Passing Through the Flame (92 page)

Blue looked at him stupidly as the chanting of the crowd got louder and louder. “WE WANT THE MUSIC! WE WANT THE MUSIC! WE WANT THE MUSIC!”

“I can’t do that,” Blue said. “Listen to them! Man, that’s the last thing in the world they want now!”

The nerd was scared shitless, the gutless wonder Sargent shoved the muzzle of his M-16 into the small of Blue’s back. This was definitely the time to apply the max motivation, it was a little late to worry about morale problems. “You listen to
this,
Blue, or I’ll blow you apart.” He jammed the microphone back into Blue’s hand and frog-marched him a few steps forward with the rifle muzzle.

As Blue lifted the microphone to his mouth in slow motion, like a brain-burn case who had just staggered out of a mortar barrage on LSD, Sargent turned to the invisible pressure of eyes boring holes into the back of his neck. And saw Ruby staring at him with such hurt, such anger, such confusion that he froze solid for a long moment. He wanted to explain, and he felt the hot metal of the M-16 in his hands thrust into the back of one of her people, and the crowd was getting so quiet and strange, and we could all get killed for this mission, and what the hell’s it all for, and he couldn’t think of a thing to say. His brain was burning and grinding and slipping gears. He couldn’t quite focus on what he was doing or why.

Bill Horvath held Susan by both limp hands, feeling the leaden weight of the guitar strap across his back, and looked into eyes that were somewhere else, that weren’t seeing him at all. Her whole body was vibrating like a tuning fork.

“Susan... babes....”

But she wouldn’t answer him. She just looked right through him, staring out into the crowd, flipped into the total reality of Star, into that terrible beyond. I created a place for her that I can’t follow her into, that I can’t even see into, and I pushed her into it, and I kept putting her there, and now she’s walking away from me into there, and this time maybe she’s not coming back. Maybe she’s never coming back.

Damn you, Beck, goddamn you, you motherfucker! We could’ve been just another group, we could’ve been just Bill and Susan singing our songs, we would’ve been happy, we would’ve been all right. But you had to make us into more than that, you had to make us want to be more than that, let the music take you, let the music take you, and here we are where it’s taken us, and where the fuck is that?

“We’re ah... gonna show you that all this is yours... that... ah... we’ve liberated Sunset City from the... rip-off artists and... pigs who put it together to exploit you for their... downer movie and... overpriced record albums....”

Ivan Blue’s amplified terror drew Horvath’s eyes away from Susan, and he saw that Sargent had stuck his machine gun in Ivan’s back! Bobby, Jerry, and Mark were cowering around the organ; the Movement people were huddled together near a huge pile of tapes, covered by one of Sargent’s gunmen. The crowd has suddenly become ominously silent. What the fuck is going on?

“We’re going to trash those rip-off albums in the name of the people,” Blue said, igniting an enormous collective groan of protest, an animal moan in which Horvath found himself joining as his body carried him across the stage toward Sargent,
leaping
for his throat as the voice of the crowd became a scream in his ear his vision reddened out in fear and rage all the pain that went into those cuts last album we’ll ever make Susan—

Paul Conrad suddenly saw the figure of Bill Horvath dash into his two-shot on Ivan Blue and the commander of the gunmen. He leaped straight at the armed man’s throat as the commander turned, extracting something out of a pocket with his left hand. The scream of the crowd was deafening as Paul pulled back to a longer shot, showing all the figures on the stage frozen in the impending moment of violence. The Movement people cowered under the gun of one of the armed men as he tossed a bottle of some oily liquid onto the piled-up reels of tape. The Velvet Cloud stood dumbfounded around the organ. Star drifted across the angry frame of violence, sunlight flashing off her body in dozens of momentary rays, a moving kaleidoscope of unreal brilliance and fluidity.

Abruptly, Paul’s eye was jarred away from the viewfinder by a press of bodies surging forward around him, almost knocking him off his feet before he recovered his balance. He saw a phalanx of about twenty uniformed guards charging toward the stage tower, and the crowd was flowing forward with them.

“Here comes our copter!” Emmett’s voice shouted in his ear.

“Brace me back to back!” Paul shouted back, not daring to waste the time to look.

He felt Emmett’s back braced against his, parting the crowd as it oozed around him, as he raised the viewfinder of the camera to his eye again and refocused on the stage. The commander of the gunmen stiff-armed Horvath, sent him sprawling backward across the stage toward Star. Something in his hand sparkled. Paul heard the beat of rotors overhead, felt the wind of the camera copter’s passage toward the stage. Whirling at the sound and whipping his automatic rifle up to bear on it, the commander of the gunmen tossed his cigarette lighter into the pile of tape reels, which instantly burst into bright orange flame.

Before Chris Sargent could fire a warning burst past the helicopter, he heard the pop-pop-pop-pop of an M-16. Completing his whirl, he saw Frank Bellows already firing into the rotors.

Then the crackling of random gunfire, and a searing pain across his left bicep. Shit, I’m hit!

Gunshots going off practically in his ear tore Paul’s eye away from the camera, and he saw two red-faced guards not ten yards away firing pistols at the stage as screaming people tried to stampede away from them in a widening circle, only to batter against the human wall of the surrounding crowd. Paul caught a few seconds of this, then whipped back to a full shot on the stage. The copter was climbing and angling away from a burst of machine-gun bullets, and the leader of the gunmen had a bright smear of blood on his left arm. Bill Horvath staggered backward, clutching at his shoulder, as more pistols were fired from within the crowd.

“Suppress that fire!” Chris Sargent screamed, dropping to the deck. “We’re sitting ducks up here!” He fired a long burst toward the muzzle flashes in the crowd near the tower. The order was superfluous. The boys were already down on their bellies, firing short efficient bursts at the muzzle flashes that were erupting now in every quarter of the crowd. A bullet pinged off the steel floor two feet from Sargent’s left foot, and another zipped past his ear. He answered with a short burst in the general direction of their origin—

Paul Conrad reeled in a red fog of blood and holocaust, knocked every which way by the panicked crowd around him that had been whipped into a froth of fear by the bursts of automatic weapons fire tearing into it like random lightnings from the sky. He held the camera to his chest and shot more or less blindly as he was knocked left, right, back, to his knees.

He saw a hand holding a pistol reach above the heads of the roiling crowd to fire two shots at the stage, and then he was diving into the forest of legs as an answering burst of bullets ignited screams and shrieks of pain around him, as something zipped past his nose and buried itself in the ground.

He staggered to his feet past a bare thigh streaming blood, and stumbled into something tall, immobile, and metallic—one of the steel poles that had held up the fencing around the stage compound. He braced his back against it, and as bodies smashed against him, bruising his flesh and slamming his spine against the metal again and again, he managed to hold his ground for the moment and aim his camera shakily at the stage—

Star felt as if she were drifting in slow motion through a thick liquid of crystal clarity, as if the moment of karmic explosion had strobed her consciousness up to an ultraviolet level where every motion of matter through space was revealed as a slow geodesic curve of deliberate inevitability.

A bright red flower unfolded itself on Bill’s shoulder as he pirouetted back toward her, and a matching red ribbon was wound across Chris Sargent’s sleeve as hot black corpuscles of incredibly dense evil pulsed from his weapon, ripping apart the very reality of the space they passed through. More bullets pierced the air around her, their trajectories turning her motion through space-time into a dance through a crisscrossing lattice of infinitely sharp wires, a maze of death.

But even as her body moved forward to Bill through this slow-motion turning of the great wheel, even as the mandala of fate moved her through the transformations with an irresistible inertia, the light within her flared outward in a transformation of no less profundity, no less fluidity. Wave fronts of golden light passed through her from within emptying her being of all else, and she merged with the light, merged with the moment as she passed through it, donning it like a suit of clothes, her
traje de luces
, stepping totally into it, and thus gaining the power to move it through herself as she moved through it, transforming and transformed.

Now everything around her was an extension of her own being, and her own being was only the outline of the light against the space through which she passed. She was the vast and panicked crowd, and she was the innocent people cowering in dread and guilt on their bellies on the stage, and she was Sargent’s gunmen transforming their fears into a hot-blue metal rage, and she was Chris Sargent himself twisted with anger and self-loathing, and she was the red-crazed minds behind the pistols firing up at the stage, and she was Bill, hurt and bleeding, falling back toward her while sharp metal death filled the air. She was there for them all, for she was all of them, passing through each other, transforming and transformed.

Motion exploded through her, the beyond within moving through her flesh; she threw off her vest, moving forward into the face of the storm, bringing her microphone up to her lips, and letting the song bubble through her into the poisoned and fractured air.

Paul gasped aloud at what he saw through the viewfinder of his camera, and he soared and ached deep inside.

Star moved across the stage to her wounded lover through flashes of random bullets, walking upright through the crossfire as if it wasn’t there. Rays of light scintillated from her mirrored clothes, as she tore off her vest, tossed it into the air where it shone and sparkled in the bright sunlight as it descended, exposing her preternaturally perfect breasts, red nipples thrust upward to challenge the sky and the bullets, a vision of flesh baring itself to metal.

She lifted her microphone with what seemed a strange unhurried tenderness to her lips, and her voice filled the world from hundreds of speakers, intimate and immense, centering every eye, every soul on the image of her naked flesh against the sun and bullet streaked sky. “Take this body, I am yours...”

At once, the huge crowd of terrified and enraged people, the bleeding and the wounded, the killers and the victims, ooohed with one voice as one, two spots of bright red blood appeared on her left shoulder and right hand. Her voice did not falter or break beat. “I will warm you.....”

Sargent, turning, stared upward into a vision that pierced him to the core—Star, as she had been that magic night, her bare torso arcing upward and outward above him, her breasts soaring over him like the proud figurehead of a towering sailing ship, love in the liquid green depths of her eyes. The evocation of the finest moment through which he had ever lived—but wrenched through a twisting pain as he saw the blood streaming down across her chest and falling from her uplifted hand. “I will love you,” she sang, and it seemed to Sargent that she was singing just for him, heedful of his pain, oblivious to her own. “I will flash you through the fire of my flame...”

Jesus Christ, how did this happen? How did I let it happen? For what? He wanted to cry. He wanted to throw up. He wanted to throw his arms around her. He wanted to shield her flesh. He leaped to his feet in front of her, right into the crossfire, and felt himself take a slug in the thigh as he threw away his gun.

Time stood still, and the thump of sudden silence froze Paul’s heart in mid-beat as he watched the automatic rifle sail off the stage into the crowd, as the firing abruptly stopped. He seemed to be watching the shot in slow motion, from multiple angles, overlapping sequences flicker-fading into each other, as if it were the edited moment in cinematic hyperreality flashing forward in his head and transforming his present-tense vision with anticipation. He was seeing this moment in his film, and he was living its reality, experiencing it on both levels, and engraving the combined image indelibly in his memory.

Sargent throwing his body in front of Star. The rifle sailing into space. The blood on Sargent’s khaki army shirt, on Star’s pink flesh. The look in the eyes of one of the black riflemen. The massive head turn and freeze of great reefs of human faces in the background. Bill Horvath reaching Star’s side. The sudden absence of flying bullets. Each detail seemed to emphasize itself to him in turn in a freeze-frame of time.

It was the greatest single piece of film that he would ever shoot, the greatest sequence he would ever put together, and it was not the product of his calculation, but a free moment of reality, a gift of unknown fate.

Horvath felt and didn’t feel the pain in his shoulder. It existed somewhere on the unimportant periphery of his consciousness. He felt her body against him, shoulder to shoulder, blood to blood—that was what was at his center, that was all that mattered, their bodies against each other, sharing whatever their common fate might be.

Then he saw that the shooting had stopped, and the people—festival-goers, gunmen, guards, all of them—had frozen for a moment at their fever pitch of frenzy. He saw that Sargent’s gun was sailing down into the crowd, that he was shielding her with his own body, that the slaughter and madness now hung suspended on the knife-edge of this moment, that the people longed to be flipped out of this horrid reality and home again, and that Star, his Susan, had done this thing.