goodlit

Not anywhere. Certainly not in Honolulu, certainly not on
a night like this one. Kanye pushes though the glass door
onto the studio deck. He leans against the railing over Kuapa
Pond, its shores lined with palm trees and expensive homes,
and checks his phone. Nothing, still. Rose usually gets back
to him right away. He wonders if she’s still awake. Across the
pond lies the highway, dotted with headlights, and beyond
that the Pacific, black and still in the night. The sky thick with
stars. In the sunlight, Honolulu is blue-green and white and
slopes toward the ocean, toward the clouds that hang just
above the hills. At night it’s another city.
He’d sent the others—Cudi, No I.D., Jeezy—back to his
house hours ago. Get some sleep, he’s said. You’ll need it
for tomorrow. He’ll work as late as his eyes will let him, as
long as he can hold his neck erect, keep his forehead from
dropping to the console. He’ll sleep a few hours on the couch
in the lobby, wake before the others arrive in the morning.
He’ll have coffee ready, protein bars, weed. Whatever they
need to perform.
He’s frustrated with his collaborators. They’re hesitant
about the new album. It’s different, they said, the sort of
thing you say when you don’t know how to react. And it is
different, though Kanye would say it’s fresh. Forward thinking.
It’s all ghostly synths, drums like a marching band playing
at half speed from two blocks away. And his voice—filtered
through a machine, warbling like a recorded message. Jeezy,
in his fitted hat and dark sunglasses and diamond-bedecked
snowman chain, said it sounds lonely. He said it sounds like
talking on the phone with no one on the other line.
Maybe Kanye drank too much Hennessy after that. In the
studio, seated at the console, he’d unzipped his jeans, pulled
his dick through the opening in his boxers, taken the picture.
He’d sent it off to Rose with a message: Got this for you if you
#GOODLitSwerveAutumn