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.