Passing Through the Flame (88 page)

Willingly, almost gratefully, he let the strobing patterns of light take control of his body, drawing him toward the billboard and away from his own volition. He allowed the focus of his consciousness to flow up from his loins to his brain to the flashing patterns of light vibrating the retinas of his eyes, obliterating time and memory, self and volition, in willing surrender to the pulsed feedback between his nervous system and the electronic sign.

Storm winds crackled around her and lightnings sparked between her and the hard black firmament. The power moved through her and around her; she was nothing more than the membrane between darkness and light.

People moved in and out of her aura. Some were drawn to her and followed her trajectory; some were random bodies flashing through on courses of their own; some leered at the edges of her psychic field like beasts just beyond the campfire’s light. Star tried to touch them all. Three young boys followed her like puppies, and she touched them casually as if she were the old lover none of them had yet had and watched them inch closer to being what they wanted to be. A couple who had just met minutes ago passed by and moved closer to each other. The boys left her orbit and wandered off into the chaos of the crowd, awakened, but not clinging overlong to the
awakener.

She was riding a great breaker of energy from the beyond within, and she could see her vibrations lift the energy level around her, banishing the black. She had never given herself so completely to where the music took her; she had never felt so strong and light, soaring like a great bird on the wind that blew through her, the breath of the universe lending her its inexhaustible power, filling her with itself.

But other forces were moving in the night, out there beyond the light of her campfire. She could hear them in the voice of the river of people—a tense, high-whining keen like a guitarist on too much speed, like an engine right on the redline, like an explosion looking for a place to happen. She could smell them in the electric fields of passing people—four men in army shirts, a tense woman in laced boots, two glowering rentacops brandishing their uniforms and clubs—an ozone stench of violence. People she couldn’t touch, cells of the great black beast that struggled toward birth within the body of the people.

Then wave fronts of darkness were pulsing through the flesh of the crowd toward her, the beating of some terrible subsonic gong heard by the soul.

Up the street, the river of people was pooling behind a dam of human bodies, row after row of them, standing transfixed before a great evil thing, a dark monolith raised like some enormous Stonehenge against the sky. Pictures and patterns flashed across the surface of the huge electric sign like the voice of the neon god himself, the god of deadness animated by electronic clockwork, the drinker of life.

Interweaving lines of triangles�buzz-saw teeth of red, green, blue, yellow—chewed their way through each other, exploding the screen of the electric sign into knife-sharp shards of black that became jagged lances of color attacking the eye. A cartoon atom bomb went off in slow motion, billowing swirls of color that exploded into a blinding flash of light. A rocket belched an angry rooster tail of fire. All the images that flashed across the grid work of bulbs were violent explosions of things with teeth.

Hundreds of people stood in front of this thing, sucking up its horrid black vibes, letting it leach the life-force out of them and throw it back at them as violence. Here cells of the beast had been drawn together to form an obscenely beating heart. Here was a vortex sucking at the soul, drawing more and more people to it, ozone-smelling people, moving like lemmings toward it through the crowd.

Beery-looking surfers, city street kids like packs of tattered alley cats, far-gone acidheads with wires crossed in their brains, bikers ripped on downers and red wine, gaunt black leather queens—bodies and minds that vibrated with pain moved through the crowd toward the electric sign like the creatures of night drawn to a blood moon.

Paul stood in the silent brooding crowd staring into the attention-focusing patterns of the electric billboard, one more hulk in the psychic Sargasso, one more mind fleeing toward obliteration. A great mandala filled the world, spirals of jagged edges exploding outward from a central void or imploding in toward it, promising the triumph of nothingness. Scores of spaced-out acidheads swayed in front of the sign with eyes like fractured marbles. A whole troop of Hare Krishna people in orange robes stood transfixed by its presence. Speed freaks, bikers, junkies, low-riders, and other species of human tiger shark glared at the patterns, bodies knotted into ideograms of frozen rage.

Paul wallowed in the miasma of bad vibes, pain, and self-hatred that hung over this collection of night’s refugees, a darkness without to match his darkness within, obliteration of his own pain by merger with the toothache throb of the collective bummer.

But a trick of his mind split a part of him off from the part that surrendered itself to the one-dimensional universe of the electric sign. Even as the center of his attention was focused on the vortex of light and darkness that bored like a drill into the pith of his brain, this restless demon’s eye segment stood to one side, seeing the whole thing as a shot in the film, cursing itself for not having a camera. And seeing this dichotomy itself as something happening to a character in the film.

He was seeing himself seeing himself as a character in the film. It made his brain ache. And it seemed to be the essence of his sin. Not that he had let Gentry blow him, not even that he had felt physical pleasure, or even that he had done it to save the film, but that he had used it afterward to get his footage. That he had used his own pain as a device to make his film. That he couldn’t even allow himself the authenticity of his own suffering. He had gone so far into the film that he had annihilated his own self; he and the film no longer had separate realities outside each other.

The mandala fountained into an explosion that seared the eyes, then captured them in a shimmering curtain of randomly coruscating lights, like an empty channel on a color television tube. There was a collective sharp exhale, then a slow intake of breath, and Paul joined in the protoplasmic reaction.

But that other part of him stood aside watching the brain-burn cases staring into the vacuum of the electronic void and felt a sickening, twisted tension building toward explosion.

Star moved into the dead zone where pain vibrated in blown out minds and violence brooded in muscles yearning for release, and the patterns of the electric sign washed over a multitude of tortured souls seeking release in black destruction.

The swamp breath of the beast filled her lungs, stinking of pain. An unclean, fetid pain, green with sickness, red with rage, black with self-sustained despair. It was the strongest and most terrifying onslaught of pain she had ever felt, a typhoon of darkness blowing on her candle. But she felt the light within blowing in that wind, growing in that wind, fanning into flame, feeding itself on the very power that howled against it, filling her with the light, setting the boundaries of her flesh aflame, and she was a torch against the night, burning yet unconsumed.

She walked into the zombielike crowd like a fairy princess in an aura of special-effects lighting, but no Disney princess ever had a body like that or used it like that, breasts thrust upward and outward against yellow satin fabric under a sky-blue cloak thrown back over her shoulders. No fairy godmother had ever had eyes like that, luminous green jewels that went straight to the heart from the loins. In her presence, sex reached through the body to touch the soul.

Paul’s attention was freed from the meaningless patterns of the electric sign, drawn to this warmer and brighter sun the moment her presence entered his perceptual sphere, and her presence was such as to broadcast itself far beyond line of sight.

His eyes moved to center themselves on this vision of flesh in the corner of his perception, and he raw her smiling and touching, saying little words to people, and all the while those strange green eyes looked off into some other space-time continuum. She was like the queen of the fourth dimension seeing the purple hills of home even as she walked the earth. Spaced out—or spaced in to something no one else saw.

She touched the darkness with fingers of light. “Ah, it’s a beautiful night!” she sighed, breaking the dead silence around her, throwing her arms out, arching her breasts into the air. People blinked and smiled, waking from their dark dream. Killer-shark faces regained some portion of their humanity. A biker grinned at her through broken teeth. She could feel her presence breaking the crystallized violence, shattering the obsidian heart of the beast.

Paul felt his body carrying him through the crowd toward Star, through a crowd that moments before would have slashed in hair-trigger rage at anyone daring to move through its tense and solid immobility. But now what had formed in front of the electric sign was breaking up into clusters and groups and pairs and single human beings, even as the patterns on the sign above them continued to scream at the mind for attention.

Like the others, Paul was alive in the world again, plunged back into his own private pain. Yet he felt enhanced, not diminished, by the shattering of the crowd consciousness—the
mob
consciousness—sucking on the bile in each of them, feeding it back in a cresting cycle of violent tension moving toward critical. What she had done was so simple, yet so profound. He loved her for it. It didn’t matter whether she had known what she was doing or not, whether she was a psychic genius or stark staring insane. She was what she was, good in a time that was bad, light in the dark. She was truly beautiful—that was what mattered.

This beauty drew him toward her like a man staggering across an endless desert toward a shimmering vision of cool water. Within him, there was nothing but a ball of ache, the hollow vortex of his schizoid centerless being spiraling down, down, down into the hole inside himself, the nothingness at his core, where he merged with the film and became an automaton of his own creation. But before him was someone who had shattered such a vortex in the world outside. Surely she could light up the darkness within as she had banished the darkness without.

He came up to her like a holy madman out of the desert, eyes burning with visions he didn’t want to see, surrounded by a blinding rainbow aura that flickered and flashed unstably like a dynamo running wild. He pushed through the people around her—through Krishna people, red-eyed speed freaks, purple acidheads struggling for some purchase on reality—and none of them impeded his passage, so shrill, and powerful, and out of control were his vibes.

But they weren’t bad vibes; they were the vibrations of a strong man in pain, a man somehow blinded and wounded by his own strength, yet a man, she sensed, with strength to give.

She smiled at him, and he seemed to float out of his headlong rush. He stared wildly at her, wanting to say everything, but none of it had words. She remembered having seen his face before in some other place; it had been a detached face then, existing in its own self-determined reality. Now it was the face of a man confronted with more outside and inside reality than he could bear. And who understood that more than she?

“Would you like to take a walk with me?” she said, throwing psychic arms around him, hugging him to her, offering comfort. Offering it, yet perhaps seeking it too, sensing some strange communion of need that the two of them shared.

He nodded mutely, twitching the corners of his mouth, looking at her with confused eyes. “I know,” she said, feeling the endless levels of her words in her own mind. “I think we both know,” she said, taking his hand.

Paul let her lead him through the crowd, through the girders supporting the electric sign, and into the gray darkness behind it. She furled the hood of her cloak around her face, drawing into privacy as they walked silently up the slope of the campgrounds that ascended to the lip of the natural amphitheater. Through thousands of abandoned campsites; sleeping bags, tents, and gear whose owners were off chasing rainbows and demons in the maelstrom below. Here and there a fire or a pinpoint of glowing orange light punctuated the darkness, and every now and then Paul could make out shadowy figures balling in the grass, grunts and sighs that tormented his heart.

“This is better here,” Star said. “Out of the crowd, out in the night. I know you, don’t I?”

“At Jango Beck’s party. Remember? I was the guy who wasn’t making a movie. You told me I was living my life like a movie I was making, that I’d lose my center. I thought I understood you then, but I didn’t.... Not till now... not till....”

“You’re Paul Conrad, the dude that Jango got to make his movie for him, aren’t you?” she said, seeing that he was struggling with something he couldn’t express.

“Yes.”

“And you’ve found out that you’re not in control. That Jango’s put you on a trip you don’t understand and now you have to fly it on your own.”

His eyes widened. She smiled sadly. “We’ve been given the same kind of karma,” she said. “If you want something from me, just ask. It’s yours if it’s mine to give.” She could feel his pain and confusion, reached out with her love to contain it. But he still couldn’t speak. She sat down in the middle of a pile of sleeping bags, gently drew him down beside her. “Why don’t you just tell a story?” she said.

“When I met you at that party,” Paul said, “I wanted a chance to prove I could make a feature film more than anything in the world, and I had given up hope that I would ever get it. I was drying up inside. I would’ve sold my soul to make a film. And I think I did.”

Her eyes sparkled tenderness at him. “Jango gave you what you wanted,” she said. “Did you think there wouldn’t be a price? He put you where you were meant to be. Did you think you were going to choose where that was? He synced you into your true energy source. Did you think that couldn’t be frightening? Are you unhappy with the bargain? Would you rather go back to dying slowly inside?”