Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [64]
“Yann and I are going to go dancing,” Marta said to Frank. “Do you want to come along?”
“Too busy,” Frank said promptly, and grinned as she cried out and punched him on the arm.
“Oh come on, you’re out here visiting! You don’t have any work at all.”
“Okay,” he said. Dancing, after all, was on his paleolithic list of Things To Do. “What is it, some kind of rave again? Do I have to blast my mind with ecstasy to get with the beat?”
“Rave. That isn’t even a word anymore. It’s just a band at the Belly-Up.”
“A rave band,” Yann confirmed.
Frank nodded. “Of course.” That was Marta’s thing.
“Come on,” Marta said. “It only means you’ll know how to do it. No swing or tango. Just bop up and down and groove. You could use it, if you’re so busy out there.”
“Okay,” he said.
Leo had already driven off. He was outside Marta’s sphere of influence.
So he followed Yann and Marta up the Coast Highway to Solana Beach, and turned inland to the Belly-Up, a big old Quonset hut by the train tracks that had hosted concerts and dances and raves for many years now.
This night’s bill appeared to Frank to be catering to the gay and lesbian crowd, or maybe that was just what the Belly-Up audience always looked like these days. Although the band was a mostly butch all-girl acid reggae kind of thing, with perhaps a score of people on the little stage, and a few hundred bopping on the dance floor. So he could join Yann and Marta both on the dance floor, and start dancing (that curious moment when the rules of movement changed, when one began to dance) and then it was bop rave bop rave bop, in the heavy beat and the flashing lights, easy to lose one’s mind in, which was always good, dionysiac release into shamanic transcendence, except when it involved losing his sense of all that had gone on between him and Marta (Yann was somewhere nearby) and also his sense of just how dangerous it would be to regard her only as a sexy woman dancing with him, seemingly oblivious to him but always right there and deep in the rhythm, and occasionally giving him a light bang with hip or shoulder. (In the old days these bumps would have come from pubic bone as well.) He had always loved the way she moved. But they had a history together, he struggled to remember. A really bad history. And he was already overcommitted and overentangled in this realm, it would be crazy and worse to have anything more to do with Marta in that way. He had gotten her back to San Diego as a way to make up for taking their money out of their house without telling her, and that was that—they were even! No more entanglements needed or wanted!
Although he did want her. Damn those softball players anyway.
“Here eat this,” she shouted in his ear, and showed him a pill between her forefinger and thumb. Ecstasy, no doubt, as in the old days.
“No!”
“Yes!”
The paleolithics had gotten stupendously stoned, he recalled, in the midst of their dionysiac raves. Some of their petroglyphs made this perfectly clear, depicting people flying out of their own heads as birds and rockets. He remembered the feeling of peace and well-being this particular drug used to give him when he danced on it; and let her shove the pill in between his teeth. Nipped her fingers as she did. Leap before you look.
He danced with his back to her, and felt her butt bumping his as he looked at the other dancers. Quite a radical scene for good old San Diego, which Frank still thought of as a sun-and-sports monoculture, a vanilla Beach Boys throwback of a place, hopelessly out of it in cultural terms. Maybe one had to stay out in the water all the time for that to be true anymore. Although in fact the surf culture was also crazed. Certainly it was true that in the Belly-Up of the beast, in the cacophonous sweaty strobed space of the rave, there were plenty of alternative lifestyles being enacted right before his very eyes. Most provocatively in fact. Some very serious kissing and other acts, dance as simulated standing sex, heck actual standing sex if you were at all loose with the