Current Transmissions:

20131210

DAY TWENTYNINE 1:55AM


Kaleidoscope 

Max tried to lose himself into the music. His body felt sore and aching, he couldn't risk the dance-floor. He tried to just listen, to watch, the swirl and flux of people. Ever since the chalet. Everything had sharp edges. Her arm was moving like smoke, he tried to read it, she was gone, three other dancers swirling into the space. Max blinked or the lights strobed. The bass thumped or his heart beat. Something had happened. Driving up the laneway, the trees surrounding him. Leaves like voices, clustered and brushing against each other, voices at the bar beside him. Drink orders, pickup lines. Branches trying to reach out and entangle, over decades. The music crescendoed, arms thrown up in the air, the crowd like coral, he had made his decision. 

To risk it, she was deciding whether to give the guy her phone number, he was deciding whether to ask the other guy out, he had decided to risk it. Hoping, hoping, hoping she looked good tonight, she would meet someone new, hoping he would get that promotion, hoping he had made it to the chalet in time. He knew that ops had timetables, the DJ worked the turntables. He knew that he had a window, jewelry flashing in the technocolour lights like broken rainbows. The bodies moved through the music like trees in a windstorm, driving up the lane ready to risk the infection moving through him into her, or to find it was too late, the song changing up the tempo mixing down, samples playing hide and seek in the beat. To maybe find her changed already, the world changed, always changing, dancers finding the melody, the rhythym, trying always to find the way through the worlds.

Or maybe she would be gone, already too late, but the enemy was on the horizon, chopper blades like crows' wings, like scythes ready for harvest. So Max into the risk, standing at the bar, music and lights spinning together, and the strange pulse in him, that had started the other day, as he was driving up the lane, like a signal, like an injection. The crows cawing behind him. The crowd cheering. Max was coming to save the day, Max was coming to end the world, Max standing at the bar. The Crystal Method on the speakers, 'This transmission is coming to you', mixed with the KLF, 'What time is love?'. And he pulled up to the chalet. To save her or kill her. 

He took a drink. He could see faces he knew at the windows, among the trees, old faces, lost faces. Dragons in the crowd, dancing, couldn't be, couldn't be her. She was long gone. And they were all gone. They were all gone. He knew they were just there, but now they were gone. He pushed away from the bar, towards the dance-floor, trying to reach her, moving slow like a branch growing, but she was already gone. Couldn't have been her... The crows had landed, he was already hiding, he was hiding back at the bar. She asked him for his phone number and he imagined his cell phone ringing and it not being the Professor or Control or a crisis or static, and he started to laugh, and she was gone.

He arrived, he had arrived at the club, because of the name probably, to try the ritual, Light had arrived at the chalet, the castle, black armour, enemy knight, and everyone was gone. Somehow they had all disappeared. Tried to disappear into the music and couldn't, he was different now. Tried to find them but they were gone, they were trying to find them but they were gone. They were both alone together. Each other's prey.



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