The glassbox hums like an aquarium. I feel the air through my teeth—recycled, cool, tinged with coffee and that faint burnt-sugar breath drifting in from the factory. The tidal creek behind the building has licked the curb again; the sidewalk outside shines with a film that throws back red tail-lights. I close my eyes to find the tempo I claimed earlier—the steady off-beat that belongs to me, not his metronome—and I open the mic.
“I’m live,” I say, and I let the words be small. “Ground rules before anything: no speculation, no naming civilians, no contact info read aloud. If you’re calling to flex trivia, I’ll cut you. If you’re here to help from a place of craft and care, welcome. This is not a show; this is a workshop with receipts.”
I watch the chat window on the pirate mesh like a coastline map. A troll’s wake appears—three skull emojis and a dare to “read a confession, clown”—and I sink it with one button. The Night Choir pin on my jacket presses a cool crescent into my collarbone. The line blips; the call screen shows “Acoustician — verified,” then “Cobbler — verified,” then “Stagehand — verified,” green badges we minted in a hurry with Elena’s vetting. I glance at the clock. The creek will rise again after midnight. I will not.
“First up, acoustician,” I say. “Give me your first name and union or credential, and we’ll go from there.”
“Rhea,” a measured voice answers, studio-quiet. “AES member, twenty years in theaters that smelled like dust and pride.”
“Rhea,” I say, and I let appreciation stand in the air. “We recovered a metronome and a timer-speaker from a pedestrian tunnel. I won’t describe the location. We also taped over two pinhole lenses. Could that space produce voice timbre like the clip I aired earlier if it’s been washed with water?”
“Yes,” Rhea says. “Water on concrete is a diffuser. It can add shimmer like cheap plate reverb, especially when you have parallel walls. If your sample shows a tight slap under 40 milliseconds, you’re hearing a boundary reflection from knee height.”
I look at the metronome bagged on the desk, a small animal that forgot how to beat. “Boundary reflection,” I repeat, so the audience—no, the helpers—can follow the breadcrumb back to physics.
“Also,” Rhea continues, “your voice had a notch at 1.2k—microphone off-axis. Somebody wanted the tick to sit in the pocket and your voice to feel just a little… withheld.”
“Withheld is the brand,” I say before I can stop the gallows humor. “Thank you, Rhea. You’ve given me more than texture. You’ve given me parameters.”
I cut to musicless space—two seconds, deliberate—and let her hang up knowing I didn’t mine her for content. A troll tries again: “play the whole tape!” I throat-clear into the mute key instead of performing anger and boot them. The room feels steadier for it, like the glass has agreed I can inhabit it without claws.
“Stagehand,” I say next. “You’re on.”
“Vic,” a gravel voice says, half whisper, half throat. “I swing from the rail when somebody calls out. I’ve laid that kind of chalk a hundred times.”
“Help me read the marks,” I say, and I describe only shape: Xs with tails, arrows that stop short, smears where chalk lifted in a crescent.
“Performer couldn’t hold still on cue,” Vic says. “Right-foot dominant pivot, quick heel drag. Either they were cold, or the cue made them want to bolt. And those tails? Overlays. You put rubber on a leather sole when you need grip without squeak. Cheap overlays leave crumbs; yours sounded… clean. Like a shaving from a cobbler’s bench, not failure.”
I glance at the envelope on the edge of the console—Elena’s neat block letters timing the rubber curl. “Thank you,” I say. “You just handed me a kind of silence there. I’ll fill it carefully.”
He grunts once, a benediction, and drops off the line. The chat line flutters with tiny heart emojis and a single shoe icon that makes me smile without my mouth moving. I breathe in the room: warm foam of paneling glue, faint citrus from the wipes I used too late at night, ozone from the consoles. The creek gurgles in my head like a bassline. I am not alone in here; I am not a spectacle.
I tap the next green badge. “Cobbler,” I say. “I’ve got tread geometry questions and a theater problem.”
“Name’s Iris,” a woman says, quick and precise, Brooklyn vowels kissed by leather dust. “I’ve got lasts older than the Orpheum. You got a close-up of the shaving?”
“I do,” I say, and I feel the old journalism muscle. Describe the evidence, don’t display it; protect the chain of care. “Black, clean edge, slight crescent, no fray. Not a chunk. A curl. Like a pencil shaving made of tire.”
“Then you’re looking at a rubber topy,” she says. “Custom cut. Not a full sole. The kind you glue to a dance shoe so the actor doesn’t slide into the orchestra pit. If the edge is that clean, they used a rotary trimmer. Hand-cut leaves chatter. Rotary sings.”
“Brand?” I ask, cautious, because naming things can be a kind of doxxing if you do it sloppy.
“Three make that sheen,” she says. “But only one ships pre-skived to a profile that would shed a curl like you describe. Supplier ID starts with ‘GRT—’ then four numbers. You’d find it in a theatrical catalog that costume shops use, not general cobbler supply.”
I don’t move. The call is suddenly less about rubber and more about trust. “Can you give me the rest of the numbers,” I ask, “without making it easy to harass a shop that doesn’t deserve it?”
Iris chuckles, not unkind. “You’re learning. Okay. GRT-2190. Theatrical rubber cap for split-sole jazz and character shoes. Comes in a bulk pack you’d only get if you rent shoes by the row.”
My stomach steps sideways. “Rent,” I repeat.
“Yeah,” she says. “You rent shoes when your theater’s broke or your season’s swinging with cast sizes. There’s one rental company in the boroughs that carries that exact cap in quantity. They serviced the Orpheum’s shop until it closed. I know because I sharpened blades for their old trimmer. Haven’t in a while.”
The studio’s noise gathers into a hush so physically present I swear I can pinch it. The Orpheum’s cherubs float in my head—plaster toddlers with cracked lips and big eyes. Corrupted innocence, staged salvation, now laced through rubber supply chains and donor plaques.
“Iris,” I say, careful as surgery, “that supplier ID—can I say it on air for other professionals to weigh in, or do I keep it off to prevent amateurs from turning it into a scavenger hunt?”
“You keep it in your notebook,” she says. “Read it to the cops and to the shop if you’re polite and if they let you in. Don’t send the Choir. You want help from our world again, you don’t smoke us out with a crowd.”
My throat tightens in a way that feels like relief. “Thank you,” I say. “I won’t waste your trust.”
“One more,” she says. “That cap pairs with only a few uppers that take glue like that. Think black character shoe with a split shank. If you find a catalog page with a cross-section diagram and a little angel icon—odd, but I’ve seen weirder branding—you’re warm.”
Angel. Cherub. He doesn’t know how to stop himself.
“Iris, you’re a lighthouse,” I say, and I mean it like a fact, not flattery. “I’ll route this quietly.”
She hangs up, and I let silence sit like a good dog. The chat shivers, respectful, then steadies. I can taste the citrus on my knuckle where I wiped the mute key. I write GRT-2190 on a sticky note in tiny print and stick it inside my notebook, not on the board. No screenshots tonight. No performative paperwork. Elena will get the page, not the stream.
Micro-hook #1: My phone buzzes on the desk—a new number, no name, a single image: a catalog scan with GRT-2190 circled in blue, and a grainy angel watermark in the margin.
Heat blooms behind my eyes, not tears, an adrenal flare. I flip the phone face-down like it’s radioactive and then turn it over again because I can’t help it. It’s Jonah’s style—blue circles, his shorthand, the way he used to text me PDFs of adapters at two in the morning with “use this, not the cheap one” scrawled across. He’s listening. From where I don’t know. The ache that opens has teeth and hands. It holds me steady and breaks me in the same breath.
I inhale, let the mic catch only the even part of me. “We have enough for tonight,” I say to the room and the people in it. “Thank you to the experts who came and to everyone who didn’t demand a spotlight. We’ll be taking this to the right desks, not the comments section.”
A troll tries a last swing: “call the rental place LIVE!!” I press ban with the same gentle force I use on the fader when I land a hard segment without blood. The creek gurgles in the street like a laugh I’m allowed to have later.
I check the message again off-air and text back to the unknown number: “Received. Thank you. Safe?” The three dots blink, stop, blink again. Nothing else arrives. The gap between dots is a canyon.
I cue a short outro—no music, just my voice laid directly on the glass of the world. “Quick reminder,” I say, “this project owes favors to dumplings, not drama. We swap notes over soup, not screens. If you’re a vendor who serviced the Orpheum before it closed, I’d love to talk off air with Elena present. We’ll bring receipts, not a mob.”
The message light on the studio phone blinks. I ignore it. The studio smells like warmed dust now, motors cozy from the hours. I kill the stream. The glass drops its shimmer; the city folds its noise back over us like a blanket with holes.
I stand and stretch until my back cracks. My Night Choir pin catches the desk edge and pops loose; I pocket it like a contraband mood. I think about the kid we once interviewed who collected every tour pin the Orpheum ever sold—cherubs winking in enamel. The same icon keeps returning to me as a warning and a dare: don’t be the angel on a mask; be the person who refuses to wear it.
Micro-hook #2: The studio printer—dormant for weeks—wakes and spits a single page into the tray.
I don’t move for a count of four. The page curls with heat and lands face-up: the catalog image Jonah sent, only now it’s annotated by a second hand—black ink, tidy letters. “Rental client list available on-site only. Ask for back room. Don’t stream.” There’s no signature, only a small drawn square that could be a hatch, could be a stage door, could be a joke.
“Okay,” I whisper to no one and exactly one person. “Okay.”
I snap a photo for Elena—encrypted, her preferred app, no metadata—and slide the paper into a folder with the metronome receipt and the rubber curl envelope copy. I write a list in the margin of my mind: Iris, Vic, Rhea—send thank-yous, offer gas money or coffee cards, promise a debrief that’s not content. If experts feel used, they will never come back. I am not letting this turn into a harvest.
I power down the board in a ritual order Jonah taught me when this glassbox still felt like a fort I didn’t deserve: aux sends first, then the bus, then the master. The lights dip like a respectful audience. Outside, the creek has crept higher; the sidewalk river doubles the streetlamps into a treacherous runway.
My phone buzzes once more. Same unknown number: “Don’t go alone.” Another message snaps in: “South roll-up gate—watch the camera.” Then nothing. I touch the screen like it’s a cheek and let myself feel the longing fully for the length of one measured breath. He’s out there, exiled by my microphone, still building me a safer route with a blueprint made of texts.
I lock the door and tuck the folder under my arm. The studio’s aquarium hum fades into the stairwell’s hollow echo, and the city’s burnt-sugar air catches in the back of my throat. I picture the rental company’s warehouse lights burning over rows of shoes that once knew more stage than sidewalk, their soles shaved clean. I picture a ledger in a back room with buyer codes and donation notes, and a line with a donor name that turns my stomach.
I step into the floodlit drizzle and text Elena: “Got supplier ID + catalog. Jonah pinged from an unknown. Orpheum’s vendor likely ‘the one.’ Request escort, no stream.” A minute passes; a blue check lands. Her reply is short: “Dumplings at 0700. Then the warehouse.”
I pocket the phone and listen for the metronome that isn’t there. The only ticking is my own. I can keep that beat. I walk toward the van with professionals in my corner, the Choir quiet for once, and the question pushing at my ribs like an exit sign: when I knock on the rental company’s door, what will I owe them—and what will they owe the dead?