Passing Through the Flame (20 page)

The room seemed to contract into a tunnel focused on those pain-ridden eyes. The shapes moving outside the cone of attention that drew her to the old man became abstract and fuzzy, as if only that ruined face was in sharp focus and entirely real. She found herself walking toward the old man. At the other end of her arm, Bill seemed a million miles away as she fell down the long tunnel toward the pain with no sense of volition, no will.

“Hello,” she said, “I’m Star.” The words moving her lips seemed like a fluid flowing through her, animating her flesh from within. She felt the pressure of her body against the tight silk of her pants suit. She felt juices flowing between her legs. She felt grace in every movement. She felt the desire to absorb the old man’s pain and transmute it to joy, the desire and the power. She was Star.

The old man seemed to cringe even as he loomed toward her, his mouth twisted in a bitter sneer, but his eyes reaching out for hers hungrily.

“I know who you are,” he said, in a rasping, defensive croak. “Why are you talking to a smelly old bag of pus like me? Listen lady, I’ve seen it all, and I’ve done it all, and I don’t need your putrid sympathy. I knew the Village when it was
really
the Village, and Provincetown before it was taken over by the tourists, and San Francisco before Ginsberg and Kerouac and that crowd of squirts turned it into a zoo. I took peyote with the Indians in Mexico before Hitler marched into the Rhineland. I’ve screwed five-hundred beautiful women and at least an equal number of ugly ones. I’ve had my head cracked fighting for the Wobblies and the CP and Eugene V. Debs. You never even heard of Eugene V. Debs. I’ve had a great life, I’ve had a full life, and now I’m the dirtiest fucking old man you ever saw. Nobody lives forever, girly, so save your shit-eating sympathy for someone else.”

An enormous wave front of pain radiated from his being, more powerful than anything she had ever felt before, but her soul was open to it, and it flooded through her, and somehow was transformed to raw, neutral psychic energy, and she reflected it back to him as love. She could see him responding to it in the relaxation of his muscles, in the drawing away of his consciousness from the pain eating at his guts, in the softness, the frank sadness that came into those ruined eyes.

“You’re something, girly,” he said quietly. “I’m sure you know that.”

She touched the palm of her hand tenderly to the weathered skin of his cheek. “So are you,” she said. “You’ve got a rich and beautiful soul.”

His face wrinkled into a sneer under her touch, but she could see tears form in his eyes. He laughed a nervous laugh in lieu of the kiss he dared not attempt. “If I were about twenty years younger....”

“Maybe in the next incarnation,” she said sincerely.

The old man sobbed once, openly. “Oh, Jesus Christ,” he said. “I loved this life so much, you know that? And now I’ve got no time left and no one left to love me on the way out.”

“I love you. Believe that. Believe in me. The soul never dies.” Star felt warm tears against her hand.

Slowly, tenderly, she cupped the old man’s face in her hands and drew his mouth toward hers. With gentle strength, she parted his withered lips with her own, tasting the rotten wind of impending death on his breath. Trembling, she swallowed this sirocco of decay, slid her tongue into the old man’s mouth, and let him caress it with his own. The foulness dissolved for a timeless moment, and she seemed to meet the old man’s soul as a guttering red glow in the endless night. She cherished that dying ember, embraced it, warmed it with her love.

When their mouths parted, his eyes glowed and his lips were straightened into a smile that seemed to be reliving the memory of every woman he had ever loved. His face no longer was a harsh wreckage but the well-weathered monument to a soul that had lived long and well.

Looking at the transformation she had wrought, Star was filled with an oceanic feeling of love, swept above and beyond the shores of self. Susan looked at the ruined old face, the rheumy eyes, tasted the foul breath of decay in her mouth, and a fit of trembling overcame her. The air molecules in the room were a million tiny fragments of sharp glass. A cold wind blew through her as she looked back on what she had done and didn’t see herself there at all. Not at all.

“Remember me,” she said, managing a small smile. Then, before the old man could speak, she turned, feeling the gentle, sure tug of Bill’s hand in hers, and gratefully let him guide across the room, away from what Star had done, and through an archway into yet another reality.

The room was cool blue, blue walls, blue balloon furniture, and icy blue light that made it seem ten degrees cooler. Bill Horvath studied Susan’s face, and the room seemed to be cooling the fever in her eyes too.

“Christ, Bill, I feel so strange. I don’t know who I am, Susan or Star. I don’t know which I am, and I don’t know which I want to be.”

“—structure an entire film around these mythic personalities, cast it first and then write the script—”

He could see the pain and confusion in her eyes, but that was better than what had been there moments ago, that manic, terrible certainty. These, at least, were
Susan’s
eyes.

“There is no Star,” he said. “She’s a character we created, you and me and Jango. You’re Susan Schiller. Star is a picture on album covers and posters, an image in people’s heads. You’re Susan, baby,
Susan.”

“—but why bother with a script at all? Just create a situation, say the Malamute Saloon in the Alaska Gold Rush, and throw Lee Marvin in there, and Steve McQueen, and Orson Welles, and Fay Dunaway, and let their film characters react—”

“I wasn’t Susan in there, I was... I was....”

“—are a few people like that, genuine stars, not actors. We don’t know what they’re really like inside, and it doesn’t matter because their images have a reality that goes beyond whatever they may be as private people. And here’s one right now!”

A middle-aged man, naked to the waist, with Indian features and long blond hair, had been rapping to half a dozen people, and now he was looking at Susan with an intense smile on his wide-lipped mouth and a frantic glow in his eyes that made Horvath’s gut quiver for her.

“Here’s Star of the Velvet Cloud, one of our contemporary goddesses of love,” the rapper said in his smooth flowing voice. “We all feel we know her better than our wives, don’t we? When we see her, we know exactly who we’re seeing, we get all those wonderful nuances of meaning in a single glance. We’d never imagine her belching or sitting on the john. But you do belch, don’t you, and you do sit on the john.”

There was something warm and friendly in his voice that made Susan relax, smile, and say “I fart, too.”

Horvath laughed with her, but the people around the bare-chested man were seeing Star, and when they laughed, it was a lightheaded unreal laughter, because what Susan had said from her own flesh would also have been the perfect answer from the image of Star.

“There, you see, she belches, and she sits on the john, and she even farts, but that doesn’t matter, that’s not real to us unless we see her do it in a movie, in which case we will only love her more for it. You’re the goddess of love, my dear, even if you go home and perform foul and unspeakable acts in the privacy of your own bedroom.”

“What’s the point, George?”

“The point is that the public image a genuine star projects is stronger and actually realer than whatever they may be inside as ordinary human beings. Isn’t that right?”

His smile was so warm and friendly, but Horvath could see his words mangling Susan’s guts like a knife being twisted cruelly inside her. “I’m me!” she cried. “Can’t you see I’m
me!”

She trembled, and bit her lower lip, and dragged him out of the room through the nearest archway, fighting back panic, her face tensed into the mask of an unvoiced scream.

Susan found that she had fled into the herky-jerky syncopated reality of the strobe room. Star and Bill Horvath moved through old-time movies of themselves on the mirrored walls. In the flashing light of the strobe, she saw her own flesh as a movie of itself, detaching itself from the her that was watching it. Bill was just another character of the movie her mind was viewing.

On the mirrored walls, she saw Star as the outside world saw her, a radiant creature of preternatural beauty, black hair flowing, an image she herself could love as something outside her true being. She saw the body of Star moving as she willed it, but each movement was transfigured by the flashing strobe into a stylization of itself, an element of abstracted dance.

“Oh, Bill, we are what we’ve made ourselves become,” she said. “I’m Star. There is no Susan. Look around you, do you see a Susan in here? Is that body Susan? We’re living in a story we wrote about ourselves.”

Bill hugged her to him, burying his head in her flesh; on the walls, his image clung to the body of that unreal goddess. “Oh, baby, baby, what’ve I done to you?”

She cupped his head in her hands, lifted his lips to hers, feeling the pain; on the mirrored walls, the simple human motion was transfigured into a ritual gesture. “It’s all right, Bill,” she said, and the words seemed to emerge from the goddess of the strobe, not from her own lips. She kissed him tenderly. “We are what we’ve become.”

Their lips parted, and she looked down into his confused love-filled eyes. She felt golden light flowing out of her body to envelop him, the power of her love. His mouth quivered. His whole face seemed to blink.

“Love you, babes,” she said.

“Who loves me? Who’s in there?”

“I am,” her fleshy mouth said. “I am,” said the mouth of the flickering image before her.

She shuddered as a strange electric thrill passed through her body. Everything around her seemed remote and unreal. The flickering was inside her now; every flash of darkness seemed to wink her into unbeing, every flash of light into a stylized movie of herself without a human center.

“Let’s get out of here,” Bill said. Gratefully, she let him lead her out of the strobe room and abruptly found herself in a reality of utter blackness pierced only by hard-edged cones of yellowish light from overhead spots—here picking out a black beanbag chair, there a single table with a bowl of fruit, a sickle-shaped orange couch, a Persian rug piled with cushions. Each cone of reality was in full view of all the others, yet isolated from them by solid darkness.

In one of the cones of light, Jango Beck sat on the edge of a blue couch with a balding man in baggy pants and an old brown sports jacket. The balding man was sweating lightly in the harsh illumination, and Star seemed to see a subtle aura of black despair floating in the air around his body.

Jango Beck seemed to punch a solid hole through the space he occupied, his face deeply shadowed by the penumbra of his own hair, his eyes turned to chips of black glass by the unyielding light. Somehow, at this moment, the very absence of any psychic aura about him struck her as ominous and yes, fascinating. He seemed like some jeweled insect: a totally alien and cold form of life that glistened with an impenetrable surface brilliance.

As they hung back in the darkness, Star wondered if it would be possible to thread their way across the room avoiding the shafts of light, avoiding impingement on the reality that contained the unknowable creature who had godfathered her birth.

“Ever since we blew that narc story, the paper’s been in a hole,” the balding man said. “The suit is pure bullshit, but the Establishment is out to close the
Flash
, so they made us post a twenty-thousand-dollar bond and the lawyer fees, and no printer will touch us without all kinds of bread in escrow against lawsuits. So even though the paper shows a paper profit each week, we’re drowning.”

Jango Beck shook his head; the convolutions of his black hair seemed to writhe like snakes for a moment. “It’s a losing proposition, Barry,” he said. “How far in the hole are you, forty, fifty thousand?”

“Something like that. But if someone would just front us thirty thousand or so, bread that would just sit there as bond, we’d be operating in the black again, and once the suit is won, he’d get his bread back. I wouldn’t even touch it.”

“But if you lose the suit, the money would be gone.”

“We won’t lose.”

“Famous last words.”

“Look, Jango, the
Flash
deserves to survive....”

“Agreed. I dig the paper. But not thirty grand worth. Not my own hard-earned money.”

“Come off it, Jango, we all know where your money comes from. Record industry rip-offs of the people. Five-dollar-a-head clubs the people can’t afford. Dealing.”

“You’re a funny one to be putting down dope, since you got in trouble by defending people’s right to smoke it,” Jango said. He smiled, and Star felt the gnashing of obsidian teeth in a cruel tropical sun. “Tell you what, though. I do like the paper, and if I can find some asshole willing to—”

“
I
want your ass, you fucker!”

Like a demon popping into existence from the netherworld, a raging apparition in black pants and a tan jacket appeared in a shaft of light near Jango Beck’s. His eyes blazed, his powerful muscles were bunched and tangled like overcoiled springs, and his mouth was a twisted scar beneath a drooping mustache. Murderous waves of energy blanched the air around him, enormously powerful, sick beyond Star’s understanding. His pain made her reel with nausea.

Jango Beck whipped up and around like an uncoiling snake. He stared across the blackness at the raging demon out of a bottomless well of ice-blue coldness, leering and preening like a bird of prey.

“I didn’t think you cared, Chris,” he said. Red lightnings flashed in the black thunderhead of the man’s rage at Jango’s words, and it seemed as if only some immense reserve of inner strength focused that fury into words instead of blood-hot slaughter.

“Get this straight, Beck, if you don’t get this war called off in the next week,
my
decision is that
your
ass gets fragged! I’ll come looking for you personally, and the first thing you’ll know about it is when your head explodes like a watermelon. That’s the way I learned to play the game in Nam.”