Emma Bull - Bone Dance

“I’m watching you undo your work,” I replied.

He took the cigarette out of his mouth, looked at it, and grimaced. “Well, that’s why I’m cleaning the thing.”

“If I answered that, this conversation would get damned recursive.”

“Instead of just redundant. Glad you’re here, man. We should be able to do some groovy stuff tonight, if we get the crowd.”

Theo’s favorite movies were Wild in the Streets, The Dagger and the Rose, Easy Rider, and Leary. They’d affected his vocabulary. He seemed to glow a little in the semi-gloom; he was wearing a white cotton jacket whose previous owner had been either a waiter or an orderly at an asylum, and a collared knit shirt under it. The VU meters from two tape decks and the mixing board reflected in his wire-rimmed glasses, and Spangler’s floor lights turned his brown bob to auburn. I found myself wondering what less appropriate things shone on him when he wasn’t working. I’d known Theo for about four years, and I had no idea where he lived, or what he did before the moon was up. I hadn’t seen anything strange in that before, but suddenly I was aware of it, and it bothered me. Paranoia, maybe—downtime erasures, walking dead men, vampire hunters, and why shouldn’t I wonder who my acquaintances were when I wasn’t there?

“I may not stay the whole night,” I warned him.

“That’s okay. Maybe Liz’ll come ‘round later to fill in.” One of his heels tapped furiously at the leg of the chair he sat in; he seemed unaware of it, as if it were run by a second brain.

After a moment I said, “Also—sometime—some people may come looking for me.” Well, spit it out. “I’m in a little trouble.”

He closed the door on the tape transport and stared at me. It was unnerving to find myself the single focus of all that energy. “Somebody noticed you? Sorry,” he said, in response to my expression, no doubt. “Bad trouble?”

“No, no. Annoying. I just don’t want to be found.”

“Nothin’ easier.” Theo stood up, ambled past me to the door at the top of the stairs, and kicked it shut with a crash. The candle flames leaned wildly. “You’re working, man. Can’t be disturbed.”

“That’s the idea, anyway. But these people may have connections beyond those of mortal men.”

“City connections?” He was rolling the cotton swab hard between his fingers.

“I was thinking of the kind that are supposed to result from sacrificing small animals. But yeah,” I said, remembering Dana’s apartment, “there may be one or two of those, as well.”

Theo nibbled his lower lip. “That’s not good. If it was just the brujo, you hire another brujo. But we bugger the City over here and we’re done, you know that.”

I sat down at the console and powered up the two video decks and the A/B switcher. “They need us. We’re part of the circuses side of the equation.”

He sat down next to me and stared into my face. “What we have here,” he said in the voice of the warden in Cool Hand Luke, “is a failure to think straight. We generate electricity by the grace of God and A. A. Albrecht. I don’t know about God, but Albrecht can shut us down anytime he wants.”

“Theo, what can they do to us? Reroute the river?”

Theo shook his head, sadly. “The City controllers license the hardware, sell the fuel, own twenty-five percent of the metered output and tax the rest, no matter how you make it. What do we do if the inspectors confiscate the generators?” He waved a hand at the quaking flames around the balcony. “Light candles and sing?”

I knew all that. It was why the wind turbine on my roof was disguised as a vent, after all. But the Underbridge had seemed—still seemed—too big, too important, too visible to be at the mercy of the City. “There’d be a stink if we closed.”

“There’s people lined up to run places like this. If the City closes us, they just hand our permit to the next guy, who’ll keep his nose cleaner than we did. And the nightbabies all just move on down the block. Be damned hard on Robby, man.”

I knew all that, too, I suppose. “It’s okay,” I said. Outside the windows, the moon had drowned in the cloud bank. I felt—it took me a moment to figure it out. Lonely. “If anything happens, I’ll keep it away from here.”

“Sorry, Sparrito,” said Theo.

I shrugged. “Maybe nothing will happen. Let’s do some good.”

I had color bars on monitors one and two, and zip-all on number three, which meant that either the third monitor was evil-eyed or the camera in the rigging was. I hoped it was the monitor. The camera was one of maybe five I’d seen in my life, and that only because I’d been looking. It had full remote capabilities and a twenty-X zoom, and I suspected it of having been made to military specs and used to spy on SouthAm dictators. But who am I to judge?

I jiggled connectors, and finally crawled out on the edge of the balcony, lay on my stomach on one of the crossbeams, and, by reaching as far as I could, managed to poke at the camera jacks themselves. The camera swung on its mount, and I grabbed at the beam.

“Watch the fuckin’ lights,” Spangler shouted from somewhere below me. Serve him right if I fell on his head. I wiggled my way backward off the rigging, and checked the monitor. Live, tah dah.

“I hate it when you do that,” Theo observed.

“D’you ever wonder what it was like when this stuff was new?” I asked him, waving at the mixer, the tape decks, the video gear.

Light turned the lenses of his glasses opaque pink. “Crowded,” he said, but his voice made it mean more than that.

The house lights were down, the room was dark, and thunder muttered from miles away. I slapped a tape in one of the decks and faded the image up on the projectors, on both screens at the other end of the room. At the edge of my vision I could see Theo’s hand on the mixing board, bringing up sound as I brought up my video.

“So, don’t let ‘em catch you, okay?” Theo said mildly in that last moment as it got too busy to answer him. I don’t know what I would have said anyway.

Strange scratchy sounds moved through the room, hung on moaning bass notes like the lowing of cows lost underwater. The image I’d grabbed to start with was the old black-and-white test pattern and countdown spinner: nine, eight, seven, six… At one it froze and began to melt, iridescent color oozing slowly out of the monochrome rings and crosshairs. Theo would have called the effect “trippy.”

Suddenly Theo segued to his other deck, pulled in something that went thump-thump-thump against a harmonica that went chigga-chigga-chigga. So I switched sources, too; because I knew how Theo’s mind worked, I had a bit ready from a fifty-year-old war movie that put the viewer nose to nose with an assault rifle on full auto. Pull back on bronzed beefcake sneering under his visor, spewing hot lead at whoever it had been that week, budda-budda-budda-thwakow! I grinned at Theo: That for your chigga-chigga. He grinned back and poked the pan controls as a flute riff seared the room and sent me back to my decks for the next image. We were just warming up.

On most nights our partnership would snag on some piece of equipment; something would fail. Everything we had was old, and hardly any of it was built for the kind of industrial-weight use we gave it. The regular after-closing ritual turned the sound balcony into a repair shop where we fixed anything that had broken during the show. But that night, we had the hoodoo working.

Christopher Lee sank his fangs into someone just as Theo cranked to a horrible reverbed wail from Morticia just as lightning shattered the air between two clouds outside the window. Uma Thurman, with a look that would melt glass, stretched out a glimmering hand to the Beast in the Forman remake of Beauty and, while Theo raised a Zimbabwean singer’s plaintive high note into the rafters, while blown rain broke the view outside into a moiré pattern. Lightning lashed at the City like artillery; Ego’s top was lost in cloud, but the hits on the obelisk shape of the Foshay looked like pointing fingers. Theo put both decks to work at once, overlapping and cutting between something that was entirely percussion and something else that was all singing. I took a feed off the camera, panning the dance floor in dizzy swoops, then zooming in on anyone who took my fancy.