Babylon Revisited Revisited
And the Babylon was as strange a disco as ever there was. For Communist-ruled Dubrovnik, it was light-years ahead.
Downstairs the party raged on. Eddie and Pamela’s heads were close because the music was so loud they couldn’t hear each other without shouting.
“Where’s Molly? She should be back by now. Did you tell her about the police?”
“Not yet. There wasn’t time.”'
“Not enough time? Eddie, how long have you been here?”
“About half an hour, but it’s frantic and only saw Molly just now. She’ll be back.”
“You saw her but you didn’t say anything…” Pamela trailed off, set her lips, shook her head.
“Eddie, I follow you to the ends of the earth and this is how it turns out. You’ve got to get serious about this. You have no idea the trouble we’re in. You can’t just ignore it. It’s time for you to step up to the plate.”
Eddie couldn’t see past the present, and said nothing in return.
“Eddie, I don’t like what you’ve become.”
“Something’s up,” Eddie admitted, “Or something’s about to come down. See how everyone’s acting?”
“Forget the money, Eddie. Let’s just get out.”
“Just look at them!”
Pam scanned the room. Everyone was moving or talking or dancing. More than just gay, they were frenzied. The dancing, at one time a purely social pursuit, had taken on a more tribal quality. It was as if the dancers, by their attitudes and body language, had blocked the uninitiated out, or restricted them to the bars and tables. To keep the laymen on their side of the barrier, a couple of girls barked like a dog. A waiter crashed a plate of food on the floor, while a fat woman bellowed her love to a man at the bar getting drunk. A couple of girls started cackling with laughter. A drunk gay young blade with red hair stood up on a chair and started to crow. With all the variety of sound and movement, the crowd was more like a farmyard of nervous animals before an earthquake, rather than dancers going crazy on a wooden floor.
The skinny blond autograph signer ran off to the women’s room clutching her purse.
Pamela started to feel the energy herself. She didn’t like how it felt. The crowd was under a spell and she felt immune, but it was as if the Babylon was a microbe attacking her system, making itself noticed all the same.
“I feel uncomfortable,” she shouted, “I’m going to the little girls’ room. Grab Molly when she comes back, and whatever you do, don’t let go.”
Outside was no better than inside, in fact it was worse. The wind drove the rain with so much ferocity that grown men could not cross the square without being blown away. Trees were uprooted and lay overturned on sidewalks and streets. Lightning crashed in the heavens and visited the earth, setting fire to the bushes and untended grass inside the city walls. Perched high above the rooftops, the only recognizable things were lofty church spires and the cross of Old Darko, glistening against the night, highest of them all.
Inside Eddie was mesmerized by patterns on the surface of his water glass. As the beat reverberated, it struck the glass, forcing concentric circles to converge on the center. Then there was a snap and a crack, and the pattern increased tenfold. Eddie placed his hand flat on the table. It was shaking. The mirrored ball above started to sway, the spotlight that fed it sparked, fell, and hung lose by one wire. Extreme shaking forced the needle on the turntable to skip off the record, compelling the tone arm to scrape mercilessly on the vinyl. The crowd grew silent and listened.
Then the violent rumbling began in earnest.
Old rotten bricks lost their grip on each other and turned to dust. The floor started to roll like a deck of a boat in a storm. A young woman screamed when the walls collapsed. Clouds of dust flew from the shaking rafters and dozens, then hundreds of bricks and splinters and beams fell down smashing the dancers and patrons. Unable to catch their breath, they coughed their innards out in uncontrollable spasms. White powder covered their limbs and faces, giving them a pale and deathly look as they walked like zombies through the wreckage, stunned and disoriented.
Eddie nearly passed out under a collection of bricks the size of Manhattan in a crumpled heap. But the pain kept him alert. His forehead was torn and bleeding. He recollected a noise like a train wreck and being under a rain of bricks, plaster dusting his face, choking, and feeling he'd been pounded by Jack Johnson into fresh white meat chicken salad.
The rending vibrations stopped.
Next came sirens and the high-low whining of ambulances, shouting firemen's voices and scores of police.
The voices grew faint as Eddie struggled to get up on one elbow. All he could see were clouds of smoke and dust, great smoking beams hanging down from the ceiling split in two like matchsticks, and piles of rubble and bricks. Nothing was left of old Darko Drazan’s tower except an enormous pile of smoking bricks with broken beams poking up at different angles. It looked like black and white newsreels of Berlin after allied bombings, a suffocating world of dust and cinders.
Then it occurred to Eddie that he was seeing in black and white, and to further obscure his vision, a warm trickle of blood, like Salome’s seventh crimson veil, gradually descended over his eyes, transforming his acute vision to an inky darkness, just before he lost... his...... head.
©StevenHunley2018
https://youtu.be/XivVggd4utk Steely Dan Babylon Sisters Live
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