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:
“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.
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.