Prick of the Spindle: Fiction: Thornton: The Temple of Zuul

Celeste started to put everything together two hours before the opening, playing it safe. The video artists had done their part days before, lugged in the monitors, the laptops, the bowls of vibrating jello, the synthesizers, the pyramid baffles. They'd already duct taped their speakers to the walls, found the pitch-perfect resonances in the corners. Celeste just had to set out the artist statements, run off only that day on the new laser printer at her travel agency (representation vs. reaction: the visionaries in this exhibition choose to follow both paths), and she had to start the Black and Decker hot plate burning beneath the punch. She turned on all of the artwork, turned off all of the lights: alone within the white walls on the linoleum floor, the low analog mumble of the oscillator haunting the space like white noise in the field recordings of parapsychologists. The punch was boiling as it ought to be. She took her leather purse into the bathroom.

Her eyes were locked straight onto her own eyes as she dragged the mascara brush down her long lashes. She knew how to keep her reflection perfectly still, blank, like a painting on a wall.

The first guests filed up the stairs from the frozen Chinatown street fifteen minutes after the official opening time. Mostly it was people Celeste knew, her friends or those of the artists. She chatted amiably with them about the space, just opened; about the pieces, how wonderful; about the punch, how welcome on a sub-zero December night. More and more people filed in, until the space was a scrub forest of spiked-up hair against the sunset of the video screens, dark glasses on boys' foreheads and cat's-eye rims over curved brows, the leaflights of CRT panels dancing around knees and Cons.

They were standing by the punch bowl, punching buttons on exhibits, crowded, thighs pressed thrillingly against thighs, on the brown leather couch that sat before the largest exhibit: the Temple.

The Temple was a single laser, humming with occult power, tracing out right angles in neon fuschia against a white wall. As each rectilinear tracing formed, it began to drop down the wall like disks on a tower of Hanoi puzzle, its dimensions growing as they reached the wainscoting. New laser trails appeared at the top to replace the old ones, rippling, cascading down the wall. The finished piece looked like a melting Mayan temple in contours, burning away like the greasy smoke from sacrificial meat.

Cynthia w atched it burn; she had seen them on the streets, those kids—like her!—in the skinny jeans and the dumpling coats that broke into feathers and angora wisps at their collars, like the spumes of waves. She had floated in their wake up the stairs and into the gallery, followed them to the punch bowl and around the artwork, running her hands through her mouse's hair to keep them warm. The videos were showing test patterns, dancing abstractions, fades from blue to red to green, pulses of light tuned to chipset bleeps and warbles.

—It's really pretty, she said to the girl standing next to her. —It's like Tinkerbell, only from the future.

—That's cute, she said. —You can turn those knobs and change the patterns. Like this.

She leaned over and took hold of the dials on the front of the piece, then teased one a quarter-turn to the right, the other a half-turn left. The light scattering on the screen jerked to attention, arced, turned blue, and dissipated into a starburst. Cynthia clapped her hands.

—Is there a way you're supposed to do it? she asked. —I mean, to get the best effect?

Cynthia frowned and turned the dials a full turn left. It took her thirty seconds or so to get the hang of it, she thought, and she turned to see if the girl approved, but the girl had already gone to talk to some chump by the punch bowl. Cynthia continued to figure out the controls, working out what each knob must have done inside the secret components of the machine, her eyes trying to focus on the RGB patterns on the screen. She made arcs, loops, nearly a little picture of a person if you squinted. She'd always had a talent for this kind of thing, she decided—one of the many little folds of tissue wrapped around the special thing she kept wrapped up inside herself like a Christmas gift, its tag still blank. She brought the animation she was creating to a nice climax, the synthesizers screaming along with her, and let the arc she'd made settle into a pulsing horizon line, a quiet denouement, the final pulse of the orchestra after the soprano aria went silent. She stepped away, hushed at her own great talent. The normal drone resumed; the screen went dark. The voices of the kids around her came back into her ears, swirled around her, and the quiet buzz of a dozen armed video screens blazed other patterns or controlled chaos into the dark.

She went to refill her punch, hating everyone here, then joined the line for the bathroom. A man was kissing a woman on the leather couch and the neon fuschia light of the Temple, reflected off the wall, was tracing up their bodies like the lights of police cars through the Venetian blinds of a Malibu motel.

—The light from the laser temple thing is tracing up their legs, she said. —See it?

He had skinny shoulders underneath his khaki-fur coat, striped gloves on his fingers, a newborn beard on his upper lip and chin.

—I love this temple, she said. —It's so creepy. I keep expecting some priest to jump out of it and cut out my heart.

The boy laughed with his whole body, a controlled Marcel Marceau kind of spasm, clenching his mouth open and shut.

He sang the first notes of the Ghostbusters song. Cynthia smiled and pretended to laugh; why was she doing that. She looked at the place where the door to the Temple of Zuul would have been; the laser wasn't complex enough to trace out a door.

The toilet flushed and an anorexic man walked out, looking guilty. The line advanced by one. The boy turned again to Cynthia.

Cynthia smiled; he laughed in spasm. If she kept smiling maybe he would keep laughing, like Pavlov's dogs. She felt good about herself, like she had learned something about another person.

—It's weird, she said, —I mean how everyone our age has, like, five thousand songs stuck in their head, playing constantly, all the time—yet most of them are songs we totally hate.

—No, I know, said Cynthia quickly. —I meant, like, other songs are to be hated. I agree that that song is a good song.

Another toilet flushed and another door opened. The boy waved goodbye, his eyes black, ice, and he went in, leaving her alone with the temple of Zuul.

She watched it for a minute, heart alarmed and moving fast in the dark, and then there was a flush, the crack of an opening door.

The bathroom was tiny and the door was backed with a mirror. She peed and she watched herself sitting on the toilet, alarmed by her face, her short brown hair that stuck out at angles, her eyes too large, crazy-looking. She had never been able to look into a mirror disinterestedly in her life.

Someone had written in white paint across the silver surface: CONGRATULATIONS, YOU'VE SURVIVED ANOTHER DAY. She watched the words float in space, superimposed over her body, the skirt and tights around her knees.

The boy was in the corner behind the leather couch; he was talking to two other boys, twirling an unlit joint in his striped fingers. Cynthia tapped him on the shoulder; he turned.

He stared at her, and she realized that he had no idea who she was. He gave her a tight, go-away grin and turned his growing beard back to his friends.

She stood outside the group for a moment, then drifted away through the feathered collars of the crowd. The drone was pressing her eardrums now, making her dizzy. She found herself by the light switch for the space. She watched it for a long minute, then reached out and flipped it.

The plastic chandeliers on the water-stained ceiling tiles burned to fluorescent life; the Temple of Zuul vanished from the wall. There was a loud groan and jumble of alarm; kids were rubbing their eyes, reaching blindly for their punch, like they were waking up from some drugged nightmare. Even the chant of the synthesizers, in full light, seemed to go silent. You could see everyone's face in motion.

Cynthia, terrified, stepped away from the switch, but it was too late: Celeste was already walking over to her with long-stride steps, her blank eyes, her mascara eyelashes pointed like sticky daggers at Cynthia's heart.

—Why did you flip that switch? Celeste asked. —Why did you disrupt this art opening?

The kids were all silent, surrounding the bubble of confrontation. Cynthia bowed her head, then reached into the pocket of her coat, took out her wadded-up knit cap, pulled it snugly around her ears. She walked across the stained linoleum to the stairway door. Kids stepped aside to let her pass, forming a feathery gauntlet around her. She kept her face still and tried to look just between the faces surrounding her, not to let their clean eyes meet her red ones. And then, at the center of the floor, some great rafter cracked inside of her, and she stopped in place for a moment and spun, a tight, furious whirlwind on the toe of her boot, some echo of ballet training she'd had long ago, when one day she'd be a princess and the whole world was a dance performed in perfect measure, and all you had to do was grow up to take your place in it, and the faces all blurred and swirled around her like electric arcs.

Then, dizzy, she put her hand to her forehead, and she resumed her straight course across the gallery, cut a line to the stairs, down to the street, out into the anonymous Chinatown winter, where snowflakes burned her cheeks and she disappeared.

The lights in the Gallery were turned off again; the Temple of Zuul was rebuilt. The kids all chattered about the disruption for a while: the boy from the bathroom line said he'd talked to her—she was crazy; kind of cool also; he laughed and spasmed without making a sound—and then neatly fell again into the usual patterns and groups, like children awoken by lightning and then settling back into peaceful sleep. Celeste kept one mascara eye on the clock and another on the level of the crowd. It was difficult to fix the moment when the balance of the opening tipped and people started leaving, vanishing two by two, as if they'd wandered too close to the Temple and been swallowed whole.

At last there was only one video artist left; she smiled and told Celeste it was a wonderful night, kissed her once on each cheek, then put on her sunglasses and put her arm through her partner's arm and went out the door, and Celeste was alone again with work to do.

Her back aching, she turned on the plastic chandelier lights, then walked from exhibit to exhibit, unplugging chords, flipping switches. The electronic drone of the laser went silent. She swept the artist statements she'd printed into the trash, turned off the hot plate, and picked up the dregs of the punch bowl. She carried them into the bathroom and flushed everything down the toilet, one leg propping the mirrored door open. It would only take ten minutes for her to get the room as stainless and spotless as if no one had ever been in here at all.

She turned to take out the punch bowl and saw her reflection in the mirror, the white writing splayed across her thin, thin body. She squinted at it, suddenly furious and tired, and went to find a sponge to scour it away.

Jeanne Thornton lives and writes in Brooklyn. Her work has previously appeared (under a currently-inaccurate name) in the Evergreen Review, A Capella Zoo, Word Riot, Night Train, and other places; a complete listing to date of her work and projects can be found at http://fictioncircus.com/Jeanne. Her story "Satan In Love" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2010. She is an undying fan of the Beach Boys and is currently writing a novel about them.