Page 446 - Some Dance to Remember

416 Jack Fritscher

self-consciously theatrical,” he said. “That’s the song Coppola used to open
Apocalypse Now. What is this if not Heart of Darkness? I ventured out to
live on the edge and stayed out too long.”
He greased his own hard cock. He set his tit clamps. He watched
Kick on screen. He stroked himself with the bittersweet feel of a man who
knows he is watching something for the last time in his life.
He reached for the remote-control gun, took careful aim at the golden
man muscularly stroking himself on screen, and pressed ever so slowly the
button on the gun to ERASE DURING PLAY.
Every image he had so painstakingly recorded of Kick, all the images
of Kick he had so carefully saved, he saw play for the last time. He was
killing the video image of Kick. He was driving the stake through his
vampire heart.
Blood on his hands.
The dying videotapes.
Never to see him again!
The colors breaking up.
Never to hold him again!
The lines per screen dissolving.
Never to be held by him again!
Crying like a comrade bereft.
Stroking like a lover.
Kick dissolving, fading, crumbling on-screen in scene after scene.
He had created this man. He was destroying his own creation. As
one video erased Kick, the other recorded, if not Ryan, then the shell of
Ryan kneeling in the bed, masturbating his final lust, rocking in tears,
crying in his cuming, falling back on the bed, spent, watching the last
images disappearing from the screen, lying like a perfect sculpture of late-
twentieth-century man, spent, lustless, himself watched by the all-seeing
eye of the video camera watching him fall back from his sexual pant to
the regular rhythms of drugged sleep, his lean aerobic body adrift on the
bed, in the sea of mementos, rolling finally, under the track light, to his
side, his knees pulled to his chest, sleeping, dreaming, while the humming
video camera looked coldly on, running on AUTOMATIC to the end of
its LP cassette early that Christmas morning.

11

Sometime after New Year’s, Ryan read in Iron Man magazine that
Kick had placed fifth in the Mr. America contest. Rumors had confirmed

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