Flycatcher

I breathe, I take aim.

He freezes in my viewfinder, silver shadow fur and bleach, caught in the act of turning away with his face still twisted towards me. An eye-shadow bruise leaks down from his eye.

This in the breath before hell patches through: the bass thrums, a dark object flies through the frame in slow motion. He cannot see it, doesn´t know until the bottle makes contact with the mic stand and splinters on his chest. My finger falls. The shutter clicks.

I put the cap back on my camera, screwing down the lid on the firefly that glows when I shake it around the jar.

Some moments of chaos, when things and people collide with the bloody brilliance of a fresh bruise, are not chaos at all, but the underlying love of it all in disguise, breaking through the skin.

He looks down at his chest, the cuts bleed and the pain registers on his face a second late. His eyes seek out the spot in the crowd where the green glass missile was launched from, and wander, almost absentminded, to the microphone in his hand. His face is empty as he twists it out of its fixture and hurls it into the crowd.

Two years ago, I am fifteen on the carpet of my best friend´s older sister´s purple-draped bedroom and she puts the record on. She sets the needle down as gently as though she is cutting a baby´s fingernails. A moment´s silence. Then a scream tears through our small, suburban setting. The guitar riff hits and I lose my footing. The fingers on the strings pluck my electrified rib cage, the feral vocal wakes something in my gut that has been crouched sleeping and hidden since prehistoric man.

“Who is this?” I gasp.

She lies back like a cat, like she´s seen women move in the movies, and lights a forbidden cigarette, right here on her bedroom carpet. “Adam Cain, baby,” she says and blows out smoke like a snake´s tongue. “The sound of freedom.”

Now I am here.

The microphone spins, head over tail, through the haze above our heads and collides with something. I cannot see. I hear the thud. Someone screams. Not the person hit, but the person lunging for the object that just left the hand of Adam Cain, the square inch of breath before his lips.

A black hole opens where the mic landed. All collapses inwards. The crowd´s weight concentrates on this spot, churns, tramples. I can feel the clawing, scrabbling hands as though they are my own. I think of the weight of all those platform boots, with all that weight of body behind them.

The music limps and falters. A cable pulls out and the sound system screams feedback. Adam Cain sways, he steps back. The cuts on his chest bleed dark down his abdomen. The manager is on stage now, hands touching shoulders, ushering the band back behind the curtain as the noise in the audience tips to a different note. Pain hazes the air, mingles with the smoke. Feet that I cannot feel retreat to the side of the room with my body following numbly atop them. Someone rams my shoulder and I cling to the large arm beside me to stay above the crushing platform heels. The security guard´s neck cranes around. He scans me fleetingly, notes I am unhurt, and pulls his arm from my grasp. He shoulders me behind him and plunges towards the writhing bruise at the center of the crowd. I stumble back into the side stage corner. I try to lean but behind me is just a curtain. I watch madness unfold out in the dark room. A girl is helped out of the hole, holding her side. Even in the darkness outside the stage lights, I can see the blood running down from her nose, carrying along with it particles of her glittering make-up. She clutches a microphone in her fist.

Nobody watches me.

The curtain gaps. Distant silver moves behind it.

The noise of a hundred voices blurs at my back. I step through the curtain. The black walls of the narrow corridor are covered in stickers and signatures. Between the scraps of paper, the walls are glazed, feel almost wet to touch. Stronger now than the clamor behind me are new voices at the end of the passage.

I follow them to the bottom of the rabbit hole. Nobody follows me. The world simply lets me walk into the room.

Suspended in the brutal atmosphere that the evening has slipped into like a dark new coat, he sits with one leg pulled up on the dressing table. The silver fur of his jacket rubs at the lipstick scribbles on the mirror. Confused voices surround him where the band and roadies argue in the corner, but he sits in silence. He raises his glassy eyes and notices me. The manager turns, lifts a pointing finger, and opens his mouth. But Adam Cain says: “Are you the photographer?”

His voice is slurred. I realize he is drunk, that I still clutch my camera, shielding it with my hands. And I say: “Yes.”

The manager is assailed by two roadies and turns away from me. Adam Cain just shrugs. He holds a bunched-up T-shirt to his bleeding chest. His injury is not the issue in the room. The issue is whether the show can go on. The decision they are failing to arrive at is that it can´t.

Adam Cain waves a hand. A limp cigarette dangles between his fingers and trails curls of smoke behind it. “Nobody asks me,” he says.

My mouth speaks without me. “Maybe because it´s your fault.” I cannot stop looking. Up close, he looks like a person. There are tear tracks on his cheeks. The dusky blue eye-shadow cakes at the wet inner corners of his lids. His nail polish is chipped, his lips cracked. They part a little in surprise. Then he lets his head fall back against the mirror. “Yes.” There will be lipstick in his hair.

“You -” I begin. I fall silent. I try again. “You´re amazing.” I wither. “None of what comes out of my mouth corresponds to what I´m trying to say,” I say.

He nods. “I know the feeling.”

“No,” I shake my head. “That´s what I´m trying to say. You say everything. With the music, you express everything.”

His mouth closes around the cigarette and smoke snakes from his nostrils. “Glad it sounds that way to you, darlin´.”

I bite my lip and wrestle with words. I will not lose his interest, so randomly piqued, so easily skipped over by a wave of his chip-nailed hand. How easily grace and beauty come to some. Not beauty that is manipulated into being by bleach or colored powders, but the kind of beauty that holds it all together. True, Oscarwildian beauty, that makes a singer like a feral god and not a sock puppet when he shakes with the music. To photograph it is the closest I will ever come to that beauty. “I took your picture,” I say, not knowing why.

His eyes flicker back to me. He looks me over as though seeing me for the first time. “You´re not the photographer. You´re just some kid.”

I swallow. The words lump down my throat heavily. “And you´re one of the best glam rock artists out there. So I took your picture.”

“Glam rock is dead,” he says. “I give it a year. Nobody will want this shit anymore. I´ll have to reinvent myself.” he widens his eyes theatrically, then drops the mask again. In this moment, his face reminds me of Grecian statues, blank on the surface but scarred with undercurrents of deep melancholy. “You, even me: born just a little too late. Soon, the beautiful things will just....” he flutters his fingers upwards and makes a soft swooshing sound between his teeth. He smiles. “And that´s okay. Because that´s how every generation feels, isn´t it? In the big picture, we´ve lost the beauty so many times, it´s incredible that there´s still any left to lose.”

I want to reach for his hand. “There will always be more. Just not the same.” Behind me, the manager calls out to the band. They are packing up. They will leave the last show of the tour half-played and everyone has gotten hurt. I make one last attempt to express something. “So I took your picture.”

Adam Cain extinguishes his cigarette. He nods. “Keep it beautiful.”

He slides off the table and I find my own way out.

I leave by the stage door and pass a parking ambulance. Some moments of love break through the skin so brutally that everything bruises and nothing feels the same ever again.

I carry my camera, which carries the moment things shattered, captured in its shutters like a small burning fly.