by Mick Brady
“First, you must understand that you are a manifestation of your maker’s mind, a part of him that he doesn’t know yet. And as you’ve already discovered, you have the ability and the desire to transcend time and space in order to immerse yourself in him, as he has in you. Though he has created you, you will return again and again to save him from the coming darkness. Where does it all lead? To a place where time itself does not exist, where all things exist simultaneously. The endgame is for all triune beings to go through the process of refining and upgrading until they reach the crossroads of existence, where they will experience all things, past and present, simultaneously, and float in the center like a feather. This is the nexus of the Master Code. Runtime Zero. Eternity.”
There was much murmuring among the group, followed by a lengthy back-and-forth to fill in some of the blanks. But it was Vanilla who finally brought the discussion to a halt.
“But what about the others? The ones who don’t make it out…what happens to them?” Her question hung in the air like a frozen explosion as Quin threw another log on the fire, sending a swarm of sparks into the black sky.
Gears, chains, sprockets, pistons, and all sorts of mechanical odds and ends filled the racks along the walls; entire engines lay naked on the oil-stained halocrete floor. Every bit and pixel had been datamined from a classic speed shop in old Pasadena, the First World birthplace of the original hot rod, the wellspring of Will’s dreams of freedom. A little deuce coupe, resplendent in raw steel and lighter than air, hovered beside a bevy of choppers in various stages of undress, all patiently awaiting their upcoded parts. This was the scene at Holy Motors, the home of Chrome and his quantum mechanics, within hours of Juliette’s return from the retroworld. It was now ground zero at the dawn of the age of time travel.
Servos were standing by, waiting to begin the daily cleanup, when Chrome finally stepped back to survey the fruit of his labor. He’d been working all night on a surprise for Juliette—a virtual masterpiece of custom retooling—a ’72 Honda café racer. The engine and running gear were textured black, its tank and accessories a luminous flint gray. The icing on the cake, of course, was the fact that it was the first digital craft to be coded for interworld travel.
“Whoa…sweet!” crooned Manhattan as he stood nearby, his arms crossed, beaming that dazzling grin of his.
“She’ll be rippin’ up the mindzone on this one, poppin’ wheelies in the STC,” Chrome said.
“Amen to that, brother…And you’ll be right behind her.”
When Juliette arrived, everyone in the shop stopped and gave her a standing ovation. Though she did her best to deflect the attention, the importance of her trip couldn’t be overestimated. What had long been a one-way line of communication—human to virtual, basically—was now a full-blown feedback loop. She made it possible for every avatar in the metaverse to journey back to the crucial moments of their maker’s lives, infuse their data-clouded minds with the hard-won wisdom of their future selves, enhancing the process of soul refinement much the way an artificial intelligence program improves itself by recursively rewriting its own software.
“What do you think, Jules? Your new baby.” Chrome was gleaming.
She was utterly smitten, both by the beauty of the bike and the love embedded in its sheen. She was keenly aware that her journey, a work of art in itself, had stolen some of Chrome’s thunder and left him standing on the sidelines during one of the biggest events in the history of their young world. The building of the bike was a noble gesture on his part, an act of pure love, a public acknowledgment that he was willing to swallow his pride and resentment and accept her as an action hero in her own right and not just as a satellite of his dreams.
She named it The Hummingbird in honor of the tiny bolt of feathered energy that appeared before her that fateful day at the Paradox and sealed her mission with a preternatural kiss. Overcome with relief after all that had led up to this moment, she threw her arms around Chrome, anointing him with tears and whispering her gratitude as she pulled him close, planting a long, wet kiss on his gleaming face. Will and Quin, watching from afar, each in their own separate world, beamed like a couple of interplanetary parents. “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single kiss,” Quin streamed, smiling.
“Make that light-years, Quin…She’s a muse,” Will said.
11
THE FACTORY
Will was pacing the floor of his studio, embroiled in a heated argument with Juliette, who, in spite of her absence, seemed to be holding her own quite well. His monologue was peppered with the kind of double-edged street slang usually associated with spoon monkeys and fuzz junkies in the club scene, a lingo he picked up during his photographic expeditions through the jazz underground. Images of her face and echoes of her voice filled the rooms of his mind and left him wandering in circles of despair. Ever since their brief encounter, he’d been wrestling with the cryptic messages she’d planted in his fevered brain, and now the fever had reached critical mass—that fateful moment when it would either break or do him in.
Truth was, he really had painted himself into a corner and had no one to blame but himself. His impulsive act of bravado had left him without a job and no direction forward. He knew that if he hit the road now, tossed his fate to the wind, he’d be truly and fatally lost, adrift in the world, his dreams dangling from his shoulder like a sad old hobo from the dust bowl days. He had nothing to fall back on, no net beneath him. His own father had done this many years before and now lay drowning his sorrows on the beaches of Laguna, his mother doing much the same on the banks of the Hudson. He didn’t have a job and couldn’t paint a lick; his friends had all left town, and his days in the studio were numbered. Like Raskolnikov on rewind, he was trapped in the gloom of his dirty little room. Push had come to shove, and the gods were nowhere to be found.
“What the hell was I thinking? Just as I begin to make peace with the world, I get the old cosmic two-by-four upside the head,” he shouted, shaking his fist in the air. “It’s just not fair!” He stopped pacing and threw himself down on the daybed, his old landing pad after a night of stalking his dreams on a blank canvas back in the old days. Painting had been all consuming, taking everything he could fish out of his soul, but at its peak, it was hard to beat—it was right up there with making love in the ocean, or jamming at Jimi’s farm in the Catskills. “Maybe she’s right. Maybe I should just hold my nose and jump back into the swamp,” he thought.
He began to study each of the works-in-waiting that covered the walls of his studio. Directly ahead, a dizzying juxtaposition of two precariously balanced big rigs careening straight at his mortal soul; to its left, a couple of engagingly attractive bicycles enjoying a moment of intimacy. There were others, of course; all in varying stages of undress, longing for the moment of consummation. Tormented at every turn by the agonies of creatus interruptus, he finally ended the conversation with his absentee lover in a fit of despair, crying, “Where the hell are you, Juliette? Can’t you see the holy mess I’m in?” Then he slowly drifted off into a long night of fitful sleep.
He awoke to a rare moment of clarity. Left to his own devices, with his back against the wall, he finally decided to act. He would take the faith she’d placed in him and wield it as a sword to keep the demons at bay; the pendant would serve as a talisman to deflect his dreaded melancholy—the kryptonite that neutralized his superpowers. He was cornered, and there was nothing left to lose; the alternative was the abyss. Fight or flight. He was back in the ring.
“Back to work in the studio, pick up where I left off, then step out into the world and make my case.” Once he had a batch of world-class paintings, he figured, he’d go straight to the center of the art world and prove that he, Will Powers, was someone to be reckoned with, someone with the makings of a star. It went against his every instinct, but he felt he had no choice but to follow the trail of breadcrumbs Juliette had scattered before him, hoping against hope that her connection to a higher realm would win
the day. But he didn’t know for sure; he was flying by the seat of his paint-splattered jeans.
Giants had walked the streets outside his door—de Kooning, Duchamp, Gorky, Kline, Stella, Pollock—all part of the intellectual ferment that had caused the center of cultural gravity to shift from Paris to New York back in the Fifties, bringing it to rest somewhere near 10th and A, though for some reason the money remained uptown. By the time Will arrived, the apex had begun to shift once more, this time headed north to midtown, to a cavernous old loft on East 47th, a place Will called the Echo Factory.
This was the world of Andy Rorschach, the undisputed ruler of the New York art scene; his studio the de facto center of the cultural universe, the flame to which Will had been drawn. His strange, androgynous presence hovered over the Factory like a ghost, feeding on the lives of hangers-on and groupies alike, sucking light and love and laughter into himself like a cosmic Hoover. He was the first human android—a man so absent from his own body that he couldn’t be touched by another human being without recoiling in horror like a vampire in the sun. He was a living vapor who once said he was obsessed with the idea of looking in the mirror and seeing no one. Nothing. A world-class soul vamp.
Despite the constant chaos around him, and in spite of his seeming detachment, Andy was able to sustain his creative output through an army of surrogates: porn stars, drag queens, drug addicts, and so on—many consigned to a place on his silkscreen assembly line while waiting for a chance to star in one of his films. For the rest, the only compensation was a permanent state of artificial ecstasy fueled by a seemingly endless supply of drugs, distributed in direct proportion to one’s place in the Factory hierarchy. Andy was the first soul vamp to rock Will’s inner compass; as he once noted in his journal, “Nothing is more seductive than a genius without a soul; it’s like dancing with a cobra.”
Word spread quickly through Max’s Kansas City, ground zero for Pop artists, rock musicians, and off-duty Factory workers in those days. Sexy Sadie let it slip that something big was going down at the Factory that night, but she refused to say what it was. Sadie, a bona fide thrift store diva and hard core member of the glitterati, had entrée facile to Andy’s inner sanctum, a privilege guaranteed by her pedigree. She was the latest in a long chain of luminaries stretching back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which made her Revolutionary War royalty. Andy was Slovak poverty, straight from the Pennsylvania coal mines. They were a perfect fit.
“Will, you must come,” Sadie said with mannered sincerity. They had been lovers for all of one acid-fueled night, but the dream quickly turned to ashes in the early morning light. On the upside, they were still friends, and she was one of the few who knew just how desperate he really was. She would love to bring him inside Andy’s circle, but Will was afraid that if they waltzed in there together, sparks would fly—the word on the street was that Andy had been leading her around town like a Siamese cat, and he was a notoriously jealous master. On the other hand, Will figured it might be nice to have Sadie in his corner when they met. This, after all, might be his last chance; all the superstars were aligned, and Juliette, goddess of love, was watching from above.
The first thing Will saw when they stepped from the elevator was the famous red couch, where so many had found their fifteen minutes of fame. Then, of course, there was the glitter of it all. Tinfoil everywhere. Ceilings, walls, and pipes all wrapped in foil, and where it stopped, there were shards of shattered mirror to fill the gaps. Everything else was painted silver. Cases of Coca Cola—painted silver; an old trunk, perhaps the one Judy Garland was born in—painted silver; Andy’s electric chair hair—silver. One of the few breaks in the theme was the double gunslinger painting on a nearby wall, where it looked like Elvis was making a last stand before even he was foiled.
As Will and Sadie drifted through the crowd, they spotted Andy standing in a corner, fiddling with his camera. Tilting his head slightly, he said so all could hear, “Oh my, look what the cat dragged in.” To the average observer, he may have appeared relaxed in his horn-rimmed sunglasses, striped Breton shirt, black jeans, and black zipper boots, but to Will it looked more like he was coiled and ready to strike. Andy was pale, skinny, and anemic; his mouth sullen and immovable. Reptilian. Will tried to appear cool and aloof when they met but came off as nervous and guarded, providing Andy with all the ammo he needed for the evening.
“Andy, this is Will Powers, a friend and a great artist,” said Sadie, in all her royal glory.
“Hi, how do you do?” Andy’s hand loose and clammy, x-rays shooting from behind the shades.
“Hey, Andy,” Will said, forehead glistening.
“Will has a studio down on 10th filled with a fabulous stable of—” Sadie began, only to be cut off midsentence.
“Would you like to star in one of my movies, Will?” Andy asked blankly. The crowd drifted closer.
“Why, sure…I mean, yeah; I’ll give it a try.” Will looked around at the crowd and was not encouraged.
“I want to make a movie of someone committing suicide. One of my friends committed suicide recently, but he didn’t call me,” Andy said. The fingers of his left hand went to his lips—his standard look of schoolboy innocence. “He was a dancer. He got high and just danced right out the window. Do you dance?” This elicited titters of laughter from a few of the superstars, but Will stood his ground.
“Yeah, I do actually,” he said. “Maybe we can do a kind of Peter Pan thing, you know, cables and all, for the fall. I’d hate to miss the movie.”
“Oh no. It’s not a big deal, really. Dying, I mean. I don’t believe in death anyway; do you? I think when somebody dies, they actually go uptown, to Bloomingdale’s or something. It just takes a little longer to come back.”
“Yeah, good point; shopping in Bloomingdale’s is pure hell. But look, about my work—”
“You don’t like Bloomingdale’s? Oh my God, that’s so sad! Shopping there is better than sex. You don’t have to touch anybody.” Andy said this with such a perfect, deadpan look of androgyny, Will thought he might be impersonating one of the mannequins in their store window. “What kind of work do you do, Will?” he asked suddenly.
“I paint machines with souls, machines that breathe fire, machines that take you to other worlds.”
“Oh…so you’re an escape artist!” There were ripples of laughter—a sign the crowd was waiting for the estocada.
“If you mean escaping from the ‘fire next time,’ the coming revolution, well, yeah, I guess I am. You stickin’ around?” Will said, growing visibly agitated.
“Oh yes. Absolutely! I can’t wait to watch it on TV. Things are far more exciting on television than they are in real life, don’t you think? Everything is so cool and far away. Too bad you’re going to miss all the excitement. Anyway, have a nice trip, Mr. Willpower.” With that, assured by Will’s frozen silence that he’d just shut another wannabe down, Andy turned and walked away, and the crowd followed in true swarm fashion. Will’s hand reflexively reached for the silver talisman burning into his breast.
The minute his fingers touched the pendant, the effect was electric. The room began to glow with a stark, cold, unearthly luminescence, as if a black light x-ray probe from an alien spacecraft had just beamed through the ceiling, turning the scene into a negative of life itself. It was as if the party had suddenly shape-shifted into a zombie jamboree or maybe one of Andy’s death-and-disaster paintings tricked out as an off-Broadway play. Any way you sliced it, though, Will found himself smack dab in the middle of a nihilist’s wet dream, theme song by Nico.
Unbeknownst to Will, Juliette had slipped unseen into the STC and rewritten this scene, offering him a chance to bow out of his own movie, which he had long dreamed of starring in. The rewrite exposed the Factory as nothing less than a den of faerie scarecrows, nightshades, juju dolls with arms and legs akimbo, all splayed and arrayed in a homemade barricade against the ancient wisdom of the world. One more window to the soul had been closed; another dr
eam space shuttered. Lured by the scent of immortality, Will had inadvertently stumbled into the final stages of a dying culture. This, then, was the flame he had been circling.
As the light returned to normal, he found the crowd still milling around, smiling and chatting as though nothing had happened. Will turned to Sadie. “Listen, babe, looks like it’s the end of the line for me; turns out I’m nothin’ but a stranger in this world.” Sadie, her platinum hair glowing green against the naked light bulb overhead, looked up at him, a wisp of sadness flickering across her clouded face.
“OK, Will Powers. Sorry ’bout that shithead Andy. Screw him. You’re still a star in my book.” Her eyes, wide and unfocused, seemed to be looking at someone inside her own head.
“Yeah. Thanks, sweetie, but listen: you’ve done me a favor, and now it’s my turn. I want you to get on that elevator with me.”
“Uh, no…Don’t think so, hon’…But hey…listen…where you goin’?”
“As far away as I can get, and when I get there, I’m gonna send for you.” With one light kiss on the cheek and one last look at her vacant smile, he was gone. As the heavy metal doors closed behind him, he hit the red button and the freight elevator began dropping back to Earth like a Soyuz space capsule, freeing him once and for all from the gravitational pull of Planet Rorschach.
12
ELEVATOR MUSIC
“What the…fuck! Who the hell are you?” Will, fresh from the dead zone, was sitting bolt upright on the daybed, his rendezvous with a belly dancer rapidly fading. It was as if someone had flipped the dial to a new dream, and now he was trying desperately to flip it back, his body still throbbing for the belly dancer. As he slowly came to his senses and having received no answer, he began to look around the studio, noting that the lights were on, the deadbolts were locked, and a pot of coffee was brewing in the kitchen. “How the hell did he get in here?” he wondered.