Everybody Scream! (11 page)

The distant shouts, cries, exclamations, laughter had been almost frightening at first to Del on some deep level, as if he feared that when the near-empty corridors of the carnival suddenly flooded with people he would be trampled. It was almost enough to make him want to seek shelter or higher ground. It was a scary thought, like the scary thought in years past of what it would be like to suddenly fall off the stage into the masses of his fans, like a man who can’t swim falling into the sea. He didn’t hate the sea, he loved it, but he’d rather love it from a ship. A big, high, unsinkable ship. There had been a time when Del–who wasn’t even a very distinctive, interesting-looking man–couldn’t walk a city street to browse the stores, couldn’t go into a fast food restaurant for a burger. He didn’t have that problem anymore, but it had taken a while to feel comfortable among the masses, and to hear these distant voices like the great murmuring he had once heard from backstage now gave him a brief shiver, as if thousands of people would be pouring in after
him
, to grab at him and in crazed possessive love tear his body to pieces. Funny, Del thought, how he had sought both to evade the masses, out of fear and a sense of jealous privacy, and how he had sought to draw the masses to him and hold their attention with all his strength.

But there was no mad animal stampede–the turnstile only allowed one at a time, and there were many corridors of the carnival maze to disperse the flood quickly, and only a few children ran frenziedly past him, exhilarated. Del now stood at a candyfloss booth, chatting with the woman inside, Toovish Oga. Too, as they called her, was a Tikkihotto, who were human in appearance but for the swimming translucent nests of tendrils that grew from their eye sockets in place of eyeballs. Too, however, had had her tendrils cut down to stumps which hid inside cosmetic human eyes, gazing out of them, although her vision was thus limited for her kind. She’d had eyelids made, and eyebrows implanted. She was very tall, shapely, with long fluffy brunette hair, and very funny and friendly. She was quite pretty but wore too much rouge, lipstick and eye makeup for Del’s taste. One night after work Del had taken her out for a late night snack at a highway restaurant stop, and afterwards they had kissed and embraced in his car. He’d fondled her breasts and started slipping his hand into her sweat pants but she’d squirmed free shyly. Del was married; she didn’t feel right. Del was surprised, in light of her great friendliness toward him, her sexy makeup and hair and rather showy clothing. But it wasn’t that she had been teasing him, he knew. Though disappointed, he was impressed to see that all along she hadn’t just been flirting with him, flaunting her attractiveness, wagging her ass for him–she really liked him as a friend, she opened up her private feelings out of trust and regard for him. He still wanted to fuck her, but he liked her even more since then, in a different way. He didn’t have many platonic girl friends,
real
friends. It was nice to see her face brighten whenever he came to her booth, knowing she didn’t want to lure him to bed to prove her womanly power. So many of the beautiful girls and women he’d had during his days of intense popularity had thrown their bodies on him in a smothering avalanche, but just to say they’d fucked Del Kahn; if he, the exact same man, had met them before (or after) his fame, they might have sneered with distaste or laughed in his face.

Del wasn’t tall, wasn’t handsome. He had a very friendly, very pleasant face; he could look handsome in the right pose or light, and had been specially lighted and posed for publicity shots many times, but it was the pleasantness that made him seem handsome. He had short dark hair, thinning back from his forehead a bit (he liked the mature look and hadn’t felt inclined to halt the progress yet), a not exactly delicate nose, a worried brow that made him look concerned and compassionate and also vulnerable. His face could register a lot of intensity, but the flesh never conveyed the extent of the intensity he actually felt. It came as a surprise to some just how strongly, or angrily, the pleasant Del Kahn could feel about things.

He had a muscular body, but his muscles were not the product of years of hard work (he had worked in factories, had drawn much of his song material from those early days, but he had usually performed light work), nor had they been hardened in the mean streets. He’d built them up during his touring days, working out and submitting to medical procedures, no longer content to be the skinny big-nosed kid turned down by the girls at the factories. His natural facial features, though, he had kept. It was, after all,
his
face. He didn’t want to feel too phony, too synthetic, just happy about his physicality, strong and healthy. And Del had never cared for the garish or ostentatious costumes of many of his fellow musicians, had always dressed casually, in keeping with his image of being a regular man, an everyman, singing from the hearts of all the men and women who loved him and wanted to hear him express what they felt but couldn’t articulate. After a while his casual dress had seemed like a costume to him, though, and he had felt trapped, obligated, as if he would be called a traitor, be accused of selling out, if he dressed up more often, dressed for the varied moods he felt.

Thus, now he felt liberated and gratified to wear this bright white dress shirt, a black string tie clasped with the turquoise-studded disc Sophi had given him, very sharp in his suit made from expensive Kodju silk, a dark greenish-black or blackish-green with a fly’s eye iridescent metallic sheen. Sophi teased him that he looked like a Nevadan gangster lately, but that wasn’t because he sometimes carried a pistol, since that wasn’t so unusual, or unwarranted, in Punktown. It was just a stab of revenge, he felt. Not that she lived for revenge against him, but her little stabs let off her steam, and better that than a volcano. She wouldn’t have bought the tie clasp if she hated his new look.

If anyone might now have still recognized Del Kahn, some old loyal fan, not as fickle as the rest, Del had himself practically erased the chance by deviating so drastically from the days of black t-shirts and jeans. He wasn’t hiding, not at all; that wasn’t the point, privacy aside. He simply had other moods to express. That had partly been his downfall. With his last few releases, Del had gotten more serious, adhered more closely to a unified theme each album. Less prevalent, and on
Heroes
absent, were the songs celebrating the freedom beyond the punch-out of the factory clock or the stale office, optimistic, fun and raucous. The Del Kahn who wrote an entire album full of gloomy portraits of true life characters wasn’t the Del Kahn who had attracted all those eager fans, screaming girls, cheering men, with songs of liberty and love and passionate rebellion of the spirit against the chains of oppressive society. This Del Kahn bowed his head, defeated, under those chains. He wasn’t an escape anymore. If Del Kahn had remained the t-shirted, grinning factory troubadour, he might not now be Del Kahn, the forgotten, who had sunk down in the murk of his own art. It wasn’t so much that his audience had tired of him and drifted on. Many had, would have moved on no matter what. But the real thrust of it was that Del Kahn had tired of Del Kahn and moved on, and the general mass of fans had wanted him to remain as he was. He could understand that, as greatly as it disappointed him. He didn’t resent his fans for needing that optimism. But he had other moods to express.

Of course, now people had magnetized to Chauncy Carnal of Sphitt, and Flemm and the Saliva Surfers and their kind, to find that raucous celebration of life. But it was a celebration in another tone, a mean-spirited, misogynistic, ugly tone, and his former audience’s ardent embrace of these groups in his stead was what could inspire Del Kahn to resent them.

Del hadn’t disowned his old work. But he had grown older, more experienced, more realistic, more sophisticated. He had matured. His old music was sometimes naïve. But people
wanted
to be naïve. They wanted to feel young, idealistic, passionate. Wasn’t he meant to entertain them, rather than inform them of what the dismal VT news could already tell them? Didn’t they want to laugh and cheer, rather than be moved to thought and tears? Why else had so many of Punktown’s diverse people, male and female, human and non-human, lifted him as their spokesman on their shoulders in the first place? They had given him what he had, right? So who was he to betray their trust and need?

But Del Kahn wasn’t a factory machine designed to churn out a stale product. That was what he had always rebelled
against
in his songs! He didn’t feel that old burning optimism anymore. It made him as sad as any of his fans could be, but he had to be true to himself. He was an artist. He had hoped, in maturing, entering marriage, changing, that he could continue to express the feelings of his fans as they too matured and changed with the years. But they didn’t want that. Their bodies were changing, their lives were changing, but their emotions still clung desperately to the safe, naïve dreams of youth. If they became dislodged they would fall into the black void of growing old and facing the unpleasantries of life, such as a greater responsibility to their jobs, paying bills, responsibilities to wives and husbands and children–and dying. Del Kahn hated drug abuse. He had smoked seaweed here and there, but he had never even tried gold-dust once. He had urged his fans years ago to turn onto his music, not to drugs, to expand their horizons. Well, it had happened. Del Kahn had become a safe, transporting drug, offering release and escape. And now he had taken the drug away, and the escapists among his fans had turned to other drugs.

Del stared into a pink whirlpool cloud of sugar, mesmerized. A hurricane spiral vortex. A paper cone moved into it, swept around the sides of the whirlpool, turning, gathering up a head of cloud sugar. Del’s lips molded into a faint smile. “That looks sexual.”

“Everything looks sexual to you.” Too held up the finished cone of candyfloss, extended it to him. “A last cone for the year?”

“Oh, how sweet.” Del took it.

“Ha ha.”

“I’d rather bury my nose into something even sweeter.”

“Ha ha.”

“Can I dip my love cone into your sugar pit?”

“Someone told me somebody did that–she read it in a letter to a sex magazine,” said Too, growing animated. “This guy put his thing in a candyfloss machine and his girlfriend and her sister ate it off.”

Del laughed. “Oh, come on…the magazines write those letters.”

“No they don’t, do they?”

“
Yes!
” Del laughed. “Man.” He took a bite of the cloud; it reverted back to a crunchy sugary liquid in his mouth. “Our last day together. You’re going to school, and you may not be here next year. We may never see each other again. Your last chance to seduce me.”

“Geesh, I’m heartbroken. I ought to let you have sex with me, and then suddenly pull my fake eyes out.” It wasn’t just anyone she confided in about her eyes. “How’d you like that?”

“Honey, you don’t know me. I’ve had Tikkihotto girls. This one girl wrapped her eyes around my rod, pumped me until I thought I’d explode, and then used them to put me in her mouth.”

“Well, all I have left is little stubbly ends, Del, sorry–but then, I guess that’s all I need to handle your thing, huh?”

“I
told
you not to make fun of my penis. I happen to like single-celled organisms.”

Loud rock music started up from the Screamer, off behind the booth. It was one of the first rides you saw when you came in through the gate, tucked in a corner of the charged fence. Del stared over at it through the glass of Too’s booth. His manner grew subdued again. “I really will miss you, hon. You’re a sweet, sweet kid–no pun intended. I really am fond of you, all sex talk aside. Write to me. Come back next year if you need work–I’ll get you something better. Let’s stay friends, alright?” He looked at Too and gave her that big, toothy, extra-pleasant Del Kahn grin.

“I’ll write you, I promise.” Too was embarrassed, averted her eyes. Luckily, a little girl had appeared, so that Too could keep her eyes on her whirlpool. “I may very well be back next year…God knows my mother and father won’t give me enough money for a car.”

“I’ll buy you a car if you go to bed with me once.”

The little girl paid for her cone, looked up at Del. “You pig.”

Del laughed. “Sorry, honey, forgot you were there.”

The child ran off. When Too let herself look at Del again, he was again looking through at the Screamer. “Decide what you’ll be doing this fall?”

“Nope,” he muttered. “Same old thing. I guess.”

“I thought you said you might start writing some songs, and if you decided not to use them you’d give them to friends.”

“Mm,” he grunted.

The Screamer was a circular machine, with a full circle of connected cabs which rotated around a central axis, dipping and rising along with the dips and rises in the surrounding metal walkway as they spun. The cabs, base, and circular roof were white, but the sides of the roof, trimmed with colored lights which didn’t show too well in daylight, were also covered with bright, crude paintings. Music was strongly associated with the Screamer. While there were far more complex, imaginative rides, it was the use of music and the very simplicity of the ride itself that made the Screamer one of the most popular rides. Music blasted from speakers above the control booth attached to the left side of the ride at the highest point of the surrounding walkway. The Screamer’s music was loud; it was the primary background music for a fifth of the carnival proper just by itself. And so, painted on the outside of the circular roof above the train which madly spun around the central cylinder, biting its own snake tail, were four or five music stars.