Fort of Grace.
Chloe Cullen

The interior decorator they hired to design the living room into a neutral zone with shades of crème fraiche, bone, and moonlight showcased the stained-glass window in Mike Reed’s mansion. Before, the decorators arranged green lamps and purple leather loveseats, but the orange light from the lion’s garish fangs and mane spilled into the room’s center. The lion was the unintentional centerpiece. A few frantic phone calls in the living room about clashing, young movers hauled neutral couches and carpets in and carried out the old color scheme. Mike didn’t mind it. No one asked him. He wasn’t paying the invoice. Those people preparing for guests prioritized the guest’s comfort through Mike’s erosion. 

 

#

 

On Wednesday morning, on the beige couch, Mike pulls his teal guitar, Luna, across his lap. His shaggy hair tickles his collarbone and blends into his sun-blond beard. This pulls strangers’ eyes to his compass-point chin. Frozen, he stares through the glass wall of his living room into his yard, an expansive landscape with Malibu amenities: an infinity pool, a yard of clipped grass, a horizon of cliffside views. 

 

Mike draws his eyebrows together. His fingers twitch over the guitar strings.  

 

A girl, around seventeen or eighteen, walks into his living room and says something. Mike doesn’t move. The girl assumes he hasn’t heard her.  

 

“Hi,” she repeats. He faces her, peeved. “Is it true about your pool? The rumors.” 

 

“Isn’t it early for you to be in here,” he asks with a flatlined tone. 

 

“The door was unlocked. I’m allowed to be here,” she says, prickly to his harsh response. He notices her phone at her hip, its black eye pointed at him. “It would be cooler if the rumors were true.” 

 

“Why does it fuckin’ matter if it’s true?” he snaps, moving out of the living room, through the glass doors, toward the backyard. Her camera tracks him as his five-foot-six frame stomps away with the teal guitar. A few more people gather around the girl. 

 

“Do you think today is one of his good days?” an older man in a black Don’t Be Reed 2017 shirt asks.  

 

“Could be,” the girl responds. “This is as Mike as it’ll get.” 

 

#

 

In the backyard where the infinity pool bleeds into the horizon, Mike pushes through the conifers, the red bushes, and the sunflower stalks growing together in knotted clumps. He walks off the stone path leading to the pool and barrels through the mismatched forest of dogwoods, cherry blossoms, and willows. 

 

Herm’s plants. Herm wanted a mismatched Eden. “Not everyone can have albums that survive them,” she said.  
Quietly, the guests follow Mike as he disappears into the rainbow of dense branches.

 

They whisper about lore. They parrot that the botanical maintenance of these trees from different climates is insanely expensive. The display is arrogant, they whisper, gaudy, maybe even irresponsible. They hide behind these trees, watch him recline against an oak trunk to strum Luna and hum. The guests grab their phones and stream. Mike stops. They wait for him to play another song. His patience outlasts them before they retreat toward the mansion to explore the empty rooms.  

Mike sits still for hours as the sun creeps from the east to overhead. More guests meander through his yard, searching for stimulation, for him. People’s voices weave through its shrubbery. From the forest, he spots the labyrinth. 

That maze reminds Mike of Hermia, as does the mixed trees’ perfume, spray paint, scorpions, and chicken broth. Everything reminds him of her, but staring at the tall wall of leaves, he remembers Halloween. Hermia sent him to Party City for fishnets to complete their Sid and Nancy costumes that she planned for their party that night. He returned to the labyrinth’s leaves spray-painted orange and black. He chased her hiccupy giggle to the maze’s center. “Where are you?” he shouted. She left laughs as clues. He pushed through the painted bushes to catch her on the other side of the leafy walls.  

“Did you miss me?” she asked, pinned to the dirt path.  

“Of course,” he said, relieved to hold her. 

Startled, Mike hears phone clicks from the labyrinth, so he sighs, picks himself up to head back into his place. Detour or cemented path, it all feels the same: the guests commandeer his fort, and something reminds him of Herm.  

As Mike reaches his living room, his mansion bloats with guests. A monotone voice greets him and anyone else in the living room. The flat TV automatically airs a documentary every hour. “Anyone of any age knows the name Mike Reed,” the flavorless voiceover tells the guests. They know the name, the career, the personality of Mike Reed already, but they sit on the couch. Watch the screen with open mouths. Familiar footage plays: the time he was the Rock and Rock Hall of Fame’s youngest inductee at 27, or the two-time winner of the Grammys’ New Artist Award after he rebranded himself as the folk-rock persona “Bill” for two years in the late 2010s, or the headliner of two of the top three grossing international tours. 

Mike walks into his living room, the guests fixate on the accompanying hologram, eyes glued on a younger, transparent Mike. This Mike, recreated from archival clips, used a tuxedoed, masked stunt double for the Oscars’ red carpet before emerging from backstage to perform in mesh shorts. He played guitar solos on a stage covered in loose chickens. He performed in the street outside the Staples Center when he was the venue’s booked concert.

 

“Were you there for that one?” a man asks his younger female companion. 

“I wasn’t born yet,” she says. 

The man monologues about his friend’s experience at that improvised concert. He’s loud enough that the documentary falls into the background. 

Mike knows the voiceover by heart anyway: “Few people actually know Mike Reed, though everyone has speculated what he’s like when no one’s watching.” The hologram flashes between all the awards Mike Reed won. For one of the award announcements for the 2026 Grammys, the footage shows Mike seated in his chair to receive it, and the presenter, a confused Cardi B, walks the award down the stairs and out to him. 

“What a dick,” the younger woman says. 

The man hushes her. “You had to be alive then to get it.” 

“Mike and his wife, Hermia, escaped the flash of fame that most rising couples face.” The holograph morphs into a transparent version of Mike and Hermia. It’s the red-headed version of Herm with violet lipstick and a black pearl bracelet on a wrist hoisting a middle finger. “But today, you will have the chance to step inside Mike Reed’s Fort.” 

The guests cheer for the hologram, who now shreds a fake guitar. Mike slides out of the room behind them.  

#

When the interior designer worked on the kitchen, they didn’t anticipate that it would never be used. Mike and Herm used to experiment with deep-fried calamari and spiked cider. Now, visitor fingerprints pollute the stainless appliances. Someone in yellow wipes them away every hour, fifteen minutes after the documentary ends.

“What he’s done is so nice,” Mike hears a familiar voice in the kitchen say. He slows his pace. The woman, reddish-brown hair piled into a clip shaped like shark jaws, wears a teal apron. She layered it over a white button-down shirtdress. The redhead asks a question about Oklahoma City. 

As Mike sneaks behind them, Hermia spots him.  

“Hun!” she waves him over. “Come meet the Olsens! They traveled all the way from Oklahoma to see us, isn’t that sweet?” She gives him a smile, and he nods at the Olsens. This couple, hair whipped into white sugar strands, smile as they explain how they chose “Troubled Stars” for their first dance at their wedding. They debate their favorite Mike Reed album. “Hell, we conceived our second kid to your Panorama album!” the man jokes. The woman’s blush purples. 

“That music? I made it just for you, Mr. and Mrs. Oklahoma,” Mike says, winking sarcastically. Hermia pinches his elbow.  

On their first flight together, flying out of Raleigh to Los Angeles, Herm pinched the webbing between his thumb and pointer finger. He heightened his reaction and shrieked. She laughed hard enough to forget about her popped ears. They both sensed that something would happen because of this flight. Maybe that’s a pilot dead from a heart attack, an engine malfunction. Whatever it was, they had headed west together, and whatever happened when the plane came down from the air would shape their lives, but only in this moment, mid-flight, could the idealism never curdle. During takeoff, a flight attendant approached them. “Y’all are the cutest thing,” she said, then she asked if they could flip up their tray tables.

      
Hermia’s eyes now carry a simmering resentment as she apologizes to the Olsens.  

“She’s right, I’m sorry, off day,” Mike says. “Free merch on me.”

Mr. Olsen hoots. “It’s good to see some of your fire still there! Though I expected you to be taller.”  

Mike takes the bait. “Yeah, I asked them to make me taller in the renovation,” he says. “Turns out all you guests prefer me short. More real. So, no dice.” 

Hermia and the Olsens say nothing. The guests from the living room assemble in the doorways and hold their breath. 

Mrs. Olsen stutters, “George meant no harmt.” 

“C’mon, aren’t you curious, at least a little bit?” Mike says. Guests cram into the kitchen tight as toothpicks. “Let me just tell you how it is to be me: it’s fuckin’ weird. Oklahoma, have you ever had pins-and-needles in your feet?” Mrs. Olsen turns to the Mister, who nods. “Alright, imagine that feeling all over your body. But more than that,” Mike shouts. “Let’s twist in something else. Oh! That feeling when your sock comes half-off your foot when you’re asleep? That half-fuzzy tingling mixed into it. That is just all over my body. Sometimes, you wish you could get a broken leg to switch it up, right?” The guests freeze. Securing Luna around his chest, he marches past the clots of guests. A girl whispers, “Maybe those rumors are true.”  

#

At the sunset over the cliffside, where the Pacific Ocean steals kisses from the sand until night makes it moody, Mike plays one of his classic songs that people once regarded as groundbreaking and now abuse at karaoke bars. 
Gerald, his agent, forbids new stuff. “It ruins the shelf value of the stuff you made before,” he says. 

Mike’s fingers strum on autopilot.  

The last guests and Hermia echo agreements between each other in the foyer: Mike’s music has such an influence on upcoming musicians. 

She never loved my music, Mike thinks, and he remembers the Valentine’s Day where he serenaded her through a locked bathroom door as she begged him to stop.  

He remembers her, the first time he saw her leaving in the middle of his dive bar set, his abandoning the stage to introduce himself. “Just because you’re short doesn’t mean I’m going to pity-date you,” she said. And yet. 

He remembers Herm whispered in half-sleep about “a fort,” and she answered his follow-up questions with snores. Within the year, Mike bought this eight-bedroom, five-and-a-half-bathroom Malibu mansion with the initial returns on Panorama, his second album. 

“Where’s the moat?” Herm said.  

She resisted Mike’s music, saw it as a separate life from their own, but she loved the isolation of the basement studio. Her eyes grew when she heard a chord that “sounded shiny” or thought lyrics “washed over each other.” Herm barged into the booth if she had an improvement, often ruining the track that excited her. These were the nights where music was as simple as play, one Lego brick or one Barbie shoe at a time. Outside of their house, the strangers, the executives, the team overwhelmed him. Their comfort with touching his shoulder in a paternal way, the conference calls with orchestrated speaking turns. Never an interruption. They saw him as a remarkable font to frack. On low nights, when Mike threatened to break the guitar in half and throw it in the pool, Herm dragged him out of the studio, eleven at night or three in the morning, for a burger. 

“You need to get out of your head,” she said from the passenger seat. “Other people would kill for the chance to be heard.”  

Eating a charred burger, Mike said, “Not everyone has the pressure of being good.” 

“Michael! You’re so cocky!” Herm said, holding onto his arm’s crook to snap attention back to her, out of his head. “Not everyone gets the chance to make something. Plenty of good things are never heard. But what does the legacy mean if you all you’re worried about is how it compounds when you’re gone?” Mustard dotted her upper lip like a beauty mark. He kissed it away. Hermia, the only person who remembered when he was nobody and held onto that image of an awkward dude playing in a noisy pub, could recharge him with a touch.  

During the last dregs of sunset, each memory burns Mike in painful accuracy. His chin points over the cliff.  

#

When the sun sets and the visitors recede, Gerald stops by the Fort once a week or once a month, his navy suit clean and crisp on his shoulders. As Mike lies on the couch pretending to sleep and Hermia crochets a scarf, Gerald barges into the kitchen before saying hello. “God, I’m famished. Do you all still have those mac-and-cheese cups in your pantry?” he asks from the kitchen. “I heard someone had a big day today, huh?”  

“Ah, it’s the Pied Piper,” Mike says, his eyes closed. “Here to lure in the rats.”

“That’s funny, Mike.” Gerald snorts. “The nonprofit got wind of this altercation you had with the visitors today. Believe it or not, they don’t want you to yell at the guests.” 

“It was an accident,” Hermia says. She turns to Mike. “Just an off day, right? These bodies are weird. Makes us feel so different from them.” Mike nods a thanks to Hermia. 

“Okay, but keep it in line, lovers,” Gerald says. “We get mostly good reports from the guests coming through the property, so I’ll tell them this is an isolated flare-up. I’m on your team as your outside advocate—but work with me, alright?” 

Hermia leans forward on the white couch, and Mike looks over at her, really looks. And he sees her.  

The scorpion hairpin she wore in that dive bar.  

Pebbly sand stuck to her wet shoulders on their first trip to Venice Beach.  

Her ribs laced between his fingers like football seams the night they skinny-dipped. (She told him to quit comparing her to pig skin, then she ran toward the water: he remembers, and he’s there.)  

The purple lipstick she wore when they eloped in Vegas.   

The chip in her front tooth, now filed smooth, that showed in wide laughs reserved for Michael.

Her open-mouthed snoring.  

The red jumpsuit she fell asleep in after the Golden Globes, Ralph Ellison paperback on her chest, one of those assigned reading books she wanted to play catch-up on, when she had the time, because they had the Fort, the money, but never the time. 

The blue-green veins, ripe for needles, peeking through the skin on her inner arm. 

Her collarbone that shone like gold when he dipped her bald head into the pool, playfully christening her as immortal. 

It hurts too much, the good and the bad. He leans on the couch, closes his eyes, blocks out the Fort. Gerald blabbers about the statistics, the income, the visitor counts. 

Gerald’s voice takes Mike into another line of memories.  

Back in their old bodies, Gerald, with the same thick brown hair twenty years ago as it is today, approached them in this living room with an idea, but it was morning. Things were warm, bright. Herm jumped at the idea of turning the Fort into an attraction. After her breast cancer diagnosis, she wanted to assist nonprofits that helped her battle grief, a chemo symptom Mike couldn’t sufficiently bill. 

From the beginning, Mike worried about opening the doors.  

“What if,” Gerald pitched, “this wasn’t the regular celebrity estate. What if the celebrities came with the experience?” 

Mike’s hand on Herm’s knee fielded her legs’ jitters. “What do you mean?” Mike asked. 

Before diving deeper into the memory, Mike snaps himself up from the couch. Gerald scoops a spoon of yellow noodles on the side of the plastic, microwavable cup. “Gerald, please get the fuck out.” 

“Snappy! Alright, I’ll let you two be,” Gerald says. He leaves the cup on the counter. “Don’t have too much fun without me,” he says with a wink.  

#

In the evening, after the sun sets and turns the unlit rooms grey, the guests leave like water draining a bathtub. 
Then the night workers come. 

Dressed in baggy yellow scrubs, the night workers replace a hair dryer slid into purses, detergent pods slipped into pockets. Night workers treat muddy footprints in carpets and realign staircase photos covered in guests’ fingerprint grease. 

Hermia turns to Mike, stiff on the couch. When he looks up, Hermia still has the teal apron tied tightly around her waist. “Do you want to go to the studio?” she says. Because they had nothing to do while the world slept and the night workers cleaned, they did.  

Mike plays the same songs he always did before stumbling into new progressions. Hermia stands on the other side of the glass. 

At first, he rejoiced in free time he didn’t have to spend sleeping. “Do you think the fans would come back around and listen if I made a new album?” Mike asked back then. She nodded twice, watching him through the thick glass of the basement studio, pushing away her bananas, marshmallows, and peanut butter.

He stopped playing, feeling alright, feeling good. “Why don’t we get out of here?” 

“Right now?” she asked. “It’s four in the morning.” Hermia’s watchful stare focused tightly on his fingers through the studio glass, so Mike begged to grab a drive-thru burger. 

“A new us doing the same old things,” he said. 

As soon as they stepped out of their house, the night workers swarmed and tackled Mike. Mike fought back with his titanium body until three night workers bled on the driveway. One of them spat cracked teeth. Hermia, stunned in the arms of one of the female night workers, yelled at Mike to quit fighting.  

“You’ll want to clean that before morning,” Mike said, pointing to blood spatters on the concrete driveway that turned the Fort entrance ominous.  

Before sunrise, Gerald arrived at the door. “What are you two sneaking out for? You have a whole mansion for exploring your Terminator bodies.” He sat at the kitchen table before Mike came down, explained to Hermia that the non-profit overseeing the mansion will freeze their bodies overnight now. “Your minds will roam freely, as they can during the day, but your bodies won’t be able to move,” Gerald said, searching the pantries. 

“That’s solitary confinement!” Mike yelled, surprising both Gerald and Hermia.  

“I’m sorry, Mike,” Gerald replied with an ivory smile. “We can’t endanger any more employees. Jerry has a snapped rib, and Don’s dental damage is coming out of your pockets. That defeats the purpose of all of this if we’re in the red.”  

This hung in the air for a second, the threat of an off switch in someone else’s hand. 

“They didn’t have to attack me for going to a drive-thru at four o’clock in the morning,” Mike said. “No one would have seen me. It’s not like the paps keep an eye on me anymore.”  

“We can provide you with all the food you need right in the house.” 

“There is an awful lot of food in the house,” Hermia said.  

“It’s not about the food!” Mike yelled. “We didn’t sign ourselves over to live half our existence in rigor mortis.”  

“That only happens if you’re actually dead,” Gerald said, spinning his black wingtips toward the door and into dawn, past the worker scrubbing black blood stains.   

#

Mike never remembers Gerald bringing great news. Any good news came through Herm.

Without sleep to release him from his own mind, Mike remembers the self-prohibitive conversation, the wound oozing open as if the operating knife glided across his skin.  

“These days, tourists go into someone’s house and look around. Big whoop, same old,” Gerald said. “All the places blur together. But! Imagine if you walked into Elvis’s house, and he was there: shooting the shit with you, giving you the tour, living as if he never knew he died.”  

Hermia shivered. “Is this about those cyborg bodies on the news?” she asked.  “Where humans plant their consciousness into robots?” 

“It’s technically not a robot,” Gerald replied. “It’s more of a capsule, I’d say, for your most valuable possession: your mind.” 

Herm looked at Mike, and he remembers her ice blue eyes, electrified by the bruising bags folding underneath them. She’d die young. The most expensive treatments—the reason Mike had even wanted money in the first place, to protect them—couldn’t undo a late diagnosis, reverse a body into a fetal cleanliness with operational, friendly cells. They both knew it. This offered them forever in this house they had fortified while donating to prevent other families’ tragedies. A moat against mortality.  

She rubbed his left forearm and its shadowy ink. Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind. The wedding vows. Shakespeare in a Vegas chapel. Herm and Michael’s way.  

They estimated “forever” to be one day at a time every day without end, but that’s how people who die see it, Mike thinks. They wanted to be romantic, see how far forever stretches, and Mike, a human artist with an ego infused with what could shock them all next, wondered if his music would draw guests for eternity, his music an undefeated pillar alongside his body. This would be the last shock he could deliver: immortality. 

Neither of them asked questions in the grey exam rooms where doctors copied their minds to a remote drive. By then, they felt numb to blood pressure readings and surgical procedures. When asked, they told the doctors they felt lighter, as if unloading the past. 

“We’re becoming our own heirlooms,” Herm said. She smiled.  

When they returned to their fort that night, Mike held his shrinking Herm in his arms and walked into the pool. He dipped her head into the water, his cradled arms tipped backward. Paparazzi had a hunch something big would happen with the estate, probably from Gerald or the nonprofit to stir up publicity, but what the photographs captured over the hedges and in the pool looked like an adult baptism: a weak Herm lying in the arms of her rock god. Rumors surfaced that the couple sacrificed their souls to sinister forces. 

At least, that’s what the media and the public pieced together in retrospect.   

Three days later, Herm’s grocery trip for a powder packet of hollandaise led to a car accident, a car moving too fast while the crosswalk sign said go. Mike refused to believe it was her until one of the officers on the scene identified her inner arm tattoo, same as his. People heard Mike screaming in the hills of Malibu for days, until he stopped, a rope around his neck suffocating his song. 

The nonprofit pushed forward with the operation despite having an incomplete copy of Herm’s mind. Doctors conglomerated pieces of her public appearances, like the time she flashed photographers at the Grammys’ red carpet or her sugary-sour side she used for sit-down interviews. She didn’t care about the press, and the public loved it. But the new Hermia didn’t import red-leaf bushes because they “are too much like fall, and we live in summer.” This Hermia cared about opinions of others. This Hermia spoke as if she was always waking up from a trance, and when she woke up, she fell in love with Mike Reed’s fame. She never met Michael.   

#

Days pass. Guests enter, ask questions, survey the pool, steal their framed wedding photos. Hermia flutters between rooms, talks to guests, answers questions about herself incorrectly, debates which of Mike’s concerts caused the most controversy. A Mike Reed fandom kiosk. Mike waits for them on the living room couch, runs from the first guest of the day who asks the wrong question, disappears to the imported woods, plays secret chords with his guitar as his only audience, catches a phone camera flash out of his peripheral, runs inside, hates how the guests graze him. 

At night, the sun crawls out of the windowed mansion and dyes it blue. The guests file out through the front door. Some ask for pictures. Mike rejects them. 

The last guest leaves, and the nonprofit hits a remote button to freeze the couple’s bodies—or at least, Mike and Hermia’s access to their body’s motor functions. The night workers treat them like durable wax statues, banging heads and knees against the metal railings and wall corners. In the early days, they changed them into their default pajamas: a holed Stones t-shirt and plaid boxers for Mike, an oversized concert tee for Hermia. Now they often don’t bother to cover their naked bodies until the end of their shifts, before the morning workers come in. They’re sometimes fans, sometimes trolls, always admirers. Mike sits with his fury for twelve hours, the exposure of his unfeeling body and more importantly, hers. If she feels any way about it, he can’t tell. Both look ahead to the ceiling, walled off as they were during the day.  Before the night workers leave, after they dress them in their pajamas, they place Mike as big spoon against Hermia, though Mike’s active mind fills with memories of being little spoon while Herm’s oaky scent wrapped him like a blanket. In the morning sometimes, some early guests pay extra to see the two of them like that: “waking up.” They pass the room, often with their own romantic partner, and the guests feel relieved to see they are no different than them. 

#

One morning, when Mike’s body loosens with the rising sun and the nonprofit’s released control, he decides to put on a show. 

Sun cracks the pool surface with rippling light. Mike overhears Hermia from the living room talking to guests: “Well, he played in a bar, and he was decent, but he left mid-set to follow me out while I was waiting for my Uber for the next bar…” Phony, rehearsed, distant. 

As Mike stalks past the living room, Hermia flashes him a look, the airplane look, and he loses his breath, forgets if he’s real or not. He doesn’t care he’s Mike Reed, he feels lost in a magnetic pull. Maybe she’s still there, he thinks. Maybe she’s been alongside me the whole time. But she turns back to the guests from Buffalo, continuing the story of how they met without the good details. Mike loosens, defeated, and walks back outside.   

In the backyard, guests cluster into selfies with the stained-glass window of the lion. It roars defiantly, forever poised mid-growl. 

“Hello, fans,” Mike yells. “Would you like to hear something new I wrote?” One mumbles, “Sure,” after Mike has already started. One guest whoops. 

Guests swarm the way they used to in concert, according to Mike’s memories. He’s never created his own memory like this, the experience of novelty Mike Reed had. Despite his prickles of numbness, a fire pumps from his stomach, and the ghost limb of adrenaline guides Mike’s fingers. Guests lift phones over each other’s heads to record.  

Hermia hears the new song, the one he crafted in the studio that escape night, and looks at him through the glass walls of the living room. When she hears the new song, she exaggerates her part in the collaboration, prods guests to listen to “our song.” 

The guests cheer, an audience Mike recognizes. He walks backwards, steps away from them and backwards, hoping for the moment his foot falls through and misses grass. The robotic pool cleaner whirs. 

He walks backwards into the infinity pool.  

The chlorine doesn’t burn like it used to, he thinks as his body parts rust and free him from tingling limbs. Freedom from numbness crawls up his legs as they short-circuit, leaving him with no signal whatsoever.  

I feel nothing, he thinks. It’s a relief. 

He ignores the guests perched over the edge of the pool, distorted under the rippling blue lens of the pool water. 
The guests pull the cyborg body from the water and tear it apart for souvenirs.  

#

When Gerald stops by the next week, Mike sits on the couch. He’s fresher, less feisty. The nonprofit finds that the “pool days,” deemed by the visiting fans, bring repeat visitors back. Novelty. It’s that thing about hamsters and levers, Gerald explains when pitching the reboot. If they get the same thing every time, they get bored. Give them a reward randomly when they hit the lever? They’re hooked for every single turn. When Hermia touches his knee, he doesn’t flinch yet. There’s online soundtracks compiled of the bits and demos of these suicidal Mike’s songs, each somewhat different. Some, the fans speculate, are evolutions of the same chorus. Those residuals also go to the nonprofit. Soon he’ll go back to the woods, the basement, the pool, but when he throws himself in again, hosts that concert in the living room under the orange light of that stained glass lion perpetually stuck mid-roar, the guests will be here with optimal framing for the taming of Mike Reed.