As the lights rose, the crowd clapped but did not rise. DiDi didn’t expect they would—not the kind of crowd that gave standing ovations.
Edie’s lookalike had vanished and yet DiDi never saw her leave the stage area. Hopefully she left the building like the proverbial Elvis and would offer no further visual stimuli to her boyfriend’s penis or pineal gland.
DiDi again tried to give Curt a peck on the cheek as he rose, but once more he seemed oblivious to her gesture. As he walked to the front, she saw him scanning the crowd. He was looking for that girl.
“Thanks, everyone, for attending the grand premiere of this recreation of Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Thanks again to my landlord the Mattress Factory Lofts for allowing me to use their clubhouse studio in the basement. Sorry, we couldn’t book the Velvet Underground to accompany.”
Curt paused for a trickle of ironic laughter to cycle through the audience, then spoke again: “But this should give you some idea of what audiences would have experienced back in 1967. Underground film was as key an influence on the Velvets’ sound as rock or experimental jazz. John Cale had been hanging around with filmmakers like Jack Smith and Ron Rice, through his association with La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music. Even before hooking up with Warhol, Lou, John, Sterling and Angus MacLise had provided music for Piero Heliczer’s multimedia presentations at the FilmMaker’s Cinematheque. So when Andy, who by this time, had rejected art as his vocation, stepped forward to be their manager, they were not just open but enthusiastic to embrace his multisensory approach to performance. Keep in mind, folks, this was before the big light and prop shows that characterized arena shows in the 70s and 80s, a much more orchestrated type of spectacle. Each performance was different, and the EPI program I have developed takes all these elements and remixes them to mimic the same sense of spontaneity that would have occurred at the original shows. Any questions?”
An earnest-looking young woman with long straight red hair in a black turtleneck and jeans raised her hand.
“You use the word spontaneity, but weren’t John and Lou really about repetition, following the lead of Cale’s work with La Monte Young in his Dream House Ensemble?”
“Yeah, that’s true but each show used different footage and effects to achieve the same effect of repetition.” DiDi detected an edge in Curt’s reply; she knew he hated restating what he thought was obvious. “Next?”
A bald older man with an obviously dyed black goatee and a British accent: “Andy always had a name for everything he did—a label even for the mundane. So have you got a name for your software program—it’s not just EPI, I do hope?”
“I was going to call it the Transformer, after Lou’s seminal album about his experience with Andy and The Factory, but in the end, I settled on the Resonator, after Charley Tillinghast’s nickname for the whole sensory experience. Question for the audience to see how well you know your Factory players—who’s Charley Tillinghast?”
Whispering first, then blinking on of smartphones. Furious googling.
“I know,” a female voice said softly from the back.
DiDi looked to her right. Sure enough, it was the Edie lookalike. Her head tilted down, eyes to the floor.
“T-I-L-L-I-N-G-H-A-S-T.”
Proto-Edie rattled off the letters machine-gun rapid face up, coy half-smile, nodded, dropped her head down again.
Weird that she spelled the name rather than answering the question. Surely Curt would think so, too. Instead, he clapped his hands.
“Very good!”
Sheesh, DiDi groaned silently.
“Now can anyone tell me who Charley Tillinghast is?”
Quiet fell back over the audience until proto-Edie lifted her hand.
“Charley Tillinghast helped Andy develop the EPI and ran the projectors.”
“Hey, wait, how come we’ve never heard of him then?” A silver-haired woman in angular purple glasses asked.
Proto-Edie’s eyes focused back on the floor, and she shuffled her feet back and forth. Was she still slowly dancing? Clearly she had reached the limit of what she was going to share.
When she didn’t respond, Curt went ahead:
“When I was researching the EPI out in Frisco, I was able to track down one of the extra light guys who worked for promoter Bill Graham when he booked the EPI at the Fillmore West. As I’m sure all of you know, he pulled it after two nights. Official story was that Graham didn’t like the VU’s sound, but after a few drinks, this guy told me about Charley and how Charley was supposed to do something special during the show—some extra effect, he didn’t know what it was—only it didn’t work. And then on top of things, one of the dancers disappeared. Andy arranged for an extra show, a rehearsal with just the visuals and tapes of the band. After that, the guy never saw Charley again, nobody did. He was genuinely spooked. I mean looking behind to make sure no one was watching. There’s no public record of Andy even saying Tillinghast’s name before or after. Like he never existed. Should be one of the great mysteries of rock history. More questions?
“If Andy never mentioned Tillinghast, how do you know that dude wasn’t just pulling your leg?” asked a lean kid in Lou Reed T-shirt and jeans. DiDi smiled—right on, kid. She loved Curt, at least she thought she did, but sometimes he could be as pretentious as Warhol. He wasn’t going to bring up the pineal gland, was he?
“I have to admit I was skeptical, but as I started doing my research on the EPI shows, I noticed there was a distinct difference between all shows leading up to the Fillmore and the ones after. So when I developed the program, I only used the shows before and including the Fillmore to generate the variations from the light and sound effects to what’s onscreen. In a way, it doesn’t matter if there was a Charley Tillinghast or not.”
DiDi was disappointed when a black woman in a red leather jacket followed up with a routine question about Mary Woronov. Her mind rewound back to Charley going on about Tillinghast for hours after coming back from San Francisco, but she had to admit she had the same thought. Except suddenly this Edie-cosplay-chick knew who Tillinghast was, could spell his name. If Curt could find some hard evidence, he was set for his own place in rock history.
The Q&A continued for another 15 minutes. More questions about the relationship between Lou Reed and Nico, technical intricacies about the Resonator’s functionality, and underground filmmakers who might have influenced the EPI. Proto-Edie had retreated from the main seating area and was now cross-legged on the floor near the door, like a wind-up doll whose performance had stopped until someone twisted the key in her back. DiDi didn’t like to think she was waiting for Curt, but if proto-Edie was a music box, she was sure that was the tune that would play—repeating like one of the tape loops of the EPI. Every bit of insecurity as to whether she and Curt actually were a couple ate back into her, and she hated herself for it.
As the audience rose and began to disperse, DiDi beelined to head Curt off.
“Well, that went pretty fucking amazing, don’t ya think?” she asked him.
“Yeah, it was,” he nodded, shouldering past her. Before she could spin around, he was already bent down and talking to that girl—and then helping her up.
People pushed past her, some pausing to say something congratulatory about Curt’s accomplishment tonight—friends and neighbors and teachers who clearly considered them a couple. DiDi pushed down her anger and jealousy to make polite small talk. Then when the room had finally emptied, she saw with relief that Curt and that girl at least had not left together. He wouldn’t have abandoned his laptop, his equipment. She should have known that.
The two were sitting, facing each other on the leopard print couch at the back of the room. Curt was doing his usual, a soliloquy bound to impress, probably combining his knowledge of Warhol, the VU, his efforts to accurately recreate the EPI, and how it related to his master’s thesis on the use of repetition in picture and sound in underground avant-garde film in the 1960s.
Whe
n DiDi approached, he broke away, enthusiastically declaring: “DiDi, meet Hester Tillinghast! Guess what, she’s Charley’s granddaughter. Who could have imagined that?! And she’s going to show me some of her grandfather’s notes. I was right about the pineal gland. Charley was a medical scientist at MIT before he hooked up with Andy. Isn’t that fucking amazing? DiDi, can you be a doll and run up to your loft and grab us some beers?”
“Sure,” DiDi nodded, not knowing how to react to this latest torrent of info-dump. Hester nodded, same polite but disinterested half-smile as earlier. Something in her eyes, a mix of everything and nothing all at once, made DiDi wonder if she’d ever said a word, other than what she said to the audience, maybe her name. As if Curt had made up everything he had just told her, or he’d learned it some other way than speech. But if Hester communicated through some kind of mental Star Trekkie brainy pineal method, she wasn’t talking that way to DiDi.
DiDi found herself walking to the exit—as if Hester had dismissed her with that odd nondescript glance, more than Curt’s request for beer. DiDi looked back from the doorway. Curt was still talking in monologue, but now he and Hester were holding hands. He had leaned in closer. DiDi didn’t exist anymore, only Hester.
No, wait. Curt was looking at her. He’d realized she was watching, and the glare in his eyes was meaner than any she had ever seen from him.
DiDi rushed out the door now, pushing back tears. She ran for the elevator, punched the button like a trigger. It opened right away. Good, empty. It was past midnight, but in a building like this—full of artists and students—people kept all hours.
A few minutes later, she was in her loft. She slammed the door, threw the keys hard onto the concrete floor, making Trier, her Siamese cat who had been walking up to greet her, jump instead and run behind the sofa. She scooped up a pile of Curt’s books and papers off the couch and hurled them in the air until they rained down across the floor. He didn’t live with her, but lately he’d been there almost every night, studying and sleeping on her futon. Guess he wouldn’t be doing that again. She ought to throw them all out in the hall.
What was she going to do? Was she going to just leave them alone to commune about Hester’s grandfather’s research on the pineal gland and test it all out with his penis? No way could she compete with Charley Tillinghast’s granddaughter.
Trier had reemerged and was now meowing loudly from the pile of paper at her feet. She patted her lap to signal it was OK to jump up, but instead he just stood there.
“Silly cat,” she muttered, reaching down to scoop him up. As she leaned over, she saw the word “Tillinghast” in Curt’s messy handwriting on a piece of notebook paper and a rudely drawn diagram of a face with an arm-like protrusion extending out of its forehead and culminating in the three-fingered third eye thing she had seen on proto-Edie’s chest.
She picked up the page, stroking Trier’s back with her other hand, eliciting loud purring. She read further. “The pineal gland is stimulated by darkness.” OK, that’s what Curt told her. “But rapid bursts of light and sound in the right combination can create a tension that awakens the gland to a new level of sexual arousal and release that opens a door to a higher consciousness, that frees the ID. Andy Warhol wanted to be not just a leader in the world of pop culture, but a deity.”
DiDi bent down to search for more notes, annoying Trier again, who disappeared to the kitchenette area after not getting the attention he wanted. His food bowl was probably empty, but it would have to wait. Ah, there, another drawing, men in robes, names next to each—Tillinghast, Warhol. Dollar signs next to Warhol’s name. Did he pay Tillinghast to open the door for him, but somehow Tillinghast ended up going through instead?
OK, so maybe Tillinghast was the face she saw in Hester’s body. Was Hester the missing dancer? But then she couldn’t be his granddaughter? Or Edie? Edie didn’t die until 1971. Something wasn’t right. No, nothing was right? Did Curt have another plan for tonight? Or did he unwittingly open that door? Did she need to go back and...save him?
When DiDi got back down to the studio, the lights of the mirror ball were spinning, the colored strobes flashing but sleepily compared to the performance earlier. The repetitious beat of the VU throbbed loudly, but the groans permeated the wall of sound.
The two copulating bodies pulsed, rather than pummeled in and out of each other. Slow, the slowest she had ever seen. Their surfaces shiny, their skin seemed glazed over with a sheen beyond sweaty sex. They weren’t connected just at the groin but at their heads, about a foot apart, tendrils intertwined and groping, massaging. The pineal gland had awakened not just metaphorically but physically.
“Curt!” DiDi yelled and ran towards them.
She pulled at Curt’s shoulder, but as she touched it, her hand slid rather than gripped. His skin was slippery, no flesh to cling to—not rubbery plastic but hard plastic like a Barbie doll or in his case a Ken. She touched Hester’s arm—also stiff, no give.
Neither showed any sign of recognizing her presence—as if she was invisible to them—just one conjoined blob. DiDi bent over to scan for any sign of life in Curt’s eyes, then Hester’s eyes. Both were rolled back, all white cornea, empty.
“Curt!” she yelled again, louder, top of her lungs.
Nothing.
Comes of nothing.
DiDi pushed against both again, trying to pry them apart by sheer force. No movement. They were soldered firm—locked at the head and at the groin, their shadow blocking Nico’s emotionless onscreen visage, framed by Gerard dodging the whip on one side, male head appreciating head on the other.
Only one thing she could think of to free Curt—send Hester or Edie or whoever this Factory-manufactured doll was back into the whatever dimensional, ID or Super-Ego doorway the EPI had opened. She had to shut off the Resonator.
DiDi ran back behind the rows of now empty folding chairs to find Curt’s laptop, hitting the keyboard harder than she needed to wake it up. Now where was the icon? Damn, nothing called Exploding Plastic Inevitable, EPI, Warhol, Velvet Underground, anything that could be. Wait, in the far right hand corner was a folder called Resonator.
She clicked it open and saw the .exe file pulsating, clicked on it. A screen opened with rows of graphic frequencies, but how to stop it? Wait! She saw an icon for red strobe. She dragged it to the trash-bin. The red strobe blinked out. Then the blue, the green, the yellow. The light was now reduced to the spinning mirror ball. But that was still flashing light, the trigger for the pineal.
The music picked up in speed, and along with it Curt and Hester’s coital undulation. Heads jerking, bodies jerking. From bare touch to Arriba, Arriba, Andale, Arriba! Speedy Gonzales cartoon fast.
Fuck, what icon would turn the music off? She started clicking on them all, dragging every icon she could see into the trash bin, then the entire folder. With each drag, something did shut down, elements of the sound, a bang of drum, a drone of bass, a bar of guitar, Gerard faded to black, no more head, the mirror ball and lastly the VU themselves.
Curt and Hester’s bodies ripped apart, backwards, the tendrils of the pineal gland pulling back into their heads.
DiDi breathed a sigh of relief, started to run up to Curt’s side, to tell him he was safe. Safe with her.
But then the sound started to rise again, the strobes switched back on, the mirror ball, the projectors. Color everywhere now, not just at the front, the stage. How was this happening? She’d turned off the Resonator—did it no longer need the machine?
A beam of red crossed her arm like a blood stain.
Blue on her fingers.
Light so bright it blinded her. She needed to get to Curt, drag him out of here, away from Hester, away from the inevitable whatever was going to happen. But all she could see were flashing rainbow colors.
She remembered what Curt said. Lou Reed used to wear sunglasses because...
She didn’t have any sunglasses. She closed her eyes.
Somehow, feeling like a blind wom
an using the seatbacks to guide her, she made it to the screens. She kicked where the bodies should have been hidden by the lights, but her shoe found nothing.
She opened her eyes and found the lights faded back, the center screen visible again. No Nico, No VU, no kid with maraca. Just Curt in a white T-shirt and black leather jacket, dancing, all elbows, the crack of the whip. To the side, Hester smoking and go-going in her seat. Ultimate voyeur. Their pineal glands extending out from their foreheads in a dance of their own.
Hester smiled, winked, laughed.
No, the laughter came from the man in the suit. The camera panned in until Curt and Hester were no longer visible. Just the close-up on his face. Laughing.
The same face DiDi saw in Hester’s dress.
From the middle of his forehead a long tendril shot out like a torpedo from a submarine.
She tried to duck but there wasn’t time, felt her own pineal gland emerge from her forehead to meet it. And then the pull as her body entered the screen. And as she entered, she sensed his gland letting go and his body exiting.
DiDi wanted to scream, but she couldn’t help but laugh as the whip cracked.
THE WIZARD OF OK
Scott Nicolay
“Yet shalt thou not be therein,
for thou shalt be forgotten, dust lost in dust.”
Aleister Crowley, Liber Cheth vel Vallum Abiegni
“You’re the bone machine.”
The Pixies, Bone Machine
Perdy could have slept longer if the kid didn’t keep whining. “Mommy I’m scared, Mommy I’m scared,” and he tugged the torn black lace of her sleeve as if to drag her off the couch. The Jim Beam bottle slipped from the crook of her arm and clunked on the carpet. She could tell it was empty from the sound it made as it rolled away down the tilted, buckling floor to carom off the living room wall. All hollow, no slosh. Fuck.
Resonator: New Lovecraftian Tales From Beyond Page 17