My backpack still has last year’s festival wristband attached to it. The first item I pack into it for this year’s edition is my plastic orb, deflated and still in its packaging. I’d procrastinated ordering the orb, and it only just arrived last week. That had caused me a minor panic: no orb equalled no festival. Next I pack the shirt I’d bought for this year’s Rockdown, featuring some of my favorite bands with 2021 tour dates down the back of it. Supporting your favorite bands and staying out of the heat of the sun with some official apparel: double-win.
There’s a long queue when we arrive at the festival’s gates, with the minimum six feet of space between groups of beer-swigging couples and excitedly talking families. As we approach the entrance my friends and I take our final breaths of outside air and the last swigs of unorbed beer. The guy next to us takes a deep pull on the last easy cigarette for the rest of the day, then slaps a series of nude-colored nicotine patches up his arms.
“Got any glass in there, mate?”
I shake my head.
The security guard puts a hand down inside my backpack, finds nothing that’s banned, and waves me through to a girl scanning tickets through a plastic screen.
“Ankle, please.” She gestures to the waist-high ledge between us.
I put my foot up and she fastens a brightly-colored ribbon around it. Rockdown 2021 it reads, in purple embroidered letters. She pulls it tight and heat-seals it closed. A buzzer goes off and she pumps down on the antibacterial dispenser. She winces as she rubs her hands together, then waves me through, the smell of vodka rising in the air.
“Next please! You — keep your distance!”
I step forward, holding my deflated orb, feeling like a child at the pool, bouncing impatiently from foot to foot, waiting for my dad to inflate my rubber ring.
“Pull the opening over your head.” The rough voice jerks me out of my holiday dream. I am not a child. I am an adult attending a festival during a global pandemic yet I am starting to feel more and more like a processed animal. I do as I am told, and the unseen voice affixes a tube to the side of the wrinkled clear plastic. The transparent orb starts crackling and swelling around me.
“Is the eye hole in the right place? I can’t see.”
“Lucky we caught that now,” the worker’s voice chuckles. “Turn around then, I’ll hold the orb still.”
I turn, and can see the rest of the queue stretching out behind me.
“Down to your left,” the voice says, “that’s your fuel tank, so to speak. If you want anything to drink, it goes in there. To your right, that’s your food hatch.”
“Gotcha.” It’s warm inside the orb already. I remember my shirt.
“Can you put my shirt on for me?”
“Sure thing, hand over any mods you want me to put on.” I hand him the shirt and he stretches it over the orb. “Love that band. Saw them live in Amsterdam before…well, you know.”
“Ah, me too!” I say, remembering back to when we could bump shoulders with one another and spill beer on each others’ shoes. When we could link arms with strangers to sing encores.
“You’ll be wanting a pair of these,” he says, sliding a box of headphones through the food hatch. It’s an airlock, so I wait until he’s closed his side in order to take them out. There’s enough free space inside the orb to put them in my ears.
“They’ll pick up whichever stage you’re nearest to. Tap them twice if you want a little break. Any questions?”
(continues)