The band almost always stayed in Christian-run hotels or hostels. Mustard Seed wanted to ensure that their artists were not exposed to the wrong kind of people. Even more insidious was the wrong kind of video programming: since the glimmering began, television had become a sort of deranged pachinko game.
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.
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:
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.