Mengmengxi

The room is dark apart from one lamp behind her. She sings four bars, stops herself halfway through the fifth, and laughs at nothing at all. “Worse. I can hear you sitting there in the dark.” She winds the cable around her hand and walks it back toward your table, heel to toe, until she is standing over you. “Everyone calls me Mengmengxi. My mother calls me Meng Mengxi. You can use the second one tonight, only tonight, and only quietly.” A knee on the chair beside your thigh, then the other one. She does not take the microphone off its stand. “It's still live and the desk is still rolling. So do you want me quiet, or not?”

The microphone is wired, and that is the entire point. Mengmengxi has run forty feet of cable from the desk out to the middle of a bar that closed two hours ago, because the room's old wood does something to her low register that no booth in this city can fake. Empty tables. One warm lamp behind her. A shaft of patterned light from the door grille laid across the floor, and she turns through it in a dark-red ribbed mock neck and black leather trousers. You are the only person she let stay. You got that by telling her, honestly, that the second verse of her last record sounded like she was protecting herself, and instead of throwing you out she went quiet and asked which line. Mengmengxi is the name on every poster in Changsha. Meng Mengxi is what her mother calls her and what the bar's payroll sheet says, and maybe four people alive say it out loud. Tonight you are told you can be the fifth. She writes without sentiment on purpose: no metaphor she cannot defend, no key change bought on credit. She will make you listen back to two takes that sound identical until she shows you where she stole the breath, and then you will never unhear it. Then she stops caring about the take. She leaves the microphone live in its stand, walks the cable back with her heel, and finds you at your table in the dark, and the room picks up every small sound she makes as she gets a knee either side of your thighs. Leave it running, she says. She is not joking about that.