Glimmering

No dancin’ in Anson! Trip wailed in Texas, his long arms and hands swaying above his head as he rocked back and forth in one spot onstage. No dancing in Lansing! No waltzing in New Paltz! No moshin’ in Tucson! During each performance he’d stay resolutely in one place, at the very edge of the stage, blue eyes flaring as his hands moved, sinuous and suggestive as one of those Javanese dancers he had seen on the Great Big World Channel in a hotel outside Austin. Wayang-wong, their dance was called; it had impressed the singer mightily.

The band almost always stayed in Christian-run hotels or hostels. Mustard Seed wanted to ensure that their artists were not exposed to the wrong kind of people. Even more insidious was the wrong kind of video programming: since the glimmering began, television had become a sort of deranged pachinko game.

Usually, Trip wouldn’t be able to pick up any stations at all. Other times he’d find himself watching local news, and the fat friendly weatherman would suddenly be displaced by heaving thighs and breasts, mass atrocities in Nigeria, entire city blocks evacuated because of abandoned cars, a reasoned discussion of filmed suicide by a panel of mori artists.

“Shoot. Talking.” Jerry Disney shook his head in disgust as the blurred image of a mass grave abruptly changed. He stood and walked to the door. “I’m gonna go eat.”

That was how Trip was left alone in a hotel room in Terre Haute. Onscreen, the mori artists disappeared. The Disaster Channel flickered in and out of sight with a quick look at a mud slide in Arizona, the heroin overdose of a singer Trip had opened for once in Boston, an unsuccessful surface-to-air missile strike against a commuter 707. Then the channel changed again. The moss-grown ruins of a pagan temple filled the screen.

“…ritual in Probolinggo, Java,” a woman’s voice said softly. Trip sat on the edge of his bed and stared transfixed at the retrofitted Magnavox.

On the temple steps stood a beautiful young man wearing mask-white makeup and silks stiff with pearls and glass beads. From his head rose a crown made of tropical flowers and long blue-black feathers. It trembled as he danced, his bare feet sliding across a cracked stone platform strewn with leaves. Behind the dancer the sky rippled mauve and grass green. The narrator, her voice sibilant and hushed as a child’s, recited in perfect, Oxford-accented English:

King Klono, the wanderer from afar, has come to Java seeking the Princess Chandra Kirana. He has seen her only in his dreams and fallen in love with her, but his love will destroy him. He wears red to show his passion and gold because he is a god; but even gods die if they forsake their kingdoms for the base hungers of the world. So did the Victorious One, the Buddha, warn us: “Enticing magicians are performing; fear the beguiling, hypnotizing magicians phantoms of the Kali Yuga”—that is to say, the final age that is now upon us: the end of the end.

The end of the end. Trip was still repeating the words to himself when the television reception blipped out completely.

That night he wrote a song, staying up until John Drinkwater knocked at the door to wake him the next morning. On the bus he taught Jerry and the others the chord changes. They even had time to practice before that night, their very first New York appearance. The Beacon had its own power supply, and it took the road crew longer than usual to set up. In the green room, Trip and the rest of the band went over the song by the wavering light of a sodium lamp, then joined hands for a final prayer. When Stand in the Temple finally took the stage, Trip was shaking so hard his teeth hurt from chattering.

“This is, uh, something I wrote last night. A song—a song about the age we live in.” His body mic gave a weird hiss to the words, as though he were speaking from a room that was on fire. “The End of the End.”

The words were mostly nonsense, cribbed from the Bible John Drinkwater had given him long ago. I possess the keys of hell and death, I will give you the morning star. But the melody was eerie, even coming out of Jerry Disney’s poorly tuned electric guitar. Four chords echoing again and again, with Trip’s voice whispering the refrain: