John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

He checked that everyone was in place. He glanced at Andrea, who nodded to signify readiness, one spike-heeled boot poised over the sound-control box on the floor; she wore a video dress that was showing an old movie, Apocalypse Now, exposing her long, seashell-pink legs and tattooed shoulders; her bald head crawling with anima-tattoos. He could never quite follow the animation sequence; something about a grinning Jesus smoking a pipe and firing an AK-47. Andrea herself was smoking a glass pipe with an all-night THC/MDMA flameless-smoke capsule in it; tonight, a hot-pink smoke that matched her boots and belt. Her eyes glazed from the X-dope. She always looked as if she were going to fall over, but she never missed a note. She was a real find.

Jerome glanced back at Bettina, saw her glaring at him from hooded eyes, her silver-robed hulk of a body emitting an unexpurgated body language of angry jealousy. Evidently he’d spent too long looking at Andrea. He grinned and mouthed, “I love you” at her, and she relaxed and grinned, put on her headset mike for backup vocals.

He nodded at Bones, who hit the program for the percussion, the shivery thuds rolled out into the club like stark milestones in a sonic landscape, and the screen rolled aside and Andrea hit the bass programmer with one toe while segueing into the guitar lead with her hands. Bones shakily skrilled out his keyboard part, frowning with concentration.

Jerome hadn’t turned to the audience yet, he just stood there, back to them, looking over the band, like some kind of inspector, moving a little to the music but not acknowledging the crowd till he was good and ready. Bones was a pretty lame keyboard player, all right, but it was adequate, and when he missed, it somehow sounded like the deliberate “noise factor” that many bands used; much of it was masked by the undulating sheets of sound Aspaorto rippled out of his limbs, dancing music out of his neuromuscular impulses.

Jerome was chip-linked with Bones on the Plateau. He transmitted a readout to him that said: Scan for surveillance.

No shit was Bones’s reply. Smartass.

Rather tardily, the soundman did the introduction, yelling “Jerome-X!” over the house PA, but that was washed away by the torrent of sound from the stage, and the audience knew who he was anyway, they were his small but intense London cult following, and they were already shivering to the sound…

As Jerome turned to them and bellowed,

Jerome letting the shivers carry him, getting into it now, letting his pelvis tell him what to do. More vigorously, as he found the groove and delivered:

The room itself shivered, and, on some secret molecular level, the walls themselves danced.

Bone Music always made Barrabas feel ill. But he tried to keep his expression from going sour as the shivers whirled around his stomach; as he danced with Jo Ann in a sardine press of people. Only now and then, through the churn of bodies, could he make out Jerome-X, a geeky American kid gyrating and bellowing, barely carrying a tune. A big fat Negress wobbled like jelly on a plate behind him, every so often punching through with some gospel-sounding backup singing. Something like,

Why’d they have to use these bleeding bone-shivering frequencies? Barrabas thought crabbily. He’d read about it, but he’d been in a bone club only once before. Some people claimed the vibrations could cause bone cancer; some people claimed it cured bone cancer.

Whatever, it reached into you, a subsonic current that carried the music like a kind of aural flotsam; carried it into you physically, so you felt the chords shivering in your bones, in your skull, in your flesh. Some people had Bone Music receptors implanted in their skulls, in pelvic bones, in their spines, receptors that picked the music up on special frequencies others couldn’t hear, turning their whole bodies into antennas. Some people, lots of people, found it ecstatic. Sexual and hypnotic and all-involving.

“You okay?” Jo Ann yelled into his ear. Yelling loud, but he could barely hear her over the blast of the band. “You look like you wanna puke!”

“Not used to this bone stuff!”

“Come on, let’s get a drink!”

She took him by the wrist and led him into the bar. He didn’t much like being led around by girls, but he let her do it, anything to get out of that dance floor.

The bar had closed doors, the music was filtered, and the bone shivering was mostly gone in here. It was dark, like it was supposed to be, the only light coming from the bar itself, which was made of stained glass; murky, oddly shaped panels of blood red and wine purple and jade green and dull blue, some of them illuminated from within, shattering the shadowy, smoky room with random shafts of colored light. Barrabas sat on a stool in a shaft of purple; Jo Ann sat almost astraddle a beam of green, some of it streaming up her front to tint her gray eyes jade.

They ordered vodka martinis and sat hunched together between two groups of sweating, almost-naked men giggling over cocaine fizzes. Advertisements blinked up the cocktail straws; digital music groaned like a machine about to break down. On the walls, videopaintings re-creating scenes from medieval depictions of the Crucifixion and Resurrection flickered through sequence in doleful chiaroscuro; occasionally the images of Christ alternated with other figures, paintings by Paul Mavrides and other icons from the erstwhile post-Acid House era: Timothy Leary ascending into heaven, riding a CD like a flying saucer; William Burroughs and Laurie Anderson waltzing through a concentration camp while the starveling camp victims played Strauss on orchestral instruments; Kotzwinkle shooting skull-shaped dice with William Gibson; the minimono star Calais chained to Stephen Hawking’s wheelchair; Philip K. Dick with an arm growing from his forehead, arm wrestling with an arm growing from Rick Crandall’s forehead; Rickenharp falling into the rubble of the collapsing Arc de Triomphe; Ivan Stang adding twentieth-century paper money to the flames under the stake on which a grinning J.R. “Bob” Dobbs is being burned alive; David Bowie eaten cannibalistically by a demonic horde of twenty-first century pop stars; Iggy Pop having sex with Mrs. Bester, the president of the United States.

And back to the dead but numinous body of the scourged Christ, his head in Mary Magdalene’s lap.

“That loose data bothering you here?” Barrabas asked. “The Brain Bank stuff, I mean.”

Jo Ann shook her head. “Isn’t room for it with all the input here. You feel better?”

“Much. I’m sorry about the dance. I’ll get a few drinks in me and then—”

“Don’t worry about it. It was too crowded to dance anyway. What is it you do for Dr. Cooper? Video stuff, you said?”

“Documentation, editing.” He wanted to change the subject. She was frowning slightly.

Two guys behind him were talking over one another, yelling opinions that neither heard. He felt a nonmusical chill when he realized what the issue was. “The bloo’y SA Fascist barstads ’er in Parliament now, what yuh going to do, ay?” one of them, a white guy in dreadlocks, yelled. “There’s no bloo’y way we can get the Nazi barstads out without a war, a blee’in’ civil war, mate, ay?”

At the same time the other shouter—a black with a scalp-up shaped like a street scene, his home neighborhood—was saying, “Oi mean, these buggered right righ-cist barstads are everywhere, fuck me for a joke, ’ow you goin’ to fight them, bloo’y ’ell you’d arv to bust in the system, righ’?”