Finest Hour

Chapter 12: Nothing in This Room

# Nothing in This Room

The hands left his collar.

Quin stepped back — two steps, then a third — until the window had most of him and the storm had the rest. Then he laughed. It was a real one, out of the chest, and it kept going. Halfway through, it bent toward something else and stayed there half a second, no more.

Eli's glasses were folded in his jacket. There was nothing in the room but what the window gave it, and he wasn't going to swear to half a second.

He stayed where he was.

Neither of them said anything. Rain on the glass. Quin's breathing, slower by degrees. It went on like that for ten minutes, and Eli didn't move through any of it.

Then Quin turned, as if he'd surfaced, and crossed to the couch and sat, and reached over without looking for the lamp.

Amber light, filling the front third of the room and leaving the rest of it alone.

Books on the floor, in stacks that had given up at some point and spread. Bottles — two standing, one down. A single bed against the back wall under a dark blue blanket. Wallpaper that somebody had drawn on years ago and then covered over with notes and index cards and receipts, all of it stuck up crooked.

None of it was music.

No guitar in a corner. No amp, no monitors, no interface, no keyboard, no mic stand, no cable coiled anywhere the light reached. Not one page of anything written down.

Quin leaned his head back against the couch and looked at the ceiling for a while. Then he turned and looked at Eli — the same look he'd been giving him since the doorway, straight at the eyes and staying there.

Something rose into his face and stayed. He wanted to ask something.

Eli watched him try to get it out. He couldn't read it. Only the surface: something being held on to, something confused, and under both of those, something that looked like hurt.

Then Quin folded all of it back away. When he spoke again it was small talk, and his voice had gone soft — the voice from the snow, six years back.

"Where were you before this. Which band."

Eli had no idea what had changed.

"No band," he said.

Quin frowned. "What?"

"I've never been in one. Any of them."

Quin's face went to plain confusion. Eli waited, with something close to enjoyment, for what he was certain was next: something with teeth in it, and nothing standing in the way of it.

Nothing came.

Quin laughed instead — smaller than the first one, more in the throat — and Eli had read him wrong.

That was the first time. Six years at the far end of hallways, watching, and he had never once gotten it wrong before. It interested him. He set it aside to look at later.

"Where do you rehearse?"

"The blue-roof building," Eli said. "Basement level. Last door at the end of the hall. We're there every night."

"Oh."

The quiet settled back in.

Quin was still watching him. Eli dropped his eyes to the floor. After a second Quin did the same, then gave the room a slow pass of his own and stopped on the case standing by the door.

"You're already here. Play me something."

In the doorway it had been no, and go home, and don't come back. Eli left the contradiction where it was. Quin was erratic. Nothing he did tonight was going to surprise Eli.

The problem was the room. He'd shown up on an impulse with nothing: the bass in its case, and none of what went with it.

Quin read that off him, or read something. He got up, walked past the end of the couch, and went into the part of the apartment the lamp didn't reach. There was a minute of things being moved around in there.

He was back with a Spark amp.

He set it on the floor between them, ran the cord to the wall, turned the first knob over to the bass setting, and pulled the effects down to nothing.

"Use this for now. The low end won't be what a real bass amp gives you, but it'll get you through."

Eli looked at it. He had more or less assumed that nothing in this apartment plugged in.

"Okay," he said, and took out the bass.

It was a cheap thing — black fading up into gray, dull hardware, the kind that gets sold to people in their first year, in stores where the cheap ones hang at eye level.

Quin looked at it for a second and didn't say anything about it.

Eli plugged in. Head down, he started on the tuning and worked the strings in from the bottom.

"What do you want to hear?"

Quin breathed out long, like a man setting down something heavy and not caring where it landed.

"Anything. Anything at all. It's all the same."

Flat. Not cold — flat. A man expecting nothing, by the sound of it, least of all from himself.

Eli had wanted to do this somewhere else. In the rehearsal room, with the amp warm and Theo's kit behind him, where the playing would carry it and he wouldn't have to open his mouth. It was the only argument he had ever been good at making.

The one thing he'd had to go on was six years old, and he'd heard it himself: that band had needed a bass player, and had needed a good one. That had been a man with a band, a stage, and somewhere to be every night.

Eli didn't know anything about this one. He knew about the guitar — that Quin couldn't play it anymore. Past that, he had nothing.

Quin turned his face away, toward the window, and looked at nothing out there. His voice stayed down where it was, soft and unhurried, the same as before.

"Play it, and then you can go. And don't come back. Okay?"

Eli had heard it before. A few times now, in one wording or another, and every time it had sounded like a thing a person says to hurry a conversation to its end.

This one didn't.

He had nothing he could point to, and he was certain of it anyway: this was the last time Quin was going to say it.

He didn't answer him. He went back over the strings, one at a time, and took longer about it than the strings needed.