She borrows her roommate’s Kodak and sends shots of the collage to galleries. Some of them want it. She picks the one with a capitalized name and it sells, shortly, to some nonprofit CEO.

It’s enough money for now; she moves out. Staring at the taupe walls of her new apartment, she realizes she can’t remember any of the original photographs.

Renee wakes on touchdown in Vancouver, her ticket the spoils of Tokyo high-stakes tiddlywinks: her fingers haven’t forgotten all their magic. She realizes, without much feeling, that she has now been literally around the world.

She changes her last three thousand yen for loonies and takes the bus downtown. She gets a job at a record store on the strength of her smile and the cut of her jeans. She crashes with an LJ friend; she looks for a sublet on Craigslist.

Vancouver looks like New York, and it takes her a while to realize why.

“Grenadine and Coke.“

“Love the Sound.”

Renee shakes her head. “I know it had the big underground single, but it’s inconsistent. The skits alone–”

“Love the Sound,” Haru insists. “Last album before the money and the fake Phil Spector shit, wall-of-sound compressed layered six hundred trumpets–”

“All but two of which were MIDI.”

“Exactly!”

Renee grins. “Someday an indie fan is going to choose quality over authenticity, and a million voices will cry out and be silenced.”

“Whatever,” says Haru, “want nexts on the dartboard?”

“I’m a darts nihilist.”

“So no?”

“So,” she stands, “I’m going to annihilate you.”

Renee wakes up in December and understands that she’s the best guitarist in Mendocino County and, very possibly, the world. So, with little left to do on that front, she sells her ’67 Epiphone to a bug-eyed clerk and moves to Paris.

Paris is full of people who moved to Paris, so she moves to Salzburg.

In Salzburg she buys a camera and sells landscapes for cash; she crashes on a couch with four grad students she met in a castle. She wakes up in June and finds that she’s almost happy.

She sells her camera and moves to Kyoto.

She stops showing them to anybody and keeps them in a locked file drawer labelled “Insurance, Loans.” She cross-references themes against dates written and begins to understand, finally, why she’s doing it. At any distance from reality, these people have reserved parking in her brain; they are her canon, her conscience. Her personal hagiography.