Passing Through the Flame (76 page)

“If only you were gay,” Gentry said softly. “We could....” He broke it off and forced a smile. “Let’s get to work,” he said.

“Sunset City
, Scene Forty-nine, take six.”

“Speed.”

“And... action!”

Velva walked into the frame from the left, Gentry from the right, as Paul held his breath, the glare of the shooting lights painting rainbow auras around the periphery of his vision.

“Mr. Winter... Doug....”

“Hello, Peggy,” Gentry said, cocking his head at an angle which allowed him to glance at Paul without blowing the shot. Paul forced a smile, and Gentry’s eyes lit up, his shoulders squared a bit, and he did look like Doug Winter running into a pleasant surprise. “Having a good time?” His voice was warm and friendly and tinged with the undertones of a planned sexual pickup. He moved around slightly so that he could face Velva while still giving the camera three-quarters profile. So that he could still look at Paul. Paul’s legs trembled; his mouth tasted foul from the Dexamyl and the coffee and....

“It’s all so... so different, you know? Like being in a foreign country. All these thousands of people, but I can’t think of anything to say to any of them.”

Velva smiled at Gentry on cue. Gentry smiled back, his eyes preening themselves—for Paul. Paul’s temples began to pound, and a wave of physical nausea flashed through him; but he dared not look away from Gentry, dared not show what he felt, because it was working. He was getting what he needed.

“It’s so nice to see a familiar face, it’s....” Something made Velva falter; but then she recovered, and it was all right. “It’s so nice to have someone to talk to.”

“I know what you mean. It makes me feel old, like some kind of prehistoric relic wandering around in the wrong age.”

“Isn’t it weird? I almost feel that way myself, and most of these people are my own age. I... I feel I have more in common with you... than with any of them.” Again, Velva faltered and recovered; but it was okay, it was in character.

Gentry looked into Velva’s eyes, into Paul’s. His voice was soft, his manner wistful. “Does it make you feel sad?”

“A little.”

Gentry’s mouth opened slightly; the top of his tongue became visible. “It makes
me
feel glad,” he purred. “Does that bother you?” Slowly, with what would seem like a casual gesture on film, he ran the tip of his tongue in a tiny circle around the inside of his lips. Paul blinked away a black fog of fatigue. What am I getting myself into? How am I going to handle this for three more days?

“No, it doesn’t bother me,” Velva said. “It makes me feel a little less lonely.”

“I’m lonely, too,” Gentry said softly, a fox about to pounce silkily on an innocent morsel. But he never took his eyes completely off Paul, letting him know who was really his intended victim. Paul looked back, unable to change the expression on his face, holding himself in iron control, for the take was almost in the can.

“Why don’t we both make each other a little less lonely, Peggy? Why don’t we see the sights together?”

Velva hesitated, looked wary, uncertain, as she was supposed to.

Gentry smiled a weird, unnatural oval smile, took her hand, looked at Paul, and said, “Come on, I won’t bite you.” It wasn’t in the script; Paul knew it had been spoken directly at him, and his nausea crested into a bubble of sourness at the back of his throat.

Velva forced a little laugh, and the two of them walked out of the frame to the right.

“Cut!” Paul shouted. “That’s a take. And that’s it for today, folks.” The crew broke into a little smattering of sarcastic applause. “Emmett, you want to wind things up here, please? I’m dead on my feet.”

“Sure, Paul.”

Paul turned gratefully away from the set, away from Gentry, away from it all, and walked rapidly off into the indoor jungle, losing himself under the canopy of greenery, letting the monkey chatter and parrot screech fill his contracting consciousness, watching the black loam squish and billow in front of the toes of his shoes as he scuffed at it. Now that the shooting day was finally over, he gave in to his overwhelming fatigue, letting it wash over him and through him, blotting everything else out, carrying him toward the welcome shores of mental oblivion.

He didn’t see Gentry at all until the man was standing in front of him.

“Tired, Paul?” Gentry said.

Paul grunted and kept walking. Outside the dome was a helicopter which would take him to the ranch house. In the ranch house was a room with a bed. That was about as much as his mind was capable of encompassing.

Gentry walked along beside him. Paul tried to ignore him, which wasn’t too difficult; everything but the thought of flopping in bed was beyond the periphery of his mental vision.

“I know what you need,” Gentry said softly. Suddenly, Paul felt a soft, sly hand slide gently but firmly through the space between his buttocks from behind, up along the bottom of his crotch, cupping his balls with its palm, while the fingers curled themselves expertly around the limp bulge of his cock. Gentry squeezed, stroked, and wiggled, and in an instant, Paul felt his treacherous flesh responding, felt a surge of pure physical pleasure even as he jerked his body away.

He confronted Gentry with his face flushed red, his hands balled into fists, his heart pounding, his knees turned to rubber—and with a full, throbbing erection. Gentry’s eyes focused on the bulge in his pants, and he grinned triumphantly.

“Why don’t you let me take care of that for you?”

Paul cursed the treason of his own body, cursed the situation which made it impossible to deck Gentry right then and there, cursed his own silence. Gentry shook his head sympathetically. “Poor Paul,” he said soothingly, “you’re so tired, you’re so confused....”

“Leave me alone,” Paul finally said. “Will you please just leave me alone....”

“Am I interrupting something?”

Velva Leecock appeared from behind a big palmetto. Paul flushed again; a cold, primal, reasonless shame gripped his guts. Did she see it? Does she know?

Velva’s eyes flicked from Paul to Gentry and back to Paul again.

“We were just having a little man-to-man talk, isn’t that right, Paul?” Gentry said.

“We were just walking to the helicopter, is all,” Paul said. “Come on along.”

Velva glared at Gentry. Gentry glared at Velva. No one said anything.

Paul began walking through the hot, damp indoor jungle, and the two of them silently fell in on either side of him. He felt like a hunk of dying meat hovered over by vultures, but so deep was his fatigue that he didn’t much care. Overhead, a parrot screamed a warning at two encroaching monkeys.

Electric sparks flashed along the interface between pleasure and pain with the contraction of every tired muscle in Susan’s body as she moaned and thrashed and gripped Bill’s body with her arms, and thighs, and cunt, clinging to the solid reality of his flesh like a drowning woman clinging to the underside of a floating log in an endless black sea. She sighed one long sigh, gave him one last squeeze, then felt his orgasm deep inside her, heard a groan of pleasure melded with utter weariness escape from the depths of him. Bill, oh, Bill!

He half slid off her, cradling her in his arms as he did so, half turning her to face him, side by side, face to face. She opened her eyes and saw his face as a sculptured pattern of darkness. His heavy breathing was an oceanic beat over the background drone of the air conditioner. The bright lights of the performers’ compound filtered through the nearly opaque blue facets of their little geodesic dome as a ghostly radiance, making the blackness glow with an eerie blue luminescence. She didn’t have to ask to know that Jango had designed these dome tents as cells of cool blue-blackness, refuges from the maelstrom outside, the faces, voices, bodies, the overwhelming press of human emotion, human need that was greed that—

“Wow,” Bill said, smile lines crinkling the darkness of his face, a near-subliminal geometric pattern. Like the lines of force in the blackness she had felt as Bill and the boys moved past her up onto the stage, their footfalls echoing on the metal stairs, their presence shattering the unnatural stillness of what waited above long moments before Bill’s guitar sounded its first chord. She could feel the pressure of the stage access hatch above her as a membrane between two realities, straining against her as she ached to burst through it, out of the bubble and into the wide world....

Then she rose into a circle of light, a cone of brilliance that seemed to lift her up the final feet like a moth drawn to the flame, and the song emerged from within her, passing through her....

Take this body, ease your pain

Let me take you on a trip

Back to yourself again....

A low, vibrant, immense sigh from the palpable velvet blackness surrounding her cone of light washed over her, a tsunami of sound that was human breath, human soul, caressing her body beneath the veils. She felt as if she were in the arms of a great lover, a lover who engulfed her body with his own and, in a strange reversal of sexuality, drew her into him, drew her upward into an overwhelming human presence.

Take this body, I am yours

I will warm you, I will love you

I will flash you through the fire of my flame....

The universe erupted into light, and with the light came an immense orgasmic shout that crested into cheering and applause that shook her body with its power. When her eyes adjusted to the light, she saw a vast sea of people spread across her field of vision from horizon to horizon, a triumphant sweep of friends and lovers from the foot of the stage tower to the circle of hills outlined against the starry night.

They were rising to their feet, seeming to surge toward her from all directions, moving toward her center, shouting their love and drowning out the music.

Slowly, she turned and turned, rubbing herself against that tidal wave of love like a cat against its master’s leg, basking in the vibrations, purring in the core of her being as she whirled faster and faster and faster. Pin wheels of delight seemed to spark from the fingertips of her outstretched hands, igniting the crowd to laughter, as she spun and danced and burst into song as Bill’s guitar twirled her at arm’s length, spinning her soul like a ballerina to the music—

“Wow,” Bill said again. “Babes, you were great. Here and out there tonight.” He ran a finger around the shell of her ear in the luminous darkness, and she shivered—with the twinge of electric pleasure he sent through her, with the memory of where she had been, out there in the fire of her own flame. She squeezed Bill’s body, clinging to the mooring of his fleshly presence.

“Maybe too great, Bill,” she said.

“Too
great? Ah, babes, we were the Cloud out there tonight, we were what we were meant to be. We were alive! They were with us, and we were with them.”

“Tripping... flipping...” she muttered against his chest. “I felt myself slipping.”

She giggled at her own word salad, but it was a nervous giggle, against the immensity of the dark, against the silence of the night. That terrible silence when the laughing and shouting of a quarter of a million people sputtered to nothing in an instant as the motion of her body transmuted itself to the sound of her voice.

Running through the fire, Lord

Passing through the flame....

She stood on the stage, a circle of light in the crystalline darkness, as thousands of human bodies swayed silently to the sound of her voice, their souls straining upward in the keening wail of Bill’s guitar, trapping her with lines of force that impaled her at the center of this universe.

The whole world is on fire, Lord

Passing through the flame

Weep not for this maya, Lord,

You are not to blame

We are laughing children, Lord

Passing through the flame....

An overwhelming sadness filled her, and quite suddenly she seemed to see the massive aura of the crowd, a great blue fog of lost hopes, dying dreams, fading memories of youth’s golden age, unfulfilled lost chances. And she was a tiny red spark of hope in the center of that great cloud of cold blue nothingness, and it was terrifying; it was more than anyone could bear.

But then the magic of the Velvet Cloud transformed reality as the keening of Bill’s guitar became a soaring surge of hope between beats, and Bobby’s organ rolled the power of the Cloud through her, and that tiny red spark began to glow, became a red flame, brighter and brighter like the rising sun burning away the cold blue mists of the hangdog hours before the dawn. Her voice laughed and soared and rolled back the night.

Dancing through your fire, Lord

Laughing in your rain

Conquering your mountains, Lord

Writhing in your pain

Dancing in the flame

Passing through the flame....

The words of the song were motes of light, golden doves soaring out over the people, rainbow auras flashing off their wings. And the cold blue mist of despair dissolved in their light. She opened her arms to the people, held them to the bosom of her love, let the sunshine vibes pour out of her, let herself become Star, let herself be what they needed her to be.

The whole world is on fire, Lord

Passing through the flame

We are sons of fire, children

Dancing in the flame....

The texture of the music thinned out till she was backed only by the thin tones of Bill’s guitar, the soft brush-brush of the drums, the muted stillness of the crowd. Half a million eyes glowed up at her from the darkness, pinpricks of pleasure-that-was-pain against the soft skin of her soul, eroding the interface between the her and the them, till it became a pocked surface of holes, a lace work of fine threads, a mist of tiny particles, a vanishing pattern of nothingness, and then she was there, no longer at the center looking out, or at the edges looking in, no longer hers or them, but we, her being diffused into and merged with that immense meadow of humanity.