I’m supposed to be editing these AI things, but I find that I don’t care anymore. Someday I’ll smooth it all out and make it more personal. Meanwhile, this is raw 5.6 and it is quite an amazing improvement over 5.5.
July 9, 2026
Here is the scene, grounded in Drake and Angela’s established temperaments and in the series’ balance of affectionate satire, insider realism, and cultural elegy. fileciteturn0file0 fileciteturn0file1 fileciteturn0file2
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The Albrecht Spa had been constructed upon the theory that sufficient wealth could persuade nature to behave itself.
The building stood in the Wisconsin woods like an Egyptian embassy from a more hygienic dimension: sandstone corridors, copper lamps, artificial waterfalls, heated pools tiled in lapis blue. There were massage rooms named for constellations and a meditation chamber shaped like a small pyramid. The dining room windows looked out upon birches, pines, and a lake still cold enough in May to kill anyone who mistook it for scenery.
During the first weeks of sheltering in place, they had treated the spa as a private resort.
By June, it had become a submarine.
Alvin’s family had closed the property before the state ordered them to. The guests had gone home, the employees had been furloughed, and the seven Sickies occupied the complex like the final members of an extinct royal household. They wandered around in robes and bathing suits, drank wine from the spa restaurant’s inventory, and tried not to check the numbers too often.
The world outside arrived through their phones as graphs, refrigerated trucks, governors, rumors, arguments, and footage of empty streets.
Inside, Chuck had declared the aromatherapy lounge a bar.
“This is not a bar,” Alvin said.
He was wearing a white robe embroidered with the Albrecht lotus and carrying a tray of cucumber water.
Chuck raised his glass. “Anything becomes a bar when you lose faith in tomorrow.”
“That,” Dustin said, “is probably the most culturally representative thing you’ve ever said.”
Dustin sat cross-legged on a chaise beneath a mural of Nut, the Egyptian sky goddess, his silver-blond hair untidy from several months without professional intervention. His laptop was open beside him, displaying a grid of news sites, medical journals, and computer terminals. He had spent the afternoon explaining viral replication to them and had finally been threatened with expulsion from the room.
Trish lay on a couch with her head in Angela’s lap. Graylyn sat near the windows, sketching the tree line. Angela, still instinctively athletic even in middle age, stroked Trish’s hair with one hand while using the other to scroll through photographs on her phone.
Drake stood at the sound system.
The spa’s music library had been chosen to induce submission. There were albums of rainfall, whale calls, Tibetan bowls, and something called Celestial Pan Flute Rejuvenation. Drake had connected his phone and begun correcting the atmosphere.
“What are we drinking to?” he asked.
“The annihilation of linear time,” Graylyn said.
“Again?” said Chuck. “We drank to that Tuesday.”
“We’re getting older. We repeat ourselves.”
Drake looked around the room.
They were all there.
That remained astonishing.
When they had been sixteen, they had assumed they would always be together because sixteen-year-olds believed desire possessed constitutional authority. Later they had assumed they would lose one another because adults mistook exhaustion for wisdom. Yet here they were: seven improbable survivors quarantined in a monument to Alvin’s family money, waiting for civilization to decide whether it intended to continue.
“What do you think they’ll remember about us?” Angela asked.
Nobody answered at first.
The question had entered quietly, but Drake felt the whole room reorganize around it.
“Who’s they?” Chuck said.
“The future.”
“The future has never shown much interest in my work.”
“You’ve never done any work,” said Graylyn.
“I’ve delegated.”
Angela held up her phone. On the screen was a photograph of a deserted avenue in Chicago, the buildings magnificent and useless beneath a crystalline sky.
“Our generation,” she said. “What will anyone remember?”
“The internet,” Dustin replied.
“That wasn’t us,” Trish said. “That happened to us.”
“We built portions of it.”
“You personally built portions of it. The rest of us kept forgetting our passwords.”
“They’ll remember that we were the last people to grow up before it,” Alvin said. “Before everyone carried the entire world around in a little glass rectangle.”
Chuck examined his own rectangle. “We should have stopped them.”
“You bought four of them the first year they came out.”
“I was infiltrating.”
Graylyn continued drawing. “They’ll remember that we sold everything.”
“Everything?” Angela asked.
“Music. Rebellion. Childhood. Privacy. Grief. Sex. Every feeling became a product, and then every product became a subscription.”
“That’s cheerful,” Alvin said.
“I’m a painter. Cheerfulness is outside my department.”
Trish opened her eyes. “They’ll remember the clothes.”
“They absolutely will not,” said Angela.
“They remember the clothes from every generation.”
“They remember six outfits. The rest becomes evidence against us.”
“We had very good coats,” Trish insisted.
Drake listened to them, smiling. Their voices still had the old rhythm. One began a thought, another inverted it, a third decorated it, and Chuck knocked it over to see whether anything valuable fell out.
Behind the jokes was a real apprehension. They had arrived at the age when history began removing the labels from one’s private experiences. The songs were no longer theirs. The clubs were documentaries. Their scandals had become aesthetics for children who wore reproductions of the clothes and had never smelled cigarette smoke in a restaurant.
“We’ll be remembered as the generation that believed irony would protect us,” Dustin said.
“Didn’t it?” Alvin asked.
“No.”
“It was never intended as protective equipment,” Drake said. “It was more like decorative sunglasses.”
“We thought we could mock everything and therefore not belong to anything,” Angela said.
Graylyn looked up from her sketchbook. “We belonged to each other.”
The room became still.
Chuck took a drink. “Christ, Graylyn. Warn us before you say something sincere.”
“I apologize. It won’t happen again.”
Outside, the birches moved in the evening wind. The lake showed through them in metallic fragments.
Trish sat up. “I know what I’ll remember.”
Angela smiled down at her. “The clothes?”
“The summer of 1985.”
They all understood immediately, although the summer contained hundreds of nights, houses, swimming pools, automobiles, arguments, disappearances, and catastrophes narrowly avoided.
“Which part?” Alvin asked.
“The night at the lake,” Trish said. “When we were stoned and listening to Bowie.”
Drake looked down at his phone.
He found the song without needing to type the whole title.
The opening guitar tore through the aromatherapy lounge.
“Suffragette City.”
It arrived indecently alive, as though forty-five years had been a clerical error.
Chuck gave a shout. Angela laughed. Alvin abandoned the cucumber water and began turning down lamps. Graylyn shut her sketchbook. Dustin closed his laptop, which was his generation’s equivalent of kneeling before an altar.
For a moment the spa vanished.
They were back beside the lake in 1985, lying on blankets beneath a sky made enormous by marijuana. Chuck’s Mercedes was parked crookedly near the trees with all four doors open. Music poured from its speakers. They had stolen liquor from several households and combined it according to principles found in Mr. Boston’s Guide, which Dustin had treated as a grimoire.
They were making out indiscriminately.
Not in the calculating manner of adults, who carried biographies, consequences, and comparative market values into every embrace, but with the sovereign irresponsibility of adolescents who believed kissing another person was a contribution to world peace.
Drake remembered Trish’s skin warm from the day’s sun. He remembered Graylyn laughing as Angela attempted to time how long she could kiss Chuck without becoming disgusted. He remembered Alvin dancing barefoot at the water’s edge, beautiful and unashamed, while Dustin narrated the evening as though transmitting it to an alien civilization.
They had believed in rock and roll.
Not merely liked it. Not collected it, analyzed it, ranked it, streamed it, or used it to announce themselves to an invisible public.
They believed it.
They believed the right song could expose every lie their parents had told. A guitar could abolish boredom. A chorus could turn seven frightened children into a nation. Desire was good because singers had said so, and singers knew things. They had leather trousers and access to amplifiers.
Life had seemed straightforward.
There were hypocrites, and there were rebels.
There were people who wanted you to behave, and there were people who showed you how to escape.
There was the school, the family, the country club, the government, the dinner table—and against them, miraculous and undefeated, there was Bowie.
“We were idiots,” Dustin said softly.
“Yes,” said Trish. “But it was wonderful.”
Drake sank into an armchair. The old song moved through the spa, bouncing off sandstone pillars and gilded statues. Its energy made the disinfectant stations look absurd.
“We thought adulthood was going to be the same thing with better rooms,” Angela said.
“It was better rooms,” Chuck observed. “That’s how they got us.”
“We thought freedom meant nobody could tell us what to do,” Alvin said.
Graylyn looked at him. “Doesn’t it?”
“No. Freedom is knowing what deserves obedience.”
They considered this.
“I preferred it when he was arranging flowers,” Chuck said.
Trish crossed the room and held out her hands to Drake.
He stood.
They did not dance so much as remember dancing. Their bodies carried old permissions. Angela pulled Graylyn up from the window seat. Alvin spun Chuck, who objected only ceremonially. Dustin remained seated until all six of them surrounded him, whereupon he submitted with the weary dignity of a scientist abducted by woodland creatures.
They moved beneath the painted stars.
Drake watched their older faces become intermittently young as they turned through the lamplight. Angela’s discipline dissolved into laughter. Graylyn’s melancholy loosened its grip. Alvin became the boy who could turn any room into a palace. Chuck, who had spent his life disguising tenderness as bad behavior, sang along with magnificent inaccuracy. Dustin raised both arms as though receiving information from a friendly satellite.
And Trish—
Trish danced as she had at sixteen, not because she still possessed the same body but because, somewhere beneath all the accumulated selves, she still possessed the same consent to happiness.
The song ended.
The silence afterward was filled by their breathing.
“That was it,” Angela said.
“What?” Drake asked.
“The happiest time.”
No one contradicted her.
It was not their marriages, careers, victories, houses, exhibitions, promotions, journeys, or nights in cities whose names had once sounded like passwords. It was not Paris or Ibiza or New York. It was not the years when they had possessed the most money, beauty, influence, or knowledge.
It was seven adolescents by a lake, pleasantly stoned, kissing one another beneath the stars while David Bowie explained the universe at maximum volume.
They had been naïve enough to believe life was direct.
Perhaps happiness required that naivety—not stupidity, exactly, but an interval in which the symbols and the world had not yet separated. A song was freedom. A kiss was love. Friendship was destiny. The future was a place they would enter together.
“I don’t want to say that everything afterward was a disappointment,” Alvin said.
“Then don’t,” said Graylyn. “We’ll know you considered it.”
Chuck returned to his improvised bar. “I maintain that several portions of 1987 were excellent.”
“But in 1985,” Trish said, “we didn’t know we were supposed to be afraid yet.”
Drake thought of the houses they had come from, the secrets already operating inside them, the fathers and mothers weaving their traps. They had not truly been safe. They had only achieved one evening in which danger could not make itself understood.
Maybe that was what they had been trying to recover ever since.
Not youth.
Coherence.
A world in which pleasure and meaning had briefly occupied the same room.
Outside, the darkness gathered over Wisconsin. Somewhere beyond the woods, hospitals were filling. Businesses were closing. Millions of people sat isolated in rooms, wondering whether the lives they remembered would ever resume.
Drake picked up his phone.
“Again?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Angela.
“Louder,” said Chuck.
“Much louder,” said Graylyn.
Drake restarted the song.
This time, when the guitar came crashing through the room, they were ready for it.
They danced without irony. They danced for the vanished summer, for the frightened children they had been, for the ridiculous faith that music could save them. They danced because the faith had been wrong in nearly every measurable respect.
And because, for one night beside the lake in 1985, it had been perfectly true.
July 9, 2026
The song finished for the second time.
No one rushed to put anything else on.
The silence itself had become part of the music.
Outside, rain had begun, soft against the glass walls of the spa. The heated pool reflected wavering bands of gold across the ceiling. Somewhere deeper in the building, an automatic fountain continued its endless conversation with itself.
Chuck finally broke the silence.
“So… whatever happened to rock and roll?”
Nobody laughed.
It wasn’t the sort of question that admitted jokes.
Drake remained standing beside the stereo.
“I don’t think it disappeared.”
“No?”
“I think we stopped believing it was describing reality.”
Angela leaned forward.
“It used to.”
“We thought it did.”
“No,” Drake said quietly. “It really did.”
Graylyn watched the rain.
“There’s a difference between a fashion and an atmosphere.”
They all turned toward her.
“The sixties weren’t just clothes or music. They were an atmosphere people walked around inside. By the time we got there, the atmosphere was gone. We inherited the photographs.”
Alvin nodded slowly.
“We were born after Eden.”
“But close enough to smell the garden,” Trish said.
Dustin smiled.
“That’s actually a remarkable way to put it.”
Chuck took another drink.
“I always felt like we were reenactors.”
“No,” Drake said.
“We were pilgrims.”
That word settled over the room.
Pilgrims.
Not imitators.
People traveling toward a sacred place they had never seen.
Angela looked toward the stereo.
“Where did the pilgrimage begin?”
No one answered immediately.
They all knew hundreds of songs.
Thousands.
Every one of them possessed an elaborate private mythology of records, concerts, album covers, guitar solos, and impossible singers who had seemed larger than governments.
Yet beneath all of them…
There was one.
Drake spoke almost reverently.
“‘Eight Miles High.'”
The others nodded.
No discussion.
No debate.
As though they had all independently discovered the same hidden equation years ago.
Chuck looked surprised.
“I’ve never actually heard any of us say that.”
“We never had to,” Graylyn replied.
“It was obvious.”
Dustin leaned back.
“It wasn’t our favorite song.”
“No.”
“It wasn’t even necessarily the best song.”
“No.”
“So why?”
Drake looked out into the rain.
“Because it sounded like someone seeing another universe.”
He searched for words.
“Not describing one.”
“Seeing one.”
Angela’s eyes brightened.
“The guitars.”
“They don’t sound like guitars.”
“They sound…”
She struggled.
“…like sunlight becoming geometry.”
Dustin laughed.
“That’s scientifically useless.”
“I know.”
“But it’s true.”
“The drums,” Alvin said.
“They don’t march.”
“They tumble.”
“They’re falling upward.”
Chuck grinned.
“Everything in that song sounds like it’s discovering itself while it’s happening.”
“Exactly,” Drake said.
“They weren’t performing a style.”
“They sounded like they had wandered into some place human beings weren’t supposed to reach.”
Graylyn closed her sketchbook.
“When I was sixteen,” she said, “I used to imagine that song wasn’t about flying.”
“No?”
“I imagined it was what the entire decade felt like.”
Everyone became quiet.
“The whole sixties,” she continued.
“Not the historical one.”
“The mythological one.”
“The one that existed somewhere behind the photographs.”
“You could hear people trying to invent themselves.”
“You could hear them believing the world hadn’t finished yet.”
She smiled faintly.
“We wanted that.”
“God,” Chuck whispered.
“Did we ever.”
Trish reached for Angela’s hand.
“We weren’t trying to become hippies.”
“No.”
“We were trying to arrive wherever they had briefly been.”
Dustin looked thoughtful.
“I think that’s why Bowie mattered.”
“How so?” Alvin asked.
“He knew it was already over.”
Everyone nodded.
“He wasn’t pretending the sixties still existed.”
“He was carrying their light forward.”
“A relay runner,” Angela said.
“Exactly.”
“He knew paradise had vanished.”
“But he refused to become cynical.”
Drake felt something click into place.
“That’s why ‘Suffragette City’ made us so happy.”
“It wasn’t nostalgia.”
“It was evidence.”
“Evidence that the current was still flowing.”
He pointed toward the silent speakers.
“We believed there was a line.”
“‘Eight Miles High.'”
“The Velvet Underground.”
“The Doors.”
“Bowie.”
“Talking Heads.”
“Roxy Music.”
“Prince.”
We weren’t listening to old records.
“We thought we were following a river.”
Graylyn’s voice became almost inaudible.
“And rivers eventually disappear underground.”
Rain continued to drift across the windows.
The spa suddenly felt less like a refuge than an observatory.
Seven people looking backward across half a century trying to locate a vanished constellation.
Chuck frowned.
“So where did it go?”
Nobody answered.
Not because there wasn’t an answer.
Because there were too many.
It had become advertising.
It had become branding.
It had become streaming.
It had become playlists generated by invisible mathematics.
It had become celebrity.
It had become background music in coffee shops.
It had become nostalgia sold back to the people who had lived it.
It had become content.
Rock had once seemed like a place.
Now it was a category.
Finally Alvin spoke.
“I don’t think we lost the music.”
“What then?”
“We lost the expectation that music might change who we were.”
The sentence hung in the air.
Angela looked around the room.
“When we were fifteen…”
“…a record coming out felt like history.”
“We would wait.”
“We would speculate.”
“We would argue.”
“We thought some new album might reveal the next stage of civilization.”
Chuck laughed softly.
“I remember believing David Bowie knew something.”
“So did I,” Trish admitted.
“I still half believe it.”
Drake smiled.
“We all did.”
“Every singer was an explorer.”
“They went somewhere strange.”
“They came back.”
“And the record was their map.”
Graylyn stood and walked to the rain-darkened window.
“I’ve been thinking about something.”
“What?”
“The Greeks.”
Chuck groaned theatrically.
“Oh no.”
“They imagined there had once been a Golden Age.”
“A perfect beginning.”
“Everything afterward was a decline.”
She touched the glass.
“I wonder whether every civilization invents a golden age behind itself.”
Dustin considered this.
“Maybe.”
“But ours happened to leave vinyl records.”
That made everyone laugh.
It was the first genuine laughter in several minutes.
Drake looked again at the stereo.
“No.”
“I think ours really did have a North Star.”
He spoke almost to himself.
“‘Eight Miles High.'”
“It was never the destination.”
“It was the point by which we navigated.”
“The fixed light.”
“We were always steering toward whatever that song suggested.”
“What did it suggest?” Angela asked.
Drake thought for a long time.
Finally he answered.
“That somewhere, just beyond ordinary consciousness…”
“…people had once lived as though freedom were the most practical thing in the world.”
No one spoke.
Outside, the rain continued to fall across the Wisconsin woods.
Inside the spa, seven middle-aged friends understood that they had finally discovered the real subject of the novel Drake had been trying to write all his life.
It wasn’t simply about friendship.
Or privilege.
Or America.
Or memory.
It was about the experience of rock itself—not as a musical genre, but as a spiritual geography.
A country they had never inhabited.
A country they nevertheless remembered with impossible clarity, as though each great record were a postcard sent from home.
