Passing Through the Flame (68 page)

Sargent grinned. “That’s another thing,” he said. He looked straight at Stein. “Okay,” he said, “you’ve talked me into it.”

Baum laughed appreciatively. Stein flushed. Ruby choked on a giggle. Sargent’s loins tingled, and the sun warmed his skin. A few yards away, a bare-breasted girl was tossing a red beach ball into the clear blue sky, her breasts bouncing high and handsome with the motion of her body. As far as Sargent’s eye could see, people were having a high old time in the sunshine.

A surge of well-being flowed through Sargent, something like that feeling so long ago with that woman in the Porsche, with Star. As if both moments were part of the same good feeling, an ocean of feeling like this that might somehow be reached, bit by bit, piece by piece, moment by moment.

The eyes of the bare-chested girl caught his, and she smiled at him, a shadow of Ruby’s hotter smile that made their lust a pleasure that somehow extended beyond the two of them into the world.

Nearby, the circle of chanters stared up at the sun through their closed eyelids, swaying and grinning in ecstasy. It seemed all right, a fragment of this sweet moment.

“Oooom... Ahooom... Ooooom... Ahooooom....”

With a jolt and a rush and a gut-rending clatter, the camera helicopter lifted off, soared high over the fence surrounding the ranch house compound, and veered due east, still climbing. Paul Conrad spoke into the chin mike of his sound-deadening helmet: “When we get outside the festival grounds, swing south and come to a hover over the road at about a thousand feet.”

“Right,” said the electronic voice in his ear, while the bushy-haired black man in the pilot’s seat beside him gave him the high sign. There was something eerie about talking with a guy sitting right beside you via intercom, but it certainly beat trying to shout detailed directions over the roar of the rotors. Jango Beck had thought of everything.

Below, thousands of tiny figures milled about, not like the cliche ants, but like images in a long helicopter shot, or so Conrad’s eye saw it through the viewfinder of the camera as he shot a few feet of the ascent just for the hell of it. The fenced-off compound was like a rock parting the human sea of the campgrounds, a magic square of emptiness intruding from another visual reality. He zoomed in on the ranch house compound, then reversed his zoom, ending the shot.

The copter leveled off as the crowd scene below thinned out from a human forest into a borderland plain of isolated clumps of people, then ended abruptly at the fenced boundary of the Sunset Ridge Ranch, becoming an empty dry landscape in another and calmer geological period.

The copter circled south over this western movie grassland, and then they were over the road, back in twentieth-century Los Angeles County with a vengeance. Cars were jammed together on the two-lane road like an endless double row of tiny metal tract homes along some anonymous street in some nameless development in the depths of the San Fernando Valley. More cars were strewn along both sides of the road, casualties and contributing causes of the monstrous traffic jam stewing in its own hydrocarbons in the hot sun. Heat waves shimmered up through the corridor of smog like hard radiation from the throbbing scar on the body of the land.

Paul panned along the length of the road from horizon to horizon, then directed the pilot to descend to four hundred feet and track slowly west above the road toward the parking area. He held a stationary shot, locking the camera in its mount, so that the shot was of an endless line of car-tops streaming into the frame from the top and expanding out of it below, an enormous neon arrow of changing colors pointing on to Sunset City.

My God, what a shot this is, Paul thought, what fantastic power there is sitting up here with a camera in a helicopter! What a perspective it gives you! There was something oceanic about it, a dangerous illusion of godhood. Or was it illusion? The feeling certainly reflected the fact—the power to shoot almost anything your mind’s eye saw.

The area where the road debouched into the parking area was an angry maelstrom of chewed-up earth, overheated cars, billowing dust clouds, vehicles swerving to avoid each other, squad cars, and mass bad vibes. From the air, it had the Hook of a World War II battlefield scene. Stalled cars dotted the area, clogging the traffic pattern, like bombed-out tanks. The cars poured, lurched, and ground across the wounded earth like a ragged armored assault.

Paul had the pilot ascend to a thousand feet, where the pattern was more abstract and the visual similarity to a battlefield seen from the same vantage therefore more pronounced. The helicopter hovered over the southern end of the parking area, while Paul let the metal dots below execute their dance for the camera like an animated battle diagram in a military science text film. Then he had the helicopter track slowly north, losing altitude, while he slowly zoomed in on the scene below, so that the abstract scene developed detail, definition, then a choking, squalling reality as the copter came within a hundred feet of the ground—all in one continuous, unbroken shot.

What a wonderful toy this is! The shots you can get this way! The movie I’m going to be able to make playing around with this thing!

Still tracking north at a hundred feet, the copter quite abruptly passed out of the battle zone and over a vast field of immobile metal tranquillity. Acre after acre of parked cars spread beneath Paul’s eye—squares of red, blue, green, black, yellow, metalized, dusted with brown, and arranged in a Mondrian grid work of shape and color.

“Slow down and come up a few hundred feet,” Paul ordered. The copter rose into the shot he wanted: the field of cars totally filling the frame with a dazzling pattern of colored metal under hot sun, an abstraction that on second glance was unquestionably still a huge parking lot. “Okay, now just hold this altitude and speed up gradually, then slow down fast as we cross the south campgrounds, and come to a hover about a hundred yards south of the People’s World’s Fair, got it?”

“Right. Some show, ain’t it?”

“Sure is,” Paul replied. Nobody’s ever put a thing like this on film—there’s never been anything
like
this to film. If only I could concentrate on getting this kind of footage, do it as a documentary, instead of having to schlock around with a feature film format. But then, on a documentary budget, I wouldn’t be up here in a helicopter, would I? I wouldn’t have six crews downstairs. This is too big an artistic opportunity thrown in my lap for me to whine about the parameters I’m stuck with. Whatever I’m stuck with, I’m still one lucky mother!

The helicopter began very slowly tracking north again. The field of cars moving slowly through the frame begins to stream faster and faster and faster into your face from above until all you see is a flashing, flowing pattern of multicolored metal, a magic carpet rippling below you. Then the camera begins to pan upward, abruptly at first, then floating to a fixed low angle, so that you see the People’s World’s Fair, the fancifully colored buildings, the tents and shacks and stands, the carnival gaiety, rising out of the neon landscape like a mirage city above the desert sands.

“Wow,” Paul said, rising in his seat with delight.

Through his earphones, he heard the pilot’s electronically filtered laugh. “Sure having a good time, ain’t you?”

“I sure am.”

“Yeah, this is
some
scene. I could tool around up here all day.”

“Okay, Tom,” Paul said, when he had cooled his head down, “now we’re going in for the big one. I want you to track north over the People’s World’s Fair and then over the campgrounds, keeping at this absolute altitude, but letting the slope of the rise bring the copter closer to the ground. When you’re right down on the deck, I want you to follow the slope upward, then continue straight out over the lip of the amphitheater, spiral slowly down toward the stage, and land in front of it. Can you do that?”

“No sweat.”

“Great, then let’s go,” Paul said. “I sure hope we can get
this
in one take!”

The helicopter began to move forward again, over the snail-shell Poster Palace, the broad promenade jammed with people, and close by the summit of a big transparent geodesic dome, an enormous greenhouse of unruly-looking lushness. Paul kept the camera focused down at about a forty-five-degree angle, so that all this rushed across the frame and at you with exaggerated speed, seeming to expand off the frame into infinity behind you. As the copter crossed the People’s World’s Fair and began to pass over a vast field of empty campsites, the slope of the land rose to meet it, and Paul slowly panned upward until the camera was deflected no more than ten degrees below the horizontal.

It was a sudden change in perspective without a cut, a slowing of tempo taking place between two beats. The landscape was no longer rushing across the frame at you, you were floating above but somehow an organic part of it, like a man on fifty-foot stilts. Rolled-up sleeping bags, empty tents, abandoned campsites, thousands of them, pass below you, some mysteriously depopulated caravanserai. An eerie sight that builds expectance as the camera pans up the final ten degrees to horizontal, showing this endless vista of empty campsites building to a ridgeline crest outlined against the brilliant blue sky. Just a second or two of this, and then the eye seems to soar up and out over the crest of the land like a ski jumper leaping into space at the end of his run. The camera holds for an instant on the bright sun, then comes out of the blinding light to show a gigantic saucer of human beings filling the frame, swaying in unison to unheard music like a great amoeboid organism.

It took Paul’s mental breath away for a moment, brought his consciousness up out of the camera, as if the image were too much for his mind’s eye to contain. He hoped he had captured that soaring of the soul he had felt as the copter crested the ridge, that opening up of the visual universe to encompass the overwhelming image of a quarter of a million human beings moving to the same music under a golden sun.

The helicopter began to spiral inward and downward toward a double bull’s-eye in the center of the giant bowl of humanity—the circular stage and the large circle of the fenced-off area that surrounded it. The stage itself was a yin-yang mandala of Christmas red and green in the center of a circular field of brown earth and metallic-gray clutter.

Paul held this image in the center of the frame as the helicopter spiraled in toward it over a sea of faces and colorfully clad bodies, predominantly flesh tones and denim blue. The red and green mandala whirled with stately slowness in the center of the flesh and blue, and as it grew, tiny figures and bits of equipment became visible on its surface, growing to boom mikes, amplifiers, and six men in blues, greens, and browns as the stage expanded to fill the frame, the center driving out the edges.

“Hover on my command,” Paul snapped into his mike without taking his eye from the viewfinder. The stage grew larger and larger; the instruments of the band were identifiable now: four electrified strings, a drummer, and a lead singer with long blond hair waving a microphone like a scepter. Now the stage filled the frame, figures looking upward from a red-and-green mandala, the music blasting out of the instruments visible in the movements of the musicians’ bodies—

“Now!” Paul shouted, and the helicopter hovered. Paul took a few seconds of just the stage, then panned slowly upward so that you would feel you were standing on stilts atop the stage, looking out across a curved wall of human faces that ran straight across your field of vision, filling it entirely.

“Give me a slow five-hundred-degree circle.”

The wall of faces began to move as the camera panned across it, nothing but thousands of faces moving across your field of vision, then more thousands, and more and more and more until you realized you turned in at least a full circle and then some, until you lost track of how far you have turned within this immense seamless radar dish of people that had become the entire visual universe.

“Take her down,” Paul said quietly.

The helicopter veered a score yards left and began to descend. Paul held a shot on the stage as the copter came down in front of it, lagging his angle a little so that when the copter touched down, the frame was filled with just the stage, backdropped by the wall of people around it, looming against the hard blue sky in exaggerated low angle perspective like a picture postcard shot of the Empire State Building seen from below.

Paul then panned slowly down to horizontal, into the world at the foot of the stage: the girders holding it up, the covered sheds around it, strung together by a crazy spaghetti of wires and cables, the people milling around, the uniformed guards, the portable toilets, finally ending the shot with a close-up of a Coke bottle sitting on the ground next to a girl’s sneakered foot.

Paul unwound his body from the camera, flipped off his helmet, and stepped out of the copter, ducking under the whunk-whunking blades. And found himself in an angry and sullen maelstrom.

Two hundred thousand people were jeering, booing, and hissing; a terrifying sound that whited out his eardrums and vibrated his bones and flesh with the overwhelming sonic presence of a Saturn rocket engine. He was suddenly paranoiacally hyperaware of the frozen tsunami of bodies and faces surrounding the stage area, a wave that seemed forever about to crest and break over him, restrained only by a chain-link fence topped with four strands of barbed wire. Thousands of angry fists brandished in the air, tens of thousands of rage-distorted faces. It was like nothing Paul had ever seen or dreamed of seeing.

He ducked back into the copter, took the camera from its mount, and began panning across the faces of the crowd. The shouting took a sudden jump in volume and ferocity and things began to sail in high arcs over the fence—bottles, pieces of fruit, cans, clods of earth.

“You idiot! You’re going to get us eaten alive!”

A man in a blue pinstriped suit was screaming in Paul’s face at the top of his lungs, barely making himself audible over the terrible din. Paul recognized him as Mike Taub. There was a man in blue coveralls behind him, and a young, grossly overweight man with long blond hair beside him. All three of them seemed boiling mad, and Taub was clearly frightened.