Glimmering

“The end of the end. The end of the end…”

The audience went crazy for it, and finally Trip did, too, diving into the crowd and letting them catch him, letting them carry him, hand to hand and mouth to mouth, girls kissing him and boys, too, their hands like feeding starfish as he swam across them until Jerry finally pulled him back onto the stage, killing Trip’s body mic in the process. He lost his cross, too, the chain yanked from around his neck by an eager fan. Lucius bought him another the next day, elbowing amongst Russian gangsters and silver-masked drug dealers down in the jewelry district.

“Here,” he said, draping the chain over Trip’s head. An elaborate Abyssinian cross dangled from it, larger than the other one, at once archaic and fashionable. “They’ll notice this one.”

That was how it started, the end of the end, the beginning of the end. When Trip started dancing, everything changed. Within a week, Stand in the Temple became the first Xian band ever to hold the Number One slot on Billboard International.

CHRISTIAN RIGHT’S DARLING TURNS SALOME! shrieked the New York Beacon. XIAN STAR WALKS ON WATER! CHECK RADIUM @ Z.RO.com FOR PIXNFAX!

And later, when his first single was released and his picture appeared everywhere, silvery blue threads streaming from his eyes like tears, TRIP TAKES A TRIP! The holographic cover showed Trip posed as a blond Christ in Gethsemane, the image saved from smarminess or cries of heresy by the sheer intensity of Trip’s expression as he gazed upward at a golden bar of light slanting down from the sky. It was an expression that was at once exultant and doomed. The music’s apocalyptic mood suited those days of wrath: the web downloaded two million copies in twenty-three hours.

His audience grew. There were still the church groups bused in from suburbs and compounds and housing projects, and the mainstream alternative fans; but now there were others, too. Blocks of tickets were bought by Blue Antelope and other progressive fellowships. Trip could recognize the former by their masks. No demure white surgeons’ masks or the simple black crosses favored by mainstream Christians, but colorful representations of African elephants and pandas and the blue antelope, which was the first African species to be extinguished by humans, hunted to death by 1801 for dog meat. And, of course, there were droves of new fans who were obviously either newly anointed Xians or just old-fashioned heretics out for a good time listening to bad news.

More confusions, blood transfusions
The news of today will be the movies of tomorrow
’Cause the water’s turned to blood
And if you don’t think so
Go turn on your tub…

In vain Trip argued with Xian talk-show hosts and church leaders. “It’s not just me, you know.” Online and onscreen his boyish tenor was soft, almost pleading: if you had no visuals, you might think he was only thirteen or fourteen years old. “Some guy gets onstage and moves around, what’s the big deal? It’s these times, everyone’s so repressed—I’m just trying to, ummm, put some tension, some joy into it. I mean, even if it really is the end of the world, I don’t think Jesus meant for us never to have a good time.”

OUR ran a sidebar—GIVE US THAT GOOD-TIME RELIGION!—and sales continued to soar. During their second, fateful New York engagement, Lucius Chappell spent a lot of time speaking quietly and intently on the phone. A&R people started showing up backstage after the shows. Messages from entertainment moguls began appearing on Trip’s knee top. Foot and bike couriers arrived at the Stamford Four Seasons where the band was staying, their faces hidden behind masks, glinting the metallic green of a beetle’s wing or striped like yellow jackets, black and atomic gold. The couriers bore contracts, T-shirts, vacu-sealed bags of coffee. When these offerings were ignored, corporate flacks in ragged Xian garb would flag Trip in the street and offer to take him to lunch. And one afternoon Trip got a surprise visit from Peter Paul Joseph in his Stamford hotel suite.

“We don’t want to lose control of what we’ve got here,” Peter Paul said. He wore a plain white surgeon’s mask over his mouth and nose, something he seldom bothered with back in Branson. “Trip. Your—our—success. Bringing the Word to all these kids. We’re talking about a very special situation here, and we just have to be very careful about not losing control.” He dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief.

Sprawled in his chair facing Peter Paul, Trip didn’t laugh—he was too polite for that—but he did smile, tightly, a very controlled smile that didn’t show any teeth. “Sure,” he said in his soft voice, then lowered his head, one hand shading his eyes. “I understand.”