oh, well,” Leon said. He offered another one to Jeremy, who shook his head but said, “Thanks anyway, man.” He’d brought a mason jar of green tea.

Leyla sniffed and took a drag of her kombucha. “Who’s this?”

“Special guests,” I replied.

She said, “Every guest is special,” but halfheartedly.

Then Leon’s passengers stepped in: the two cops from the first episode. In uniform. One of them, I knew, had actually ended her shift a half hour before arriving here, but had agreed to come in uniform to improve the general appearance of the shot. I wasn’t an idiot. I knew no one would recognize them without the uniforms.

I hoped Baby was impressed by my sheer cunning. Surely she had to realize just how no-holds-barred brilliant it was to bring the cops back. I had really wanted to ask Leon to be in it as well, but I knew he would say yes to make me happy and then would hate it when he was recognized in the grocery store.

So I hadn’t asked him, even though, in my head, Leon would make a great recurring character on the show. Everybody’s dad/

brother/uncle/guy.

But I wanted Leon to be happy. That was the mission. Well, one of them.

I exchanged pleasantries with the cops, just polite introductory things like asking them if they had ever gone skydiving or petted a hairless dog. Then we got down to business.

The trick was that I had to find parts for the cops that they could perform in the studio without any particular skill. Sure, the one cop could play the bass badly, but that wasn’t going to cut it for a studio track. They could do percussion, though. It would get in the way of the drums, but really, anything that irritated Leyla was a bonus.

I got the cops all set up on the stomp-clap routine, and it turned out the girl-cop (Darla? Diana?) had opera training, so we went a bit wild with that. Dante had no concept of how to use a mixing board, or maybe he just had no idea of how to mix us, but that was all right, because someone whose name sounded like mine was a wizard with a synth and could run a voice through there like no one’s business.

It was turning into something quite good. It wasn’t a single, but it was beginning to sound like one of those off-thewall tracks some fans got religious over, the cult classics that somehow managed to get played long after the big ones had burned everyone else’s speakers out. A few hours in and I was feeling pretty good about life. This was not quite the point — Isabel was the point — but it was a subpoint, and it was working well.

Then the power went out.

In the false darkness, Jeremy and I looked at each other.

Girl opera cop swore, just one short, filthy word, sort of like a scream. Someone sighed. I thought it was Leon.

To the darkness, I said, “Tell me you had this on autosave, Dante.”

Dante did not reply, because he couldn’t hear me. Without any power, he was just a guy behind a glass wall.

Leyla took a drink of her kombucha — I heard her do it, and it infuriated me. Jeremy tucked a piece of hair behind his ear.