Black Light

“The Pit?”

“Yeah, man. These guys I know are playing, a fucking great guitarist, it’ll blow your mind.” He began swaying, eyes half-closed, cigarette weaving figure eights in the air. “This amazing scene…”

Abruptly he leaned forward. His turquoise eyes were huge, their expression so intense it was like rage. “You hate it here, too, don’t you. I know you do, Lit. And I know why. I know what goes on…”

“Wh-what—”

“This place—” He waved his cigarette, let it fall to the floor. “This fucking madhouse—”

The little room was filling with smoke, but as Jamie moved his hand the smoke directly in front of him disappeared. Not as though dispersed by the motion, but forming in a pattern. The reddish wood of the bathroom walls suddenly seeming to glow through the haze. He spread his fingers, turning them in a deliberate way that was both odd and oddly familiar. As I watched him, my own hands clenched. In the air between us the pattern grew darker, more apparent. The smoke took on a harsh metallic color, like the singed blade of a steel knife. There was a soft crackling sound of leaves burning, the acrid smell of incense. Another moment and a face hung in the air before me.

I gasped. It was not a face, but the image of a mask, one of those gaping terra-cotta masks that adorned the houses of Kamensic in the autumn. Its eyes were oblique, the mouth wide, upturned in a malicious smile; the high cheekbones two slanted bars of steely light. It was a cruel visage; and unmistakably that of Axel Kern.

“No!” I jabbed at the air. It felt as though I’d plunged my hand into a freezer. But the image was already gone. There was only a roiling cloud of cigarette smoke, and someone banging on the bathroom door.

“Hey, man, give someone else a turn, whaddya say?”

Jamie stuck out his foot and nudged the door open. In the hall stood Page Franchini. He gave us both a disgusted look.

“Oh, Christ, what are we doin’ now, sneaking a ciggie? Fucking kids. Let me in, I got to piss.”

He shoved past me. “Good morning, little schoolgirl. Comb your hair and put on some lipstick, I’ll make you a star.”

“Fuck you.”

I stomped out. I was shaking so hard I was afraid to stop moving, afraid that if I paused to take a breath I’d shatter like one of those masks. I could hardly see the corridor around me, hardly see anything but that lewdly grinning face staring out of the smoke.

“Lit—damn it, wait—”

I stopped but refused to look at him. Jamie hurried to catch up, taking my arm. “Where did you go before? Were you with my father? Tell me, Lit, you have to tell me—”

I lifted my head, fury scalding me like acid, and stared at him, his sullen mouth and great bruised eyes. Not a god dying to be reborn, not a transsexual Amazon; not a redhaired girl gazing back at me across a Eurasian steppe four thousand years ago. Not any of these but a boy my own age who I’d met the day before sitting on a jukebox, a boy who’d just given me his clothes.

A boy who could make masks in the air.

Jamie was looking at me the same way he had in Hillary’s car, when I thought I could confide in him about Kamensic. After a minute he nodded. I took a deep breath, nodded back; and socked him in the mouth.

“Awwwowww…!”

“You,” I said, my knuckles aching. Jamie reeled and crashed against the wall. “You bastard. You knew, what did you know, tell me what the fuck is going on!”

“Ow—don’t, don’t! I swear, I just—”

He panted, one hand cupping his jaw. His lip was dark and swollen, but not bleeding. He looked a hell of a lot more awake than he had a few minutes ago. “Christ, Hillary was right—”

“Hillary?” I shouted. “What the hell did Hillary say?”

“In the bar—Deer Park—he said not to mess with you or you’d clock me—”

“Yeah? Well, you better tell me what the fuck you’re doing here or I’ll clock you again—”

“I told you! We just moved here—my father was supposed to do sets for some asshole project that Axel Kern is working on—”

“Wait—start there. How do you know Axel?”

“I don’t—stop! don’t look at me like that, it’s the truth! I never met him before two days ago—he wanted me to park cars for the party. Then I saw him tonight when he paid me and gave me—”

“How did you do that?”

Jamie shook his head. “What? The cars?”

“No, you idiot—that thing in the air. The thing that looked like a mask—how did you do it?”

He rubbed his lip, looked anxiously up and down the hall. The bathroom door creaked open and Page Franchini emerged, zipping his fly. He glanced at us and bared his teeth in a derisive smile.

“It’s three A.M., children,” he called as he sauntered off. “Do you know where your parents are?”

“Asshole,” Jamie muttered. “Look, let’s at least go somewhere a little more private, okay? C’mon—”

He grabbed my arm and pulled me after him. We found an empty room, a small study with a pair of oversized armchairs in front of a fireplace where graying embers gave off a fitful warmth. There was a row of candles on the mantelpiece, and a half-dozen votive candles on the floor. Jamie dragged the two armchairs together. He settled in one. I slid into the other, still glaring.

“This better be good, Jamie. This better be fucking great.”

“My father,” he said. “That’s how I learned. But you must’ve already figured that.”

I had a flash of Ralph Casson drawing a pattern in the air, a circle of fire blazing up around us. “Your father—”

“He doesn’t know that I know,” Jamie added. “Not that he’s ever been what you could call discreet. But I’ve watched him, at home when he’d go off by himself and practice…

“He’s always done stuff like that. We were always moving, trying to find some place that would give him tenure, or even hire him for more than a year. But nobody ever did. He’d start pulling this crazy shit, talking about cults, the doors of perception swinging open so you walk right through them—I mean, he was teaching this crap, it wasn’t like he was just talking to my mom and me. He’d go down to the rec room to eat mushrooms and stare at himself in a mirror for four hours. And he never made it a secret, what he was doing at the schools. Same thing later, when he got bounced from Berkeley and all he could do was build sets for all those shitty monster movies. Because eventually somebody would always complain, about the wacked-out witchcraft crap, or the drugs, or the girls—”

“Girls?”

“Sure. That crazy stuff he was talking about in the kitchen—you know, ‘go only with teenage poontang, for thus lies the way of truth’—you think he made that up? No way! Every time I’d bring someone home, that’s how it would end up—my fuckin’ father shagging her. That’s how come my mother left—”

I made a small sound. I couldn’t help it. I thought of Ralph holding me, the way he’d stroked my arm and tried to kiss me; then thought of him doing it to innumerable others like myself. I crossed and uncrossed my legs, fighting an absurd stab of jealousy. “Oh. I—I thought your mom joined a commune?”

“She did. First she became a lesbian, then she became a Jesus freak, then she joined a commune. And you know what? I don’t even blame her. I wish now I’d gone with her.”

He stopped, his voice ragged, and I looked away. He was close to tears. He punched the arm of his chair, leaving a dent in the worn leather, then lifted his head defiantly. “I’m splitting. Tonight. Ali says there’s a train at 4:35—if the trains still run out of this place. I’m taking off. This is it.”

“But—” I hesitated. “Well, I know you hate it here— but why?”

“Because it gives me the creeps. Because it’s sick. But how would you know,” he went on bitterly. “You’re part of it, you and your creepy little town, all these fucking actors and Kern up here playing lord of the manor—”

“Me?”

“Yes, you!” He leaned forward and poked me, hard, in the shoulder. “Taking notes about everybody,