d o o b i ! (^з^)-☆

It ran through your mind so often over the next few days that you sometimes found yourself preparing for conversations that didn't even exist yet. Out loud in the shower. In the back of cabs. In the recording studio while your producer was trying to give you feedback (Sandra needed to literally shake you awake to get you out of that one).

And every time the landline rang, your heart practically attempted to torpedo itself directly out of your thoracic cavity. Which was unfortunate, because you got a lot of phone calls.

For the first few days, you'd find yourself jolting to life every time your phone went off, already half-expecting to hear that familiar soft voice you'd spent years listening to on records and television interviews.

Instead it was Jerry from production. Or your publicist. Or Sandra.

Or, on one particularly humiliating occasion —

"Hello?" "Hi. Am I speaking to — " You stood up straighter. "Yes?" "Wonderful. I'm outside with your pizza." 

That had been your lesson in the dangers of anticipation.

Eventually your brain surrendered to the slow, inevitable process of habituation. And by the seventh day, the ringing of the phone no longer startled you half to death.

You reviewed the facts: Sandra had given your number to Frank. Frank had, presumably, given it to Michael. And somewhere presently on the planet, Michael Jackson theoretically possessed a piece of paper with ten digits written on it. That was all.

And a week of silence was basically an answer enough.

People got busy. He was on tour. Tours were enormous. They were schedule-devouring things that swallowed time whole. He'd had a moment of curiosity, or amusement, or whatever it had been — an impulse Frank had been dispatched to act on — and then the impulse had passed.

It was fine.

You were fine.

The thin, persistent thread of disappointment you'd been carrying around since approximately day three was simply the natural result of an unusual situation. Nothing more.

You reflected on this with great reasonableness as you dragged yourself through the door of your apartment at half past two in the morning, still wearing the clothes you'd put on fourteen hours earlier. You towed with you a full-body exhaustion that came from a day of back-to-back rehearsals for a television appearance that was, in your current state, becoming increasingly difficult to feel enthusiastic about.

Your feet hurt. Your voice had settled into a low, scratchy register that always developed after a day of singing without nearly enough water. The apartment was dark and quiet and perfect and all you wanted to do was fall face-first into bed and temporarily cease to exist for the next eight hours.

You managed the shoes. The jacket. You dropped your keys onto a random surface and would spend the next morning wondering where they'd gone. Your makeup was regrettably left on. Whatever ended up on the pillowcase was tomorrow's problem. It needed changing anyway.

Within minutes of your body hitting the mattress, sleep took you completely, the sheer weight of the week finally pulling you under. Your brain didn't even bother with the gradual descent of light sleep, skipping N1 and N2 completely. You plummeted straight into the heavy, restorative depths of N3. It was a dreamless, total blackout. And you were frolicking in it.

.

.

.

The phone rang at 3:17 a.m.

Somehow you heard it under fifteen layers of unconsciousness. Despite this, you continued your stroll through the serene meadows of dreamland, your brain deciding to file the interruption under: not relevant, continue slumbering.

You pulled your blankets closer.

The ringing stopped.

Then it started again.

You made a deeply chagrined noise into the pillow that communicated your feelings about this development clearly, if not articulately. Whoever this was would give up. Everyone gave up eventually.

The ringing stopped.

Then, with what felt like a hidden agenda, it started again. A third time.

Three separate, consecutive, deliberate phone calls at 3:17 in the morning from someone who clearly had no intention of developing any shame.

You sat up. Hastily, with an utter lack of grace — surfacing from sleep like something dredged from the bottom of a lake. Hair everywhere. Eyes not fully functioning. A deep and righteous fury gathering in your chest at whoever was on the other end of the phone.

You had been asleep. Beautifully asleep. You had a rehearsal in what was now less than eight hours, and you needed every single one of them. And the person currently dialing your number for what was now the third time in a row was going to understand that very clearly. You grabbed the phone from its place on the wall and almost ripped it off the mount entirely.

“Who the fuck is this.”

…

Nothing. Not even breathing, or the faint shuffle of someone hesitating at the pure vitriol that had just escaped your mouth. Just the empty, electric buzz of an open line at three in the morning. 

Then, very faintly —

“...hi.”

…

The absence that followed was the loudest thing you’d ever personally produced.

You knew that voice.

You knew that voice very well. Disturbingly well, considering you had just identified it from one small, scarcely spoken word while operating on half a mind. It had nestled itself into the minute crevices of your bones without you having chosen to put it there.

The cadence of it. The specific hush. How even a single syllable carried something immediately, unmistakably him.

“...um… it’s Michael…”

It was Michael Jackson…

You’d just asked Michael Jackson who the fuck he was.

The belated mortification arrived in a single, consummate wave, wiping out what remained of your righteous furor and replacing it with the sudden, hideous realization of what you’d just done.

“Oh my god,” you said. Now very much awake. “I’m so sorry. I’m so — that was — I didn’t know it was you. I was asleep, I didn’t — oh my god. I’m really sorry, Mr. Jackson, that was—”

“No, no,” he said swiftly.

Every muscle in your body locked. You braced yourself, prepared to sink into the floor. You had basically just spat on the greatest musical artist currently alive.

“Please don’t call me that.”

You flinched. “What?” 

“Mr. Jackson,” he said, and there was a twinge of embarrassment in how he corrected it. “That’s what people call my father.”

This had somehow thrown you more than the profanity had. “Right,” you said. “Sorry. Michael.”

From the speaker of your telephone came a sound you were not prepared for: a laugh. Small. Genuine. Caught between apology and delight.

“It’s okay,” he said, and the amusement in his voice made everything worse. “I deserved that.”

A yawn pulled itself out of you, born of vexation and legitimate exhaustion. You pressed the heel of your palm to your forehead. 

“Actually yeah,” you said, because humiliation had limits, but your commitment to being correct did not. “You do. You called me three times. Do you have any idea what time it is?” 

Apparently, whatever distress had seized you a moment earlier surrendered almost instantly to the stronger, uglier force of your weariness. “I don’t care who you are,” you continued. “Nobody interrupts a woman when she is sleeping.” 

“I know, I’m sorry. I’m in Osaka.” 

You processed this. Osaka was — you did the math badly twice before arriving at: very far ahead. Afternoon, for him. An hour at which people made phone calls without first considering whether they were cutting into someone else’s sleep. You dragged a hand down your face.

“You forgot the time difference.”

A weak scuffling came across the telephone line. “Well — no, I didn’t forget. It’s just — ” he hesitated, “I needed to make sure you were home?”

At that, you glared daggers at the wall in front of you. The logical part of you, still violently deprived of the joys of snoozing, was begging you to hang up, lest tomorrow’s poor rehearsal crew be forced to face the wrath of a sleep-destitute you.

Unfortunately, another part of you was still reeling from the fact that this was the call. The call you had been waiting for. The call you had convinced yourself would never come.

And now that it had, every sensible thought in your head went straight out the window, taking with it every carefully rehearsed version of how this conversation was supposed to go.

"That's — okay," you said finally. "That's actually a fair point."

"Yeah?"

"I’ve been busy."

You could hear the shrug in his voice. "I figured."

Letting your body trudge itself back to the bed, you dragged the phone cable behind you. The receiver stayed pressed to your ear as you climbed under the covers again and pulled them over your knees. “Took you a while to call.”

"A week," he said, “I kept starting to dial and then — ”

You waited for him to continue. “And then?”

“I’d hang up.” There was something painfully simple about the confession. It came without explanation, without some careful little speech to make it sound better. Just the image of him standing there with your number half-dialed and no idea what to do with himself.

You looked down at the landline cord twisted over the edge of the mattress. "So what made tonight the night?" you asked.

A pause. You had the impression of him settling — a shift in the quality of the stillness, the way you could sometimes tell through the phone that somebody had gotten more comfortable.

“I had a good show tonight,” he said. “And after a good show I always want to — I don’t know. Tell someone. It’s usually the same people and I love them. But I’d been thinking about calling you all week, and tonight I thought — well, why not?”

He stopped.

“Is that strange?”

“A little,” you said honestly. His breath caught a little too close to the receiver.

“But not in a bad way,” you added. “I don’t mind being privy to the afterglow of a good show.”

He seemed to like that answer. You heard it in the sparse exhale that followed, the slight loosening of something.

“But not at three in the goddamn morning.”

He chuckled. “I’ll remember that.”

“Yeah, you better.”

“I’ll write it down.”

“Underline it.”

“Twice.”

The clock continued to tick by your bedside.

“So how was your day?” he asked.

Your eyebrows rose, surprised by the direction this exchange had taken. “You’re asking me how my day was?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I wanna know.”

You looked at the ceiling. The dark of your apartment. The thin strip of light coming from under the door. "Long," you responded. "I've been in rehearsals since noon. TV thing next week."

"Which song?"

“Two, actually. One older, one from the new album.”

"Which older one?"

You told him.

“That one’s great,” he said. “The bridge especially.”

You blinked. “Really? The bridge almost didn’t make the final cut. The label wanted it shorter.”

"They were wrong."

“They were,” you agreed. “I had to fight for it.”

"You should always fight for the bridge."

And, without either of you quite deciding to, that was where the conversation found its footing. 

You hated how easily the corner of your mouth betrayed you. More than that, you hated how natural it felt. How one subject slipped into the next. How one topic found another. As if this were one of many calls instead of just the first one — his voice reaching you from Osaka while you lay half-buried in your blankets in your quaint New York apartment.

The talk continued.

One thing led to another in a loose little pattern of its own, neither of you steering it so much as following where it went. You talked about the television rehearsal, and he talked about the Osaka show — a specific moment in one of the songs where something had finally clicked in a way it hadn’t in weeks. The feeling of that and how hard it was to explain to anyone who hadn’t experienced it.

You knew what he meant. You told him so, and he said, “Yes, exactly,” and his voice eased.

He was funny, which caught you slightly off guard. Dry and quick, with better comedic timing than you would have expected from someone so often treated like an untouchable monument. He made you laugh twice in the first ten minutes and seemed pleased with himself both times, though he tried badly to hide it. It was endearing.

The words came faster than they usually did with new people, arriving without the usual self-conscious editing. There was a noticeable absence of measuring, of constantly deciding what to give and what to keep back.

There was an honest curiosity in the way he asked questions. Different from the performed attention you got in interviews, designed to flatter just enough to open you up. His questions landed with the weight of someone listening closely, like what you said mattered.

Betwixt another rehearsal story and his complaint about the Osaka hotel having terrible tea, it hit you with rude, inconvenient clarity: this should have felt stranger, right?

He should have felt farther away.

Against all sense, he sounded close enough that the thought of him calling again did not feel nearly as terrifying as a sober, perfectly conscious version of you knew it should have.

Though not at three in the morning, obviously. You still had principles.

Michael was telling you about a dancer who had missed his cue but had recovered so well the audience thought it was part of choreography.

“You should hire him for every mistake from now on,” you said, your voice still thick with the harrowing beckon of sleep but gaining a playful edge.

“I told him that,” Michael replied. You could hear the grin in his voice.

“You did not.”

“I did.”

“That’s cruel, Mr. Ja — Michael. Truly.” You shifted under the duvet, the landline cord tangling around your arm as you settled in.

“He laughed!”

“That man was probably terrified of you,” you countered. A series of rhythmic car honks rose from the street outside your window, thank you New York. You rolled your eyes before continuing. “Most people would be. You’re a perfectionist with a global empire; one misplaced step probably feels like a death sentence for him.”

“He was not terrified of me,” Michael defended quickly. “We have a good relationship. He’s a professional.”

“Michael, you are Michael Jackson.”

“That doesn’t mean people are terrified of me.”

“It means people pretend not to be terrified of you out of professionalism.”

He lost his sentence halfway through, a wheeze coming through the telephone line. You beamed.

“Can I tell you something?” you whispered, somewhere around what turned out to be the forty-minute mark.

"Sure."

“The fan events,” you winced, already lamenting it.

He choked on whatever he was about to say next. “Oh, the article mentioned that.”

“Yes, I know,” you said, with as much dignity as you could manage. “And I would like to note for the record that I am extremely normal about you.”

“Are you?”

“Yes — ”

“The fan meetings,” he said, circling it back, clearly enjoying himself.

You closed your eyes briefly. “It was twice. Maybe three times. It was a long time ago, before my first single, so technically — ”

“Which tours?”

“I’m not answering that.”

“Triumph or Victory?”

“I’m actually not — ”

“Both?”

“Goodbye,” you said, the last shreds of your ego rapidly dissipating.

A thud came through the speaker. He had dropped the phone. Somewhere in Osaka, Michael Jackson appeared to be losing a fight with his own laughter. You were in the middle of figuring out how not to burst into flames.

“Well, I appreciate it,” he said, when he’d settled. His phrasing sincere now, the teasing gone from it. “That you were there.”

“You can’t appreciate it,” you protested, drawing the words out as if you hadn’t been the one to bring it up in the first place. “It gives you too much leverage.”

"I won't use it against you."

"You literally just did."

“I won't use it against you again,” he amended, his tone mellowing into something more genial than the playful banter from a moment ago.

You were smiling, which seemed to be the default state this phone call had put you in. “I need to ask you something in return. Fair is fair.”

“Okay.”

“You read the whole article?” 

The silence that followed was immediate and very informative. Static crackled faintly over the line, carrying all the confession he refused to say out loud.

“Aha!”

“I read some of it.”

“Enough that you knew about the fan meetings?”

“I skimmed it.”

“Oh, who knew,” you said, tickled. “Michael Jackson is a man who likes to read articles about himself — ”

“I was not reading it because it was about me.”

That shut you up. He continued, quieter now.

“...It just… it mentioned you.”

The heat that rushed across your face was immediate. You dropped the phone. Apparently you were both clumsy with phones.

The receiver landed on your pillow, threatening to slide down to the floor while you pressed both hands over your face, as if you could physically force the reaction back into your skull. You let your head fall back against the pillow and stared at the ceiling, thinking that of all the ways this call could have gone, this was not one you had imagined.

This easy, partly ridiculous thing. This conversation that had begun with you swearing at him and had become something you did not want to end. Talking to him felt less like an event and more like something you had been waiting for without even knowing you were waiting.

The bluish light of your alarm clock washed over the side of your face.

4:02

“Oh, hell.”

A muffled sound came from the blankets. Crap. The phone.

You scrambled for it and dragged it back to your ear.

“Are you still there?”

“I’m here,” Michael said.

You had been on the phone for fifty minutes. Rehearsal was in less than seven hours. You had not slept nearly enough, and rehearsal was happening whether you were prepared for it or not. You were still in yesterday’s clothes, lying in the dark of your apartment, talking to a man on the other side of the world, and you needed, with some urgency, to go to sleep.

“I have to go,” you said. Even as you said it, there was a fragile reluctance in it that you suspected he could hear. “It’s four in the morning.”

"Yeah?"

“I have rehearsal in — ” You squinted at the clock. “Six and a half hours.”

You heard him laugh. “Do not laugh. You have taken years off my life.”

“I’ll call earlier next time.”

Next time.

The words slipped into the room far too easily. 

“Promise?” Whether you were asking him to promise he would actually call earlier, or whether you were asking him to promise that he would call again at all, you weren’t sure.

“Yes,” he said. “Promise.”

A beat.

“Probably.”

“Michael.”

He chuckled: a low, unhurried sound you were already too familiar with for someone who had only called you once.

You did not move immediately. Neither did he, it seemed. The line stayed open, both of you sitting on either end of it before it actually ended.

His laughter was the last thing you heard before the call clicked dead. You set the receiver down and lay back in the dark.

The apartment was exactly as it had been an hour ago — same walls, same ceiling, same cold air, same thin line of light under the door — and you were exactly as you had been, tired and in yesterday’s clothes with tomorrow (technically today) coming too fast.

Everything was the same.

You stared at the ceiling for a while anyway, grinning like an idiot at nobody, before you finally closed your eyes.

You were asleep in minutes.

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It ran through your mind so often over the next few days that you sometimes found yourself preparing for conversations that didn't even exist yet. Out loud in the shower. In the back of cabs. In the recording studio while your producer was trying to give you feedback (Sandra needed to literally shake you awake to get you out of that one).

And every time the landline rang, your heart practically attempted to torpedo itself directly out of your thoracic cavity. Which was unfortunate, because you got a lot of phone calls.

For the first few days, you'd find yourself jolting to life every time your phone went off, already half-expecting to hear that familiar soft voice you'd spent years listening to on records and television interviews.

Instead it was Jerry from production. Or your publicist. Or Sandra.

Or, on one particularly humiliating occasion —

"Hello?" "Hi. Am I speaking to — " You stood up straighter. "Yes?" "Wonderful. I'm outside with your pizza." 

That had been your lesson in the dangers of anticipation.

Eventually your brain surrendered to the slow, inevitable process of habituation. And by the seventh day, the ringing of the phone no longer startled you half to death.

You reviewed the facts: Sandra had given your number to Frank. Frank had, presumably, given it to Michael. And somewhere presently on the planet, Michael Jackson theoretically possessed a piece of paper with ten digits written on it. That was all.

And a week of silence was basically an answer enough.

People got busy. He was on tour. Tours were enormous. They were schedule-devouring things that swallowed time whole. He'd had a moment of curiosity, or amusement, or whatever it had been — an impulse Frank had been dispatched to act on — and then the impulse had passed.

It was fine.

You were fine.

The thin, persistent thread of disappointment you'd been carrying around since approximately day three was simply the natural result of an unusual situation. Nothing more.

You reflected on this with great reasonableness as you dragged yourself through the door of your apartment at half past two in the morning, still wearing the clothes you'd put on fourteen hours earlier. You towed with you a full-body exhaustion that came from a day of back-to-back rehearsals for a television appearance that was, in your current state, becoming increasingly difficult to feel enthusiastic about.

Your feet hurt. Your voice had settled into a low, scratchy register that always developed after a day of singing without nearly enough water. The apartment was dark and quiet and perfect and all you wanted to do was fall face-first into bed and temporarily cease to exist for the next eight hours.

You managed the shoes. The jacket. You dropped your keys onto a random surface and would spend the next morning wondering where they'd gone. Your makeup was regrettably left on. Whatever ended up on the pillowcase was tomorrow's problem. It needed changing anyway.

Within minutes of your body hitting the mattress, sleep took you completely, the sheer weight of the week finally pulling you under. Your brain didn't even bother with the gradual descent of light sleep, skipping N1 and N2 completely. You plummeted straight into the heavy, restorative depths of N3. It was a dreamless, total blackout. And you were frolicking in it.

.

.

.

The phone rang at 3:17 a.m.

Somehow you heard it under fifteen layers of unconsciousness. Despite this, you continued your stroll through the serene meadows of dreamland, your brain deciding to file the interruption under: not relevant, continue slumbering.

You pulled your blankets closer.

The ringing stopped.

Then it started again.

You made a deeply chagrined noise into the pillow that communicated your feelings about this development clearly, if not articulately. Whoever this was would give up. Everyone gave up eventually.

The ringing stopped.

Then, with what felt like a hidden agenda, it started again. A third time.

Three separate, consecutive, deliberate phone calls at 3:17 in the morning from someone who clearly had no intention of developing any shame.

You sat up. Hastily, with an utter lack of grace — surfacing from sleep like something dredged from the bottom of a lake. Hair everywhere. Eyes not fully functioning. A deep and righteous fury gathering in your chest at whoever was on the other end of the phone.

You had been asleep. Beautifully asleep. You had a rehearsal in what was now less than eight hours, and you needed every single one of them. And the person currently dialing your number for what was now the third time in a row was going to understand that very clearly. You grabbed the phone from its place on the wall and almost ripped it off the mount entirely.

“Who the fuck is this.”

…

Nothing. Not even breathing, or the faint shuffle of someone hesitating at the pure vitriol that had just escaped your mouth. Just the empty, electric buzz of an open line at three in the morning. 

Then, very faintly —

“...hi.”

…

The absence that followed was the loudest thing you’d ever personally produced.

You knew that voice.

You knew that voice very well. Disturbingly well, considering you had just identified it from one small, scarcely spoken word while operating on half a mind. It had nestled itself into the minute crevices of your bones without you having chosen to put it there.

The cadence of it. The specific hush. How even a single syllable carried something immediately, unmistakably him.

“...um… it’s Michael…”

It was Michael Jackson…

You’d just asked Michael Jackson who the fuck he was.

The belated mortification arrived in a single, consummate wave, wiping out what remained of your righteous furor and replacing it with the sudden, hideous realization of what you’d just done.

“Oh my god,” you said. Now very much awake. “I’m so sorry. I’m so — that was — I didn’t know it was you. I was asleep, I didn’t — oh my god. I’m really sorry, Mr. Jackson, that was—”

“No, no,” he said swiftly.

Every muscle in your body locked. You braced yourself, prepared to sink into the floor. You had basically just spat on the greatest musical artist currently alive.

“Please don’t call me that.”

You flinched. “What?” 

“Mr. Jackson,” he said, and there was a twinge of embarrassment in how he corrected it. “That’s what people call my father.”

This had somehow thrown you more than the profanity had. “Right,” you said. “Sorry. Michael.”

From the speaker of your telephone came a sound you were not prepared for: a laugh. Small. Genuine. Caught between apology and delight.

“It’s okay,” he said, and the amusement in his voice made everything worse. “I deserved that.”

A yawn pulled itself out of you, born of vexation and legitimate exhaustion. You pressed the heel of your palm to your forehead. 

“Actually yeah,” you said, because humiliation had limits, but your commitment to being correct did not. “You do. You called me three times. Do you have any idea what time it is?” 

Apparently, whatever distress had seized you a moment earlier surrendered almost instantly to the stronger, uglier force of your weariness. “I don’t care who you are,” you continued. “Nobody interrupts a woman when she is sleeping.” 

“I know, I’m sorry. I’m in Osaka.” 

You processed this. Osaka was — you did the math badly twice before arriving at: very far ahead. Afternoon, for him. An hour at which people made phone calls without first considering whether they were cutting into someone else’s sleep. You dragged a hand down your face.

“You forgot the time difference.”

A weak scuffling came across the telephone line. “Well — no, I didn’t forget. It’s just — ” he hesitated, “I needed to make sure you were home?”

At that, you glared daggers at the wall in front of you. The logical part of you, still violently deprived of the joys of snoozing, was begging you to hang up, lest tomorrow’s poor rehearsal crew be forced to face the wrath of a sleep-destitute you.

Unfortunately, another part of you was still reeling from the fact that this was the call. The call you had been waiting for. The call you had convinced yourself would never come.

And now that it had, every sensible thought in your head went straight out the window, taking with it every carefully rehearsed version of how this conversation was supposed to go.

"That's — okay," you said finally. "That's actually a fair point."

"Yeah?"

"I’ve been busy."

You could hear the shrug in his voice. "I figured."

Letting your body trudge itself back to the bed, you dragged the phone cable behind you. The receiver stayed pressed to your ear as you climbed under the covers again and pulled them over your knees. “Took you a while to call.”

"A week," he said, “I kept starting to dial and then — ”

You waited for him to continue. “And then?”

“I’d hang up.” There was something painfully simple about the confession. It came without explanation, without some careful little speech to make it sound better. Just the image of him standing there with your number half-dialed and no idea what to do with himself.

You looked down at the landline cord twisted over the edge of the mattress. "So what made tonight the night?" you asked.

A pause. You had the impression of him settling — a shift in the quality of the stillness, the way you could sometimes tell through the phone that somebody had gotten more comfortable.

“I had a good show tonight,” he said. “And after a good show I always want to — I don’t know. Tell someone. It’s usually the same people and I love them. But I’d been thinking about calling you all week, and tonight I thought — well, why not?”

He stopped.

“Is that strange?”

“A little,” you said honestly. His breath caught a little too close to the receiver.

“But not in a bad way,” you added. “I don’t mind being privy to the afterglow of a good show.”

He seemed to like that answer. You heard it in the sparse exhale that followed, the slight loosening of something.

“But not at three in the goddamn morning.”

He chuckled. “I’ll remember that.”

“Yeah, you better.”

“I’ll write it down.”

“Underline it.”

“Twice.”

The clock continued to tick by your bedside.

“So how was your day?” he asked.

Your eyebrows rose, surprised by the direction this exchange had taken. “You’re asking me how my day was?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I wanna know.”

You looked at the ceiling. The dark of your apartment. The thin strip of light coming from under the door. "Long," you responded. "I've been in rehearsals since noon. TV thing next week."

"Which song?"

“Two, actually. One older, one from the new album.”

"Which older one?"

You told him.

“That one’s great,” he said. “The bridge especially.”

You blinked. “Really? The bridge almost didn’t make the final cut. The label wanted it shorter.”

"They were wrong."

“They were,” you agreed. “I had to fight for it.”

"You should always fight for the bridge."

And, without either of you quite deciding to, that was where the conversation found its footing. 

You hated how easily the corner of your mouth betrayed you. More than that, you hated how natural it felt. How one subject slipped into the next. How one topic found another. As if this were one of many calls instead of just the first one — his voice reaching you from Osaka while you lay half-buried in your blankets in your quaint New York apartment.

The talk continued.

One thing led to another in a loose little pattern of its own, neither of you steering it so much as following where it went. You talked about the television rehearsal, and he talked about the Osaka show — a specific moment in one of the songs where something had finally clicked in a way it hadn’t in weeks. The feeling of that and how hard it was to explain to anyone who hadn’t experienced it.

You knew what he meant. You told him so, and he said, “Yes, exactly,” and his voice eased.

He was funny, which caught you slightly off guard. Dry and quick, with better comedic timing than you would have expected from someone so often treated like an untouchable monument. He made you laugh twice in the first ten minutes and seemed pleased with himself both times, though he tried badly to hide it. It was endearing.

The words came faster than they usually did with new people, arriving without the usual self-conscious editing. There was a noticeable absence of measuring, of constantly deciding what to give and what to keep back.

There was an honest curiosity in the way he asked questions. Different from the performed attention you got in interviews, designed to flatter just enough to open you up. His questions landed with the weight of someone listening closely, like what you said mattered.

Betwixt another rehearsal story and his complaint about the Osaka hotel having terrible tea, it hit you with rude, inconvenient clarity: this should have felt stranger, right?

He should have felt farther away.

Against all sense, he sounded close enough that the thought of him calling again did not feel nearly as terrifying as a sober, perfectly conscious version of you knew it should have.

Though not at three in the morning, obviously. You still had principles.

Michael was telling you about a dancer who had missed his cue but had recovered so well the audience thought it was part of choreography.

“You should hire him for every mistake from now on,” you said, your voice still thick with the harrowing beckon of sleep but gaining a playful edge.

“I told him that,” Michael replied. You could hear the grin in his voice.

“You did not.”

“I did.”

“That’s cruel, Mr. Ja — Michael. Truly.” You shifted under the duvet, the landline cord tangling around your arm as you settled in.

“He laughed!”

“That man was probably terrified of you,” you countered. A series of rhythmic car honks rose from the street outside your window, thank you New York. You rolled your eyes before continuing. “Most people would be. You’re a perfectionist with a global empire; one misplaced step probably feels like a death sentence for him.”

“He was not terrified of me,” Michael defended quickly. “We have a good relationship. He’s a professional.”

“Michael, you are Michael Jackson.”

“That doesn’t mean people are terrified of me.”

“It means people pretend not to be terrified of you out of professionalism.”

He lost his sentence halfway through, a wheeze coming through the telephone line. You beamed.

“Can I tell you something?” you whispered, somewhere around what turned out to be the forty-minute mark.

"Sure."

“The fan events,” you winced, already lamenting it.

He choked on whatever he was about to say next. “Oh, the article mentioned that.”

“Yes, I know,” you said, with as much dignity as you could manage. “And I would like to note for the record that I am extremely normal about you.”

“Are you?”

“Yes — ”

“The fan meetings,” he said, circling it back, clearly enjoying himself.

You closed your eyes briefly. “It was twice. Maybe three times. It was a long time ago, before my first single, so technically — ”

“Which tours?”

“I’m not answering that.”

“Triumph or Victory?”

“I’m actually not — ”

“Both?”

“Goodbye,” you said, the last shreds of your ego rapidly dissipating.

A thud came through the speaker. He had dropped the phone. Somewhere in Osaka, Michael Jackson appeared to be losing a fight with his own laughter. You were in the middle of figuring out how not to burst into flames.

“Well, I appreciate it,” he said, when he’d settled. His phrasing sincere now, the teasing gone from it. “That you were there.”

“You can’t appreciate it,” you protested, drawing the words out as if you hadn’t been the one to bring it up in the first place. “It gives you too much leverage.”

"I won't use it against you."

"You literally just did."

“I won't use it against you again,” he amended, his tone mellowing into something more genial than the playful banter from a moment ago.

You were smiling, which seemed to be the default state this phone call had put you in. “I need to ask you something in return. Fair is fair.”

“Okay.”

“You read the whole article?” 

The silence that followed was immediate and very informative. Static crackled faintly over the line, carrying all the confession he refused to say out loud.

“Aha!”

“I read some of it.”

“Enough that you knew about the fan meetings?”

“I skimmed it.”

“Oh, who knew,” you said, tickled. “Michael Jackson is a man who likes to read articles about himself — ”

“I was not reading it because it was about me.”

That shut you up. He continued, quieter now.

“...It just… it mentioned you.”

The heat that rushed across your face was immediate. You dropped the phone. Apparently you were both clumsy with phones.

The receiver landed on your pillow, threatening to slide down to the floor while you pressed both hands over your face, as if you could physically force the reaction back into your skull. You let your head fall back against the pillow and stared at the ceiling, thinking that of all the ways this call could have gone, this was not one you had imagined.

This easy, partly ridiculous thing. This conversation that had begun with you swearing at him and had become something you did not want to end. Talking to him felt less like an event and more like something you had been waiting for without even knowing you were waiting.

The bluish light of your alarm clock washed over the side of your face.

4:02

“Oh, hell.”

A muffled sound came from the blankets. Crap. The phone.

You scrambled for it and dragged it back to your ear.

“Are you still there?”

“I’m here,” Michael said.

You had been on the phone for fifty minutes. Rehearsal was in less than seven hours. You had not slept nearly enough, and rehearsal was happening whether you were prepared for it or not. You were still in yesterday’s clothes, lying in the dark of your apartment, talking to a man on the other side of the world, and you needed, with some urgency, to go to sleep.

“I have to go,” you said. Even as you said it, there was a fragile reluctance in it that you suspected he could hear. “It’s four in the morning.”

"Yeah?"

“I have rehearsal in — ” You squinted at the clock. “Six and a half hours.”

You heard him laugh. “Do not laugh. You have taken years off my life.”

“I’ll call earlier next time.”

Next time.

The words slipped into the room far too easily. 

“Promise?” Whether you were asking him to promise he would actually call earlier, or whether you were asking him to promise that he would call again at all, you weren’t sure.

“Yes,” he said. “Promise.”

A beat.

“Probably.”

“Michael.”

He chuckled: a low, unhurried sound you were already too familiar with for someone who had only called you once.

You did not move immediately. Neither did he, it seemed. The line stayed open, both of you sitting on either end of it before it actually ended.

His laughter was the last thing you heard before the call clicked dead. You set the receiver down and lay back in the dark.

The apartment was exactly as it had been an hour ago — same walls, same ceiling, same cold air, same thin line of light under the door — and you were exactly as you had been, tired and in yesterday’s clothes with tomorrow (technically today) coming too fast.

Everything was the same.

You stared at the ceiling for a while anyway, grinning like an idiot at nobody, before you finally closed your eyes.

You were asleep in minutes.

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It ran through your mind so often over the next few days that you sometimes found yourself preparing for conversations that didn't even exist yet. Out loud in the shower. In the back of cabs. In the recording studio while your producer was trying to give you feedback (Sandra needed to literally shake you awake to get you out of that one).

And every time the landline rang, your heart practically attempted to torpedo itself directly out of your thoracic cavity. Which was unfortunate, because you got a lot of phone calls.

For the first few days, you'd find yourself jolting to life every time your phone went off, already half-expecting to hear that familiar soft voice you'd spent years listening to on records and television interviews.

Instead it was Jerry from production. Or your publicist. Or Sandra.

Or, on one particularly humiliating occasion —

"Hello?" "Hi. Am I speaking to — " You stood up straighter. "Yes?" "Wonderful. I'm outside with your pizza." 

That had been your lesson in the dangers of anticipation.

Eventually your brain surrendered to the slow, inevitable process of habituation. And by the seventh day, the ringing of the phone no longer startled you half to death.

You reviewed the facts: Sandra had given your number to Frank. Frank had, presumably, given it to Michael. And somewhere presently on the planet, Michael Jackson theoretically possessed a piece of paper with ten digits written on it. That was all.

And a week of silence was basically an answer enough.

People got busy. He was on tour. Tours were enormous. They were schedule-devouring things that swallowed time whole. He'd had a moment of curiosity, or amusement, or whatever it had been — an impulse Frank had been dispatched to act on — and then the impulse had passed.

It was fine.

You were fine.

The thin, persistent thread of disappointment you'd been carrying around since approximately day three was simply the natural result of an unusual situation. Nothing more.

You reflected on this with great reasonableness as you dragged yourself through the door of your apartment at half past two in the morning, still wearing the clothes you'd put on fourteen hours earlier. You towed with you a full-body exhaustion that came from a day of back-to-back rehearsals for a television appearance that was, in your current state, becoming increasingly difficult to feel enthusiastic about.

Your feet hurt. Your voice had settled into a low, scratchy register that always developed after a day of singing without nearly enough water. The apartment was dark and quiet and perfect and all you wanted to do was fall face-first into bed and temporarily cease to exist for the next eight hours.

You managed the shoes. The jacket. You dropped your keys onto a random surface and would spend the next morning wondering where they'd gone. Your makeup was regrettably left on. Whatever ended up on the pillowcase was tomorrow's problem. It needed changing anyway.

Within minutes of your body hitting the mattress, sleep took you completely, the sheer weight of the week finally pulling you under. Your brain didn't even bother with the gradual descent of light sleep, skipping N1 and N2 completely. You plummeted straight into the heavy, restorative depths of N3. It was a dreamless, total blackout. And you were frolicking in it.

.

.

.

The phone rang at 3:17 a.m.

Somehow you heard it under fifteen layers of unconsciousness. Despite this, you continued your stroll through the serene meadows of dreamland, your brain deciding to file the interruption under: not relevant, continue slumbering.

You pulled your blankets closer.

The ringing stopped.

Then it started again.

You made a deeply chagrined noise into the pillow that communicated your feelings about this development clearly, if not articulately. Whoever this was would give up. Everyone gave up eventually.

The ringing stopped.

Then, with what felt like a hidden agenda, it started again. A third time.

Three separate, consecutive, deliberate phone calls at 3:17 in the morning from someone who clearly had no intention of developing any shame.

You sat up. Hastily, with an utter lack of grace — surfacing from sleep like something dredged from the bottom of a lake. Hair everywhere. Eyes not fully functioning. A deep and righteous fury gathering in your chest at whoever was on the other end of the phone.

You had been asleep. Beautifully asleep. You had a rehearsal in what was now less than eight hours, and you needed every single one of them. And the person currently dialing your number for what was now the third time in a row was going to understand that very clearly. You grabbed the phone from its place on the wall and almost ripped it off the mount entirely.

“Who the fuck is this.”

…

Nothing. Not even breathing, or the faint shuffle of someone hesitating at the pure vitriol that had just escaped your mouth. Just the empty, electric buzz of an open line at three in the morning. 

Then, very faintly —

“...hi.”

…

The absence that followed was the loudest thing you’d ever personally produced.

You knew that voice.

You knew that voice very well. Disturbingly well, considering you had just identified it from one small, scarcely spoken word while operating on half a mind. It had nestled itself into the minute crevices of your bones without you having chosen to put it there.

The cadence of it. The specific hush. How even a single syllable carried something immediately, unmistakably him.

“...um… it’s Michael…”

It was Michael Jackson…

You’d just asked Michael Jackson who the fuck he was.

The belated mortification arrived in a single, consummate wave, wiping out what remained of your righteous furor and replacing it with the sudden, hideous realization of what you’d just done.

“Oh my god,” you said. Now very much awake. “I’m so sorry. I’m so — that was — I didn’t know it was you. I was asleep, I didn’t — oh my god. I’m really sorry, Mr. Jackson, that was—”

“No, no,” he said swiftly.

Every muscle in your body locked. You braced yourself, prepared to sink into the floor. You had basically just spat on the greatest musical artist currently alive.

“Please don’t call me that.”

You flinched. “What?” 

“Mr. Jackson,” he said, and there was a twinge of embarrassment in how he corrected it. “That’s what people call my father.”

This had somehow thrown you more than the profanity had. “Right,” you said. “Sorry. Michael.”

From the speaker of your telephone came a sound you were not prepared for: a laugh. Small. Genuine. Caught between apology and delight.

“It’s okay,” he said, and the amusement in his voice made everything worse. “I deserved that.”

A yawn pulled itself out of you, born of vexation and legitimate exhaustion. You pressed the heel of your palm to your forehead. 

“Actually yeah,” you said, because humiliation had limits, but your commitment to being correct did not. “You do. You called me three times. Do you have any idea what time it is?” 

Apparently, whatever distress had seized you a moment earlier surrendered almost instantly to the stronger, uglier force of your weariness. “I don’t care who you are,” you continued. “Nobody interrupts a woman when she is sleeping.” 

“I know, I’m sorry. I’m in Osaka.” 

You processed this. Osaka was — you did the math badly twice before arriving at: very far ahead. Afternoon, for him. An hour at which people made phone calls without first considering whether they were cutting into someone else’s sleep. You dragged a hand down your face.

“You forgot the time difference.”

A weak scuffling came across the telephone line. “Well — no, I didn’t forget. It’s just — ” he hesitated, “I needed to make sure you were home?”

At that, you glared daggers at the wall in front of you. The logical part of you, still violently deprived of the joys of snoozing, was begging you to hang up, lest tomorrow’s poor rehearsal crew be forced to face the wrath of a sleep-destitute you.

Unfortunately, another part of you was still reeling from the fact that this was the call. The call you had been waiting for. The call you had convinced yourself would never come.

And now that it had, every sensible thought in your head went straight out the window, taking with it every carefully rehearsed version of how this conversation was supposed to go.

"That's — okay," you said finally. "That's actually a fair point."

"Yeah?"

"I’ve been busy."

You could hear the shrug in his voice. "I figured."

Letting your body trudge itself back to the bed, you dragged the phone cable behind you. The receiver stayed pressed to your ear as you climbed under the covers again and pulled them over your knees. “Took you a while to call.”

"A week," he said, “I kept starting to dial and then — ”

You waited for him to continue. “And then?”

“I’d hang up.” There was something painfully simple about the confession. It came without explanation, without some careful little speech to make it sound better. Just the image of him standing there with your number half-dialed and no idea what to do with himself.

You looked down at the landline cord twisted over the edge of the mattress. "So what made tonight the night?" you asked.

A pause. You had the impression of him settling — a shift in the quality of the stillness, the way you could sometimes tell through the phone that somebody had gotten more comfortable.

“I had a good show tonight,” he said. “And after a good show I always want to — I don’t know. Tell someone. It’s usually the same people and I love them. But I’d been thinking about calling you all week, and tonight I thought — well, why not?”

He stopped.

“Is that strange?”

“A little,” you said honestly. His breath caught a little too close to the receiver.

“But not in a bad way,” you added. “I don’t mind being privy to the afterglow of a good show.”

He seemed to like that answer. You heard it in the sparse exhale that followed, the slight loosening of something.

“But not at three in the goddamn morning.”

He chuckled. “I’ll remember that.”

“Yeah, you better.”

“I’ll write it down.”

“Underline it.”

“Twice.”

The clock continued to tick by your bedside.

“So how was your day?” he asked.

Your eyebrows rose, surprised by the direction this exchange had taken. “You’re asking me how my day was?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I wanna know.”

You looked at the ceiling. The dark of your apartment. The thin strip of light coming from under the door. "Long," you responded. "I've been in rehearsals since noon. TV thing next week."

"Which song?"

“Two, actually. One older, one from the new album.”

"Which older one?"

You told him.

“That one’s great,” he said. “The bridge especially.”

You blinked. “Really? The bridge almost didn’t make the final cut. The label wanted it shorter.”

"They were wrong."

“They were,” you agreed. “I had to fight for it.”

"You should always fight for the bridge."

And, without either of you quite deciding to, that was where the conversation found its footing. 

You hated how easily the corner of your mouth betrayed you. More than that, you hated how natural it felt. How one subject slipped into the next. How one topic found another. As if this were one of many calls instead of just the first one — his voice reaching you from Osaka while you lay half-buried in your blankets in your quaint New York apartment.

The talk continued.

One thing led to another in a loose little pattern of its own, neither of you steering it so much as following where it went. You talked about the television rehearsal, and he talked about the Osaka show — a specific moment in one of the songs where something had finally clicked in a way it hadn’t in weeks. The feeling of that and how hard it was to explain to anyone who hadn’t experienced it.

You knew what he meant. You told him so, and he said, “Yes, exactly,” and his voice eased.

He was funny, which caught you slightly off guard. Dry and quick, with better comedic timing than you would have expected from someone so often treated like an untouchable monument. He made you laugh twice in the first ten minutes and seemed pleased with himself both times, though he tried badly to hide it. It was endearing.

The words came faster than they usually did with new people, arriving without the usual self-conscious editing. There was a noticeable absence of measuring, of constantly deciding what to give and what to keep back.

There was an honest curiosity in the way he asked questions. Different from the performed attention you got in interviews, designed to flatter just enough to open you up. His questions landed with the weight of someone listening closely, like what you said mattered.

Betwixt another rehearsal story and his complaint about the Osaka hotel having terrible tea, it hit you with rude, inconvenient clarity: this should have felt stranger, right?

He should have felt farther away.

Against all sense, he sounded close enough that the thought of him calling again did not feel nearly as terrifying as a sober, perfectly conscious version of you knew it should have.

Though not at three in the morning, obviously. You still had principles.

Michael was telling you about a dancer who had missed his cue but had recovered so well the audience thought it was part of choreography.

“You should hire him for every mistake from now on,” you said, your voice still thick with the harrowing beckon of sleep but gaining a playful edge.

“I told him that,” Michael replied. You could hear the grin in his voice.

“You did not.”

“I did.”

“That’s cruel, Mr. Ja — Michael. Truly.” You shifted under the duvet, the landline cord tangling around your arm as you settled in.

“He laughed!”

“That man was probably terrified of you,” you countered. A series of rhythmic car honks rose from the street outside your window, thank you New York. You rolled your eyes before continuing. “Most people would be. You’re a perfectionist with a global empire; one misplaced step probably feels like a death sentence for him.”

“He was not terrified of me,” Michael defended quickly. “We have a good relationship. He’s a professional.”

“Michael, you are Michael Jackson.”

“That doesn’t mean people are terrified of me.”

“It means people pretend not to be terrified of you out of professionalism.”

He lost his sentence halfway through, a wheeze coming through the telephone line. You beamed.

“Can I tell you something?” you whispered, somewhere around what turned out to be the forty-minute mark.

"Sure."

“The fan events,” you winced, already lamenting it.

He choked on whatever he was about to say next. “Oh, the article mentioned that.”

“Yes, I know,” you said, with as much dignity as you could manage. “And I would like to note for the record that I am extremely normal about you.”

“Are you?”

“Yes — ”

“The fan meetings,” he said, circling it back, clearly enjoying himself.

You closed your eyes briefly. “It was twice. Maybe three times. It was a long time ago, before my first single, so technically — ”

“Which tours?”

“I’m not answering that.”

“Triumph or Victory?”

“I’m actually not — ”

“Both?”

“Goodbye,” you said, the last shreds of your ego rapidly dissipating.

A thud came through the speaker. He had dropped the phone. Somewhere in Osaka, Michael Jackson appeared to be losing a fight with his own laughter. You were in the middle of figuring out how not to burst into flames.

“Well, I appreciate it,” he said, when he’d settled. His phrasing sincere now, the teasing gone from it. “That you were there.”

“You can’t appreciate it,” you protested, drawing the words out as if you hadn’t been the one to bring it up in the first place. “It gives you too much leverage.”

"I won't use it against you."

"You literally just did."

“I won't use it against you again,” he amended, his tone mellowing into something more genial than the playful banter from a moment ago.

You were smiling, which seemed to be the default state this phone call had put you in. “I need to ask you something in return. Fair is fair.”

“Okay.”

“You read the whole article?” 

The silence that followed was immediate and very informative. Static crackled faintly over the line, carrying all the confession he refused to say out loud.

“Aha!”

“I read some of it.”

“Enough that you knew about the fan meetings?”

“I skimmed it.”

“Oh, who knew,” you said, tickled. “Michael Jackson is a man who likes to read articles about himself — ”

“I was not reading it because it was about me.”

That shut you up. He continued, quieter now.

“...It just… it mentioned you.”

The heat that rushed across your face was immediate. You dropped the phone. Apparently you were both clumsy with phones.

The receiver landed on your pillow, threatening to slide down to the floor while you pressed both hands over your face, as if you could physically force the reaction back into your skull. You let your head fall back against the pillow and stared at the ceiling, thinking that of all the ways this call could have gone, this was not one you had imagined.

This easy, partly ridiculous thing. This conversation that had begun with you swearing at him and had become something you did not want to end. Talking to him felt less like an event and more like something you had been waiting for without even knowing you were waiting.

The bluish light of your alarm clock washed over the side of your face.

4:02

“Oh, hell.”

A muffled sound came from the blankets. Crap. The phone.

You scrambled for it and dragged it back to your ear.

“Are you still there?”

“I’m here,” Michael said.

You had been on the phone for fifty minutes. Rehearsal was in less than seven hours. You had not slept nearly enough, and rehearsal was happening whether you were prepared for it or not. You were still in yesterday’s clothes, lying in the dark of your apartment, talking to a man on the other side of the world, and you needed, with some urgency, to go to sleep.

“I have to go,” you said. Even as you said it, there was a fragile reluctance in it that you suspected he could hear. “It’s four in the morning.”

"Yeah?"

“I have rehearsal in — ” You squinted at the clock. “Six and a half hours.”

You heard him laugh. “Do not laugh. You have taken years off my life.”

“I’ll call earlier next time.”

Next time.

The words slipped into the room far too easily. 

“Promise?” Whether you were asking him to promise he would actually call earlier, or whether you were asking him to promise that he would call again at all, you weren’t sure.

“Yes,” he said. “Promise.”

A beat.

“Probably.”

“Michael.”

He chuckled: a low, unhurried sound you were already too familiar with for someone who had only called you once.

You did not move immediately. Neither did he, it seemed. The line stayed open, both of you sitting on either end of it before it actually ended.

His laughter was the last thing you heard before the call clicked dead. You set the receiver down and lay back in the dark.

The apartment was exactly as it had been an hour ago — same walls, same ceiling, same cold air, same thin line of light under the door — and you were exactly as you had been, tired and in yesterday’s clothes with tomorrow (technically today) coming too fast.

Everything was the same.

You stared at the ceiling for a while anyway, grinning like an idiot at nobody, before you finally closed your eyes.

You were asleep in minutes.

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the last few hours had been spent doing nothing of any real consequence: coffee, window shopping, treating your girls to whatever happened to catch their eye. somewhere in the middle of it all, a spirited debate had broken out over whether the diner around the corner had actually gotten worse, or if you'd all simply developed more discerning tastes as you'd gotten older. it was the kind of afternoon you would think back on when life got too loud again.

a constant smile plagued your lips as you revelled in the sun's kisses.

you were laughing at something — you’d forgotten what — when the first flashbulb sparked to life across the street like a bomb going off.

and just like that, you felt your mood sour.

right. the paparazzi.

you'd been naive to think you could make it back to the car without them. you always were. some stubborn optimistic part of you still believed, every single time, that today would be different — that you could just be a girl with a coffee cup and not a cover story waiting to happen.

they crossed toward you fast, cameras raised, questions flying before they'd even reached the curb.

"are the album rumors true?"

"are you touring next year?"

"who are you wearing?"

your friends — bless them — closed ranks instinctively around you, forming a tight barricade between your body and the ever-growing crowd. you lowered your sunglasses just enough for them to catch your eyes and the utter annoyance written across them. a small sigh slipped from

your lips, followed by a muttered apology to your girls, which they waved off with a, "don't worry! i've been enjoying pissing these guys off."

you could've kissed them.

it was then that one voice managed to cut through the noise. maybe it was because they were louder than the others, or maybe it was simply the nature of the question itself, but somehow you heard it perfectly.

“how do you feel about michael jackson?”

in that instant — you stopped walking. your friends barrelled straight into your back, nearly falling over each other into one giant meat pile. they stared at you in confusion, before bracing into a familiar sensation of dread.

the thing was, you did have thoughts about michael jackson. you had a lot of thoughts about michael jackson, actually — thoughts you'd managed to keep more or less to yourself through roughly three years of being a public figure, which had been a not-insignificant personal achievement.

"for fuck's sake," another breathed — hissing your name through their teeth — amused but nonetheless exasperated, “don't do it. you'll regret it."

you’d suddenly become aware that all three of them had turned to look at you; their expressions reflective of people who had known you long enough to understand that whatever came out of your mouth in the next five seconds was about to become their problem too.

"ah, shit," one of them said beside your ear.

the corner of your mouth twitched upward.

you bit the edge of your manicured finger — not for show, just because it was what you did when you were trying not to smile too wide — and gazed at the nearest camera over the frame of your sunglasses. 

"oh," you said, already stepping backwards towards the car with all the confidence of someone who definitely hadn't thought this through:

"i think you know how i feel about michael jackson."

and just like that the once-quiet street corner erupted. camera flashes blazed everywhere. simple questions turned into shouts that were hurled through the crisp summer air. behind you, your friends made a variety of noises ranging from hysterical laughter to a soft, resigned despair. you laughed too, helplessly, ducking your head as you reached the car door — and then, drunk on the spontaneity of the moment, you turned back one last time.

you found the nearest lens. pointed directly at it. then, dumb and deliberate, you lifted your hand to your cheek — pinky and thumb extended in a tiny telephone gesture — and mouthed, with perfect clarity, the two words you would soon continue to regret for the next seventy-two hours:

“call me.”

⤹ ii. the imperial hotel — tokyo, japan

michael jackson was not paying attention to his manager.

this was not, in itself, unusual. frank had been managing michael long enough to know that his attention operated according to its own internal logic, orbiting whatever had caught it most recently with a concentration most people reserved for things like surgery or defusing explosives. generally, you just had to wait it out. stay in his eyeline. keep talking. eventually, whatever had him occupied would let go, and he'd surface again — slightly apologetic, entirely present — and you could pick up where you'd left off.

though tonight, frank was beginning to suspect they were entering whole new territory.

it had started innocuously enough. they'd been going over the next leg of the tour — tokyo, osaka, yokohama — working through the precise logistical minutiae that kept operations of this size from collapsing into complete chaos: interview schedules, press appearances. the yokohama venue had changed its staging dimensions, which meant choreography adjustments, which meant a conversation with the team that neither of them particularly wanted to have. security wanted to reroute the airport transfer after the crowd incident in rotterdam. there were wardrobe decisions for osaka that couldn't be put off much longer.

standard. manageable. things michael was normally at least nominally engaged with.

except that somewhere in the middle of frank's briefing, michael had reached sideways and picked up that morning's newspaper from the coffee table — the hotel staff had left it by the door a few hours earlier — and had gone somewhere else entirely.

frank had noticed but he'd assumed it was, as always, a momentary distraction. a photograph had caught his eye. he'd put it down in a minute.

but soon a minute passed; he did not put it down.

despite this, frank kept talking: tokyo. six o'clock rehearsal. two press junkets before noon. the security note about the airport.

“mhm,” michael said.

frank paused, put the planning folder down, and leaned over michael's shoulder at the newspaper — mostly to understand what he was currently losing to.

a singer.

he had heard of her. honestly, at this point, most of the industry had.

young, critically respected, she'd somehow managed to become attached to words like prodigy and generational within months of entering the public eye. she had arrived seemingly out of nowhere, released a number one single, collected enough glowing reviews to make veteran critics sound like infatuated fangirls, and then done something that was — from a publicity standpoint — completely unheard of:  become even more elusive after the success.

rare tours. rare interviews. a mystique that you couldn't quite manufacture, that came from someone who genuinely seemed to have no interest in being known.

she was a pretty girl. michael was hardly immune to the draw of a pretty girl. he just usually remembered when there was a conversation happening around them.

"CALL ME" — POP'S NEWEST SENSATION SENDS MESSAGE TO MICHAEL JACKSON

frank reached over and tilted the magazine to read the headline properly.

michael, having noticed the shift in the room's energy, looked up from the newspaper for the first time in several minutes. he wore the joyous astonishment of a child who had just discovered a secret.

that made frank straighten up.

"she—" he started.

"i can see it," frank said.

michael went back to reading.

the article had photographs, as most of them do. frank could only imagine the sheer frenzy on that street when they were taken. the sequence was stretched across a full spread: her laughing with her hand raised; that finger-to-mouth expression the caption described as coy, which — frank decided — was underselling it considerably; the backwards walk toward the car; and then the final shot.

her, pointed directly at the lens. that unmistakable little telephone gesture. wearing the grin of someone who had just pleased herself tremendously.

he watched michael linger on that last photograph for a long moment. he'd known, in a vague way, that michael had been following her career. it was hard to miss: the magazine clippings that appeared backstage, the way he'd pause in hallways when her songs came on the radio, the absurdly too casual mention of her name once or twice in conversation. frank had filed it away under professional admiration. michael admired a great many artists, and it rarely amounted to anything. 

in hindsight, the signs had been embarrassingly obvious.

"the catering people still need your menu choices." frank tried again.

"uhuh."

"there’s a signing event for thursday."

"mhm."

"i promised the press you'd wrestle a bear."

"yep, sounds good."

frank closed his eyes, a dim frustration slowly creeping into his soul. he moved to cover his face with both hands, pressing the heels of his palms against his forehead — physically trying to stop the headache before it arrived.

michael turned a page. then he started reading the thing aloud. frank couldn't help but laugh at that. "'sources close to the singer claim she has quietly admired jackson since his jackson 5 days— '"

he turned towards him immediately, smile bright. "she likes me."

"yes, michael," frank said, the last of his resistance gradually ebbing away. "it would appear so." 

michael went back to reading. "'the songwriter has reportedly attended multiple jackson fan events over the years under aliases—'"

he jolted up in his seat.

"she went to fan club meetings."

"michael—"

"she went to fan club meetings." he repeated, sounding genuinely and helplessly delighted by the discovery. as if it was the best thing anyone had told him in some time.

frank pursed his lips together, an attempt to hold onto the last threads of his dwindling sanity. then, because this was his job and he was a professional, he picked up his previously abandoned folder in a final act of war.

"you have choreography revisions tomorrow. the staging for — "

"'friends describe the singer as having an encyclopaedic knowledge of jackson's back catalogue, extending well beyond his commercial singles — '"

michael pointed at the page.

"she. knows. the b-sides." every word was punctuated with an almost comical emphasis.

conversation left the room soon after, frank finally relinquished the ever-losing battle for michael's attention and let him continue reading the newspaper. it left for barely a minute, though it felt much longer, the only sounds filling the expansive suite were the steady ticking of the overly grandiose grandfather clock in the corner and frank rapping his fingers against the leather sofa. waiting for the moment michael returned to the world around him for air.

then, very softly: "she thinks i'm attractive."

the folder was set aside, never to be picked up again that evening. frank looked at michael — who was still looking at the photograph of the girl — and found something in his face that he hadn't seen there in a long while, boyishly hopeful.

he sighed. it came from somewhere deep, that sigh. tired and fond and already resigned to the amount of work this was about to create for him.

michael finally set the paper down. and turned to face him properly.

and then he did that thing. frank privately thought of it as the please routine — somehow both the most earnest and the most unfair weapon in michael jackson's considerable repertoire. "no," he said, out of principle.

michael blinked. "you didn’t even know what i was going to ask."

"you want her number."

his eyes drifted back to the photograph for just a second before returning to frank, carrying such transparent, optimistic guilt that frank genuinely wondered — not for the first time — how a man this famous had managed to stay this uncynical.

"…maybe."

frank couldn't even remember making the decision. one moment he was sitting there, determined to be sensible, and the next he was crossing the suite toward the desk, reaching for the telephone, and trying to track down the manager of a young singer who had made one very impulsive gesture on a new york street corner and was very certainly not expecting anyone to actually take her up on it.

⤹ iii. columbia records — new york city, usa

here was the thing about that paparazzi moment, in your defense: it had felt very different in the moment.

in the car, immediately afterwards, it had felt funny. a bit reckless, maybe, the way some things sometimes are when the afternoon was warm and your friends were there and the question caught you off guard and your mouth had simply — moved. faster than your brain. not the first time that’s happened, though usually the consequences were considerably more manageable than this.

you could still remember your friends playfully shoving your shoulders, telling you what a complete idiot you are. and, like the complete idiot you are, you'd simply giggled before taking another idle sip of your scalding hot caramel latte.

by that evening, when the first photograph had started circulating, it had felt approximately thirty percent less funny.

by the morning, when you'd seen the headline, it had dropped to around seventy percent less funny, helped along considerably by the barrage of phone calls consisting almost entirely of "i told you so"s.

but then three days had passed, and the news cycle had moved on to something else, and you'd started breathing normally again. it had been a moment. a funny moment. it would become a story you told at dinner parties. remember that time i told michael jackson to call me in the papers? and that would be that.

the columbia records conference room was the type of place that made you feel both pretentiously important and sleepy. floor-to-ceiling windows. expensive abstract paintings that you could guarantee nobody had ever actually looked at. a long table covered in the comfortable detritus of a working meeting: your demo tapes, legal pads, someone's abandoned coffee from an hour ago that nobody had bothered to remove, a fruit plate that had been picked over to the point of mostly just grapes.

you had, in this way, entirely convinced yourself.

the label's a&r team was in the middle of a fairly fervent conversation about the rollout strategy for your next album, which you were half-following while also doodling something shapeless in the margins of your notebook. it was either a landscape or a large dog. you hadn't decided.

sandra was on the other side of the table, flipping through papers with her phone tucked between her shoulder and her ear. she'd stepped into the call a minute ago without breaking stride, continuing to sort contracts and scribble notes as though multitasking at this level was simply her natural state.

you were starting to tune her out, too…

until a moment later, when sandra said, "...i'm sorry?" in a timbre that made you look up.

the room kept talking around you. you watched her face do something strange — the paperwork abruptly forgotten, her pen set down, her focus now fully redirected to the phone.

you mouthed noiselessly at her: what?

a shushing gesture was instantly sent your way. another pause.

she glanced across the table at you, and you knew, from twenty-two years of being alive and three years of working very closely with sandra, that whatever she was about to say had absolutely nothing to do with the album.

she pressed the receiver against her blazer, muffling the conversation. "the consequences of your own actions," she said discreetly, "are currently on the phone." 

your eyebrows drew together. "what does that even mean?"

around the table, the conversation had begun to trail off. people were listening now without looking like they were listening, a skill everyone in this industry had finely honed.

"this is the manager," sandra said. she stopped. you shrugged at her, still puzzled.

"...of michael jackson."

you felt the world freeze at that. the pigeons outside the window hung in the air. somebody halfway through reaching for a grape seemed to stay there indefinitely. even the old man currently suspended washing the windows seemed to pause halfway down the glass.

"he would like," sandra continued, watching the realisation crash through you in real time, "your phone number."

silence.

a total, comprehensive silence.

not from the room — the room still very much existed. people were still breathing. somebody's chair made a small noise as they shifted their weight. somewhere, a page turned. but from you, specifically.

 a silence that spread from the centre of your chest outward until it reached the tips of your fingers and your mouth, which had fallen open just enough to let flies in.

"what," you said. not actually a question. more like a stall for time.

several executives at the table were no longer pretending. one of them — david, from marketing, a man you'd always liked for his complete lack of subtlety — had set his pen down, eyebrows somewhere near his hairline (which was receding), watching you with an undisguised interest.

sandra released the phone from the confines of her blazer. on the other end of the line—and you were now acutely, horribly aware of the other end of the line—you could just about make out the voice of a man who sounded, even from where you were, profoundly unenthusiastic about the task he'd been assigned.

you almost felt sorry for him. almost.

you were slightly busy having your own internal, private crisis.

what you hadn't accounted for — what the warmth of the afternoon and your friends' laughter and the sheer improbable silliness of the moment had completely obscured — was that you were not actually like this.

the person on that street corner who bit her finger and said smooth things at cameras and made ditzy little telephone gestures at international superstars was a version of you that only really existed outdoors, in sunlight, when the adrenaline was high and the stakes seemed abstract.

the version of you sitting in this conference room right now was the one who got shy at parties. who rehearsed phone calls before making them. who had, on more than one occasion, refused to introduce herself to someone she admired because the embarrassment of a bad interaction seemed considerably more permanent than regret.

and that version of you had just been volunteered, by the other version of you, for a phone call with michael jackson.

"oh my god," you whinged in total incredulity.

"what do i tell them?" sandra hissed, shielding the receiver.

"why would he actually—" you started.

"you told him to."

"that was—" you stopped, both palms flying up, facing outward beside your head in immediate self-defence. "that was a joke."

"clearly,” she raised a brow at you, “he did not interpret it as one."

you dropped your head into your hands. the conference table was very solid and real under your elbows.

"what do i say?" sandra said again, urgent now, because the man on the other side was still waiting and his patience had clearly been thin to begin with.

a long moment.

you uncovered your face, only to find yourself clutching your cheeks, which were smoldering beneath your skin.

for a brief, deeply humiliating moment, you thought about being fifteen years old and spending all your allowance on bootleg concert tapes. about making your friends sit through lengthy arguments over why off the wall was the better album, regardless of thriller's overall commercial success. about hearing one of his songs on the radio and driving an extra three blocks just to hear the ending. 

you thought about that girl on the street corner — the one who had somehow managed to outrun your common sense.

you took a slow breath, smoothed your expression into something resembling composure, fixed your posture, and said, with as much dignity as you could salvage from the wreckage,

"...yeah. give him the number."

sandra stared at you for exactly one second, still somewhat unimpressed with your behaviour. then she turned back to the phone.

the room gradually resumed its normal rhythm, the a&r team once again descending into their argument, though a few suspiciously ill-timed coughs were now sprinkled throughout the discussion. in the corner of the office, the old man outside the window had resumed wiping the glass, blissfully unaware of the happenings going on inside.

you gathered your useless paper doodles into a neat pile, making a vague attempt at resembling someone who was doing something important and had her life under control.

it was, by any measure, an unconvincing performance. you pressed your fingers to your mouth.

"…oh my god."

across the room, sandra was already reading the number out, her voice perfectly steady, giving nothing away. she was a consummate professional and you were extraordinarily lucky to have her.

the man on the other end said something clipped and final.

the call ended.

sandra set the phone down and met your eyes across the table. the silence between you carried the particular weight of two people who had worked together long enough to communicate entire paragraphs without speaking.

"the album rollout," she said, picking her pen back up, "is still our most pressing concern."

"right," you said. "absolutely."

the meeting resumed.

you did not hear a single word of it.

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