Pot and clove smoke, Boones Farm bottles everywhere underfoot. Western-motif wallpaper, all wagon-wheels and cow skulls, spray-painted with His name and plastered with smeary Xerox copies of His face, the bed propped against one wall to make room for the slave-ship intimacy of the crowd.
Sloane notices that some idiot has already tried to set the mattress ablaze. Black serpentine singe-trails scar the flame-retardant nylon shell, so semen-encrusted it wouldn’t burn in a volcano. She wants to complain about the damage, not because she gives a shit about the deposit, but because it’s a symptom of lack of focus. They need even this childish, destructive energy, but it must be harnessed and channeled, if this party is to serve Him.
The music storms out of a sound system that looks like a SWAT crowd control robot, all trunk-sized amps and bassbins and a display with a gnashing sixteen-band equalizer grin. Skinny Puppy throws a rod and shudders to a stop, slam-cuts to Joy Division. Scanning the playlist on a jacked-in laptop, she approves. All artists dead, all bands split by overdoses, suicides, accidents and angst. All of it faithfully copied from the playlist on the website. Good mood music.
It is the purpose of all parties. All drunken dancefloor orgies, all wet T-shirt date rape keggers, are debased invocations of blessed nothingness, to the blind idiot god of the night itself, an exorcism of daylight, an unspoken prayer to hold Time hostage and make a fool of Death.
For His fans, life was an overlong rehearsal for the grave, a dreary dumb show that spawned a fetish for the trappings of death and the afterlife. His music awakened them to the beauty of their mortality, and the futility of their daily lives. It liberated them from faceless conformity, made them feel chosen for a higher purpose, to be true individuals—exactly like Him.
Her own purpose looms large before her, and she gets back to work. Surfing the churning crowd for five minutes before she reaches the bathroom where, true to form, Evelyn is holding court, chopping out rails of moist, chunky crank on a razored jewel case from His first CD for a rapt captive audience of juvenile tweakers.
“Truly visionary artists are never appreciated in their own lifetimes, and God help us if they were,” Evelyn says. “Celebrity destroys art, children. Great art is like poisoned Tylenol or letter bombs: only produced in obscurity, in anonymity. If M—”
“Nobody says His name, tonight,” Sloane snaps.
Eyes rolling out of her half-naked skull, Evelyn drags Sloane into the bathroom and offers up a fat caterpillar of a line. Sloane declines with a sneer, and one of the teenaged jackals snorts it up with a rolled-up playing card.
“Parasite.” Evelyn knees him in the crotch.
The tweaker drops, gagging, and one of his friends rolls up his sleeve. “But, yeah, but—no, that’s like, bullshit, right?” he jabbers. “Because He was a fucking god, right? Like, check this out.” He bares his scrawny, white bicep and the ineptly carved name in ugly pink nightcrawler scars on it. “My parents sent me to this reformatory in Coeur D’Alene two years ago, right? And like, I busted out and hitchhiked home, but like, I got so out of my fucking head when I was there that I, like, did this? Listening to His songs was the only thing that kept me from doing it to my throat, right?”
“He is God, dude,” the third magpie chimes in, a townie steakhead who dyes his hair with used motor oil. “Like Jesus, I mean. They fucking killed Him before He could get His message out to the people.”
“It’s like everything’s dark, now, dude,” the scarred one mutters.
“You know,” Evelyn starts in, “when a light like His goes out, it leaves a hole behind, a dark place that closes up quickly, but those with the right kind of inner light can follow…”
Sloane jabs her with car keys. Not yet. “School’s out, posers. Leave.” She flanks the door and kicks the still-prone teenager on the scummy tiled floor. Mumbling, “Bitch,” the other two pick up their friend and leave. Sloane slams the door and drops the bags.
Evelyn is one of the chief officers in the national fan club. For a tweaker, she’s fairly sharp, but not sharp enough by half, Sloane fears, for what she needs to do. “What the fuck, Sloane? Everything’s ready.”
Sloane pulls out a Ziploc bag stuffed with forest green capsules. “Babysit these until midnight. Keep these assholes in check so nothing, but nothing, happens until then. The manager’s ready to call the cops.”
Sloane distributes party favors, plants a backup web cam, changes the music. Growls and groans are squashed as His livid, vivid voice shakes the walls, a jilted Moses ranking out God and all his pagan poser predecessors to the empty heavens for their impotence. The room freezes, every mourner trembling as if in the throes of a nitrous trip. Then the epileptic 909 kicks in, and the bodies slam into each other like boiling molecules of nitroglycerin in a paint-shaker, like the Maenads ripping Orpheus to shreds.
She weeds out fakes, collaring a wayward frat boy, some high school kids, tourists in their mom’s mascara. “I’m trying to do you a favor, morons. Get the fuck out of here.” Checks tattoos—all of the real ones are permanently marked, somewhere, with His name. Her favorite, on a cadaverous scalpel of a girl in black mesh and plastic body armor: His eyes, billboard god-sized, gaze implacably out of her bony white back, framed in silver 8-gauge rings, by which the girl hangs from hooks, like any proper piece of art.
The eyes, one milky blue, one green, unmistakably His, gaze out of a smoking hole in her milky skin; a banished demiurge, burning to break out of this tiny vessel and wreak havoc on an unsuspecting world. Sloane wants to show it to her companion, but he’s waiting at the door, tapping the face of his watch.
In the car, swooping down the onramp to the city’s aortic east-west freeway, they hear a news spot on the local alternative station. Squeezed in at the end, after two minutes of boilerplate about CD release dates and upcoming concerts, a few sentences sum up His career, noting His “small but intense cult following among the industrial Goth club scene,” and predicting that “his influence will continue to be felt for years to come in releases by far more successful mainstream artists.”
Only a few bone shards were found in the wake of the explosion that flattened the reclusive artist’s New Orleans studio, but they have been tentatively identified as His. A note recovered at the scene confirmed that the explosion was intentional. Rumors abound on the Internet about a final recording made hours before the explosion, and downloaded to His fan club’s servers as a farewell message. Authorities could neither confirm nor deny what many had already dismissed as a hoax, or, at best, a publicity stunt.
A house in the Hollywood hills, blotter acid and fine wine, dope-heads and wilting Goth-girls, hothouse flowers who would be ground to pulp by the rougher fans at the motel. He was so many things to so many wasted husks of people…
Languid layers of deep ambient music and opium smoke make a syrup of the air inside. Amorphous Androgynous and Autechre vie with Coil and layers of chanting monks and whale song, the DJ behind a bamboo bar across the Olympic-sized pool playing nasty games with the mix, a rogue air traffic controller orchestrating a slow-motion collision.
It takes a while to find Sylvie among the shrouded apparitions drifting like shopping bags in a breeze, lolling on beanbags and hassocks, floating in the pool. Sloane goes from room to room, lifting heads by their matted hair, peeling back sheets, disgusted to find three already growing cold.
Even among this crowd, Sylvie is a flake. When she ran the fan club, the site was never updated, chat rooms were rife with petty warring factions, and fans strove to outdo each other with extravagant suicides. It was merely a fan club. All that energy wasted… Under Sloane, it has become everything it’s going to be tonight. All she has to do is ride herd on these posers for a few more hours.
She finds Sylvie in an upstairs bathroom, half-heartedly trying to staunch the flow of blood oozing out of a snow-white girl in a tubful of red. “Stupid bitch,” Sylvie says over and over, and the girl smiles at her elegy.
“This is out of control,
” Sloane grumbles, but sets to bandaging the twiggy white wrists with their mute, bubbling mouths. “Yours are checking out early. You can’t serve Him like this.”
Sylvie’s eyes are all fuligin pupil, but even the apocalyptic hallucinations she must be having can’t make her pretend to like Sloane. “They’re too sad, Sloane. Or they’re too happy…”
“I want to go with Him,” the girl in the tub moans.
“Not yet, idiot,” Sloane barks in her face. “He’s waiting for us, but we all have to go at once, to force the door open, or it’s just a waste.”
“I had this dream, He was a Pharoah, like in that video, and we built His pyramid, and when He died, they sealed us up inside, and it was dark, and we died, but when we were all dead, a door opened up and this beautiful black light poured in over us, and we carried Him into it—”
Sylvie’s eyes glisten, and if possible, get even bigger. Sloane sends her away. She kneels and whispers in the girl’s ear, “We’ve all had the dream, but it’s not time, yet.”
“And I wore a crown,” the girl says, “and He called me to His side to be His queen—”
“It’s alright,” Sloane looks around, gently pushes the girl’s head down under the red water, and goes looking for Sylvie.
Downstairs, the hostess has snapped out of her daze long enough to deliver an address. The crowd of heads and wasted waifs that gathers to hear it is still encouraging in its size and exotic range. Somewhere, He is watching, and she knows He must be pleased.
“He taught us not to be afraid of the dark,” Sylvie says. “He showed us in song that we are powerful, and the dark should fear us!
“He told us that there is no heaven but the one we create with our imaginations and our desire. He showed us a world of eternal, moon-silvered night that He built for us with His dreams. We have all given Him our love, and the strength to live and work in this world, for as long as He could stand it. Tonight, the power of our love will give us the strength to live forever in His world.”
Almost to the door, when Sylvie’s girlfriend draws Sloane aside and leers glassily at her passenger, slouched on her bumper, smoking a cigarette. “Who’s your friend?”
On the 101, going downtown, he says, “This is idiotic. It’s not going to work,” and she almost stops the car. This is all she needs, right now.
“Do you really believe that?” she shouts, rolling up the windows. “Because if you do, I’ll call it off. It’s going to happen, if you will it, but if you’re going to be a pussy, then all those people are just going to die.”
He lights a joint, inhales deeply. “I think I’m dead enough already.”
“You’re just a fucking coward, then.” She gets her cell phone out, hits Evelyn’s speed-dial.
When Sloane took over the fan club five years ago, he had already tried four times to kill himself. After the band broke up, he overdosed twice and blew off a major solo contract. She rose meteorically through the ranks, not because anyone liked her, but because she was a missile, seeking communion with him, and woe unto anyone who stood in her path. She reached out to him in carefully crafted e-mails that cut through all the noise, drawing him out as no one else could, because she, of all his legions of bungled and botched sociopathic fans, seemed to understand what he was trying to do.
He used the tropes of Goth and industrial music and the aesthetics of the French Decadents and slasher movies, but the ideas at the core of the whole—the artwork and the music and the image, the cryptic interviews, the drugs, the suicide attempts—were older and more powerful than even he knew.
When men did not pray to gods, but used magic and will to command them, there was an afterlife, but only those who could build a door could find their way in. The Egyptians and the Aztecs knew how to travel the Black Road, but only a few sorcerers and philosophers had discovered the way in modern times, men and groups whom history had branded as monsters: the Zodiac, Jim Jones, Aleister Crowley, Adolf Hitler, Solar Temple and Heaven’s Gate. And all the times it almost opened on its own, when men of vision were snuffed out, and broken little people leapt or stumbled after them into the dark: JFK, MLK, Elvis, Kurt Cobain…
But they were only half-formed fantasies, until Sloane came to him with the mandate of the newly reformed fan club. His followers already had one foot in the next world, and needed only His light to follow. If He was serious, and not just flirting with them, she could make it happen.
Last party: strictly for the hardcore, the worms in the industry corpse. An abandoned dance club, unsuccessfully torched by the owners, so half the ceiling is open to the night sky. Every smile a silicone-bloated cocaine rictus, all the machismo of a Pamplona bull run, a Viking funeral. Free-floating menace like a giant severed power line rampant among the crowd. Sloane’s lieutenants move through it like Furies, ready to tear apart anyone who brings them down from their ecstasy of grief.
These guests, of all the people in His life, should be celebrating. Many of them lost money, lost face, and some lost their minds, in return for backing His career, and Sloane has taken steps to keep the mood ugly. Execs and agents and producers who loathe each other line opposing poles of the club; former rivals, ex-bandmates come to gloat and trade told-you-so’s, get into glaring and shoving matches with the Furies, and photographers bother everyone. Nobody seems to have noticed the drinks are spiked.
She walks in with him: in drag, now, he’d be recognized here. He shouldn’t be here at all, but he needs to see this to believe in it, to make it real. The world, the fans, had to be lied to, so He would believe, and follow them.
Video walls shower the room with His cockeyed glare, a wretched dubstep remix of one of the old singles shaking asbestos dust into thousand dollar hairdos. She steers him through the crowd to the steps leading up to the DJ’s bunker. She’s shocked, looking around, to see so many faces in the flesh that she’s only known as photographs on her own site. His enemies list, and so many of them looking morose, broken… bereaved. She pushes him faster, his sequined shoulders shaking with laughter.
The DJ is a chubby kid in pajamas, bobbing his head to the screeching submix in his headphones. He takes Sloane’s disk without looking at it and slots it in, cues it. She checks her watch. Five to midnight. This is the one part she couldn’t time out, exactly. She hopes her Furies can make it happen.
She goes to the laptop set up in one corner, toggles to the video feeds from the motel and the house on the hill. They’re all waiting. Waiting for her to open the door and take them all to Him. Her heart skips a beat, then it races. She slips on a headset. The DJ fades down the music, patches Sloane’s headset into the PA.
“This is His final message to the world, children. Follow it through the dark until you get to the other side. Your dreams and blood and bones are the seeds of the new world.” She looks at her watch, cues the DJ. “Follow the music—”
The last song fades in, rumbling, molten womb-sounds, contorting basso shudders resolving at long last into a convulsive, peristaltic rhythm, expelling the unborn song out into an undeserving world of horror.
On the screens, the parties react to it according to their respective natures.
The motel explodes in violent Jonestown pathos, bodies beating each other to slush. Crunching down on pills, foaming rabid death-rattlers forcing fistfuls of poison into the mouths of backsliders. She sees those piebald eyes tattooed on that pale white skin, but someone’s ripped it off the girl’s back, and waves it like a battle flag.
The house party subsides into mellow, Heaven’s Gate surrender. Bodies sink to the floor in clouds of lace and silk, Sylvie and her girlfriend guiding the living and posing the dead into artful tableaux before disrobing, feeding each other pills and sagging into a cold embrace.
And here, the bloody lightning-strike catharsis of Hitler’s bunker.
She can feel it. Even as she sees all the little lights fading out across town, she can feel more going out across the nation. In her heart, like the pull of an unknown homeland, s
he really believes she can feel their energy building on the other side.
“It’s time, children.”
The DJ turns the music up in the booth, but she can still hear it. Shooting, screaming, crying, bullets caroming off the cinderblock walls.
And then it’s very quiet. The DJ and the Furies take their own pills, now. Only Sloane and her companion are left.
She sucks on doubt. She wants to go to him and change his mind, now there’s just the two of them, and both their old lives swept away, and all this unclaimed power in the air. They could make a heaven for themselves right here, or just run away, and live this life for each other, and maybe even try to be happy.
But she looks into his eyes, drunk on revenge, glutted with love, and says, “They’re waiting for you. Your estate is prepared.”
“Thank you, darling Sloane, for all of this.” He takes the pill between his teeth and bites down.
Sloane looks away from his sick grin, because in the end, she sees more than she should have. She sees the sick, empty little thing behind the mask of talent that beguiled them all. She sees only a worm who wanted to be loved, whose morbid genius called out to other sick, damaged souls; who collapsed under the weight of their desperate worship, but was too chicken-shit to go out alone.
He pulls her close and clamps his mouth over hers, his kiss sloppy and cold and not like how she always dreamed it would be, at all. His tongue shudders and dies in her mouth. She feels the edge of his dissolving gel capsule at the back of her throat.
His lips slide away from his bleached teeth, but his eyes remain fixed on her, as she lays him down. A little light seems to leak out of his eyes, a glimpse of silver, and it’s all she needs to see.
She tries to spit it out, tries to vomit, but her face goes numb and only a stream of drool oozes from her drooping lips. She goes to leave, skidding on blood, tripping on lead-shredded bodies. Bleary, she can’t see the door. She falls, but never hits the floor.
Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars Page 16
