It was like the words had been dammed up inside her, and with me around they broke loose in a huge, gushing wave. “I didn’t like her at first, and I didn’t like her any more after I went up to her room with those others. I’m not saying they’re fake or total fools. They’ve got the goods. Carlos showed me some of his books, and your sister has a communion knife and a chalice she said came from St. Florian’s. They’re beautiful, real gold, I think. Or electrum—that’s a mix of silver and gold. They really are amazing, and her friend Cyanne said she’d been to Aleister Crowley’s secret place, the Abbey of Thelema. Carlos said he was there at Cape Canaveral when the Apollonauts took off for their third trip to the moon. And it all sounded so ‘verily verily I say unto you heavy and true.’ But then they started in with the séance, and it wasn’t much more than a joke.”
She went on like that the whole way back to the Angelus, talk pouring out of her. Sometimes it seemed like she was making herself up out of words, an endless stream of monologuing. She could go on for hours, and I loved to listen because her talk was better than any buzz a kid could get from smoking fly-spell or sniffing white gong. Sometimes it was like she got drunk on herself talk-talk-talking and I’d get a contact high from just listening.
“You must’ve done the rites with her, right? So you know. I don’t have to explain anything. You know the difference between dynamite and a dishrag. You can tell Mars from marzipan. You saw Django live and you’ve heard the records and—Sweet Jesu with Jelly!—you know what kind of kiddie games they’re up to. I couldn’t believe it. All that great ritual stuff, and money to buy more I’m sure, and you live in the Angelus no less. That place is just amazing! I couldn’t afford a room there for one night, and you’ve lived there your whole life! But they don’t want to hear a thing about mutation music or life in the Real Outside. It was just ghosty-ghosty and woo-woo stupido.”
NINETEEN
We went in through the Prince Eugenio foyer, and I took her straight through the grand lobby. She didn’t care who saw her gawking or what they thought. She loved it, being there and seeing all the gilding and garnish, the bright lacquer and dark tapestries, the silk Renaissance hangings I went by every day, and the filigreed mirrors I hardly even saw anymore. She gaped at the luxury and rattled on about how amazing it was all the way to my room.
Earlier, she’d come in through one of the back entrances. Sabina and Carlos, I supposed, had told her to use the doorway that the maids and kitchen drudges used. It wasn’t like she was a peasant from the countryside. She could talk about a hundred things that the pseudos my sister spent her time with had never even heard of. It was just that when she felt something, she let it loose. When she had a question, she asked it. And when she knew the truth, she said it out loud. I thought it was great that she didn’t care how people judged her. She was free, absolutely free, and I wanted to be like that.
We took the elevator to the fourth floor then wandered the east wing, where I showed her the San Simeon ballroom and the conservatory. The heat and the sticky air always gave me a peculiar feeling. It seemed to affect her even more. The huge drooping leaves of all the exotic plants, the smells of black earth and overripe fruit combined to make a sweet, heady perfume. I showed her the coffee trees, the orchids heavy with swollen purple flowers, wormwood from Kashmir, sloe bushes from Lapland, and Illyrian blood oranges. We took our time there, and I think she got a little buzzed from all the scents and green secretions.
So it was dark by the time we got to my rooms. She flopped down on the bed and I asked her, “What do you want to hear?”
“You said you’ve got some good bootlegs.”
I showed her all of them, one at a time, albums with plain white covers or ones cheaply printed in the New World. Mostly these bootlegs were live shows that somebody recorded secretly off the mixing board. A few had studio cuts that had never been released. Those were my faves. They seemed more private to me, like I’d snuck a peek into Django’s mind and seen things he didn’t want the rest of the world to see. I put on The Great Conn; we listened a while, and then she started talking again, making her worlds of words.
TWENTY
“Here’s the way I see it. Music makes the mutation. Songs and riffs and Django’s voice—all together, they’re the mutagen. You know what that word means? You understand? The mutagen is the thing that makes a creature start changing into something new, like a weird science chemical or cosmic x-rays or the full moon that turns the werewolf into his true self. Or the radioactive spider-bite. Or the mummy’s curse when the tomb is opened up after four thousand years. It’s anything that makes the body mutate. Cells start changing and making new ones like crazy. And soon enough you’ve got yourself a real mutant on your hands. Like Django, and me. And you.”
She flipped through a copy of Creedo and pointed to a picture showing Django and the band. It must’ve been shot through a filter or some gauze, because it gave all four of them a misty, see-through look.
“I’m telling you, Davi, he’s the next step in human evolution. There was Homo erectus, which means the caveman who stood up straight, right? And there’s Homo sapiens, which means the smart man. Which is what people are supposedly now. And we’re Homo lux. Humans made out of light just like in the movies and the late show on TV. That’s Django—and that’s us too. You listening to me? You and me: we’re the next step—higher and wilder, brighter and better, beyonder than all the rest.
“You’ve got to think like Dr. Frankenstein, Davi, if you really want to get it. Mad science experiments, secret formulas, graveyard hunting, lightning to give the life. Sneaking around in moonlight, ancient books, lost at the North Pole. Mad, wild science. But listen, the word ‘science’ means ‘wisdom,’ not just bubbling test tubes and electric switches and dials and rocket ships. It’s about knowing, not just doing.”
TWENTY-ONE
She lay back on the bed then and picked up the album sleeve for Man in the Moon in the Man. She held it like a mirror, seeing her own face in the shiny square. Because I left the cellophane on the record cover, there was a little gleam, a faint out-of-focus reflection.
“Listen to me, we’re specters, Davi. S-P-E-C-T-E-R-S. And you know what that means? Not faked-up movieland ghosts. We’re specters like Django and the Reptiles. You know what specter really means? The word comes from Latin. It means ‘to look, to see, to spy on.’ We’re spies, Davi: flies on the wall and eyes in the sky. And there’s the color spectrum too—all the shades shining together. There’s spectacles. You know, the old word for eyeglasses. And there’s prospectors, those old guys in the New World who go hunting for gold in the mountains. Get it? Pro-specters. We’re searching for precious metals too. It’s about looking and seeing what nobody else can see. You following me? We’re spectacular, the new breed, and we will not stay hidden. We will be seen and heard. One day, we will show ourselves to the whole world. We’re specters, Davi. S-P-E-C-T-E-R-S. And that’s a good thing, the very best thing in the whole world.”
She rolled onto her side and was quiet for a while, staring at me. At first I thought she’d changed her mind, realizing I wasn’t as far gone as she was. I had all the things a fan, a true Django-fanatic, would have. But the way she talked, it was clear she’d gone way beyond, into a place I could hardly glimpse, let alone enter.
“Specters,” I said, feeling like a fool. One word. That was the best I could do with her lying there on my bed. “Specters.”
“Right. You got it,” she said, and then started up again. “Something flickers on the screen and is it real? Just pictures or is it realer than real? You think that Frankenstein’s creature or Dracula or the Wolfman aren’t real? I don’t mean you’re going to see them boogying down the boulevard any time soon. But they’re real in your brain, which is where it all happens. You can call them up and hear their voices and see them perfect and true. Do you think you’re ever going to forget when the Bride of Frankenstein first sees her mate and starts that sexy, wild screaming? That’s in y
our brain forever and ever. It was just a movie, right? Lights flickering on the screen and voices from a speaker. Just people made out of light and sound, like us, Homo lux. But they’ll be around forever, long after every person you ever see today is long dead and long gone. Shadows and swirling smoke, silver gleams on the screen, and black and white fire like the torches of all those screaming peasants at the end of Frankenstein, when they come to get him and kill him but they never succeed. They can’t ever really kill him because he’s made out of light and sound and he comes back again and again and again. Just like you and me, Davi. You and me and Django, and all the wrong, true, beautiful, impossible specters.”
TWENTY-TWO
We stayed in my room a long time that night, spinning records, looking at the covers, and talking. Or I should say that she talked and I listened. I had no clock because I had no reason to be anywhere at any particular hour. I never paid much attention to what time it was. Sometimes I noticed the church bells tolling, but they were more like background music than a reminder telling me I had to do something.
“You’ve got Django’s first album, the one he made before he changed his name? You know about that, right? His first band was called the Soul Strangers. They were his first love when he was just a kid, our age, his first shot at the big time. They played blue slave music stolen from a lost river delta in the New World, like everybody else did in those days, white boys trying to be black men. He called himself ‘The Crawling King Snake’ and ‘The High Priest Gone.’ And he went. He disappeared. That’s how it happened. He vanished, and then he came back as Django Conn, the Late Great Lord of Glister, the new Frankenstein.”
There was a different look on her face when she talked about monster movies. Sadness, but the sadness that some people actually like to feel. Late autumn leaves have that sadness, and so does the look of a room after a great party is over, and some kinds of music too: slow and dreamy and deep as a goldmine.
“Remember? At first there was a rumor he came right out of the movie screen, like he was a special effect blend of Boris Karloff and Elsa Lanchester, Bela Lugosi and Carol Borland. Did you ever see her? She’s great in Mark of the Vampire—cool, creepy, and beautiful. People said that Django was like a creature made up of all those stars. Vampire and mad scientist and werewolf. Witch and warlock, ghost and ghoul. But he’s got something bigger, something ten thousand times more high voltage than horror movie stuff, and that’s the voice, the words, the sound.
“You know, I’m still buzzing from the show. It was just last night, and it feels like it was a year ago, or in another life. I was really gone, really scrambled. I woke up this morning and it was like my whole body was a deck of cards that had been totally shuffled, dealt out, and played in some weird game. And I don’t even know the rules. I was up front by the stacks. You said you saw me, right? I was practically close enough to touch him, and I felt the power surging off the stage, off of Django himself right into the crowd. Into me, myself, and I-don’t-care! Everything was changing. Cells, germ plasm, brain spasm, molecules. I don’t know what to call it, except everything was new and true, through and through, thank you, thank you, Sweet Jesu!”
Sometimes I think she was replaying songs from the deepest places in herself, the words and rhythms so much a part of who she was. And at other times they seemed more like messages.
TWENTY-THREE
It was past midnight, probably, when Anna Z got up off my bed and said she’d better be going.
“You want me to come with you?”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It’s late. Things happen sometimes. Trouble.”
“That’s okay. I’ll be fine. And anyway, it’s a long walk,” she said. “I live on the far side of the Black Lagoon. Over past the Hessian Quarter.”
“So when are we getting together again?” I asked.
She said something vague about vespers at St. Florian’s, then kissed me on my forehead. That’s when my thoughts really started to melt down. Church and chimes. Songs and science and specters. They went churning in my brain. I needed to shut my eyes soon. I needed to be in bed. But after she’d left, I stood at the door, listening. I heard her footsteps and maybe the sound of a soft knocking down at the end. I opened my door a crack, peeking. The hallway was totally empty. The lights burned in their bronze ceiling sconces. The carpet extended all the way, like a great furry tongue, to the dark end of the corridor.
I went back to my stack of wax, knelt down, flipped through my fave albums, and found one I hadn’t heard in a few months. I didn’t care what it was, just something loud to push away my feelings. Excitement and fear, swirls of happiness, and shivers of confusion.
I’d grabbed the first album by the Starry Crowns, my fave band before I’d discovered Django Conn. With a shaky hand, I set the needle down into the groove and out came the chiming, galactic gamba-riff of “Praying for X-Rays.” Usually, my nerves and my pulse calmed down when the music started. The best songs could do that for me. With the right chords, right tune, and right voices filling the space around me and inside me, the twisty backward-forward feelings would dwindle down to nothing, and I’d feel safe again.
I turned up the volume as the chorus came around again. Vance’s voice was like a pale, gleaming tendril stretching across the emptiness of space. “Hear my whisper, hear my song. Praying for X-rays all night long.”
TWENTY-FOUR
My fave writer for Creedo was a guy from the New World named T.V. Geist. He did record reviews, wrote snarky captions for the photos—like: “Neither bug spray or hair spray can save this man”—and usually one big article for every issue. Sometimes they were just the usual fan-mag trivia: gossip about the making of new albums, tour information for the biggest bands, interviews with stars who didn’t really want to talk. But when T.V. had a subject he actually cared about, it showed. The words got wilder and the ideas went off in a hundred directions. Even though he was hard to follow then, he was really trying to make sense of something he really cared about.
I woke up even later than the day before and lay there in a daze. A couple dozen issues of Creedo were scattered on the floor around my bed. We’d been looking through them, but I didn’t remember leaving such a mess. Of course, the mags were mostly open to articles about Django. One had a big photo spread showing him with his arms stretched and his head tilted back, the way St. Florian stood at the altar of his church. Another shot was of the whole band, wearing clothes that might have been made out of spider webs and a mummy’s gauze wrappings.
The piece that went with the picture was called “He Came from Beyond—Maybe,” and it was written by T.V. Geist. Though I’d read the article before, this time it made a lot more sense. Or maybe I just got more sense out of it. Mostly, T.V. went through all the rumors and guesses and theories about how Django came to be and who he really was.
Some people said he made himself into a human sacrifice, that he tore his own heart out of his chest and laid it still thumping on an ancient pagan altar. They said he poured out “his own warm, red blood as an offering to the gods whose names are many, yet never spoken.”
Another theory claimed that he’d dissolved himself in psychedelic acid, one more longhair hipster casualty. That was how, supposedly, he made his transformation. “And thus the doors of perception opened unto him,” T.V. wrote, “and he strolled right through, smirking and sparkling.”
There were books that talked about conspiracies, mysterious medical operations, secret plots, and even murder. “Or maybe he just got offed by some cranked-up Metal fans.” Alcohol, asthma, amphetamines: all of these got mentioned. Some people were positive he’d been found floating face down in the Great Canal the day the first Apollonaut had walked on the moon. “I even met one beautiful, young blonde bimbette,” T.V. wrote, “who swore on a stack of blue Voovoo Bibles that the Great Conn was swept away in the monstrous beating of black, veiny wings.”
TWENTY-FIVE
I wasn’t sure how to take any o
f this. Sometimes T.V. would spin out long, complicated tales just for fun, or because the bands wouldn’t give him any real stories to print. The biggest names were already rich and famous, so why should they pass on any hot gossip to the fan mags? And the ones that hadn’t made it all the way to the top just wanted to look good. So the whole thing was always a bit of a maze. And sometimes I felt lost inside it, wandering, hoping to find my way out. Or at least a reason to be there.
That day, there was a different scent in the air, the after-trace of Anna Z. It wasn’t like Sabina’s spicy perfumes, or the smell of baking on the waitresses, or soap and clean sheets on the maids. I took a couple of deep breaths, almost like the kids who huffed white gong to get buzzed. Being with Anna Z had made me feel weird and free. Just a faint whiff of her and I was there again.
I went to the window and looked out. Beyond the rooftop, the afternoon sun gleamed on golden domes and silver spires. And church bells were pealing, an outburst as complicated as jungle drums. Anna Z had said we were people made of light and sound: Homo lux.
“I know, I know, either something’s real or it’s fake, right? Something can’t be both. That’s what everybody says. But most everybody is wrong most of the time. Homo lux? People made out of light and sound? That can’t be. Either you’re flesh and bones and skin and blood, or you’re just made-up, fake, bogus, imaginary. That’s all you hear, all the time. Unreal. Impossible.”
I wondered now if the whole city was the same as that. Like a movie, like Django’s show at the Maxima: voices and riffs, glister and glam, sound and light, and nothing more.
TWENTY-SIX
Sliding Man in the Moon in the Man out of its paper sleeve, I laid it carefully on the turntable and set the needle gently into the groove, at the second cut. Anna Z had said that “Flash Bang Baby” was the closest Django got to explaining what was happening and why. So I listened and listened, reading the words printed inside the album’s gatefold cover.
Meet Me in the Strange Page 4