Passing Through the Flame (48 page)

“You’re right, Jango,” Susan said. “We’re hanging in limbo now.”

Horvath turned to her, not really surprised. She’s saying what’s inside me, too. We’ve got to know. We’ve got to either face what live performance means or quit. Jango’s right. Bobby’s right. Susan’s right. “Do you know what you’re saying, babes?” he said.

“In front of a quarter of a million people?”

Through her hand, he could feel a single shudder go through her body. Her eyes blinked once, twice.

“Why be so dramatic about it?” Jango said, blowing smoke at the ceiling, breaking his frozen posture. “You haven’t performed live in over a year. Does it make sense to jump in the river before you test the water with your toe?”

“What do you mean?”

Beck sprang up off the water bed, went to the console on his freeform black marble desk, diddled with the controls. Five soft white lights came on at strategic points around the office, banishing the reddening murk with a flood of ordinary, businesslike white illumination. Shadows retreated, in the room, in Horvath’s mind.

“Why don’t you just go down to the High Castle tomorrow night?” Beck said. “It’s a Thursday, the place won’t be very crowded. No advance notice, just get up on the stage, relax, and jam for a while. See how it feels. Get your shit together. After that, maybe we’ll talk about Sunset City. I don’t want you high-pressuring yourselves.”

Horvath studied Beck, trying to read cunning in his eyes, trying to find the angle in this sensible, straightforward suggestion. And seeing nothing but a friendly open face.

“That’s a great idea,” Susan said. “No fans, no pressure, just a few dozen cool people. The ideal audience.” Horvath felt her hand relax in his, saw her breathing calm into an easier rhythm.

“If you want to, Susan,” he said. “If you feel you’re up to it.”

“Oh, Bill, will you stop treating me like a basket case!” Susan snapped, with a sudden vehemence that took Horvath utterly by surprise. Shrillness and anger were so rare between them that when it came, it pained to the core.

As if sensing this, her face softened, and she squeezed his hand tenderly, and said in a soft little voice, “I mean, let’s not make a big thing out of it, okay? What I’m not up to anymore is not knowing. Hanging here suspended in space. Let’s do it. Let’s get it over. Let’s find out.”

“Okay, babes,” Horvath said. And surprisingly, felt a great weight lifted off his being, felt closer to her, tighter together, than he had in weeks. “Let’s be what we’re going to be.”

Zip, zip, the two Porsches jounced into the parking lot of the High Castle, Susan just a few yards behind Bill, strung high as a speed freak soprano. Across the tarmac of the parking lot hand in hand without saying a word to each other, sharing a tight little universe of tension, creative and fearful. Golden auras haloed the streetlamps in the light evening mist. Her body was a tangle of sensitive nerve endings twanging inside her skin, primed to explode.

The black door seemed to open for them just as they approached it, as if by magic, and they were walking down the long dark hall, nearly double time, toward the golden glow at the far end.

“How do you feel, babes?” Bill said.

“Good. Scared.”

“Yeah. Yeah.”

They burst from the semidarkness into the mellow earth-colored vibes of the main room, an indoor forest clearing in early twilight. The rough-hewn walls of split telephone poles created a cathedral effect, and the hanging canopy of foliage overhead transformed that cathedral into its primal forest model. The round tables scattered around the square promenade were only half-full, and the sunken central pit held only about a dozen people. Jango had kept his promise, nothing was out of the ordinary, no word had been put out. Just a few dozen people, cool people, eating dinner in the High Castle. In a mellow atmosphere. There’s nothing threatening about this.

Up on the stage at the far end of the room, their instruments had been set up, but when they were noticed, no one seemed to make the connection. All these people saw were Bill Horvath and Susan Schiller out for an evening in the High Castle. It was the most natural thing in the world.

They walked across the room parallel to the bar, pausing only to nod to Duke and Marlene, who happened to be sitting at a table in their path, and back along the far hallway to one of the private dens provided for members who wanted to be alone together for one reason or another. Most of the dens had water beds and soft light, but this one had walls muraled in full-color abstract cartoons and a series of couches done in the same weird amorphous cartoon shapes, a Picasso version of an R. Crumb comic book.

Bobby, Jerry, and Mark were sitting together on one of the couches passing a joint. Jango, wearing a pseudo-Levi suit of blue velvet, reclined on a chair that looked something like a big purple tongue, eating a plate of cocktail artichokes.

The air of the room crackled with electricity as they walked into it. Bobby stood up. Jerry and Mark froze in the middle of a joint pass. Only Jango seemed unaffected by anything outside his own reality, forking another artichoke into his mouth.

Bill was moving in graceful double time, muscles of tight rubber over a skeleton of spring steel. He took the joint out of Jerry’s hand, took a quick, nonfunctional ritual drag, handed it to Jango, clapped his hands coming out of the crouch like a quarterback coming out of the huddle, and said, “Okay. Let’s go.”

Nobody was moving fast enough; the whole world was moving too slowly for Bill Horvath. He walked across the big room toward the stage beyond the sunken pit, having constantly to hold himself in check so as to not leave Susan far behind. Even so, the speed of their passage sent waves of excitement rippling through the people at the tables. A single small light now spotlighted the instruments on the little stage, and now the connection was made all at once; the roomful of casual people was transformed into an
audience
as the Velvet Cloud passed through their reality headed for the stage.

A wave front of silence moved with them, so that by the time Horvath had skipped up the three steps to the stage the room was hushed, all the people at the tables had turned their chairs to face the stage, and people were moving from the bar to the upholstered pit so as to be closer to them.

Blood roared in Horvath’s arteries like an endless express train through an infinite railway tunnel. He was aware of the monstrous tension he was riding and knew from long experience that there was only one avenue of release.

He picked up his guitar and felt something almost slobberingly sensual, like a junkie picking up his works in the depths of his metabolic hunger or a lover’s touch after a long, long drought. Susan came up onto the stage behind him wearing jeans and a plain red and brown dashiki, looking a little spaced, maybe, a little nervous, but definitely
Susan,
in control of herself, natural as life. When she touched a live microphone sending a blast of electronic ectoplasm through the sound system, a shiver went through the audience like a galvanic shock. They grinned at one another, and the boys came up onstage, and at once they were the Velvet Cloud.

Tuning up, Horvath felt the tension within and the tension without continuing to build, two walls of energy restrained by a thin membrane of time, about to crash together and peak into release. The audience oozed toward the stage like an amoeba, as the people in the pit crowded toward the forward lip, and people from the bar and tables slid down onto the soft rubbery pit floor. Human presence surged toward them.

“Let’s warm up with
Take This Body
before we try any of the new stuff,” Horvath said. Bobby nodded, Jerry gave his shoulders a little flex as he picked up his sticks, Mark’s fingers started to do anticipatory phantom picks, Susan’s eyes met his, she smiled, he grinned, those big green jewels sparkled, and there they were together, as they had been a thousand times before, as if their last performance had only been last week. We’re still alive. We’re still the Velvet Cloud.

He paused, feeling the audience inhale, then brought his hand down into the first chord.

A crystal flash of sound fractured the silence, and the tension shattered into the roll and drive of the music as Bobby’s organ came in behind him, and Jerry’s sticks came down, and Mark was in there backing, and the full texture of the Velvet Cloud came on, already moving. A surge of ecstasy went through Horvath as the world around him snapped into a higher gear, and he was riding the driving music coming out of his own guitar, tension dynamically resolved into a torrent of easy energy pouring out of him and through him. He synced with the music, became the music, flowed with the music as it came out of him; he was where he was meant to be.

From some vague locus beside him, he heard Susan’s voice begin to ride the line of his guitar, and he wrapped and glided his notes around her.

Take this body, ease your pain

Let me take you on a trip

Back to yourself again...

Together, they rode the music, guitar and voice intertwined in a serpents’ love dance of soul-soaring, copulating sound.

“Take this body, I am yours,” Susan sang, riding the wave front of Bill’s guitar, feeling the energy flow through her body and out to the people from a source both beyond and within. “I will warm you, I will love you....”

Her body moved to the music, making love to Bill’s guitar, and she could feel the good vibes that they shared, with each other, with the audience, and it was all right. Love was there, it was inexhaustible, and it was meant to be shared with everyone. “I will flash you through the fire of my flame....”

How mingy, how cramped of soul, to have held this back, she realized as she felt the center of her being come alive. How could it not have been a bummer to have let this hammer at the walls of my soul, crying for freedom?

“I love anyone who needs me, love is the food that feeds me, take me, make me, hold me, feel me,” she sang, the words moving into her center, melding with her being as her voice melded with Bill’s guitar. They were Bill’s words and the music of her soul, and it was all right. It was all right.

“Take this body, leave your pain,” she sang, and she meant it, everything that happened was real, anything that made someone feel loved was love, and any holding back of love was giving pain. Giving pain was letting pain pass through you, and that hurt. Oh, you always knew that, you knew it all the time!

The instruments eased off into nothing but soft organ and Bill’s guitar as she sang the last lines out into that blur of faces and bodies melting to her just beyond the pool of radiance in which she stood. “Let me take you on a trip... back to yourself again.”

A ripple of guitar into silence, then a warm, friendly, unexaggerated spring shower of applause that left Susan feeling strangely shy, a little overcome, and happier than she had been since... since the last time they were onstage.

“Back to ourselves again,” she said to Bill, to the audience, to the whole wide universe. Bill grinned at her, and she could feel the audience picking up the vibes they were putting out, feeding them back to create a shared moment of homecoming. Oh yeah, this is where we were meant to be!

Bill Horvath rode the good feelings breathing up at him from the audience, just digging it, and nodding, and flashing sweet vibes back and forth with Susan, with the boys, with the people. We weren’t bad, we weren’t half-bad. After a year, we’ve still got it.

“Like to try something new for you,” he mumbled happily. “Hope it turns out okay, we’re just getting it together. It’s called ‘Lazy Saint.’” Maybe all we ever needed was a roomful of people and the guts to get up onstage.

He glanced at the boys grinning and lazing to themselves, then out into the dim light of the big room, where a haze of psychedelic smog was beginning to build up as one by one a constellation of glowing joints winked on. It might have been the Den in the old days, in the Summer of Love, or the Fillmore, or any one of a hundred little funky places they had played before the legend swallowed up the band, before Susan became Star and the audiences became congregations of vampires. Susan was projecting herself at the audience, bouncing around on the balls of her feet, glowing at them, delighted to be with them, but her eyes were sweet and clear, sharing the same reality with his.

“Here we go,” he called, and led the Velvet Cloud into the yowling sun dance opening chords of “Lazy Saint.” Then he shaped his guitar into a silver staircase for Susan’s voice, cresting waves for her to ride.

Well, sometimes I can ride it, sometimes I don’t

Sometimes I’ll do anything, and sometime I won’t

Sometimes I’ll dive into any flesh I see

Sometimes I’m chained to life and sometimes I’m free....

The song seemed to bubble out of Susan’s soul, a ringing chord of her own spirit vibrating to the gift of eloquence he was bringing her.

“Lazy Saint! Lazy Saint!” the band blues-chanted at her.

She crouched over, silently laughing, and sang back the counterpoint mugging into their faces: “Well, sometimes you got it, baby, sometimes you ain’t!”

“Lazy Saint! Lazy Saint!”

She turned to sing the counterpoint directly at Bill, but his eyes were staring off into the blind universe of her voice and his guitar, oblivious to more mundane senses. “Well, sometimes you got it, baby, sometimes you ain’t!”

Bill glided up into a wailing, driving, rising guitar run, and Bobby backed him with an outward-surging tsunami of organ, and she let herself soar up there with the music, opened herself up, and let it all pour through her. She felt herself becoming the focal point, the energy channel, for forces beyond her ability or desire to control or comprehend. In that moment, she was Star, a nexus of the universal mind, creature of light and power, yet nothing more than a mote in the wind.

Sometimes I feel the power of the sun

Sometimes I feel that I love everyone....

Bill Horvath throbbed with the sweet ache of the music flowing from the live thing in his hands, merged with the music, became the music, wrapping his quicksilver body around the voice of the creature of his mind, lover of his secret soul, his love gift to the world, his Star.