Down on the street, with the cool air moving against his face, Alex thought it through calmly.
Nothing practical had actually been solved up there, but the trip had done what he’d come for.
He knew the order of operations now.
He wasn’t walking around blind anymore.
“Going by what Chuck said,” he muttered, “the thing that matters right now is cutting a demo of the thrift store song. Then take the demo and the score to the Composers’ Association and file them. And then find an agent I can trust.”
The moment he’d thought it he was doing it.
He found a phone booth with a set of yellow pages in it, dug ASCAP out of the listings, and dialed straight through.
A long wait; then somebody picked up and asked what he wanted; then a series of transfers, holds, transfers, holds.
He used the hold time to start planning the recording.
For the demo I’m nowhere near able to do the backing track.
I could get somebody to help me — no.
Forget it.
I can’t ask anybody for help on this.
In the life before Alex’s, Alexander Song had been the school band’s lead trumpet.
The boy had real musical training and a solid grounding in theory, and it was that foundation, plus the English he’d brought with him since the switch, that had let him take the original version of the thrift store song and cut it down to something that could exist in this decade.
Out came the strange shout at the top of the track.
Out came the electronic parts, replaced with something playable.
The bits of slang in the lyrics that nobody would understand — that probably hadn’t been invented yet — got swapped for words that existed in 1990.
So did the white singer’s line about being a honky, the joke at his own expense that didn’t belong in anybody else’s mouth.
But that wasn’t enough on its own.
Alex’s own ear for music was thin these days, and the creative work hadn’t come from him; it had come from the Revelation.
He knew what, not why, on far too much of it.
Recording the demo counted as part of the creative process, and if an outsider got involved in that, the seams would show.
Finally a manager came on the line.
If all he wanted was to file a record of the work, the basic procedure was simple.
The Composers’ Association had an office right in Chicago; they could book him a time and he could come in and do the paperwork.
So: an a cappella demo.
Time’s tight, the school’s got the gear, and it’s going to be hard.
Have to try anyway.
Best case, get it done in one day and file tomorrow.
If I can’t manage it, drop the demo and file the lyrics and the score by themselves.
He made an appointment for tomorrow afternoon, then walked over to the flea market near Chinatown and bought two blank cassettes and a very cheap plastic digital watch — LCD screen, built-in microphone, name brand, if you took the word of the logo stamped on the face: CASIQ.
The morning went by fast, and Alex got hungry.
The Chinese restaurants were out of the question; he didn’t dare go in, the prices were brutal.
He eventually found a white guy running a cart on the sidewalk and bought a hot dog to hold him together.
Spent way too much money this morning.
Which is probably the standard humiliation for a man who wakes up in somebody else’s life.
He ate the hot dog on his way to the subway station.
There was no telling when the Revelation would come again, and whatever else he did, he couldn’t hang his whole future on that one branch.
The lawyer thing’s not bad.
Chuck runs a dump of an office and he still walks off with thirty-five dollars for an hour and ten more for two thin sheets of paper.
Maybe that’s the road — the law.
People do say lawyers are the ruling class in this country, or at least the ruling class’s mouthpiece.
And nobody plays a lawyer for a fool.
He was only in ninth grade — the equivalent of the third year of junior high back home.
There was time for all of that.
The demo was what mattered today.
He kept tapping out a beat on his thighs and murmuring the words under his breath the whole way.
When he’d first woken up in this body he hadn’t given a thought to its musical talent, and he couldn’t hear anything in rap but a man chanting at him.
It had never once occurred to him that after a month of grinding for school credits, the thing he’d have to go back and dig up and put to work would be music.
Back at school, he went straight to the office to find the music teacher.
“I am deeply ashamed of how little attention I’ve been giving the band.”
“Because my other subjects were coming along, I let my commitment to music slide. I regret it.”
“Please, give me one more chance.”
“Yes — I felt a little unwell this morning, so I took the day. I’m better now.”
“It’s fine, I’m fine now, I’m completely recovered. Look — you want me to jump up and down for you?”
“So, um, all I want is to borrow the instrument storage room and the equipment in it, to record something.”
“No. No. Am I the kind of person who takes girls in there to fool around?”
“You think far too highly of me. I couldn’t get a single leaf to fall for me, never mind anything else.”
“I really, truly apologize for how I’ve behaved these past few days, and I swear I’ll get back in shape as fast as I can.”
“I used to be your lead trumpet. Give me another chance! Teacher!”
“I promise I will never miss another note — wow. Where did you get that necklace? It’s gorgeous.”
“Yes. It really suits you.”
“Honestly? I think Miss Cheryl has terrible taste. Yes. Yes, exactly — that hairstyle with earrings that size looks ridiculous.”
“She can’t compare to you at all.”
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be running my mouth about another teacher behind her back. But you know me, I say what I think, I can’t sit on a thing once it’s in my head.”
A whole basketful of nice noises later, the music teacher was thoroughly comfortable with herself, and Alex walked out with the key to the band’s little storage room, exactly as planned.
He locked the door behind him, put one of the new cassettes into the school’s Sony dual-cassette deck, and set up the metronome.
Then he started the tape and opened his mouth.
He got four words into the first line and coughed.
“Okay. Not right. Again.”
He got three words in and hit the next one flat, and stopped himself.
“I’m — I’m — damn it, wrong again.”
Class periods ended.
Club hour ended.
By the time the music teacher knocked and let herself in, an easygoing, low-ambition, well-behaved Chinese kid had been pressed into service as a rapper by the Revelation.
The finished product was in no way satisfying, but it tracked the score well enough, and that was fine.
The whole point was to nail down ownership of the copyright.
Artistic value wasn’t in the specification.
He thanked the music teacher, hurried home, and that evening pulled Tony outside for the showdown.
“Fuck you!” Tony went off like a firecracker the moment he heard it, which was entirely what Alex had expected.
As far as Tony was concerned right now, the success of Lori’s first album was close enough to touch, a sure thing.
When Lori became a star, Tony would be walking along behind him making himself useful, and eating and drinking well while he did it.
And here was his fifteen-year-old brother, holding a song he claimed he’d written the words and the music for himself, saying he was going to find a way to get it onto Lori’s new album.
That wasn’t wishful thinking.
That was greed with the lid off.
Tony’s read was that Alex was jealous of Lil Lori’s success and had come up with an unbelievably clumsy, ridiculous excuse to cut himself in on the money.
Being Lori’s hanger-on, helping him spend it — that was one thing.
Muscling into the middle of Lori’s actual business and splitting the take — that was something else entirely.
Tony was bad at school, but nobody had ever said he was stupid.
“You are a piece of shit, you know that? How the fuck did I end up with a brother like you? If you weren’t my brother — you believe me? You believe me? — I’d twist your damn head off!” Tony got two hands into Alex’s collar and hauled him straight up off the ground, feet swinging.
“You — how’d you get this greedy? This dumb? I knew something was off with you, I knew it. Where’s the old Alex?”
“Hey! Hey —”
Alex hadn’t expected the reaction to be this big.
Tony really did hold his brotherhood with Lori sacred.
“Don’t do anything stupid. Listen to me and you’ll understand.”
“Talk!” Tony set him down.
“Okay. First of all, I didn’t have to tell you about this at all. My original plan was to find a way to get in front of the boss of Lori’s label first. I’m telling you first instead, because you’re my brother and I respect you.”
“Second, without my track on it, Lori’s album is never going to work, and I know that because I overheard his agent talking to the label boss the day of the video shoot.”
“Seven thousand cassettes in the first run. No vinyl. No CDs. Seven thousand cassettes, that’s it. Does that sound like what a successful album looks like to you?”
“Why would I lie to you? It won’t be long before you see it for yourself.”
“Drop the friend thing. Drop every feeling you’ve got about it and just look at the facts. Those dozen-plus songs Lori and Al put on that album — name me one that’s good. Name me one that sounds like a hit.”
“He sells seven thousand copies of his first album, you think there’s a second one coming? He loses money on the first, there is no chance at a second. And with what, exactly, is he going to support you and Muffler? On top of AK, and Al, and everybody else —”
“Yes. Yes, I’ve changed. I’ve gotten more calculating. And that change is a good thing for this family, one hundred percent. I want out of this hellhole exactly as much as you do. You want to be stuck here your whole life?”
“The song came to me the last time I went to the thrift store. The day of the video shoot.”
“Of course it will! I’ll stake anything you want on it — my song is going to be a hit.”
“I’m the lead trumpet in the school band. Or did you forget that?”
“Fine, you don’t have to believe me. I never expected you to believe me. But anybody who actually knows how this works will get it the second they hear it.”
“You want to hear it first? Good. I recorded a demo.”
That day, Alex genuinely did nothing but rap and sing and talk until his voice was hoarse, and in the end Tony was talked into listening to the demo.
Which would do, for now.