The voicemail came in mid-1996, chirping from a flip phone wedged beneath a Thomas Guide. Quinn sat in his car between cold calls, engine ticking, and let it play: a thin crackle, cassette-worn, as if the tape were nearing its end. Then Darren's voice surged cleanly through the speaker, sure of itself in a way that made Quinn's life feel like nothing but questions left ringing.
"Hey Quinn, it's Darren. How you doing, man. Hope you're good. Listen, let's get the band back together. I'm serious. Riley and I have been talking it through and we want you out here in Connecticut. We've got the spare room at the duplex in Danbury, you can have it. It'll just be you and me writing, the way we used to in California, only this time it's not all on me. We'll make it tighter. Cleaner. Pro-level. You're the only one I'd trust to do it right, man. Call me as soon as you get this. All right. Later."
Darren had never been just another name in the wake of failed lineups. He was the only one who took a Tuesday-night rehearsal with the gravity of a sold-out room. He and Riley were already a unit, married in everything but paperwork long before Quinn drifted into their orbit, and that shared history gave the invitation more weight than a career move. It wasn't a gig. It was entry into something like a family.
The invitation gave him a quiet permission to abandon California without ever having to speak the embarrassing truth of his collapse out loud. He was circling the drain of a very specific failure, the kind that looks ordinary from the outside until you're living inside it, watching Florida dissolve in plain increments: the steady job, the reliable car, then the last of the self-confidence required to start over.
Was the resurrection of a rock band truly a viable business plan, or was the whole endeavor only a desperate escape dressed in the costume of ambition. If he chose to believe the lie, the buy-in was exactly three thousand miles of highway.
It had been years since Quinn had seen Darren and Riley in person. What held between them had thinned into the occasional phone call, the traded status update that stood in for a real conversation. The California band was already a ghost by the time Quinn moved to Florida, and when Florida collapsed too, he drifted back toward the West Coast with nowhere to land and no plan beyond motion. He lived a life stripped of infrastructure. No apartment, no furniture to justify one, no sense of having been set back into the world. He moved through the familiar geography of his old life without its former structure, navigating a landscape reduced to a few lingering friends from high school and the quiet, looming presence of his mother.
Survival had become a relentless kind of self-employment that kept him in motion, a cycle of B2B direct sales where the inventory only moved if he did. The back seat of his car served as a portable gallery, crowded with stacked frames and limited-edition prints that amounted to his entire net worth. The car itself, bought on credit, was his storage unit, his livelihood, and his only sanctuary. It was the sole piece of functioning infrastructure he could claim as his own.
He rented a bedroom from a buddy, a small foothold where he kept his personal things and could shower when he needed to look presentable. If he ended up too far from it, he took whatever motel he could afford and tried not to think of it as a pattern. But waking life happened in the driver's seat. He lived through the sludge of bumper-to-bumper traffic, took cat-naps in the gaps between appointments, ate hunched over the steering wheel. Without the car there was no income, and nothing beneath him but his mother's house. Saying yes to Connecticut meant stretching this fragile system across a continent, betting that neither he nor the vehicle would die on the way.
Quinn mapped the northern route in his Thomas Guide, penciling a line through higher elevations and colder air, skirting the southern highways he'd just worn thin on the run out of Florida. Late into the first night, the car began to make a sound he didn't recognize. Not a knock or a grind, but a frantic, irregular flapping from under the hood, like something loose had found the wind and couldn't stop. His grip tightened on the wheel. He listened for the next change, for the moment the sound became the failure.
There was nowhere safe to pull over. He kept driving into the dark until a smear of light appeared ahead, the warm window-glow of an off-season lodge in Aspen. The lot was open and exposed, too bright, too visible. If they turned him away he would be slexki,eping in the cold in plain view, a stranded car with out-of-state plates and a back seat full of frames.
Inside, he talked himself into a room that wasn't supposed to be available. He kept his voice even, his posture deferential, offered cash as if it solved everything. When the key finally changed hands, he carried his bag down the hallway and stood in the room a moment without moving, listening to the heat come on. When it hissed through the vents and the mountains went quiet around the walls, his body found an exhaustion so deep it felt like grief. He sat on the edge of the bed and let himself almost cry.
The following morning revealed the majestic scale of the mountains surrounding the lodge, a landscape indifferent to the mechanical drama of the night before. Later, a local mechanic stood in the oily light of a garage bay holding up a frayed, broken belt and offered a casual shrug of dismissal. The failed component belonged to the air conditioning system, a luxury Quinn could live without for the remainder of the trip. The man suggested replacing it later once he reached his destination, noting with a dry sense of irony that it was a good thing Quinn had chosen the northern route, where the mountain air would do the work the engine no longer could.
Once he was back on the open road, the rhythmic hum of the tires pulled him into a reimagining of the band. The stage and the sound took shape until the fantasy felt more real than the pavement beneath him. He pulled his acoustic guitar across his lap and guided the steering wheel with his knee while his fingers found the familiar shapes of old chords. For a few miles the synchronization actually worked, road and music agreeing on a tempo.
A passing semi threw a wall of displaced air against the car. The frame rocked violently. He dropped the instrument as if it had turned hot in his hands, shoved it into the passenger seat, and clamped both hands onto the wheel, his heart hammering as he stared straight ahead through the glass and waited for the car to settle back into its lane.
As night fell, the wind rose until it stopped feeling like weather and started feeling like force. It caught the car and shoved it sideways across the lane, tires skittering, the steering suddenly light in his hands. Quinn eased off the gas and fought the wheel, watching the white line slide toward his headlight, imagining the next gust carrying him into the dark.
He saw the overpass too late to feel lucky. A row of semi-trucks had already nosed in beneath it, huddled tight as cattle. He threaded into the line behind them and left the engine idling, afraid to shut it off, afraid it wouldn't come back. The wind drove debris under the bridge and it struck his car in bursts, metal ticking and snapping, then a harder rattle like gravel thrown with intent. The whole frame trembled. Every few seconds he braced for the sound to change, for glass, for the sudden lurch of the car being lifted or slid.
In the morning he called Darren and tried on a half-joking voice. He said he thought he'd been hit by the outer bands of a tornado. Once the sun was up, the daylight answered him. Tiny pits stippled the paint. Deep scratches ran along the side panels. The whole vehicle looked lightly sandblasted. Worst was the new stress crack in the windshield, a jagged line that didn't just mark damage so much as time, counting down the miles he had left.
The following days blurred into gas stations, motels, bad coffee, and the anxious listening he'd developed for the car's new sounds.