Elizabeth Hand - Black Light

“I know who you are,” she said. She scooched over, patting the floor as though she were plumping a sofa cushion. I settled beside her, trying to arrange my velvet dress so it wouldn’t get dirty, and still being careful not to let my gaze fall on the rock painting opposite.

“Pretty,” she said, stroking my dress. Once more she gave me that ravishing smile. “You’re the godchild. Charlotte. Right?”

I shrugged and said, “Yes.”

She looked pleased, and started playing with the hem of her dress. There were runs in it, spots where the metallic blue fabric was so frayed you could see right through.

“You know how I know that?” Her lips were dry and cracked. She licked them, over and over and over, until a seam of blood appeared. “Because I am, too. Did you know that?”

“No,” I said shyly.

She nodded. “So we’re sort of related. Right? So that’s why I wanted to talk to you. Because of what happens to us. Just so you’ll know.”

She leaned toward me, and once again I caught that rank chemical smell. “No one understands about Axel. People think they do, they see the movies and read all that stuff but no one really knows. Except me.”

She took my hand and opened it, traced the lines on my palm the way my friend Ali did when we were playing fortune-teller. The girl glanced up, her gaze flicking from me to the far wall. Despite myself I looked, too; then quickly lowered my eyes.

She pointed at the rock painting and said, “You see that.” It was not a question. “Hardly anybody does. Do you know what it is?”

“No,” I whispered.

“A self portrait.” When I looked at her doubtfully she shook her head. “Not mine. His.”

This reassured me somewhat. Plus, I felt flattered by her attention, the fact that she was talking to me as though I were one of her friends and not a little girl. I thought of the strange artwork some of my parents’ friends collected, and the ugly paintings I had seen elsewhere in the Nursery, and ventured another glance at the rock painting. “Really?”

“Sure.” She lowered her voice. “You should see some of the other stuff. I mean, I probably shouldn’t talk about it ’cause you’re so young—but, well, some of it is very sexy. Definitely X-rated.”

She giggled. “That’s one of the amazing things about Axel. All this stuff, you know? It’s all sort of hidden in plain sight. Like the movies, and the paintings, and the books and things he collects—everyone thinks it’s just, like, junk —but really it’s all for a reason. He’s been very careful about what he brings into this place, and his other houses…

“Like, at Swarthmore I read this book about witchcraft, and I mean, his stuff is in there. I mean the things he owns, the manuscripts and that collection of—well, some of those sexy things—it’s all real. And you know what else, Charlotte?”

She placed a hand on each of my knees and drew her face to within inches of mine. “ We’re real, too. All of us,” she whispered. Her expression was rapturous, her dark eyes huge. “Me, Precious; Joey and CeCe and Page…we’re all really what he says we are. Just like you, Charlotte. Just like you…”

She rocked back, tilting her head and looking utterly blissful. “Isn’t that amazing? All this energy, these vibrations all over the world—they’re all focused right here, on us! All these things are happening, like this new age is coming on and there’s all this amazing energy and these, like, radical changes, and we’re doing it! It’s happening right now, Charlotte, and you and me are in it. Doesn’t that just blow your mind?”

She crossed her hands upon her breast, the soiled blue fabric bunching between her fingers, and I tried to look as though I understood what she was talking about. It made a certain kind of sense to me—I had seen things on TV, and in Life magazine. I heard the songs on the radio, and read pilfered copies of Rolling Stone and Creem and Circus magazine, Viva and Rosemary’s Baby. I knew people thought that something was going to happen.

And when I saw pictures of people like this girl, or passed them in the street, with their gorgeous motley and occult jewelry, peacock-feather eyes burning like candle stubs and mouths slightly ajar, as though they had just glimpsed something marvelous, something unspeakable, something with a name that I would never know—well, then I thought something was going to happen, too.

“But you have to do it right. ” I was daydreaming: when the girl jabbed me with her finger I almost jumped out of my skin. “ That’s what’s gone wrong all those other times. No one did it right. But that’s not going to happen now…”

She made a funny, giddy face, shook her head so that her long earrings spun and sparkled. “Because I am strong. I am so strong, I am going to be the one who does it right! And then, Charlotte, you’ll be able to come and visit me on Sundays!”

She laughed and clapped her hands—just once, as though she’d performed a marvelous trick. I looked at her warily, not sure if she were making fun of me. But her delight seemed genuine.

“On Sundays?” I asked.

“That’s just a joke. Listen, don’t you know what happens here? People come, and they stay for a while; and Axel gets stronger. And stronger. And stronger. And I mean, this has all been going on for like a thousand years. Not here, not in this building, but—you know how everyone thinks this is the age of Aquarius? Well, that’s only part of it. That is the tip of the iceberg —”

Abruptly she turned and began rooting in her bag, loosening the drawstring ties and poking inside. “Where is it? God, I can never find anything —I hate this!” she cried, and upended the whole thing.

An astonishing array of objects poured onto the floor. Matchbooks, Lucite bracelets, gold hoop earrings, crushed and uncrushed cigarette packs, a spiral notebook, a pink rosary, innumerable pill bottles, a silver flask, drinking straws, loose change and rolled-up bills, an address book held together with rubber bands, wads and wads of newspaper clippings. I stared, amazed, but the girl just made an impatient noise and swept most of it to one side. Very delicately she picked through a tiny heap of dust and loose pills, choosing a black capsule and popping it into her mouth. Then she took the newspaper clippings and began smoothing them out on the floor.

I craned my neck at the flashlit image of Axel Kern escorting a coy, heavily made-up blonde past a police barricade, but the girl shoved these pages back into her bag.

“Here,” she said, stabbing at the single curling column that remained. “Read this.”

Hollywood monarch turned “underground” filmmaker Axel Kern makes Art out of Life—or is that vice versa?

The recent screening of his controversial “The Savage God Awakes” brought to mind the furor a few years back when Kenneth Anger’s “Lucifer Rising” was all the rage. But Anger never claimed that his hocus pocus actually works.

Axel Kern does.

Press releases touting the verisimilitude of a sequence wherein two teenage “chicks” ritually dismember a live goat brought down the wrath of the American Humane Society and ASPCA. But nobody seemed overly worried about the chicks, whose monokinis (designed by Kern’s pal Rudi Gernreich) might pass muster at bohemian Malibu Beach but definitely shocked ’em onscreen—and off. NY society deb Caresse Hardwick (“Kissy” in the film credits) raised a few eyebrows at the La Tartine party afterward with her comment that “if the Beatles were bigger than Jesus, well then Axel is way bigger than God.” The party’s menu, catered by Les Trois Freres, went largely untouched as…