The good guy stabbed the rock journalist, which was widely agreed to be a regrettable development, particularly by the rock journalist, who had not expected the evening to contain anything as definite as consequences.

The rock journalist’s name was Crispin Vole, though this was not the name he had been born with. He had been born Jeremy, but had changed it upon discovering that nobody named Jeremy had ever successfully described a bassline as “apocalyptic” while wearing snakeskin trousers.

Crispin had spent twenty-seven years writing about music without ever forming a clear opinion about it. This was not because he was stupid. Stupid people often have very strong opinions about music. Crispin’s problem was worse: he understood, dimly but accurately, that music was a serious human activity, involving time, suffering, mathematics, lust, memory, and the mysterious ability of three chords to make a person forgive their father for nearly twelve seconds.

Naturally, he wanted nothing to do with it.

What Crispin liked was being near music. He liked the smoke, the dressing rooms, the free drinks, the terrible sofas, the sense that something important had just happened in another room and might be explained to him by someone attractive. He liked walking past queues. He liked saying, “They’re finished,” about bands who had not yet begun.

The record companies adored him.

Record companies, contrary to popular belief, do not hate music. They are simply suspicious of it. Music is unpredictable, emotionally contagious, and occasionally made by people who mean it. This makes it a poor commodity unless surrounded by sufficient adjectives.

Crispin supplied the adjectives.

If an album was boring, he called it “austere.” If it was incompetently played, he called it “urgent.” If nobody involved had any idea what they were doing, he called it “the sound of a generation refusing to explain itself,” which was especially useful because it meant he didn’t have to explain it either.

On the night in question, Crispin was backstage at the Lyceum of Electrical Regret, sitting on a road case and wearing sunglasses indoors, which is the closest a human being can come to declaring moral bankruptcy without filing paperwork.

The good guy stood opposite him.

The good guy was a guitarist named Niles Mercy, and he had made the tragic mistake of believing that songs mattered. He believed, for example, that a song could rescue three minutes from the general collapse of civilization and hand them back to the listener, glowing faintly. He believed that a drumbeat could remember what the body had forgotten. He believed that a voice, when pushed through fear into truth, could become a small illegal radio station broadcasting from the soul.

This made him almost impossible to market.

“You don’t even listen,” Niles said.

Crispin smiled the thin, damp smile of a man who has just found a way to be superior to sincerity.

“My dear boy,” he said, though Niles was thirty-four and had recently developed a mortgage, “listening is terribly middle-period. One absorbs. One detects the cultural vapor.”

Behind Crispin, three record executives nodded. They had no idea what cultural vapor was, but they were confident it could be invoiced.

“You told them that album meant something,” Niles said. “You told them it was a revolution.”

“It had a very compelling sleeve.”

“It was garbage.”

“Yes,” Crispin said brightly. “But important garbage.”

This was the sort of phrase that had made Crispin famous. It sounded as though it had passed through an expensive education on its way to betraying everyone.

Niles looked at the catering table. There were lemons, beer bottles, a collapsing bowl of ice, and a small knife whose previous ambitions had involved garnish.

It should be said that Niles did not decide to pick up the knife.

Human beings rarely decide the important things. They drift toward them in a series of tiny permissions, each one signed by a different version of themselves.

Crispin continued.

“Look, nobody wants music. Not really. They want evidence that they have not missed the party. They want permission to feel clever in groups. They want a jacket, a haircut, a paragraph. Music is just the noise the costume makes while entering the room.”

There was a silence.

It was not a noble silence. It had gum on the floor and a broken amplifier humming in B-flat.

“You poor bastard,” Niles said.

Crispin frowned. He disliked pity. Pity had no obvious resale value.

Then Niles stabbed him.

It was a small stab, as stabbings go, though this is not a phrase recommended for use in court. It was not operatic. Nobody’s childhood flashed before anyone’s eyes, except possibly Crispin’s, and even then it appeared to have been badly reviewed.

Crispin looked down at himself with professional disappointment.

“This is very derivative,” he said.

Then his sunglasses slipped.

For the first time all evening, perhaps for the first time in years, he looked less like a critic and more like a man. Not a good man. Not even an especially interesting one. Just a man who had discovered, at an inconveniently late stage, that irony was not a shelter but a very small umbrella in a meteor storm.

The record executives fled, pausing only to check whether the situation had documentary potential.

Later, everyone explained the event.

The police explained it as violence.

The magazine explained it as tragedy.

The record company explained it as an exciting opportunity to revisit Crispin Vole’s legacy across multiple formats.

Niles, from his cell, explained nothing.

He simply sat very still and remembered the look in Crispin’s eyes when the sunglasses fell. The vacancy there. The terrible emptiness of a man who had spent his life standing near amplifiers and never once been changed by sound.

A month later, Crispin’s final column was published under the headline:

HE HEARD THE FUTURE.

Niles read it twice.

Then he began to laugh.

He laughed because Crispin had not heard the future.

Crispin had heard the cash register.

And, like most professional fools, he had mistaken it for thunder.