and the crowd goes
Fiction by Phoenix Alexander
wild as, sweat-bright and triumphant, the singer finishes her number, and the band members behind her physically diminish with the music’s end: the drummer flings her sticks down, the guitarists sever the chords held, the keyboard player collapses over the backlit keys of the console and MORE! the crowd shouts, MORE: joy, vitality — life — and the singer, never believing she would be here, now, in this moment, not yet thirty and thinking people strive their whole lives and never get this yells into the mic WHAT’S THAT? YOU WANT MORE? and the crowd gives forth joyous energy like a sonic boom as they reply as one voice, or seemingly, because there are sixty thousand people filling this stadium and at a certain point, yes, humanity acts as an organism, any collected thing does, but also, yes, each life is singular, each mind is singular, and we alight in the headspace of a young woman, sixteen, dressed in inexpensive approximation of the popstar on stage, who thinks the pop star on stage is the apotheosis of womanhood (chunky, fit, irresistibly confident, able to do her eyeliner perfectly, with just the right amount of glitter spackled across both cheeks) — before we are jarred away from her by the sudden crash of a barrier breaking outside as a white van accelerates through the parking lot, death in the mind of the driver, and we leap away from that back to the stadium (it is a summer evening, the sky is a masterpiece) to another man in a copper coat who lets himself be swayed among people much younger than himself, guiltlessly enjoying the music, because he is gay, and because so much of his youth was spent hiding behind a marble façade of what he was told a man should be and now he is reclaiming lost time, and he thinks, yes, more, I want more, and so do we, so we fly over his head (riding the soundwaves of the crowd, the yowls of the guitars as they strike up again like a flying carpet, like wings beneath us) and arc over the whirling spotlights to the security staff outside, unseen by those having the time of their lives, as they scramble to intersect the van and its fatal trajectory, and we whirl away from that, praying to whatever God we believe in, or praying to nothing at all, flying back to the locus of joy in the singer on stage as she sings her fucking heart out, as the musicians play until all sense of self is dissolved, not in the violent way of an explosion but of a collective transcendence, a recognition of the smallness of the individual and the beauty of that, the artistry of the still-living: the keening of a whistle note, harmonizing with the shrill protest of shredded tires against asphalt as stingers deploy at the last moment, and the man inside, and his home-made bombs, never detonating, never killing anyone, never puncturing the rampant life in that stadium with life’s opposite — the ending of all music — and our time here is nearing its end but, fleet, we dip into this mind and that: the grandmother seeing her own youth reflected in the delight of her grandchildren (she has saved up her weekly pensioner’s allowance to bring them here) thinking how precious it is to be witness to generations — over to the husband who got himself into debt to bring his family here, and the nag of that tugging like a fish-hook at his participation in this collective elation, but still he is buoyed, irresistibly, and for just a moment he forgets all of that — and we go into the sky, over their heads, back into the swaying dancing singing screaming crowd (unseeing the blue and red lights of emergency vehicles outside, the man’s explosive vest failing to trigger as he is dragged out of the white van, cuffed, thwarted), because our business is life, and we don’t want this to end — we never want this to end — and we make home in those sixty thousand bodies , that band, that singer, that music, those words, these words, and as the song reaches its crescendo we too shout MORE, phantom-voiced with the assembled, this particularity, hoping for this outcome again, these puzzle-pieces of minds and events, this feeling, forever, hoping that everything falls into place again just like this — leaping up, back to the beginning of these pages, to the beginning of this tale — yes! scroll up, back to the beginning, page one, sentence one, word one, as the final note hits,
Phoenix Alexander is a queer, Greek-Cypriot author and curator based at the University of California, Riverside. His work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The Deadlands, Metaphorosis, and others. Find him online at www.phoenixalexanderauthor.com and on Twitter @ dracopoullos. He is represented by Angeline Rodriguez at WME Books.
