Make Something Up (17 page)

Whiplash gave the photo another look. A longer look. “Forward me the picture,” he grumbled. “I'm familiar with the weapon in question.” He plucked a spliff from behind his ear and a cigarette lighter from deep in his loincloth. Putting flame to what smelled like Californian Skunk and good tobacco, he drew a chestful of smoke. Exhaling it, he said, “If the transgressor is one of ours, we'll settle the score.”

He offered Rainbow a toke, and Rainbow accepted it. They parted company at the Furbie tent. A whole tribe slouching around in full-body animal costumes and plush masks. How anyone could wear fake fur in this heat, it was impossible to comprehend.

As he strolled, his phone rang. “Ludlow, I know I'm being a drag.” His wife, again. She hadn't always been a drag. They'd met at the festival. In the days when she'd been a fire-walking, pill-popping, body-painted freak. She'd been beautiful, back then. Fearless. Now she shaved her armpits. Over the phone, she said, “Luddy, you've got two kids. You can't spend your whole vacation away from your family.”

As before, Rainbow Bright let her say her piece. He didn't respond. He didn't defend himself. The clarity of the signal impressed him. He could even make out the grinding of her teeth.

“Part of me says I should leave,” she baited him. “Should I leave you? Take the kids, change the locks, and move out?” Her voice clenched like a fist, she waited. “Is that what you want?”

He listened. Letting her blow off steam. His mood ring was going dark, darker, again, almost obsidian.

“Ludlow, are you there?”

He was there but didn't say so.

“Fine,” she said. And hung up.

He doubled back to the Media Pavilion. The redhead was between interviews. She was drinking a diet cola when her hazel eyes caught sight of him. Sizing up her come-hither expression, Rainbow Bright was glad he'd worn his clean loincloth. He worried that his wife and kids might see the broadcast, but he prayed that his business associates would. The cameraman seated him under the striped umbrella, and the redhead checked herself with a mirror. After some fumbling, they finally clipped a tiny microphone to his beard.

“I tried to phone you.” She offered him a freckled hand. “I'm Skipper.” Turning to the camera, she asked, “You ready?” A man wearing a baseball cap and a headset gave her a double thumbs-up.

Rainbow Bright understood the camp's official stance on media. It was here to exploit and turn the festival into a commodity which could be leveraged to sell other commodities: beer, condoms, anything young partygoers sought. Nonetheless, the media gave the burners a means to share their message and vision with the world. The trick was to not get snared with a gotcha question. He answered, yes, his name was Rainbow Bright. No, he was not the head of security for the tent city. His job was to facilitate communication between tribes. She asked the standard line of questions about fights. About drugs. About sexual assaults.

Out of left field, the presenter, Skipper, asked, “What's a Code Spearmint?”

Rainbow wasn't sure he'd heard correctly. “A code…?”

She nodded. “A sad clown told me to ask.”

Rainbow shrugged. “We don't have that term.”

“It signifies a serial killer, does it not?” The redhead didn't miss a beat. She pointed a finger toward the crowd that stood watching them. “That's the clown, if I'm not mistaken.”

He followed to where her eyes focused in the audience, and there was a frowning clown. It looked familiar, but only because all clowns looked similar. Something about its eyes or the posture of its body.

Rainbow Bright flinched. “This isn't like the outside world.” He flashed her an aw-shucks grin. “We don't have anything remotely like that, here.”

“You're saying that even with the drugs and young people and extreme
conditions”—her
eyes were laughing, daring him to tell the truth—“you've never had a killing?”

He pretended to think. Cocking his head. Furrowing his brow. A pitcher's long windup before throwing a fastball. “No,” he said. “Never have.”

His phone chimed to signal a new text message. Live on camera. He'd been told to turn it off but was glad he hadn't. With Skipper glaring, he checked the text. It was from Strawberry Shortcake, she was reporting on shouts and the sounds of a violent scuffle at the Angry Ninja Camp. Despite the cameras, he started to text her back.

To provoke a response, Skipper asked, “Is that your Code Spearmint?”

Rainbow used the message as his excuse to bail. He looked straight into the camera—another action they'd specifically forbade him to do—and he said, “Time to go fight the bad guys.”

By the time he left the makeshift stage the clown in question was gone. Absorbed into the milling masses of ballerinas and leather-clad bikers and drag queens.

Off camera, he called Strawberry. She'd found nil. Nothing to report. The Vampire tribe and some members of the Superhero tribe had heard a man screaming. Yelling for help. Before anyone could investigate, everything seemed to have returned to normal. As normal as it got for these parts. Rainbow Bright thought of Snidely Whiplash and wondered if some righteous ninja justice had been dished out.

At this point, each of Sandra Bernhard's legs was as tall as a telephone pole. Fully assembled, she'd tower as high as an old-growth redwood. The schedule called for her to be burned in two days' time. She'd hardly be finished before she'd be put to the torch. Rainbow Bright stood and watched as they hung the arms on her headless torso. The afternoon shadows stretched longer. By dusk, the shadows of everything went for miles, striping the vast flatness. Strings of Christmas lights were blinking on, and soon the great shadow of night snuffed out all the smaller ones. The clear desert air began to stink of diesel smoke from the generators. Somewhere, some idiot played the bagpipes.

On his phone, a text bulletin came through from the National Weather Service. High winds were predicted for midnight, and that meant another blinding dust storm. He hoped it would hold off. The gigantic papier-mâché penis was scheduled to burn at nine. A big crowd was expected. The evening consisted of the usual verbal altercations concerning love or drugs. A couple of cases of heat prostration. Tribes paid their respects as he ambled past their camps. Girls tossed candy necklaces over his head. People offered beer and chai. These were his people. Failed artists. Rejected musicians and writers. Part-time idealists and closet visionaries.

As a young man, he'd been an idealist in a corrupt world. It was no surprise that he'd turned out equally as corrupt, just a new and different form of corrupt. That might be the best any generation could achieve: to pioneer its own brand of corruption.

He'd attended art school, it was bunk. A stinking, lousy racket. They'd cashed his checks and told him he had Rembrandt potential. His advisors and professors, they'd painted a picture of his future prettier than any masterpiece they'd ever painted in real life. What a put-on. They'd told him he had talent. That word was heroin to the young.
Talent.
Four years, five years, six, and he'd kept buying the fix. His dream had been to do computer animation in movies, maybe video games. He'd spend his career bringing CG heroes and angels to life. Making the impossible possible.

Student debt and a string of service
jobs—interrupted
each year for this, where he'd met his wife, a woman who could stick to a boring pigeonhole—and finally he'd found his calling. A proctologist, of all people, had recruited him. Funny, but he used to trust doctors. Now he knew doctors were just like every other working stiff.

Rainbow Bright had suffered through his first sigmoidoscopy. Still high on the Demerol, he'd watched the video with his doctor. A guided tour of his healthy large intestine. They hadn't set out to hatch a con. Just two smart guys acting smarter. Rainbow Bright had asked for a copy of the video. It was digital. Everything was, anymore. And he'd taken it home and stayed high and uploaded the colon footage to his digital animator. He'd Photoshopped JPEGs of the gnarliest precancerous polyps to be found on the web. These he merged with images of Jesus Christ. It was the most creative work he'd done since his boy-genius days in art school. Lastly, he'd planted the polyp faces on his colon wall and downloaded the video back to his sawbones. Shocked the butt doc, he did. They both got a good laugh, but then the good doctor took the prank seriously.

They only worked it on people who could afford to pay, people with lavish insurance coverage. It was a scam, of course. When a sigmoidoscopy revealed no abnormalities, Rainbow worked his art school magic. One gander at the horrors Rainbow so meticulously detailed inside them and people begged to go under the knife. No cutting actually took place. Maybe some drugging and poking around, but nothing traumatic. The patients went home, stoned, energized with new life because they'd cheated death. Rainbow Bright and his doctor split the fee. Money rolled in.

As of late, he'd taken a couple of commissions from an oncologist, doctoring chest X-rays. Tumors mostly, some tuberculosis. Not that he needed the money. He just wanted to explore a new avenue for his artistic expression. It was a con, a dirty con and a scam, but no more so than art school had been. Besides, it proved one thing: Marcel Duchamp was right. Nobody could hoodwink the French. Context was everything. You could depict something lovely, a lovely sun setting over a lush rose garden, and no art lover would fork over a red cent. But if you executed a masterpiece, something misshapen and discolored, and you stuck it up some rich somebody's ass, they'd pay a king's ransom to have it gone.

By nightfall, the mammoth penis loomed over them. So tall it disappeared into the gloaming. It was of course uncircumcised.

As a crowd of thousands watched, a nude Sex Witch stood off at a distance and pulled back the string on a bow. With perfect aim, she shot a flaming arrow which traced a bright arch across several thousand retinas before lancing the glans. Every man present winced. The flames roamed in every direction, like some blazing herpes flare-up. Following that, firecrackers popped. The brand that whistle, Piccolo Petes, were beginning to shriek. Other fireworks exploded, rocketing sparks into the night sky.

To his imagination…it had to be his imagination, but the Piccolo Petes sounded almost human. By then it was too late to listen. Everyone was shouting and wailing, dancing in circles around the fiery spectacle.

The screaming inside the penis prompted the crowd to scream. In the din, Rainbow Bright noticed Snidely Whiplash sidle up beside him.

His eyes on the fire, Whiplash said, “Dude picked a fight at Mud Camp. Said his stars and knives went AWOL.”

The night air smelled like barbecue, but no more than it always did. Grilled meat and diesel smoke and gunpowder.

Snidely sounded self-righteous. “We took a vote. Dude lost.” He continued to stare at the burning phallus. “Don't worry,” he added, his focus never leaving a certain high-up spot on the pyre. “We gave him enough Rohypnol to knock out a horse. Dude won't feel a thing.”

For a moment, to Rainbow Bright, the festival no longer looked like the future. It looked like demons smeared with blood and feces, dancing around a tower of flames, accompanied by the music of tortured screams. It was the weed, he told himself, it was the weed, until his vision went back to what he wanted to see. Until foremost among his worries was the question of where he'd be able to acquire two pounds of fresh ground beef.

The penis spent itself into the night sky. Slumped to one side. Collapsed sideways in slow motion. And the fire burned down to a hill of coals the Mystic tribe wasted no time in walking all over. As predicted, the winds were picking up. People started heading for shelter. It was going to be another pea soup dust storm.

Even the biggest raves, the Neverland Camp, and the Applied Science of Kinetic Ritual Laboratory, they pulled the plug on account of hurricane-force gusts and blowing dirt. The air grew so thick Rainbow Bright couldn't see from his tent, down the path as far as the Sex Witch Camp. He couldn't make out the lights of the Chow Tent. The moon and stars were blotted out.

From the comfort of his sleeping bag, he dialed a number he knew by heart. “Thumbelina?” It was her festival name. In the outside world, she stuck to her birth name. Sloane. Mrs. Sloane Roberts. He asked, “Are you okay?”

She asked, “Are you okay?”

Exhausted, he replied, “We had an incident, but it's resolved.”

“Ludlow?”

He hesitated. “Not to worry.”

He heard her waiting. He listened to her deciding something. He could hear the roar of the sandstorm building outside the tent. Scouring the desert clean. Erasing from his memory the screams of a killer burned alive. Where his next words came from, he wasn't certain. When neither of them had spoken he waited for the silence to deepen. He waited longer. At last, he spoke. “A dog got into our school, this one time. I was in fourth grade. It ran around and licked everything. I was eight years old, and that dog made me aware of everything I was giving up forever.” That's all that came to mind. He'd had his say.

Sloane or Thumbelina, she seemed to understand. His wife countered, “It made the children laugh and play, to see a lamb at school.”

She understood. To stay at home was to doom his children to a future of the same. This was the cradle of a better civilization. She had to see that. This wasn't a midlife crisis or a stopgap measure, but an original option. Seekers had always trekked into the desert in pursuit of a big answer.

“I was thinking,” he said hopefully, “maybe next year we'd all attend the festival as a family.” He was drifting toward sleep.

Her voice stiff, soft but not-unsympathetic, his wife said, “There won't be a festival next year.”

Rainbow Bright marveled at how close and clear she sounded despite the wind.