See the lights turning him into silver and Gold... the guy is almost transparent!
It's hot in those lights, but he won't sweat. Ever.
How does that puny frame house such a huge voice?
In fact, it was beyond the laws of nature that the voice was there at all.
This guy almost never slept, was always either travelling and/or working... and drank enough Cognac and snorted enough Coke A DAY to crank up the whole front row of the audience....
He fucked twice a day and sometimes read while he fucked, to stop himself becoming bored...
The guy was a whorehouse for energy, drive, focus, contradictions and, it goes without saying, was NEVER boring in himself.
The pop singer was sleep walking through his own dream and dreams are rarely boring.

The whole place was converging on one moment, now.
The final song.
Just vocal, the band mute.
Tension, black out, silence and explode.
Show was over and the Pop-singer was off stage, towels placed on his champagne shoulders, a lighted cigarette in one hand, the other hand groping for the offered cognac, in it's heavy, bulbous glass.
The screams were behind him now, not in front.
He skipped toward the dressing room, his delicate feet hardly touching the floor, still high from the show, the voices of hangers on, caterers, the babble of those who worked for him in his ears, the crowd becoming a distant white noise.
Without looking at it, he drained the heavy glass and handed it to some flunky.
Some other flunky, or maybe it was the brandy glass retrieving flunky, stepped in eased open the dressing room door.
It had been a lifetime since the Popsinger had opened a door for himself.
Sucking deeply on a cigarette, the pop singer stepped into the dressing room.

Except he didn't.
The pop singer was overwhelmingly confused, the pop singer, if not so regally fucked up as a matter of course, would now be entering a state of shock.
As it was, he was just too numb, too generally frozen for such passion.
Which was kind of ironic, him being an 'Iceman' , seeing as the pop singer, instead of standing in his dressing room, which is where the dressing room door usually leads to,no, instead of finding himself in the familiar air-conditioned inner sanctum, with it's drapes and low level lighting, store of Cognac and stash of pink Peruvian flake cocaine ,the pop singer was standing in a desert at about 4 o'clock in the afternoon.

There were dunes, sweeping impeccable and almost lush, there was a dry wind, occasional and stark foliage, no bird or insect life but miles and miles of sand, stretching out beneath an uncensored sun that was only now ending it's warping of the cloud and colourless sky.
The silence was very loud.
He stood there, waiting, mute, synapses throbbing beneath the pancaked, made-up skin of his temples.
He went over and over it again... the last few minutes.
The Show, the brandy, the door.
He picked up the towel that had been placed on him... wasn't this evidence?
Had he had a blackout,... or.. or.. if someone had had the audacity to spike his drink (no-it was too soon... he could taste the cognac in his parched throat, even now... no acid worked that quick)... well.. no.. no.. the towel, the towel was the thread back..
Except there was no way back. There was no door just dry air and sand...
the singing silence, broken by the distant rush and tumble of the blood in his veins, rising and falling in time with the inaudible sound of panic rising and falling, rising and falling and finally disappearing.
He wouldn't panic. No. Shut that particular door... the pop singer wasn't gonna freak out.. except.. that.. what if... no. No. Forget that too.
Truly.
He was still who he was.
He shook free something momentarily blown into his already wilting hair.
He decided what to do
He would... he would... walk.
So the pop singer looked at the horizon and began to walk.
And very soon, he began to sweat.

It had been... how long had it been? How long had he been walking... how long since the pop singer stepped out of his sell out pop show and into this baking desert? He'd been puking copiously for what seemed as far back as he could remember, his head was a steaming puddle of biochemical jelly squashed into a tin pepperpot eggshell... no water... so dehydrated was he that he was back to his old self-he wasn't sweating anymore... his contact lenses had dried up and fallen out at some point, long past the start of the agony they had caused but to which he was too exhausted to respond too..
He was blind, rasping and driven only by the lower mechanical impulses that are some of the last to go....

It was sad.

And In the desert, it was dusk.
The sky was no longer neutral but the colour of a kind of dying fire.
Some lizards came out, drawn by the cooling sand.
The dying pop singer was crawling.
Baking and quietly insane, he groped through the desert and through his blindness.
Soon he was dragging himself along on his elbows... the silky blouse fucked, his knees sloughing the cooling sand.

Blind and approaching delirium, he still felt his head meet something impossibly hard and wrong.

For a moment he experienced a burst of curiosity and hope driven energy.
His hands groped madly on this new and alien surface... it was huge, metallic... he tried to fathom, without seeing it, what it was... but it was useless, again it was useless.
It was too big... too uniform to the touch... he could make no sense of it.
His energy dissipated and he crumpled, finally defeated.

And so, The pop singer died, there in the evening desert,his hands sliding down and away from the impossible obstacle that he would never see nor know.
There in the desert, dwarfing him both monstrously and in complete silence; 'Titanicesque' yet perfectly preserved, was a Giant, Gleaming Ship.

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