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The last chords from the stage fade into electric fuzz. She can see them written across the night sky in kaleidoscope colours as the band starts to leave the stage.
It is long past midnight now, or so she thinks. Right now, time is not flowing for her the way it normally does. It could be a few minutes since the band finished their set, or it could be hours. She genuinely does not know. The crowds who previously milled and buzzed excitedly at the bottom of the slope have thinned out a little, with groups of people trailing back and forth across the road, through the trees to the swimming hole and the campsite where they parked Mike’s friend’s VW bus.
She looks up at the clouds. They look so…bright, pulsing pink and green and yellow, flowing and flaring to match the last echoes of music and the sounds of excited voices in the hollow below. The voices sound like music too. The drops of rain still lightly falling, kissing her burning cheeks, caressing her bare arms and legs, glitter like brass butterflies, like diamond jellybeans in flight. She left her clothes somewhere. She can’t quite remember where. It is a balmy, wet night, and besides she has her strings of beads, her peace sign necklace, to keep her warm.
The grass she sits on seems to breathe, making her bob like a floating raft. Or maybe she is just swaying, grooving in time to the music.
The music only she can hear.
She giggles, pushing sodden, rusty copper strands of hair out of her eyes. Her heart almost bursts with…love. She loves the colours, she realises. She loves the music. She loves the people – all of the people – dancing and shouting and stumbling around in the mud and discarded trash that cover the slope.
She picks up the round glass ball she is cradling in her lap, holding it up to the darkness, using it as a lens to look at the colours in the sky. Spilled-paint rainbows pour out of it, dripping into her eyes, tickling her brain. Her skin feels indigo. The air smells red.
“I spy,” she murmurs, wondering at the meaning in the words that she never comprehended before now, “with my little…”
She laughs aloud again. How can she never have noticed…never noticed how funny the crystal ball is? Tears of innocent mirth crawl down her cheeks like golden spiders, mixing with the silver rain.
“Lastochka moya,” says a voice behind her. “There you are. I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”
“I love you Katya,” she replies, because why wouldn’t she? It’s true. She watches the crystal as she slowly moves it from side to side, seeing how the colours arc and burst across its smooth surface, tracing the trail of smeared after-images it leaves hanging in the air behind it. The glass looks like it is melting, trickling slowly down over her hand and arm, until her fingers too are shiny, hard and transparent, dancing with every hue of the spectrum. The ring Katya gave her on her birthday burns like a circle of fire, like a crown made of steel and ice.
“I didn’t know where you’d gone,” Katya says, kneeling down on the grass behind her, putting her arms around her to hug her close. “I didn’t know…”
“I love you,” she tells her again, suddenly terribly afraid that Katya didn’t hear her the first time, that she doesn’t know that either. Doesn’t know what she knows.
“Of course, my petal.” And the words look like petals as they fall from Katya’s lips and blow away; fuchsia and violet and marigold and cornflower blue… She can see them even though Katya is behind her and she has not yet looked around. “I love you too.” And Katya kisses her gently on the ear; the sensation echoes through her, thrumming her nerves like guitar strings, making every hair on her body stand out crackling like antennae, taking her breath away.
The sweetest melody…
“Picture yourself,” she recites solemnly, “in a boat on a river.” She strokes Katya’s arm; it feels like clashing tambourines. “With tangerine trees and marmalade skies.”
“Oh,” says Katya. “I see.” Now her words are like smoke, scarlet and heliotrope and aquamarine, carried off downwind in a blast of trumpets and drums.
“I met a girl,” she tells her, “she gave me…something. A gift. She laid it on my tongue, like… Like… What do you call those things? You know, priest things?”
“Are you all right, Evangeline?” Katya asks, very softly, and her voice flashes like lightning across the pink-green-yellow-black sky. “What have you taken?”
“Oh, you know.” Evangeline nestles back against her…her lover, she suddenly thinks, and suddenly wants everyone to know that. She can feel their bodies leaking into one another, becoming one. She does not know where she ends and Katya starts. “Just party favours. Candy apples and lemon drops and…”
“A likely story,” says Katya, but not sternly. Katya’s cool. She doesn’t judge. She just…
Evangeline is so, so, so proud of her, of her old, old, old lady, whom she loves with all her heart, to whom she would give anything, anything at all, anything she had. She has given her her blood…
“It wasn’t the brown acid was it?” Katya idly wonders, stroking Evangeline’s hair with fingers like tuning forks, making her skin vibrate and her head float away like a helium balloon. “I heard them telling people over the loudspeaker before not to take the brown acid. I’m not even sure what the brown acid is.”
Evangeline tries to think, tries to picture the little square of blotting paper the girl with the flowers painted on her face very carefully placed in her open mouth. It might have been brown, she supposes. It might have been green or blue or… It might have been a sugar cube dipped in vinegar. She remembers how she and the painted girl smiled at one another, as if they had just shared a special secret. She supposed they had, really.
“It was nice,” she tells Katya. “Like, really groovy.”
“I’m sure it was.” Katya sounds a little fuzzy herself. Evangeline left her in the bus before with Patrick and Sally, who spent the afternoon smoking their own body weight in grass.
“Did you have a little…a little something in the van?” she asks, trying not to giggle again.
“I might have,” says Katya, a touch defensively.
“You asked them first?” she inquires, very seriously, because that is very important.
“Of course,” Katya answers. “But don’t worry. They won’t remember in the morning.” She sounds uncomfortable to be talking about it. She still doesn’t quite grok the whole free love thing. She worries about making Evangeline jealous, when Evangeline keeps telling her they don’t own each other. Whatever Katya wants to do, as long as other people want to do it with her, it’s her trip, and it’s all cool. So, so, so cool…
There are more people on the stage down below now, roadies and technicians she thinks, setting up for the next act. She saw a setlist yesterday, on a crumpled, rain-blurred flyer but cannot remember the order. She only really came here to see Janis Joplin, but she has found so, so, so much more.
“Are you glad you came?” she asks Katya a second or a minute or an hour later, because she wants her to be having a good time.
“I am,” Katya replies, thoughtfully, as if surprised by her own answer. “You know I’m not a lover of this modern music…”
“Oh, I know.”
They both laugh at that before Katya continues: “But I like the atmosphere I can feel here. I like seeing the young people being so happy, so…alive.” Not like me, she doesn’t say, but the thought makes Evangeline nearly burst into tears all the same. “This is a very special event, I think. I can feel something…awakening here tonight. I can feel the magic in the air.”
“I can see the magic in the air,” Evangeline announces, quite truthfully.
“I can feel the…the…”
“You can feel the vibe,” Evangeline informs her, leaning back against her and raising a hand to brush Katya’s hair, fingers shivering electrically as she has the sensation of falling, falling into her.
“Yes.” Katya kisses her again, on the side of the neck, and it is like being touched by a frozen flame. “Yes, I can feel the vibe.”
She hears herself make a contented little sound as she keeps on falling, falling straight through, straight through Katya and out the other side.
Katya took a lot of persuading to join Evangeline and her friends on their trip upstate, mainly because of the sun, until Evangeline had explained how they could keep her safe from it while they travelled, and without her friends having to know what Katya really is. The sun is so, so, so cruel to Katya, Evangeline thinks sorrowfully. It’s so, so, so unfair, not like the night. The lights around the stage spin like iridescent windmills. The ground seems carpeted in broken dragonfly wings. No, the night is kind and gentle. The night loves them both, just like she loves the night.
Just like she loves Katya.
She raises the crystal ball up again, to look through it at the lights, shattering their glowing orbs into a thousand, thousand rainbow splinters that stick into her hands and arms and eyes, into the earth and the sky, like a swarm of multicoloured arrows. And that is when she remembers what the glass is, why she brought it with her when they left the city, early, so early on Friday morning in the dark.
She turns around, squelching in the quivering, breathing mud, suddenly frightened again. She needs to show Katya. She needs to let her know too…
“I g-g-got this for you,” she declares, holding out the crystal ball. “I c-c-came by some b-b-bread I wasn’t ex-expecting to g-g-get, and I…I thought, I thought I’d, I’d use it to g-g-get you s-s-something, thing. A g-g-gift, b-b-because, b-b-because I love you.” She does not think she is stuttering; it is the sound of her voice, speeding up and slowing down and echoing and repeating. She does not know how it sounds to Katya.
Katya stares at her, open-mouthed, for a moment. Or a minute. Or an hour. Or a night. She seems to get larger and smaller, nearer and further away, without moving at all. Her short black dress pops and flashes with stripes and polka dots and geometric patterns. Her face is illuminated in shades of mauve and pea-green and neon blue. “A gift? For me?”
“Yeah, there’s this, this antique store on c-c-c-Columbus Avenue, by the bookstore, and I, I, I walked past the window and I saw…” She thinks Katya looks as though she is breathing heavily, even though she knows perfectly well that is something Katya does not do. Her outline judders and jumps, shedding sundog silhouettes. “And I thought…”
“You thought of me?” Katya’s face shines blood red, an eclipse of the moon.
“Yes.”
She lets the crystal fall into Katya’s outstretched, cupped hands. It lies there, beating like a heart wrapped in cellophane, sweating drops of mercury, changing colour by the second. Or the minute. Or the hour. It takes her a moment (or a minute) to realise that the tears drawing straight lines down Katya’s cheeks are really real; they glow a deep, molten orange like volcanic lava.
“Oh,” says Katya. “Oh, lastochka moya.” And her words fly away like a flock of swallows or like swirling embers from an open fire. She clutches the ball in one hand while the other combs through Evangeline’s hair and the whole world seems to stop and hold its breath and curl in upon itself. “Moy bagrovyy lepestok…”
“Don’t cry,” Evangeline implores her. “I didn’t want to make you cry.”
“No, no my darling,” Katya insists, between sobs that sound like cymbals to Evangeline’s ears. “Spasibo. Bol'shoy spasibo. Thank you so much. It’s been… This will sound like a lie, but it has been so long since…” She shakes her head. “You are so kind to me, Evangeline. I’m just not used to people being kind to me. And I know I’ve not always been very kind to you.”
“You have,” Evangeline weakly argues, looking down at the ring on her finger. “You have. If I hadn’t met you…”
“Thank you so much,” Katya says again, running her hands over the crystal’s liquid surface. “I will treasure it always.” She presses it to her dead heart. “Always.”
And Evangeline knows that for Katya “always” means exactly that.
They sit and watch as the technicians on the stage finish their sound check. The crowd has started to gather again, drifting across the road and down the hill. Katya’s arm rests across her shoulders, alternately a feather boa or a boa constrictor with scales like enamelled jewels.
“I wish you could see what I’m seeing,” she says to Katya as the voices of the spectators and the feedback from the stacked speakers below send textured columns of gold dust swirling and dancing into the night. “Have you ever tried it? Acid, I mean?”
“It was invented long after I, well, became as I am,” Katya explains, rolling the crystal ball between the fingers of her other hand. “And now, well… But I think I can imagine what it must be like.”
“You can’t,” Evangeline assures her, earnestly. “I thought that too. But until you try it for yourself…” An overhanging raincloud crawls with interlocking lines and squares. She gasps aloud at the sight.
“But I can see things others can’t see,” Katya goes on. “If I use my innate abilities, I can see auras and spirits. I can see glimpses of things to come…”
“Not like this,” Evangeline replies as the singer walks onto the stage. She looks like a tiny dragon under the flaring spotlights, trailing a weaving, floating train of fiery coils in her wake. Evangeline glances over at Katya, a little shyly. “You could… If you wanted.” She tilts her head to one side and pushes her hair back, baring the side of her neck.
“Oh no,” Katya demurs. “I’ve fed tonight.”
“Go on.”
Katya glances furtively around. “There are people…”
“And some of them are fucking each other, right out in the open,” Evangeline points out, indicating one nearby muddy, complicated group who seem to be having a good time from all the grunts and giggles and the shapes and colours she can see wobbling around them. “No-one’s paying any attention to them. No-one’ll notice us. If they do, they’ll think it’s…” She laughs. “The brown acid, probably.”
“Evangeline…”
“Go on, Katya. Just a sip. You won’t regret it.”
She feels Katya’s arm tighten around her shoulders with a python hiss. Katya kisses her again, right in the spot she has offered to her, the same place she kissed her before, but this time…
“Oh…shit…” Evangeline laughs as the singer picks up the microphone. Laser beams and gunpowder explode along her veins. She is soaring, her soul lifting free of her body, spreading its wings, zooming up, up, up into the blackness like a Saturn V rocket, all the way to the Sea of Tranquillity. The band strikes up and a voice rings out across the fields and woods, powerful and clear but raw, rough-edged with pain and feeling. Fireworks blossom across Evangeline’s field of vision, sparks giving birth to sparks giving birth to sparks in ever-spreading, ever-expanding, concentric rings of light.
“If there's anythin' that you need, Hon,” the voice rasps, “that you've never, ever, ever had…”
Even when she closes her eyes and collapses full length in the mud, moaning, with Katya on top of her, she can still see the fireworks.
She can see them even more clearly there, in the darkness of her own head.
END?