Passing Through the Flame (85 page)

“You sound like a horny old man.” But she took the edge off it beautifully, became a teen-aged cocktease; behind her dozens of little flowers of light bloomed on the black field of the electronic billboard.

“Horny old men need love, too,” Gentry said, but his voice went
with
the line instead of against it, turning it into the filthy leer it was not supposed to be. This was the best work Velva had given him, and as bad as the worst shit Gentry had put out. I can save this with overdubbing, Paul thought, but the love scene after they’ve balled.... I’m going to have to get the same glow out of Gentry... I’m going to have to... I’m going to....

“Oh, I really don’t think you’re an old man, Doug.”

“But you do think I’m horny....”

“Aren’t you?” Velva said. And she was every young girl tantalizing every middle-aged man with a pink tip of tongue across her teeth, a sly smile of innocence, a subtle leaning of the electric tips of her breasts toward his chest. “Wouldn’t you like to touch me? Wouldn’t you like to kiss me?” The flowers on the billboard burst into multicolored fountains of light that expanded into a sheen of rainbow brilliance behind her. Goddamn, what great stuff!

Paul could see Gentry cringe, his shoulders hunching over, his body drawing away from Velva’s, but it was out of the shot, it wouldn’t mar the image on film. “Yes, I’d like to kiss you,” he said, his voice breaking into an awful croak.

“Well then,” Velva said, leaning across him, blocking his face out of the shot with a golden corona of hair, “let’s just pretend we’re just a farmboy and his best girl at a Kansas county fair.” The electric billboard went black for a moment, then a rainbow of color slowly arched from left to right across it, completing the rainbow bridge above them as Gentry hesitantly moved his hands across her back to accept the kiss.

They held that way for a moment, the back of Velva’s head filling the shot while the rainbow arch behind her expanded down across the dark field of the billboard, becoming an aurora borealis illumining the kiss like a headshop poster.

Then Gentry’s whole body convulsed, and his hands fell foolishly to his sides.

“Cut!” Paul shouted. “That’s a take!”

Velva broke away, and smiled at him with an unreal radiance, highlighted by red, blue, and yellow bolts of lightning that fragmented the rainbow billboard sky. Gentry wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

Four eyes focused on Paul’s, trapping him in a twisted triangle of sexual tension: Velva’s soft with love, Gentry’s bright with pain. Paul feared for the final completion of that geometry of lust at the heart of his film. Feared, and felt the dread inevitability of the destiny that bound them together, a destiny whose ultimate end Velva had already foreseen and forgiven.

Behind them, the grid work of bulbs went totally dark, then exploded into a stylized mushroom cloud of nuclear fire.

Wrapped in a light-blue hooded cloak that hid her hair, her face, and her persona, Susan felt like some dark conspirator of the night as she let Bill lead her along the crowded midway of the People’s World’s Fair. Their vibes drawn into themselves, they moved among the people like masked royalty skulking toward some nocturnal rendezvous. Energy, bodies, human musk, clouds of pot smoke, karmic electricity whipped and flowed around their hidden personas, destiny’s whirlwind swirling around two secret centers of the void.

Something was in the air tonight, a crazy tension, as if this hour was the nexus of a conflict of cosmic forces in the collective soul of the festival. She could taste the sweet stoned madness in the crowds, the bittersweet echo of the lost Summer of Love, but lurking behind it waiting to pounce and prickling her skin with its static charge was the same dark beast that had leaped out of the center of the Summer of Love to devour the Haight in a long winter night of speed and smack and death. And she could feel herself standing like the empty eye of a hurricane, a void at the center of the gathering storm.

Through the roiling crowds, across the empty courtyard of the People’s Forum, and into a small tent. Barry Stein and Ivan Blue sat side by side on a cot nervously sharing a joint, surrounded by a blue aura of tension shot through with yellow flashes of shared excitement. The echo of the Summer of Love was strong in here, but she felt the black beast snuffling at the tent flaps.

“Good to see you,” Blue said, handing Bill the joint as they seated themselves on folding chairs across from the cot. “Gotta get the final timing down as perfectly as possible; this thing’s gotten a little complicated.”

“Oh?” Bill said, handing her the joint. She took a quick ritualistic puff. Something made her keep the hood wrapped around her head, made her keep her vibes drawn in on her center, made her sit there, sifting the forces that surrounded her in silent stillness.

“We’ve got to know pretty exactly when you’re going on, when you’re going to sing ‘New Worlds for Old,’” Stein said. There was something beyond tension in his voice—guilt or fear, something hidden that blackened the edges of his aura toward shrill ultraviolet. Outside, she could hear silent baying in the night.

“Why?” Bill asked diffidently, blind to the thing that hovered over the tent. “I thought your cue was the beginning of the song. What difference does it make exactly when we start?”

Stein and Blue exchanged quick covert glances; their auras darkened to utter black for the moment of eye contact, and in that moment, the beast was inside the tent.

“Er... the way it’s planned now, there’s going to be some coordinated preliminary action before we actually move on the stage, so we’ve... ah... got to be able to begin about ten minutes before you give the signal, according to Chris....”

“Chris?”

They were hiding something. There was a gaping black void at the center of what they were saying, an inner uncertainty they were hiding from Bill—and trying to hide from themselves.

Bill seemed to catch the edge of it, too. “Who’s this Chris?” he said more sharply.

“The guy who’s running the actual action...” Blue said uneasily.

“I thought you guys—”

“Oh, the Revolutionary Action Committee is still in overall charge,” Stein said. “But we brought in Chris to... ah, lead the troops. He’s... er... what you’d call a pro.”

“Knows much more about the tactics of this kind of thing than we do,” Ivan Blue said, smiling a sickly weak smile. “Should show up any minute now.”

Bill nodded and relaxed, mollified, but Star could see the void irising wider and wider, opening up like a malevolent flower to dominate the reality, the unseen center at the pivot point of the storm, an absence that overshadowed all. They fear this man, and they rely on him. They respect his power, but they don’t trust it. He stands at the center of everything, but they don’t know who he is.

She could sense the presence of the void outside the tent, mirrored by the core of darkness within. She felt these two dark presences converging as waves of black energy battered at the thin membrane between them, as something hard and strong and menacing blew in out of the night.

Then the tent flap snapped open, and two figures stepped inside: Ruby Berger, the third member of the Revolutionary Action Committee, and... and... and....

A hard, powerful masculine figure who burst into the tent behind a wave front of violent energy—a presence that battered at her being with hard radiation, a persona that immediately dominated everything.

“This is Chris Sargent,” Ruby Berger said, and it all poured through her at once.

Chris Sargent.
Human tiger stalking through Jango’s party radiating impending death.
Chris Sargent.
Eyes blazing, muscles bunched and tangled like overcoiled springs, sickening waves of murderous energy frying the air around him with terrible pain.
Chris Sargent.
Ticking in front of Jango like a human bomb on a hair trigger, a cancer eating at his soul.
Chris Sargent.
Standing before her with lust in his mind crossed with frustrated rage, poor pitiful monster in such overwhelming pain.
Chris Sargent.
Ripping off her clothes and raping her like an animal, the heat of his breath, the poor frenzy of his body.
Chris Sargent.
“You’ve gotta enjoy doing your thing, whatever it is.”

“You’re not nearly as bad as you seem.”

“Do I really seem so bad?”

“Poor baby, you’re so fucked up.”
Chris Sargent.
His body below hers, accepting her tender love with an unexpected childlike sweetness.
Chris Sargent.
Sleeping with a smile on his lips as she stole out of the room in the hour before dawn.

Chris Sargent
, the black presence at the center of the storm, the creature to whom these fools had entrusted their fate, a volcano of pure force. And yet... and yet....

Bill was on his feet, his whole body tensed into an ideogram of hate, his vibes rending the air like the flashing teeth of a buzz saw. “We’ve met,” he snarled.

“Yeah?” Sargent said.

“Yeah.” Bill took two quick steps toward him, and instantly Sargent was in a slight crouch, the edges of his hands poised before him like two deadly blades, the adjustment in his stance subtle, but so sudden and sure that Bill cringed backward, and the moment crystallized into a geometry of barely suspended death.

As Horvath stood there, suddenly facing what he knew was a killing machine that could chop him to pieces before he could even react, Susan moved with almost the same speed as Sargent had, throwing off her cloak with a deliberately dramatic gesture. “Hello, Chris,” she said.

Sargent whirled at the motion, at the sound, but his turn slowed down to an easy glide as he saw her, suddenly dominating the tent with her unfurled presence.

“Hello yourself,” Sargent said evenly. The very coolness of it seemed to put him on her wavelength, to feed on her presence, to establish a bond between himself and Susan that left Horvath on the outside looking in.

“Nervous, aren’t you?” Bill said, forcing his body into asimulation of relaxation, lapsing into a face-saving casualness he did not feel.

“I’ve got a lot on my mind,” Sargent said. “These troops aren’t the easiest in the world to control. So please don’t go making sudden moves around me, man. The next one might be your last.”

Horvath sat down, not knowing whether to take it as a bit of countermacho or as a simple statement of fact. Could be either or both, he thought. This dude’s a killer. I came awful close to it there, as close maybe as Jango came at the party. And Susan saved us both. He suddenly felt a flash of empathy, a lessening of the pain of the memory of that night—now he understood all too well why she had offered Sargent her flesh.

“Pulaski has your Molotov squads as together as they’re going to be,” Sargent told Stein and Blue. “So once we have the timing down, we’re ready to roll. When do you go on, Horvath?”

“Quarter after twelve,” Horvath answered automatically.
Molotov squads?

“Bill, I don’t think we should go through with this,” Susan said.

“Huh?”

“Jesus!”

Ruby Berger and Ivan Blue shook their heads in exasperation; Barry Stein came to alert attention. Horvath looked up at her in surprise, then saw Sargent’s hard eyes look from her to him and back to her again. “What’s the matter, babes?” he said.

Her green eyes looked strange—not so much frightened as distant, glassy. “I don’t like the vibes,” she said. “There’s bad karma in this...” Her eyes, her feverish, glowing eyes. Star’s eyes.

Sargent looked at her coldly. “It’s out of your hands now,” he said. “At five after twelve, the diversionary action begins, and when you start to sing, we move. It’s a little late to try backing out now. The wheels are already rolling.”

“Yes, the wheels are rolling,” Susan said distantly. “You can’t stop the wheel from turning.”

“Are you okay, babes?”

“You’ve gotta do your thing, whatever it is, that’s what you told me, Chris,” Susan said. “And I told you to try my thing and see if it wasn’t better. Is this
really
what you have to do? You can stop it, Chris. We can stop it together.”

Sargent flushed. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, lady,” he said. But Horvath sensed that he did know, that she had wounded him in some unguessable soft spot. What’s going on here? What’s this all about?

“We’ll see,” Susan said. “You do your thing, and I’ll do mine, and we’ll see whether it’ll be the darkness or the light.” She put on her cloak, draping the hood over her shoulders, leaving her face free and clear, and turned toward the open tent flap.

“Where are you going?” Horvath said. “Are you all right?” She turned those green eyes on him, and for a moment he was standing again in this morning’s mist, feeling that transcendent, unfathomable power, waves of energy seeming to shimmer in the air between them. “Where I belong, babes,” she said. “Where I’ve got to go.” For a moment, she was Star in his eyes, and her presence was overwhelming.

“Susan, you can’t go out there, you’re freaking,” Horvath said, but he felt no conviction in his words, no certainty that he knew what he was saying or to whom he was saying it.

“I’ve got to go,” she said. “It’s where I was meant to be. You know that, Bill. You know you do.”

“What you’re talking about isn’t real!” he said. “You don’t even know who you are.”

Her eyes seemed to look outward and upward through him into some spectrum of reality that only she saw. Madness, or a sanity beyond sanity—how could a blind man tell red from yellow, a deaf man a sharp from a flat? “I know who I am,” she said, “and so do you.” Then abruptly, she was Susan again, giving him a sly, playful smile. “Whatever happens is real,” she said. “You said so yourself, remember?” Then she disappeared out the tent flap, the canvas slap-slapping behind her. Horvath stared into the empty space where she had been, transfixed by the vibrations of her absence.

“Some old lady you got there,” Sargent said softly, almost tenderly.

“Yeah,” Horvath answered, slowly coming out of what in retrospect seemed like a stoned acid-flashback trance. “Yeah!”
Shit, what am I letting her do?He
dashed out of the tent; knowing even before the fact that he wouldn’t see her. She was gone into the endless crowd boiling through the People’s World’s Fair, gone into the storm of her own destiny. As he had known she would be. Perhaps, as she said, as she was meant to be.