Sometime
later, I was dislodged and my Spider-man suit hastily pulled back on, before
being handed over to Raf at the bar, so that Jen could use the restroom.
The musicos
on stage were dismantling gear to make way for the next act, while some stage
hands were setting up some panels around the DJ booth on the stage.
The floor was
already starting to whistle and cheer, and stamp their feet even before the
next group was introduced. Evidently it was a popular act.
The noise
increased as a guy in headphones came in behind the DJ booth, now barricaded by
the glass panels. The edges lit up with neon lights, making it look like he was
inside a big glowing rectangular prism.
A
microphone rang out with the MC’s announcement:
“NOW MAKE
SOME NOISE FOR DJ RAITARO AND ANYA ZARSKY!”
The floor
did not need to be told. The music started and the room exploded as a young
woman carrying a microphone came out on the aluminium gangplank suspended over
the stage and stepped down onto the glass prism with a sharp clunk. She was wearing
a ‘child-friendly’ bondage outfit, devil horns, and led-lit glass platform
heels, and though her face was partially hidden under her black mask, the
bleached hair falling down her back from beneath the headpiece gave her away.
While she
tested the microphone by thanking the city, I jumped up and scrambled across
the bar, trying to avoid slipping on alcohol moisture.
“Raf! –
Hey!”
He leaned his
elbow across the bar counter towards me, but barely took his eyes off the
stage.
“Is that
Anya?” I yelled up at him, “–your Anya?”
“THAT’S HER.” He gave a tiny nod, his
eyes reflecting the stage lighting. “SHE’S
A VISION, YEAH?”
“Yeah, a
vision that every man in this joint has his eyes on.”
He didn’t
reply; not seeming to have heard me over the pounding noise, or maybe thinking what
I’d said was so obvious it didn’t call for a response.
“You said
she worked here,” I called up at the top of my voice.
He gave a
self-evident shrug.
“SHE’S
WORKING.”
“She’s
gigging, it’s a little different.”
“SAME
THING.”
“No, I
mean, she’s famous. Like, seriously. She’s a big hit. I thought she was a
bartender or something.”
“SHE USED
TO BE A WAITRESS,” he offered. “I THINK?”
“Maybe a
million years ago. Let me take another look.”
His giant hand
circled my chest and lifted me up over the sea of dark bobbing heads where the
stage materialized, and the strikingly leggy singer making her way with
model-like catwalk pose through flashes of lighting and plumes of theatrical
smoke, singing the first few lines to the house music being mixed by the DJ.
"WHO
ARE THEY?"
Raf was
looking at a small group couple of dancers; Jennifer had returned from the
restroom and was dancing with them.
"No
idea."
"FRIENDS
OF HERS?"
"Nope."
"YOU
WANT ME TO CALL HER OVER?"
I shook my
head, grateful for the rest.
"She's
having fun.”
The
DJ/singer act spun through several songs. Raf was keen to buy me a drink, and
helped me partake from a tiny plastic shot cup. But when I went to order
another, he refused. His fingers closed around my head and rubbed thoroughly.
His agitation expressed itself through his finger strength, and my skull ached.
“NEED TO FOCUS,”
he explained. “STAY LUCID.”
“Ow. This
is just a mask, not a crash helmet.”
“GET HER
ATTENTION.”
“Who?” I
said. “Jen? No, really, it doesn’t bother me.”
He shook
his head, and then stretched up tall to peer over the heads of the crowd, looking
out towards the stage.
“YOU GOT US
IN HERE EARLY, REMEMBER? DO YOUR MAGIC AGAIN. GET US INTO HER.”
“Anya? You’re
joking, right?”
He leaned
his head over, trying to hear me better over the mosh din and music. Every time
I tried to speak up my voice was drowned out by the microphone-amplified vibrato
beaming from the stage. The pop star’s clear voice had everyone under its
spell, like a Homeric siren. But honestly, it was nice to have a famous person
here, to take the heat off me.
“GIRLS LOVE
YOU, MAN!” he grinned.
“You don’t
expect me to just go up and talk to her?”
In my
mind’s eye I saw myself crowd surfing, being passed hand over hand and
deposited onto the stage, and getting quickly lost in the curling stage fog,
before ending up inadvertently stamped flat to the underside of one of the
fearsome metallic chrome platform stiletto heels outfitting the ends of the
singer’s killer legs.
“NO – YOU
GO UP AND OVER!” he said, pointing
his free hand up at the alloy trusses running along the ceiling in a grid. They
formed two intersecting squares; one square boxing the mosh, connected to
another square boxing the stage.
In his
cubic booth, the DJ tipped his head back to drink from a water bottle. Across
the floor, over the heads of the bobbing crowd, I saw Jennifer had stopped
dancing. She ran a hand through her well-mussed red mane of hair and appeared
to be looking around, and sucking her lips as if thirsty or…trying to conjure
up saliva, anyway…
“Throw me!”
I roared.
He flung
his hand up and I was speeding high above everyone’s’ heads, towards the
ceiling. I threw out my hands to grab the lower metal bar of a truss, swung
myself up, and then bear hugged an intersecting bar and pulled myself up to the
upper bar. The spandex was too slippery on the metal, so I ripped my gloves and
boots off, and my bare hands and feet gave me better traction. The music quaked
through the bar, through my hands and body as I gripped it.
Astride the
upper bar, I gazed down to see Raf give me an excited thumbs up, right before
Jen pounced on him. Wrenching my eyes away, I began to move along the bar
towards the stage. It was wide enough to run along, my smaller mass gave me
better balance, because of less gravitational pull.
The lights
flared and rotated below me. I focused on the end of the metal beam and crossed
the first truss box, and bear hugged the bars intersecting with the second box,
which surrounded the stage.
Below, Anya
floated through the fog to the very edge of the stage and wailed the last Banshee
note of the song at the top of her lungs.
The truss
ran into a brick wall along the side of the stage, behind a curtain, where some
cabling extended down; my ticket to getting back down to ground level.
The crowd
erupted in cheers and applause as the song ended, and with the set over, the
curtains were pulled over the stage, cutting it (and me) off from the mosh.
Directly below, stage hands moved a ramp to the glass sphere, one of these took
Anya’s hand, guiding her down onto the stage. She unclipped a microphone and
handed it to the stage hand. From there, she moved briskly towards the back end
of the stage, down another ramp, and around a corner.
Racing
along to the end of the alloy truss, I met the brick wall and slid down the
cabling until my feet touched the stage floor. Fuzzy shadows of mist churned
around me as I sprinted along the backstage wall.
“Anya!” I
yelled. “Anya, wait!”
No one
heard me. The backstage hall echoed with carry-over noise from the dancefloor,
the stormy sea of chatter.
I barrelled
down the ramp onto a cracked stony floor. Doors and big black equipment boxes
lined the black brick wall. It was very dim, smoky, and dungeon-like except for
a puddle of red light below an exit sign. I was tiny, and Anya, gargantuan –
her heels alone dwarfed me – but I was running full speed, and she was walking.
And the lack of gravitational pull on my tiny mass allowed me to be
surprisingly fast.
Ahead, the
singer’s giant glassy stilettos were swinging along, hitting the stone floor
with deafening metronymic snaps on the stony floor.
“Anya!” I
screamed, “Stop!”
The
unearthly resonance in the dark hallway gave my tiny voice just enough crackle.
The giant glass heels froze, as the singer seemed to consider whether she’d
been hearing things. Then the heels swished around with two great claps, to
face me head on. She was frozen for a nanosecond, as if to make sense of the
seeming empty curtain of air in front of her. Then her eyes must have plummeted
and made sense of me. One of the heels unconsciously snapped back.
“HEY…!” she
gasped. “OH MY GOSH, A TINY LITTLE SPIDER-MAN. ARE YOU REAL? I THOUGHT I WAS
SEEING THINGS! WHERE DID YOU COME FROM?”
The glassy
stilettos came clomping up to me, acquiring a red glow under the light.
“Well,” I
panted, too tired for formal introductions, “there’s a bunch of metal girders
on the ceiling. I just walked along them. It beats lining up.”
“UH…” she
seemed lost for words for a second, “…THAT’S REALLY DANGEROUS.” She peered up
at the ceiling gauging the distance from the floor, and then letting her eyes
follow the rigging out over the dance floor.
“My friend
threw me up there.”
“YOUR
FRIEND WHAT?” then she frowned, “OKAY – MY POINT EXACTLY.”
“I’m a
stunt person,” I said quickly, wanting to leave her with the impression I was
not unthinkably stupid or insane, “It’s what I do.”
“THAT’S
RIGHT…” she said, as her immense height seemed to dive down over me in a
graceful kneel, “YOU MUST BE JERRY MOUSSEAU. I DIDN’T REALIZE YOU ACTUALLY WENT
AROUND DOING THIS KIND OF THING. I THOUGHT IT WAS ALL KINDS OF CAMERA AND
EDITING.”
“No, I
really am this big in real life.”
She smiled.
“YOU ARE SO TINY, LOOK AT YOU, IT’S CRAZY,” she tentatively brushed a finger
to my chest as if expecting I’d evaporate in a puff of smoke. “AREN’T YOU
AFRAID OF GETTING SQUASHED IN A BIG PLACE LIKE THIS?”
“It’s okay.
I’m a pro at not dying. Like a tiny ninja.”
“YEAH, THAT
OR YOU SERIOUSLY DON’T GIVE A DAMN.”
She seemed
to have meant this as a compliment but it was hard to tell.
I shuffled back,
trying to take in her from a more natural angle, but there was nothing natural
about my perspective. Staring straight up at her from the grimy cracked floor
gave me the POV of an actual spider about to be trampled flat by one of the
massive heels, whose glassy platforms were big enough to function as windows.
Plus, the deep shadow she was casting on me in this dim hallway made it seem
like she was about to fall on me.
“I wanted
to meet you. Uh…for a friend…”
This
surprised her. She held my gaze a moment and then smiled.
“YOU WANTED TO MEET ME? THAT’S WHY YOU CLIMBED THE CEILING? I’M DUMBFOUNDED. I REALLY
DON’T KNOW WHAT TO SAY. WHAT IF…WHAT IF YOU SAY YOU MET ME, I CAN SAY I MET YOU?”
“But
there’s someone else who wanted to meet you as well.”
“I’M SO
SORRY, JERRY, BUT I HAVE TO GO SOON. UGH, SO FRUSTRATING YOU CAUGHT ME NOW, I
WISH WE HAD MORE TIME, I REALLY DO. I’M A FAN OF YOURS. I THINK YOU’RE AMAZING,
ACTUALLY.”
I put up my
hands, not in modesty, but imploring her to stop.
“But if you
were to please wait just one minute,
I actually have to talk to you – my friend – ”
She held
out her hand towards me, lime green polished nail plates hovering just under my
nose.
“WOULD YOU
LET ME…?”
Assuming
she wanted to shake hands, I held my palm out for her.
“Uh, sure.”
Her fingers
moved smoothly forwards, ignoring my hand and sliding around my chest, grasping
tight as I lifted up off the ground, catapulting up her body and stopping at
her neck level. Her upper chest wall swelled and fell with the exertion of her
recent performance, making the leather of her bondage Lite costume
squeak faintly.
“IT’S NOT
VERY SAFE FOR YOU DOWN THERE,” she explained. “YOU’RE SO TINY IT’S SCARY. DO
YOU MIND IF I HOLD YOU?”
The ground seemed
a very long way down now, and from my new vantage point, even darker and
grimier.
“No, I, uh,
appreciate it.”
“SO, THIS
FRIEND,” she said. “DOES HE, UH, EXIST…?
DID HE DARE YOU TO COME BACK HERE, OR IS THIS THE OLD STANDBY WHEN YOU RUN INTO
THE GIRL OF YOUR FANTASIES. YOU CAN TELL ME.”
Her soft
smile had extra meaning.
I let out a
laugh.
“He not
only exists, but if you’ve got a phone I’ll make him materialize on the spot.”
She
wandered down the backstage hallway, flagging down the attention of a crew
member; a guy wearing a black t-shirt, one of the stage hands. He held his
phone under my face while I slung Raf a text. My heart hammering with the rush
of a mission completed, I sent:
face it tiger…you just hit the jackpot!
backstage left <-<-<-
Meanwhile, Anya
was saying to the stage hand:
“CAN YOU
TAKE A SHOT OF US – THIS IS SPIDER-MAN AND I’M HIS BIGGEST FAN, GWEN STACY.”
She gave me a quick wink, and then put me on her shoulder as we posed for the
shot, her head turned and lips puffed up flirtatiously in my direction and me
doing a web-slinging gesture. The stagehand offered to send the photo to me,
and I was about to give him my email address, but then at the last second
pulled up a recent text conversation with Jennifer, inserted the photo and sent
it to her.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the curtain…
My gofer
stumbled into view, looking completely lost even though he knew exactly where
he was. The look of non-comprehension on his face intensified as he spotted me
riding Anya’s shoulder.
She
addressed him, waving him over. He shuffled up to us like she was pulling him
on an invisible lead, weirdly being drawn to her as if his legs were being
commanded against the judgment of his brain. But she quickly drew him out,
charmed and fascinated that he chaperoned me, peppering him with questions that
he stuttered his way through. As they chatted, my phone presented a reply that was weirdly not in Jen's usual tone:
That is Anya Zarsky.
I will tell you about her another time...
Tvb xx
I stared at
the text for one long, uncomprehending moment.
“HEY, SPIDER-MAN;
SMILE!”
The
stagehand snapped another picture of us, now with Raf. Then Anya leaned down
and in one fluid move, pinched my mask off and kissed my cheek, and, handing
the mask to Raf, she kissed his cheek, and spun away from us, disappearing with
her crew down the backstage hall, waving and blowing a kiss over her shoulder.