The Lure (52 page)

Noel suddenly remembered what Eric had said to him at the town house about atomizing the air of the entire Window Wall with LSD. Everyone was tripping on it. He, too, was tripping on it.

A face sailed past him, multicolored, young, perspiring, glimmering in different colors, ecstatic. Another face caught him from another side, darker, sweat-beaded, eyes staring up, mouth opened in a complete and delighted grin. A glimpse of Alana, her head thrown back, eyes closed as though in orgasm, lips open to smile as though in on some secret, the lights metamorphosing her into sheer delight. She must be tripping, too. Everyone was. And Noel had never done it before!

But he was moving, too, because unaware that his mind was unable to come to terms with it, his body had instinctively taken off on the rhythm around him; instinctively knowing that the only way not to fall, to keep afloat, was to keep moving rhythmically in tune; the only way to avoid the dance, to progress, was to stay vibrating, to become the dance itself.

Alana’s hands reached out in the colored, fractured, light-growing air between them, gliding smooth and buttery soft, evoking sudden images of dancing girls’ arms in harems, of the arms of Hindu statues, of Balinese dancers’ arms making strange, enigmatic symbols before his eyes. They came together behind him, around his neck and shoulders, and she glided closer to his body, and his own arms suddenly appeared in the air before him, looking odd and unnatural, but slightly familiar, and they, too, began to dance, and finally snaked around her body, changing shape and proportions with every second-long change of light or color or detail of the sound around them.

Noel couldn’t take the barrage on his optic nerve anymore and closed his eyes. But that made no difference in the lights or shapes, except that now there was no point of reference anymore. The sounds continued, deeper, louder, closer to his skin it seemed, invading him. So he opened his eyes and felt terror and nausea sweep up through his body into his mouth and ears and eyes, and out of him. Then it began again, from within, only he stopped it from emerging, and it shot back inside this time, detonating every individual cell, until he could see their tiny nuclei individually shatter, and the blackness that had threatened to suck him below engorged him and he was sucked into the blackness, darker than any imaginable, until he almost thought, then he was sure, then was absolutely convinced, it wasn’t blackness at all but the white, white, white of nothingness forever white…

When he opened his eyes, he was whole again, Noel Cummings, as was everything else—the lights, the music, Alana, the club, the people, the dancing were there, too, a minute later. Paradox. No. Joke. First whole, then a million individual cells. There, yet not there, black becoming white, death seeming to give instant birth. Big joke. Still dancing, too. Alana turning around slowly in front of him, decomposing into billions of cells, each little cell winking on and off, moving, proving itself alive. Then all of the cells joining together to form bone, flesh, skin, muscle: Alana—with a wonderful smile. She’d known the joke all the while, of course, while he, a child, hadn’t. Eric had known all the while, too.
Eric.
What Noel must do to find Eric. To include him. This trinity that they were.

But he could not move, as another wave of sights, sounds, smells, too, tastes, feelings—first inside, then outside, then inside again—began to form around him, intensifying, building to a crest within. This time he did not fight it but allowed himself to slide right into the blackness that became so spectacularly white…

He came back in time to know that something had changed around his physical body while he’d been off tripping into the white. Everyone in the huge room was suddenly roaring what sounded like approval, pleasure, around him. Noel opened his eyes, saw Alana, her face shifting every second he looked at her, saw her gesturing for him to follow her gaze. Everyone else’s, too. Then above them, floating only a few feet over their heads, though far off across the dance floor so that he could clearly make it out, was a giant, octagonal silver balloon, which like everything, everybody around him, kept changing its shape. No. It wasn’t a balloon. Its surface was hard, reflective, all mirrors. It was an octagon, holding that shape even as it began to change, the top of it separating, until he could now see that it was one of the mirrored rooms Eric had shown him in the sketch. (Eric. Where was Eric? Why wasn’t he here, sharing this, where he belonged, with Noel and Alana, their trinity?) It was actually opening up, its paneled sides dropping slowly as it revolved, like a giant flower opening in the heat of the sun to reveal some exotic secret within.

Which turned out to be a person, standing. No, not just a person, but Veena Scarborough, a hand on one silver-lamé jutting hip, another hand attached to a long, darting, silver fingernail, shaking in the air now as flakes of silver were shot off her face, her silver-embedded eyes, the stroboscope making everything vibrate to one single vibration where the senses all melted together. Now separated. An eerie, high-pitched atonal sound pierced the music blaring and thumping around her, then, as her silver-painted lips opened and she shouted, sang, shrieked, crooned, demanded, “Pull yourself together: I say, ‘Pull yourself together, baby!’”

The crowd roared recognition of one of their favorite songs as the silver-strobe sound shot out of her, hit Noel directly between the eyes, and he felt his ego punched to smithereens with another crest of white…

And back again. And gone again into the white. Until even that became rhythmic, too, and Noel couldn’t say why he’d never felt such contentment, such pure physical, mental, emotional pleasure before.

Alana had somehow gotten them over to the edge of the crowd. Still holding him, still into the beat of the music, she managed to get the two of them into a space against one wall. He let her lead him, holding onto her outstretched hand as it changed and became a snake/a tree bough/a flower/a petal/a strip of leather/a steel-curved bar/and arm again/then a hand. Alana smiled, reached up, touched Noel’s forehead. He felt her skin hot then cool then melting into him from the touch, from his side where they were up against each other. He saw Veena in her silver Queen of Outer Space costume gyrate, shimmy, wag a finger, shout to her finale, stop as though frozen, as the petals began slowly to fold around her, and the crowd rioted into shouting, stamping, giving back what she had given them.

Noel closed his eyes for a rest. The lighting was muted inside now. Easier to take.

He felt someone touching him, shaking him by the shoulder, it seemed. He opened his eyes, turned, and saw a familiar face close by. Cal. Cal Goldberg. The manager. He was motioning to Noel, pulling him and Alana behind, threading through the sidewall of people packed together all still in motion, to another wall, then up a dozen steps, and into a sudden absence of glaring lights, cell-gripping sounds. Noel turned to make certain that Alana was with him. The door was closed.

They were inside a large plush office, with sofas, chairs, coffee tables. One wall, where they had entered, was completely one-way glass looking out into the club, where the party still raged. Inside, it was almost hermetically still, calm as a pond. Noel made out other people sitting in the swivel chairs—Rick, Cal again. Someone he didn’t know but guessed to be a friend of theirs.

Alana shook off his hand gently, dropped onto a sofa, motioned for Noel to follow. He settled into the pillows gingerly, having to rename, redefine, figure out everything he saw as though seeing a chair or sofa or person for the first time in his life.

“I saw you guys out there,” Cal explained. “I thought maybe you wanted to rest a minute. Drink?”

“Water,” Alana said. Noel nodded, unable to find his voice yet.

“You’ve never tripped before,” Alana said to Noel. It was not a question. Evidently it was all too apparent.

Noel searched for, found his voice. “Not like this.” He wanted to tell her what he had learned, discovered, intuited, seen, felt since they’d come down the escalator. He decided it would take weeks, months perhaps.

The glass of water was suddenly handed to him. Its three-dimensionality disconcerted him for a second; it seemed alive. But he watched how she took it, and did so, too. It felt odd. The water, as he looked into it, seemed filled with living, microscopically small creatures. But she was drinking it. He did, too. It tasted like nothing. Felt strange, alive again, going down his throat.

“I hereby declare this party an A-one success,” Rick Chaffee said with a much exaggerated drawl. Noel wondered why, looked at Rick. His eyes were bright: stoned. Noel’s must look the same.

“If that’s the case, I’m not needed anymore,” Cal said quietly. “I’m going home.”

“And miss the rest of it?”

“I’ve been to plenty of parties, honey. And I intend to go to plenty more.”

They laughed, exultant, telling each other their work had not been for nothing.

There was a tap at the mirror. On the other side of the window Cal’s lover, Burt, was peering in, even though he couldn’t see inside, waving his hand in a circle against the glass.

Cal let him in, along with sixty seconds of music and lights and intense heat. Noel said hello. Greetings were general. Then Noel decided he had something very important to say to Alana, turned to her, saw she seemed to be resting, tripping off, her eyes closed. It could wait. He, too, slumped back into the sofa and slowly looked outside as the others talked, and he began to feel the acid in him begin to crest again. He went off into the warm Antarctica of white again.

He was stretched out on the sofa. The room was filled with people: Veena and Alana on the opposite sofa; Cal and his lover; Rick and Jimmy DiNadio, quietly, but intensely as ever, arguing. They noticed him first.

“You okay?” Chaffee asked.

“Fine.” And he was. Everything still seemed to have its own unique, individualized presence for him—the ashtray on the table was aggressively three-dimensional. The water in the glass was almost a cartoon of water. Any movement he or anyone else made left a half dozen afterimages, as though he were seeing through a camera lens that was speeded up to catch not only motion, but the areas in between motion.

“You catch my act, honey?” Veena asked. Before he could say yes, she went on: “It was
fabulous
! If I say so myself.”

Noel sat up. Then stood up. Outside, through the office’s one-way mirror, the party was roaring, unabated. He glanced past a wall clock and was astonished to see it was three o’clock. He’d been tripping for three hours already. That meant that the heaviest part of it was over.

“Really knocked me on my ass,” he said to no one in particular.

“Honey, imagine what I felt like?” Veena said. “Trying to keep my balance on that thing. Let me tell you! Surfing is a cinch compared to that!”

Noel was perfectly relaxed. He was used to the drug’s more obvious effects now. Still, he was bothered by something: a mind itch he couldn’t find to scratch.

“Well, where in this dump is the massa anyway,” Veena said in response to something Alana had murmured too low for Noel to catch.

That was it: Eric! Eric was in trouble! He had to find Eric. He felt a rush of the acid coming on, and sat down. It worked on the cerebral cortex of the brain, Noel remembered from his reading about the drug: his excitement, fear, whatever strong emotion he had would trigger more of a reaction in turn.

No one answered Veena’s question immediately. Then almost everyone present seemed to have a different answer. Rick had seen Eric in the DJ’s booth, taking over the light panels system, he said. But that must have been hours ago. Cal had talked to Eric via the club’s intercom, when Eric was downstairs on the lower floor. Eric had reported a spectacular, very mixed sex scene in the showers. But Cal’s lover said that he had been downstairs at two thirty: the orgy had been over by then, and Eric nowhere in sight.

“I’m sure he’s having a good time,” Alana said, appearing very mellowed out. “He always does.”

“He’s up in the office on the fourth floor,” someone said almost from behind Noel. It was “Marge,” flat out on the carpet, back against the wall, feet straight out. He looked beat. His red hair was plastered down over his forehead with sweat, his T-shirt soaked. “I saw him going up, just before I managed to squeeze in here. He was with Geoff Malchuck. I saw them going inside.”

“They’re probably checking out that new shipment of coke Geoff scored,” Cal said.

Noel’s mind began racing. New connection. Coke. Geoff Malchuck. Hadn’t they talked at the elevator in Redfern’s town house yesterday? Could Geoff be the setup? The trap Loomis had all ready? The catch was supposed to be tonight, the onionskin had said.

“Who else was with him?” Noel asked.

“Some friend of Geoff’s.”

“Marge” answered. “No one I know. Anyone have a Tuinal? I’m ready to slide into my down trip.”

Geoff Malchuck a Whisper operative? He couldn’t be. Or could he?
Remember how closely he looked at me the day at Redfern’s, just after Priscilla Vega told me about the programming?

“How do I reach the upstairs office?” Noel asked, a hand on the intercom phone.

“Push C and dial eleven,” Cal instructed. No one else was paying attention. Noel had to keep it casual.

“What’s wrong?” Alana asked.

He didn’t respond. The phone rang and rang. No answer. He hung up and dialed again. Still no answer. Noel stood up. “See you later,” he said.