by Rudy Rucker
“Nice light,” Dina said. “Andy Warhol’s sandcandle.”
Her words cooled his spirit, somehow. “Yeah,” he said. “It is nice.”
The light, not the candle, was the main thing, wasn’t it? Would Andy have wanted Sally Durban to keep the candle forever, or would he have wanted her to burn it?
Dina took the candle, carefully, as if she knew everything going through Carlo’s head. She set it on the ledge of the little window where the projector beam used to come through.
It’s a big candle, Carlo thought calmly. It won’t hurt to burn it for just a little while. The light is nice.
He tapped the wall beneath the projector hole. “Come here, Dina. Bring the wine.” She lay down beside him, under the candle. They watched it shine on the other wall, the glow swaying up and down, back and forth, as if they were riding a ship.
“Yeah,” he said. “This is good. Snuggle up, baby, it’s getting cold. All right.”
They were watching the wall as the candle began to flicker, that rhythmic strobing that candles sometimes get, a pulse so deep and regular that it could trigger an epileptic fit. Carlo glanced over and saw Dina spacing out, with her glassy eyes fixed on the wall. He turned to see what she was looking at.
In the dark there, with the muffled noises of the stormy ocean night, with the wine and the schizophrenia, Carlo and Dina did start to see the movie, yes, Surf Boy was playing on the wall; that was the flicker. In black and white, the cliffs of Surf City. Surf Boy coming out of the water looking like Carlo, but healthy. And well-fed Surf Girl right there with him, looking like a shimmering silver Dina.
“Yaaar,” said Carlo.
Then the picture cut to an airplane landing at Kennedy. Carlo and Dina were in a cab, with Carlo telling the driver, “Take us to Andy Warhol’s Factory.”
The cabby jerked into traffic, and the whole sky seemed to pulse and dance like a flame. And now Surf Boy Carlo and Surf Girl Dina were getting out of the cab on a city street, on 231 East 47th Street according to the streetsign in the background and to the numbers on the buildings. Carlo handed the cabbie a spectral twenty.
As they walked towards the building, a man in black shades, leather pants and coat came out and looked at them as if he knew them. And why shouldn’t he? He was Andy’s cameraman, Gerard Malanga, and Carlo and Dina were Surf Boy and Surf Girl, superstars of one of Andy’s underground Pop classic films.
“It’s five flights up,” said Malanga, holding the door open to let them in before he walked off down the dirty boulevard.
Carlo and Dina went on in. The elevator was an open cage, a freight elevator.
“I ain’t getting in there,” said Dina. “The shaft’s gonna be full of flying ants.”
“No it isn’t, Dina. We don’t wanna walk no five flights. Come the hell on.”
They got into the clanking groaning elevator and rode it up to the fifth floor. On the way some weird shit happened to their images. Like down at street level they’d been Surf Boy and Surf Girl with only a sketchy resemblance to Carlo and Dina. But now each floor going up was like two years of hard street-time, and their bodies were shriveling and catching back up. By the time they got to the fifth floor, they looked their realtime Surf City ghost-house selves.
Carlo glanced away from the screen a moment and looked at Dina sitting next to him. The room flickered heavily. Outside the ocean crashed, spitting out sibilant words in all the languages of nature; and chorused against the ocean was the barking of the seals. Wild shit was coming down tonight. There was still a nice third of a bottle of Night Train left. Grinning happily, Carlo drew some long slugs out of it, and turned his attention back to the movie that Andy Warhol’s sandcandle was painting on the wall.
The elevator door clanked open, and Carlo and Dina stepped into a huge open room with aluminum foil pasted on the walls and aluminum paint spraypainted onto the pipes. Little pieces of mirror were stuck up everywhere.
There were about ten people in the big room, scattered here and there; closest to Carlo and Dina were a couple of high-school kids typing; at a table beyond them was a man scissoring out articles from the newspaper; through a far door in the corner you could see a drag-queen down on her knees sucking the cock of a laughing greaser hustler in a rolled-up T-shirt and unzipped leather pants. Through a wall there was X-ray-visible a cramped little photography darkroom studio with a scraggley drug-bum called Billy Name cooking and shooting hits out of a big plastic baggie of crystal meth, Billy in there with two queens and a fashion-model. In another corner of the big room, a projector was running, spewing endless unwatched reels of images onto the wall.
“Yaaar,” said Carlo. “The darkroom for me,”
“Don’t go in the dark for speed,” said Dina. “I want to stay here where it’s light. I want to look out the window.”
Sitting near the window was a man in dark shades, a surfer-looking guy in a T-shirt with wide horizontal blue and white stripes, the dude just hanging there and blending into everything. Only when Carlo and Dina got close to him did Carlo flash on his bad skin and silver-dyed hair; only then did Carlo flash that it was the King of Pop.
“Hi, Andy,” said Carlo.
Andy looked at Carlo and Dina, his mouth open a little, Andy just blending into everything, waiting to see what else they would say. Next to him facing away from the elevator was a big canvas; it was a painting of a sailboat with the picture divided up into color regions and with numbers written inside the regions. The paint was fresh and wet; a palette sat next to the canvas. By now Dina, too, realized who they were talking to.
“We just got here from California,” said Dina. “Do you have a cigarette?”
“Okay,” said Andy, and gave Dina a Kent. “What do you do that’s fabulous?”
“I see winged ants,” said Dina, staring at Andy’s paint-by-numbers canvas. “Did you buy this with the pattern already on it?”
“That would be so great,” said Andy. “But you can’t get paint-by-numbers canvases this big. I draw the pattern and the numbers myself. And now I’m having fun deciding which ones to color in and which ones to leave blank. What’s your favorite color?”
“Stained glass,” said Dina. “Did you know Jesus was a winged ant? You should do a paint-by-numbers picture of Jesus on the cross.”
“Wow,” said Andy, “I bet Gerard could get paint-by-numbers canvases from Puerto Rico. I could make a silk-screen of a Puerto Rican Crucifixion and blow it up and then I could paint it over and over again. I need to make silk screens for these sailboats, too. I like for things to be the same. Because the more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel.”
“Yo,” said Carlo, wanting to get his share of Andy’s attention. “Yo Andy! Carlo here. I’m an artist.”
Andy was silent for moment, and Carlo could hear the steady traffic down on 47th Street—Carlo could hear someone jiggling the toilet lever, the sound of an oscillating fan stirring sheets of colored gelatin, the lighting of a match, the scissors, the water running over the prints in Billy Name’s darkroom, the men having sex in the back room—here in Sally Durban’s projection room, with the sandcandle lit, Carlo could hear Andy’s Factory. “You look like a nutso wino speedfreak to me,” said Andy, giving Carlo a bitchy once-over. The speed’s in the darkroom. Billy Name can help you get loaded.”
Carlo did a fast-forward montage sequence of jabbering and shooting meth like a maniac with skinny Billy Name and a bunch of queens, debs, and hustlers. And then he was flaked out on a couch with Dina next to him, and pacing around in front of them was a Times Square hustler named Victor, holding forth about his “pleasure palette,” which was a tray with seventeen little jars with seventeen different kinds of lubricants like Vaseline and KY. Meanwhile one of the high-school typists was manning the record-player, playing this summer’s hit: The Lovin’ Spoonful, “Summer in the City”.
Andy was standing next to a movie camera on a tripod which Gerard M
alanga was setting up to point at Carlo and Dina. “Talk about the winged ants, Dina,” said Andy.
“I see them out of the corners of my eyes, mostly,” said Dina. “Ever since I was a teenager. They can be big or small—I’ve seen them be as big as starships or as small as protons.”
“What do they look like?” asked Andy. “Are they colorful?”
“Yeah, the wings are like stained glass sometimes, and sometimes they’re shiny all colors like oil on the street or like a rainbow. The wings are long and bright and the bodies are bumpy dark things like ants. They can bite.”
“Do they bite you a lot?” While talking to Dina, Andy was moving around. Now he was over at the freight elevator fooling with it.
“They bite my eyes and my private areas and most of all they bite the back of my neck. They reach in through my skin to do things to my nerves,” said Dina, getting a bit agitated as she warmed to her topic. “But they don’t like cigarette smoke. That’s one way to keep them off me.”
“Can you see any ants right now?” asked Andy. He’d gotten the elevator door open, even though the elevator cabin was at the bottom of the shaft. “Come over here, Dina, and look down the empty shaft. I think I might see some ants in there.”
“Don’t, Dina,” warned Carlo, jittering there on the couch next to Victor. “You might fall in.”
“The ants love you, Dina,” said Andy. “Come look at them. Have you guessed where they come from?”
So Dina walked over to the shaft, with the camera filming her all the while, and Andy whispered something to her, just the right freaky thing, and sure enough Dina flipped out and jumped into the shaft screaming.
In a flash Carlo was up off the couch running. He threw a shoulder into skinny Andy, knocking him into the shaft after Dina, with Carlo tumbling on in after Andy.
The inside of the shaft was flickering like a big strobe light, and it seemed to Carlo as if Andy turned into a giant winged ant, trying to fly back out. But falling Carlo pushed the Andy ant all the way down onto fallen Dina.
Dina and Carlo slept late into the morning. Carlo woke to what he thought was the sound of footsteps, though when he sat up, the house was quiet, save for the waves and the wind.
Carlo touched his head gingerly, trying to remember details of the night before; and then he thought of the sandcandle. He opened the dark, windowless room’s door to get some light, and saw that up in its little projection niche, the Andy Warhol sandcandle had completely burned down. There was nothing left but a gritty puddle of hardened wax and a few black crumbs from the dying of the wick.
“It’s gone!” cried Carlo in real grief. “Dina, we burned Andy’s sandcandle all up!”
Dina answered with a fit of coughing. Her hands were trembling, knuckles white. Finally the fit passed and she lowered her hands.
“About last night,” said Carlo. “The sandcandle…you saw Andy, right?”
“It was like a movie at first, and then it was a dream,” she said. “But I knew we were both dreaming it together. At the end we were falling down an elevator shaft. I looked up at you, Carlo. Andy looked like a big flying ant, like a Jesus angel with stained glass in his wings.”
Carlo felt a sudden shudder in his guts. He hadn’t shit in three days, but today he had to go. He went out the back door of the house, and scrambled up onto the dirty sandy slope under the house’s deck. There were pylons you could hold onto. Perfect. Carlo dropped his pants. With a scrap of newspaper in his pocket, he was all set, just about to squat down next to a pylon, when he heard a voice behind him, calling his name.
Carlo jumped to his feet, hitching at his pants, twisting around with a curse on his lips, afraid he was about to get another ticket —
Until he saw Andy standing there, still in jeans and low black boots and a wide-striped T-shirt, looking cold and wan and wet, but not really uncomfortable, as if bodily misery were an abstract concept he didn’t quite grasp. Expressionless Andy was staring at him through his silvery hair.
“Andy?” said Carlo.
“Carlo the speedfreak! You have freckles on your fanny.”
“Jesus, man—Andy—what are you doing here?”
“I came for a walk on the beach. I wasn’t sure how long you and the flying ant girl would sleep. The last thing I seem to remember, you and Dina and I were falling down the elevator shaft, but I guess that didn’t really happen. Somebody must have dosed me. Are we out in Montauk?”
“Huh?”
“Montauk, Long Island.”
“This is California.”
Andy wiped some rain off his glasses. “Gee. There should be sun. ” He felt carefully and solicitously all over his own body. “Are you sure this is California? Maybe I’m in a hospital pumped up with drugs having a near-death experience.” He glanced around distractedly. “Don’t you think it would be boring to see God? I mean bad boring, not good boring, because instead of admitting that He’s boring, God pretends to be exciting. I hope I’m not about to die.”
Carlo braced himself against the spasms in his frustrated bowels. “You’ve been dead for a long time already, Andy. This is ninety-seven, and you died in eighty-seven. It was ten years ago last week. I heard them talking about it on TV.”
“Nineteen eight-seven? That’s way too soon, Carlo. Oh, I just hate doctors. Hate them, hate them, hate them.”
“It’s some kind of timewarp, Andy. You came here because of the sandcandle.”
“Sandcandle?”
“Look, Andy, I have to take a shit right exactly now. Unless you want to watch, why don’t you go back inside and talk to Dina?”
Andy hurried off. When Carlo finally followed him inside, he found Andy and Dina sitting cross-legged before a gaping window on the main floor. Andy seemed fascinated by Dina; he was staring at her with the full vacuum intensity of his catatonic blankness.
“He says he’s never made a sandcandle,” said Dina.
“Well, you wouldn’t remember, Andy,” said Carlo. “Cause you didn’t make it yet. You’re the 1960s Andy, and it was the 1970s Andy who made the candle.”
“That’s too hard,” said Andy. “I’m not good at history.” But then he brightened. “If this is 1997, my paintings must really be worth a lot. Am I popular?”
“You know where Andy needs to go for an instant update?” said Dina. “Let’s take him to the mall.”
“I’d like that,” said Andy. “A 1997 mall in California. Like science-fiction.”
“Don’t you remember my truck’s been impounded?” snapped Carlo.
“There’s a bus runs along the highway,” said Dina. “If Andy has money for busfare.”
“I do have money,” said Andy, reaching into his boot. “Look!” He had a wad of hundred dollar bills. “I got paid for a Dick Tracy painting yesterday. Isn’t cash beautiful?”
It was starting to rain again as they headed down the highway to the shelter of the bus stop. Near the high-school, the bus picked up a girl wearing spikes and leather, with a pink Mohawk wilting in the drizzle. Carlo expected Andy to say something, but he just stared at her as if she were no more remarkable than anything else. Maybe she looked too 50s for him. A little farther on, the bus picked up a trio of teens dressed in retro-60s fashions, platform shoes and bell-bottoms, headbands and daisy-prints, and this time Andy sat up with real interest, peering at the kids, breathing softly with his mouth open.
It was fun in the mall, they laughed a lot, and Andy was generous. They ate soft pretzels and hamburgers and lemonade. Andy bought Dina a carton of Kools.
“Now let’s look for Warhol images,” said Andy.
“There’s a chain-store art-gallery next to the Foot Locker,” said Carlo.
Sure enough the little cookie-cutter gallery had half a dozen Warhol serigraphs hung on the walls—Mao and Marilyn, Elvis and Liz, a Campbell’s Tomato Soup and an Andy. Andy stood there staring at his self-portrait, posed just like it with his fingers on his chin.
“They’re not very nice prints,” he
said after awhile. “Cheap paper and cheap ink. I’d like to burn them.”
“Hey lady,” Dina called to the art gallery clerk, who was an arty middle-aged woman with a knowing smile. “We got the real Andy Warhol here. Will you give us some money if he signs these pictures?”
“They’re under glass, Dina,” said Andy. “It wouldn’t work. Anyway, they’re not good enough to sign.”
“I know how this kind of frame works,” jabbered Carlo, taking down the Soup Can from the wall and fumbling at it with his long, nervous fingers. “I can pop it open in just a second.”
“Quit it!” cried the clerk, nearly knocking over a rack full of John Lennon posters in tubes as she hurried over to stop them. “Put that Warhol back up or I’m calling security!”
“This is exactly the kind of situation I don’t enjoy,” said Andy. “Do as she says, Carlo. I apologize for my friend, ma’am. He’s a nutso bum.”
“You do look like Andy Warhol,” said the mollified clerk after Carlo had replaced the picture. “Would you be interested in applying for a job here? We need an extra clerk for Sundays. You might be good at getting nibblers to bite.”
“Thank you for the offer,” said Andy. “It would be boring. But no. By the way, could you look up the Warhol prices for me?”
He watched raptly as the gallery woman called up some info screens on her computer. The Warhol prices were doing quite well, and the database info showed how many copies of each picture had been sold by the chain nationwide.
“This is so great,” said Andy. “It’s like you’re selling home-decoration objects. It makes my art so stupid and ordinary. Nobody’s scared of it anymore.”
“You really should think about working here,” repeated the clerk. “You’d be good at it.”
“Thanks again.” The three of them wandered further down the mall until suddenly something caught Andy’s attention. It was the Trollbooth, a freestanding wagon filled with hideous plastic troll dolls of all sizes, creatures with big beady eyes and vile puffs of fluorescent hair. The trolls came in all sizes, and in every imaginable costume: Viking trolls, astronaut trolls, golfer trolls, starlet trolls, cop trolls, surfer trolls, caveman trolls, trolls in diapers. Andy bought so many of them that they filled a whole shopping bag.
