Glimmering

The commercial segued almost indistinguishably into the music station’s corporate ID. Marz fidgeted, bumping her heels against the floor. Jack noticed that her socks did not match. When he glanced at the TV again it showed a swirling background of green and purple and gold, violently redolent of the sky outside. Across the screen letters flowed, formed of varicolored smoke.

“Enticing magicians are performing; fear the beguiling, hypnotizing phantoms of the Kali Yuga. Enticing magicians are performing; fear the beguiling, hypnotizing phantoms of the Kali Yuga. Enticing magicians are performing…”

A woman’s voice began repeating the words, eerily affectless and breathy, as though it had been generated by a computer; like one of those voices you got on the phone during the rare periods it worked, warning you to expect extensive difficulties and delays in placing your call. Low, ominous music began to creep from the TV: gamelans and drums, a growing crescendo of guitar feedback. Within the garish whorls of color a tiny object appeared. A golden pyramid beset by rays of light and spinning like a pinwheel until it was large enough to fill the screen. Then the pyramid was gone. A huge glittering eye stared out from the television, blinked so that a tarantula fringe of lashes swept across its sky-blue iris, and wheeled back to become fixed like a gem within the face of a radiantly beautiful young man.

“Ah,” gasped Jack. “It’s that song…”

“I possess the keys of hell and death,” the young man sang. “I will give you the morning star. The end of the end. The end of the end…”

He was dressed like a temple dancer. Face ash white, lips and eyes outlined in scarlet, his blond hair all but hidden beneath a pagodalike headdress. His clothes were heavy with jewels and long fringes of brocade. Flowering vines swept across his body as he swayed and spun, crouched and leapt across what seemed a vertiginous height. Beneath his unshod feet clouds and sea churned like dust, and the ragged peaks of mountains. Jack watched raptly. There was something eerie, yet self-consciously hyperbolic, about the dancing figure which was at odds with the doomy music—that was merely (though gorgeously) anthemic, an irresistible pop coda to the century.

But the dancing boy—he reminded Jack of the Hindi films Leonard dragged him to when they were in Bombay in the late seventies and early eighties, bizarre epics where blue-skinned actors played gods who raped then embraced weeping ecstatic women, only to be interrupted by waves of sari-clad Busby Berkeley chorines on acid, all singing, all dancing, all for the greater glory of the avatars of Vishnu…

And that, too, was oddly familiar.

“… fear the phantoms of the Kali Yuga…”

A shiver of recognition edged up Jack’s spine. He frowned, remembering a coke-fueled evening in 1983. He and Leonard and one of Bollywood’s rising film stars, a golden-skinned man named Ashok Sonerwalla, sat on a terrace overlooking the Gulf of Khambhat, talking long into the night and drinking a beverage the color of Pepto-Bismol. Even now Jack recalled their conversation very clearly, because Leonard (much impressed by My Dinner with Andre) had videotaped the entire evening. During the months of editing that followed, Jack was forced to watch an endless loop of his intoxicated self drooling over the actor.

Ashok was telling them about his current movie, something about the Kali Yuga—

“That is the cosmic period we are in now, the Kali Yuga,” he explained, and sipped his drink. “It lasts for one thousand years, and ends with a cataclysm that threatens to disrupt the divine order of the Three Worlds. There have been many, many yugas, of course. But this is the most evil yuga, this one we are in right now.”

He tapped the glass coffee table. “Each yuga has an avatar of Vishnu—this one, the Kali Yuga, has one named Kalkin. That’s who I play. The avatars are always very exciting!”

Ashok laughed, leaning across the table to gaze at Jack with wide hunted-stag eyes. “I got to play Prahlada the last time—he gets thrown into the sea with his hands and feet bound, but then Vishnu appears to him and Prahlada experiences samadhi—the oneness with Vishnu—and he swims back to the surface. Vishnu killed all the bad guys in that one”—Ashok giggled—“avatars cause a lot of trouble! But Kalkin—me—he is really the avatar of the future, so we don’t actually know what he does, except I get to kill a lot of people and in the end of course I finally kiss Mehnaz Sabnis. So you see the terrible disasters are worth it and divine balance is restored.”