Passing Through the Flame (89 page)

Her words calmed him, cooled him with their hard, bright insight, to the point where his mind began to function, compare, evaluate. He considered the endless future of Los Angeles deadness that had seemed inevitable before Jango Beck’s party, and he considered the film he had in the can, the film he could undoubtedly cut into something that at least wouldn’t be a disgrace, that had its shining moments of reality in the dross. He considered how he and Sandy were drifting apart, and the coming alive of Velva Leecock. With a new dispassionateness, he considered the feel of Rick Gentry’s mouth on his cock and the pleasure he had felt, and the guilt, and what it had meant to Gentry, and the scene he had just been able to shoot. He considered how his life and the film had merged to the point where he couldn’t look beyond it. He considered it all, and he just didn’t know.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I just don’t know. I don’t think I can even know who I am until it’s all over.”

“Know?” Star
said. “Till it’s over? It’s never going to be over, and you’re never going to know.” She felt her own wheel of destiny swinging through the hour, bearing her to that unknowable storm of cosmic forces that would break around her at noon tomorrow. “You’ve got to go where it takes you. You can
only go
where it takes you. You can never hold back the changes; you can only try to ride their power like a wave. If you try to get off the wave, you’re dead before you’ve tried to live.”

“I just let my leading man suck my cock so I could get the footage I wanted,” he blurted.
“That’s
where it took me.
That’s
where I got by trying to ride the wave.”

She smiled at him, feeling a flash of something that went beyond empathy—identification, a two-way exchange, a moment of lessened loneliness. “Is that your terrible secret?” she said. “Is that supposed to horrify me? Oh, Paul, Paul, only this morning I gave my body to men and women and the world, and it wasn’t even me that did the giving. I wasn’t even there. It moved through me, and it took me, and I did what I was meant to do, and I wasn’t even there. I understand.”

“And... it’s all right... is that what you’re saying? Lord, I don’t even know who I am anymore....”

“I don’t know who I am either,” she said. “And sure, it’s frightening. But here we are.”

“Here we are,” he said, smiling back at her and telling her he understood, a man who in his own way stood where she stood, riding forces beyond his control, knowing it, fearing it, yet fated to ride them just the same. She felt him offering her his own psychic support, as each told the other that they were not so all alone, and once more she was the Susan inside Star.

Something changed inside her; she became a frightened girl sitting on the ground beside him, no more sure of who and what she was than he. For a long moment, they just sat there, comforting each other with a human presence, sitting quietly on the dark hillside, watching the firefly lights of joint ends glowing in the night, the pale stars in the pearlescent sky over the hilltops.

Something changed inside Paul too as he sat in the presence of someone he knew had experienced more of the world’s pain than he would ever know, who was farther from being the master of her own fate than he would ever be. What were his stupid little guilt, his puling little fears, his sniveling uncertainty beside what she must feel? A psychotic with delusions of grandeur or an authentic saint, how could she ever know which? How could such a dualism even have meaning? But she went on and lived out her destiny; she gave herself to being whatever unknown thing she was meant to be. What in my life requires that kind of courage? Paul thought. What am I really so afraid of?

“Is there anything
I
can do for
you?”
he said.

Her face lit up with sunshine. “Oh, man,
you just did!”

She took him up to the lip of the great dark saucer and showed him the empty stage far below on the valley floor, gleaming like an altar in the pale starlight.

“That’s where I’ll find out where it’s taking me,” she said softly. “Tomorrow at noon.”

“What’s going to happen there tomorrow?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I only know that when we go on stage tomorrow....” She trembled, she clutched at his hand for human warmth, for the reality of flesh touching her own, for an anchor to Susan.

“What’s going to happen to you tomorrow, Star?”

“Susan. My name is Susan.”

“What’s going to happen to you, Susan?”

“I... I think I’m going to find out who I am. I think a lot of people are going to find out who they are. I hope we like it. Oh,
babe,
I hope we like it.”

“I mean what’s
actually
going to happen?” he said.

“I can’t tell you. I don’t know myself. But if you want to film what this festival really means, film the stage tomorrow at noon. Maybe after it’s over,
you’ll
be the one who tells us what it means.”

She held his hand and stared down into the abyss at that lonely tower of steel reaching for the sky.

After she hugged him sharply once and gently once again, she left him silently and walked slowly down the slope of the hill toward the lights and chaos of the People’s World’s Fair. Paul watched her walk back to whatever awaited her down there, watched her wave to him from halfway down the slope as she disappeared into the shadow of the electric sign.

Then he turned to look out over the empty amphitheater waiting for tomorrow’s sunrise, and a true and final calm at last came over him. There was nothing he had to face that was worse than what she had to face. And now there were two women who understood what he had done and thought he was all right. Star... Susan... and Velva. Maybe I love Velva in a funny way, he thought. Maybe she loves me. Who would’ve thought it could come to that?

We are what we’ve become until we become something else. And that’s not so damned bad. It’s not so bad at all.

He took a deep breath of fragrant night air and walked down the hillside.

Bill Horvath pulled on a pair of hand-embroidered jeans and a plain white sleeveless denim shirt. Today seemed like a day to dress like the people.

But Susan was getting herself up in that
traje de luces
thing—tight black satin bell bottoms trimmed with gold thread and a brilliant yellow sleeveless blouse, both brocaded with dozens of little mirrors.

“You look like a bullfighter in that thing, babes,” he said as she began brushing the tangles out of her long hair. “Don’t you think it’s a bit much?”

“Maybe I feel like a bullfighter today,” she said. “Like somebody who’s going to be thrown into a ring with a wild beast in a stadium full of people.”

Horvath walked around the bed to the dressing table and put his hands on her shoulders. In the mirror, her eyes seemed too bright, too spacy, as they had last night, when she freaked and went bopping through the festival playing Star.

“You sure you want to go on today, babes? We could cancel; we could tell Jango to go fuck himself.”

“You know I wanted to stop this last night.”

“We can’t stop what’s going to happen. I don’t want to see it stopped. But you heard what Sargent said, he can run his timetable without us.”

She stood up into his arms. Her eyes were the same glassy green that they had been in the mirror. “If it’s going to happen, I’ve got to stand in the center of it, Bill. I’ve got to stand where I can... where I’ll...”

She seemed to be looking at him from a great distance. “You’re
sure
you want to go through with it? I mean....”

“You mean am I all right? You mean am I flipping out?”

He dropped his eyes to stare at her bare feet. She touched his cheek, and he looked up again, into her green eyes. He knew those eyes all too well—that expansion of her vibes, that crazy power, that feverish energy—they weren’t Susan’s.

“I’m going where I’m meant to be,” she said. “We all are. We can’t stop it. We’ve got to go where it takes us.”

He hugged her to him, felt her flesh and her energy vibrating in his arms. Susan’s flesh, Star’s energy. Which was her? Which was real?

“Trust me, babes,” she said. “Trust yourself. Trust us to be what we are.”

He kissed her, studied her for a moment, trying to read those unreadable eyes. He shook himself. “Let’s go get some breakfast,” he said. And they walked out of the little dome into the bright morning, under a blue sky scudded with fleecy white clouds.

“All right, folks, we want to wrap this scene up by eleven so all our crews can concentrate on filming today’s performances,” Paul Conrad said. “We’ve been going great so far, let’s keep it up.” Paul stood halfway down the southern slope of the amphitheater, just west of the curved shadow line that bisected the meadow into equal segments of light and shade. Velva and Gentry, costumed in last night’s rumpled clothes, stood together in the bright sunlight, distanced from each other, but each aware that the morning’s shooting was going preternaturally well, burying their antagonism at last for the sake of the film. He could sense the new togetherness in the spirit of the crew—in the speed with which the lights and sound equipment were set up, the calmness of Harvey Friedman, the lack of excess talk or motion.

“All set,” Friedman grunted, looking through the camera’s viewfinder.

“Right. Let’s go, let’s have the lights.” The shooting lights came on just as a cloud threw Gentry and Velva into a transitory pool of shade. “Roll ‘em.”

“Sunset City
, Scene Sixty-B, take one.”

“Speed.”

“And... action.”

Velva took Gentry’s hand with a tired smile. “When the sun goes down tonight, that’ll be the end, won’t it, Doug?” she said.

“You’ll go back to New York, and I’ll go back to Kansas, and we’ll never see each other again.” In the background behind her, people were trooping down the slope of the hill to join the solid circle of bodies that already surrounded the stage at this early hour. A nice touch, Paul thought. I’ll have to shoot a little of it and use it for cutaways.

Gentry turned to her, to the camera, to Paul. “I guess we won’t,” he said softly. There was a quiet, sad calm in his eyes. “But it really doesn’t make me sad. We had our time together.” This morning, Paul found that he could accept the levels within levels that Gentry was putting into it, the ambivalences of his own persona. The director was the man was the director, and anything he was was him. No one else had done what he had done. No one had been hurt. Everyone was getting what they wanted.

“I think I’ve heard that line before,” Velva said, softening the bite nicely with a smile and a little body English.

Gentry laughed. “No doubt you’ll hear it again.” He swung her arm wildly, and they hugged each other. Paul felt four phantom arms around him and shivered once, twice, in the warm sunlight.

“Let’s forget about today until tomorrow, Doug. Let’s not say good-bye until we have to leave.”

“Okay, lady,” Gentry said, “but please don’t cry when it’s time to go.” They smiled wistfully at each other and walked hand in hand out of the shot to the left.

“Cut! That’s great, that’s a take.” Velva and Gentry began drifting away from each other
.
“Hold your positions, please,” Paul said. “Let’s get the close-ups while we’re hot.”

Velva bounced back into position like a cheerleader, breasts bobbing. Gentry took his place beside her quickly and smoothly, if without the same bounce. Paul framed Gentry in the square of his fingers, sad eyes in an aging ingenue’s face. A part of him felt for the poor son of a bitch, looked through a hypothetical camera eye without contempt or hate, with more pity than loathing. What the hell, he thought, what the hell....

“All right, Harv,” he said, “let’s get Rick first.” Gentry sighed, then blinked as the cloud overhead drifted away, flashing him from shadow into light.

Barry Stein glanced nervously at his watch, at Ivan, at Sargent’s lieutenant Pulaski, staring grimly at the high fence around the stage area, clutching the big brown shopping bag on his lap like a security blanket. “I don’t like this,” he whispered to Ivan. “I don’t like this at all.”

Early this morning Sargent had marched the entire Provisional Revolutionary Council down here to the very front of the audience and had positioned all eight of them in a tight little group right up against the fence. Then he had stationed six of his street people recruits in a hemisphere around them—like guards. Stein noticed that at least two of them were concealing pistols. He had left this Pulaski in charge of the group and then disappeared.

“The guns?” Ivan whispered back. “You knew they’d have guns.”

“I didn’t think we’d be surrounded like this.”

This is a very paranoid position to be in, Stein thought, and there’s no use pretending it’s
not
making me paranoid. They were seated right smack up against the fence, surrounded by armed crazies, and by now the hills behind them, and the floor of the saucerlike meadow right up to the gunmen at their backs was wall-to-wall people. As far as Stein could see, people filled the world, ridgeline to ridgeline, horizon to horizon. And here we are, squeezed between all those people and a hundred armed rentacops inside the fence. Right in the front lines with no place to go but forward, when the people start to move.

Chris Sargent elbowed his way through the crowd. He was clutching a brown bag under his arm concealing something obviously identical to what Pulaski had in his shopping bag, and there were heavy bulges in the small knapsack on his back. Ruby rose to meet him, but he went straight to Pulaski.

“Everything under control?”

“No one’s freaked yet.”

Chris Sargent looked at his watch. “Eleven fifty-one. T minus fourteen. D minus nineteen. Go minus twenty-four.”

Pulaski flicked his eyes at his watch. “Check.”

Now Sargent deigned to notice Ruby with a curt nod. Ruby just nodded back, fitting into the uptight, ominous mood of things. Stein stepped around McAllister and O’Brian and came up on Sargent.

“You’ve got us right in the middle of everything,” he said. “What if something goes wrong? What if there’s shooting?” Sargent grinned at him sardonically. “Then you might get shot,” he said. “But I’ll try not to take too many casualties, sir.”