Wade got into the rhythm at the edge of the crowd, enjoying the lead guitarist’s work, which just kept getting better and better as the band warmed, playing solo after solo that stung, ripped, howled, soared. The crowd became one big group creature as it followed him outward, singing all the lyrics for the hapless singer/rhythm guitarist, whose guitar was completely inaudible in every song no matter how fast he strummed; he might as well have been unplugged, and possibly was. So it was lead guitar, bass, and drums, and the bassist and drummer were rising to the task of laying a groundwork for their leader on his explorations.
Spiff drifted over at one point to shout in Wade’s ear: “—used to play in five bands at once! Club bands—never recorded—every night of the week—New Hampshire, Vermont—” He gestured at the guitarist, shaking his head in awe. “Not possible!”
Wade nodded to show he had heard. He took another couple of swallows from Spiff’s flask. They danced and danced. Someone turned on black lights, and even a strobe, apparently damaged, so that it changed frequency rapidly. Whenever the mass of dancing bodies overheated the room someone would open the door at the back and in about twenty seconds the room would chill so far that all the sweaty moisture in the air fell to the floor and lay there, a white dust that never melted. At floor level it was always below freezing, Wade realized as he watched the swirls underfoot. “Great air conditioning,” he shouted at Spiff.
Time passed in its own uneven strobe, with some long patches of timeless dancing thrown into the mix of quick choppy impressions. The band finished everything in their repertory and threatened to quit, but the crowd refused to let them; Andrea and Lydia and two or three other women kneeled at the lead guitarist’s feet as if begging him to continue, though it also seemed clear that if he refused they might tear him to pieces. Briefly he smiled, his only expression of the night as far as Wade saw, and looked back at the band and started up again. In the interval the bass player had taped his right fingers with duct tape, and he played on with a happy expression.
Then they started up “Little Wing,” which Wade had not heard in the first set, and after a strangled vocal from the singer, the lead guitarist hammered out the powerful succession of minor chords that Hendrix had laid down, and slowly but surely cast loose from the rest of the band, and, from the look in his eye, from the rest of the universe as well—away from the song, away from the hut, out into some private space of his own, drawing the entire Jamesway along with him, out to that distant place of pain and suffering that was the world, all those nights playing unheard in those bars while he played about the ice, his blues and the South Pole Blues become one and the same, the blues of someone who had come back down to the ice for the nth time after swearing he never would again, drawn down here away from the bars and bands and women and friends, seduced away again by the ice and then stuck down here in its cold boredom. First you fall in love with Antarctica and then it wrecks your life, breaks it in half year after year, every year the same, going north and not knowing where you are or where your home is or what you’re going to do next, swearing never to return and then returning anyway, over and over, to work all day in the frigid sub-biological chill, talking a mile a minute until people actually would say No Robbie no be quiet don’t say a word for at least ten minutes, okay but I’m only saying one millionth of what I’m thinking and then shutting up, zooming in silence, working in solitude—until suddenly here’s a chance to play the guitar and speak all those thoughts, no matter that it was all in music, better that way, for this was the language that meant more than any other even though no one could quite understand it. The awestruck Wade, who had not known until now how much he had been missing music, stopped dancing just to listen to it, and watch those two hands fly about speaking such beautiful untranslatable sentences. Many other dancers had already done the same, standing stock-still as if hearing the national anthem or some great hymn; they all shared this guy’s situation, they all knew what he was feeling, they felt it themselves, and this “Little Wing” was deep, better than Jimi’s or Eric’s or Duane’s or Stevie Ray’s—bigger, darker, more profound. Wade found himself next to Spiff, and tried to convey to the astronomer this perception that had struck him again so forcefully, that music was the language simultaneously the deepest and the most incomprehensible, and the swaying Spiff nodded and cried back in Wade’s ear, “It means the whole project of science is backwards, the more you understand something the less it moves you, my goal now is to reverse that, to do antiscience, to know less, to understand less and thus feel it all more, I want less understanding. Come with us after this and I’ll show you what I mean.” Wade nodded, fell back into the guitarist’s infinite traveling. Far away from Earth, far away from Ice Planet, out to the far reaches of their shared inescapable predicament …
At the end of this great solo the guitarist bowed his head, crushing the last brutal chords, shoving the guitar next to the amp for some shrieking feedback. It seemed to Wade that he was not only done for the night, but could justifiably hang his guitar up forever. He would never play better than that; no one could.
But then the women were on him again, like sirens or succubi, laughing as they tugged his arms and wrapped around his knees, begging him to play another one, demanding it; which, after a big sigh, and a single shake of the head at their greed and lack of understanding, he did. He played “Gloria,” singing the words himself this time, and he led the hoarse crowd through a singalong that lasted many, many, many choruses, clearly intending to bludgeon them all into insensibility so that they would let the band quit before they died. During this eternal “Gloria” Wade was pulled by Andrea into the middle of the network of women, and he was passed from one sort-of partner to another for a few score choruses, soaking in what he could of these women, who were so obviously tough strong people, wearing greasy Carhartts, sweaty and wild-eyed, a lot of them big and tall and so reminding him of Val, fluid in their stocking feet, working-class Americans with a lot of bar hours in their dance moves and their dangerous sharklike smiles, their sidelong glinting private expressions which told Wade they were wild people who had done wild things, so wild that the South Pole was a terrible confinement to them. Watching them Wade could not stop thinking of Val, and he wished like anything she were there; he would have danced with her, not diffusely as he was with these sirens spelling G-l-o-r-i-a over and over, but directly and, in some much less blatant way, like Spiff and Andrea had been dancing before. If only she were here!
As “Gloria” ended the lead guitarist hurried around pulling all the plugs out of the amps. Abruptly the music halted. The grinning bassist held up his bleeding right hand, the duct tape long gone. Someone turned off the strobe and black lights, leaving them in a dim Christmas-tree glow.
Wade was surprised to see that Spiff and Andrea were still there; he had figured they would be hustling off to one of their rooms given the incendiary nature of their dancing, but here they were coming over to him, and Andrea took his arm. “Come on,” she said under the noise of the applause, “get your coat.” Struggling into his parka Wade followed them out the door.
Brilliant sunlight exploded in his head. The cold slammed into him like a great side of frozen beef, nearly knocking him down. He was wet under his parka, and the cold hurt right to the bone. It was a relief when the others started running and he could run too, blinded by a flood of cold-induced tears. Running brought freezing sweat in contact with various parts of him as he moved.