I carried the half-empty glass of milk back upstairs and closed my door behind me. I quietly locked it, put the milk aside, and sank onto the mattress, exhaling quietly as my brain raced furiously.
Calista?
A producer.
That mean face? Pretty, okay, but mean face?
You'd think she'd be a corporate lawyer or an investment banker, and here she was producing something. Not that it'd change what my previous impression of her was, but I would've expected a bit more suit-and-tie.
Instead, it turns out that we had something in common.
I closed my eyes momentarily. Sleep wasn't about to knock on my window anytime soon, so I decided to do some impromptu investigation first. I picked my phone, unlocked it, and browsed through music apps and Youtube and whatever was in there.
I went to the charts.
Scrolled through the top fifty. Women, mostly. A few mixed acts. Good stuff, a lot of it, genuinely, this world's pop music had the same fundamental bones as mine because human beings wanted the same things regardless of which version of Earth they were standing on.
Love. Recognition. Acceptance. Sex.
Some of the songs were genuinely good, with some similarities to the contemporary pop music I was vaguely familiar with. There were also, obviously, major differences, but to get too bogged down with the details would've been silly.
Bottom line, I listened to what I found, and none of those songs were a complete replica of what I used to listen to in my previous world.
Then, I filtered by male artists.
The list came back with thirteen entries.
Thirteen.
In a world of billions.
I gulped, looking at that number for a moment—internalizing the craziness of how much a minority we were—then started from the top.
The first song was by someone called Lior and it was called Gentle.
Nice guitar riff. A trained voice, nothing too spectacular or too distinct. The lyrics were mostly about wanting to go around the city without being looked at.
"......"
I moved to the next one.
A man named Cael. His song was called More Than This. He wanted to be seen as a full person. The chorus said so three times in case you missed it the first two.
Next.
Unbroken, by someone called Emmett Shore.
I had moderate hopes for twenty seconds, during which the production was genuinely interesting, and then the first verse arrived and Emmett began describing the experience of being stared at in a grocery store and how it made him feel like an object and not a human being with hopes and an interior life.
I paused it.
Stared at the ceiling.
Resumed it.
He wasn't wrong. I had personal experience with the staring phenomenon, as of approximately less than 24 hours ago, probably. So, I could sort of understand the 'troubles' Emmett was going through, though not on a large enough scale that could apparently warrant such intensity from such a strong song, nor would I ever even think of writing such a song.
No man in my previous world had ever written a song like this, not because the experience didn't exist in some form, but because the culture hadn't produced the specific conditions that would make a man sit down and carefully craft a three-minute meditation on being stared too hard at the supermarket and feeling like his dick was a traffic light.
Whatever was wrong in my universe was not wrong with this universe.
But hey, art was art.
I got through the remaining ten entries in about twenty minutes.
They existed on a spectrum that ran from gentle self-assertion on one end to extremely polite grievance on the other, with a brief detour through wistful somewhere in the middle.
There was nothing about love or longing for a woman.
One of them was actually beautiful, a slow thing with almost no production, just a voice and a piano, about the specific loneliness of being wanted for a reason that had nothing to do with who you actually were.
That one I played twice.
Then I searched for things I knew.
Names. Titles. Specific songs that had to be extremely popular, or well-known at least.
Nothing.
Not close-but-different, not similar-but-attributed-to-someone-else. Just nothing, clean absences where entire bodies of work should've been, like looking at a night sky and realizing whole constellations had disappeared. I felt a bitter hollowness in my chest, knowing that all the songs I grew up with were, simply, gone.
Of course. Different world. Different everything. The specific chain of events that produced any given song from my old life, the person, the circumstance, the afternoon they sat down and wrote the first line, none of it had happened here because none of it could have.
"......"
Thirteen songs, and the most emotionally adventurous thing any of them had attempted was to suggest that, while we were still waiting for a utopia with men as full people in our own right, the occasional can of cold Pepsi was still nice.
There was a certain grim inevitability to the music industry everywhere. Every era had a trend, a standard, and these were, apparently, a bunch of songs about being a man in a post-gender apocalypse.
Still, better than nothing.
But it did leave me wondering...
Could I actually make it big in this industry if I modernized the shit out of things here?
My fingers twitched, like my mind's subconscious response was to immediately set to work on a project. Thirteen, very careful men made very considerate music about the measured experience of existing in a world that was completely dominated by women. Their lyrics didn't invoke anything in particular. They didn't push against anything. They weren't bold or passionate.
Good music with forgettable lyrics.
And they still did well enough to hit the top 50, with some songs even cracking the top 30 and holding their place for weeks or months.
Where would I fit in the grand scheme of things?
How would I get noticed? What would I offer that was fresh enough.
I opened the notes app.
Wrote one line.
Looked at it.
Laughed, realizing that I had no idea what a massive undertaking this would be. Still, the question nagged at me.
'What are my artistic limits, now?'
What should the next line of that song be, given that the entire idea still existed only as an individual sentence for now.
I stared at the blinking line.
I wrote a second line underneath it.
Then a third that surprised me slightly.
If I managed to polish this into a somewhat complete thought, then who knows what might come after.
This... wasn't completely stupid, I told myself.
I gulped, excitement boiling up inside of me.
This wasn't completely stupid, was it?
It was such an untapped market for all intents and purposes. A simple change of angle, a new perspective, that could potentially break through and propel something huge.
It was like finding a loop-hole in the system that was just so obvious, yet the fact that nobody had brought it up so far means either no one had a genius idea such as this or it simply did not work, for whatever reason.
I closed the notes app, lost in thought.
…
I'd seen very little of the enigmatic sister today; she had come and gone like the wind, quietly, without a fuss. It was by pure happenstance—or the universe's throw of the dice—that I couldn't fall asleep by the time I heard the front door opening and closing, the click clack of heels, and then soft footfalls of tired feet now rid of the painful, shoe-inflicting spikes.
It had to be Calista. Everyone else was already accounted for at that hour.
I shuffled my feet out of bed and stood up. There was a moment's hesitation where I deliberated whether or not I should seek her out immediately. Tomorrow could wait, no? Perhaps, but I preferred getting a feel for Calista right now, where no one else could interfere.
I turned the doorknob slowly.
Lightly.
Lightly enough that I hoped the sound, even the feel of the vibration, didn't carry down to where the night-owl currently dwelled.
The hallway was dark except for the stairwell light Willow left on, likely for me I figured. In addition to the stairwell light, some small slivers of moonlight pushed their way through the large living room windows and painted some of the room in pale blue-white.
I crept silently down the steps and headed towards where I thought I'd last heard Calista, near the foyer and the downcast window.
What greeted me was her back, clad in a dark figure-hugging dress that accentuated the generous curves. The window was slightly open, just one side, either let air or let it out.
Turns out the latter, when I caught a wisp of smoke rising above her shoulder and saw a lit end of a stick between her fingers.
She exhaled.
Her shoulders trembled.
And then she parted her hair, a little, tucking it over her ear—which did nothing but slide right back.
She hadn't heard me.
I considered, briefly, retreating. Coming back tomorrow with more information and a better plan. But I knew, somehow, this was the perfect opportunity.
I advanced.
Lightfoot.
Quiet.
"... Cailsta?" I called out.
She froze.
Lifted the cigarette slowly.
Dragged slowly.
Before exhaling deeply.
And then Calista looked at me, from the corner of her eyes. Never fully turning, only taking a half-step at the very most. "You're awake..." I didn't know if I expected hostility or bored indifference in her tone. It didn't matter, her voice was quiet, hushed even, as she blew out her drag of nicotine.
"You were out late..."
"That I am."
Calista didn't take well to small-talks, apparently. Or maybe just me.
I waited for a little more to be spoken, when it was evident nothing would, I proceeded cautiously.
"How's work?"
"Fine. No problems."
More.
Not this empty repetitive chatter.
I stared at her back. "You know, I've picked up the guitar again."
Her head did an involuntary twist. Curiously, perhaps. It didn't mean that she would now fully turn and face me. Still, it was more than what I had before I got started.
"You did?"
"Yeah. Got inspired, maybe."
"......"
Silence.
"You've always been good at the guitar."
If that were to be interpreted as praise, then it was the flattest, most bored tone imaginable.
"... have I?"
She turned at that. Finally. She didn't meet my eyes, at first, rather opted to glare at the dying embers of her cigarettes, now caught on her lips once again.
Calista inhaled another breath of smoke. Exhaled, and the stench was everywhere.
"Yeah. You have been. You shouldn't have stopped."
She was leaning against the windowsill. One elbow rested against it and I caught a glimpse of her face, unmarred and, objectively, so damn pretty that... in this world, it probably didn't matter, given the general state of men.
The cigarette was almost done.
She looked at it, decided it had one more drag left in it, and took it.
"Why did I stop?" I asked meaningfully.
No one knew that I had no memories whatsoever, and since I didn’t say anything at the beginning, I had to stick with my current situation—and slowly unravel things as they went.
The smoke came out slowly.
"You know why..." She said, a slight curvature to her lips that could've been a smile, a grimace, or some strange expression in between.
"Humor me."
Calista dragged one last time. She watched the end flare and go red. Took it out and snuffed the red spark in the small metal bin, and then she looked at me. "Did you come all the way down here just to rub that in my face?"
Her eyes didn't shine with spite or hatred, but not too far from that.
The beginning of a storm, if I ever saw one.
I was a bit surprised by the guarded body language, and if in the next five seconds I didn't salvage it, Calista would likely just storm past me and this standoff would go on and on in the future.
"Of course not." I flashed a smile. "I came down because I couldn't sleep, and well, I was hoping I could talk to you."
"Talk to me about what?"
I couldn’t even open my mouth to reply that Calista was beginning to walk away, and there was a possibility this confrontation could end with me going back to my room empty-handed.
"Wait."
I instinctively reached out and took her by the hand.
Her eyes snapped wide open as she looked back at me, a gasp sputtering out before she instinctively yanked herself free, and well, my fragile masculinity shattered completely when I found myself doing the Michael Jackson lean, except that there was no support for me to defy gravity, and ended up slamming straight to the floor.