“You were right, before. It really was like being emptied out completely and filled up. With Django, at the show, I mean. When you saw me at the Maxima, I didn’t know what my name was, where I’d been, or where I was going. They were doing ‘She’s the Hype,’ I think, when it really hit me. My name and what I looked like, where I was and who I was. It all just vanished out of me. Did you ever see anybody playing with dry ice? It goes straight from solid to gas. That’s called sublimation, going sublime. You take it out of the freezer and it vanishes into a white puff. Whhffff! And that’s what it felt like when Rudy went into his solo and Django came out right to the edge of the stage and looked me in the eyes. I went sublime.
“Django was holding out his hand. Remember? Like he wanted everybody in the whole Maxima to touch him. Some of the girls were reaching for him. He had a purple scarf or a big fluttery ribbon. It went out over the crowd. Remember? The girls were stretching up for it. But not me, because I didn’t need to. I was already with him, filled up as fast as I went sublime. Everything turned to vapor and whooshed away, and then everything rushed back inside me. Cosmic rays, the sound of Rudy’s solo, Django’s voice turned to light, the power and the gleam, and the alien specters passing through us all.
“I don’t care anymore if something is possible or not. I just know what I saw and felt. The light went all silvery-gold. Electrum light, just like you saw this morning. And my body didn’t weigh anything. There was nothing solid for gravity to grab onto and hold down. Solid, liquid, vapor and pure energy. The x-rays from a million miles away went streaming through me and through the whole world too.
“You know in ‘The Man in the Moon in the Man’ how Django says that something can be inside and outside at the same time? You look up at the moon and there’s that face, right? Like right now. Look up there, Davi. Look. See? There’s the face. But supposedly it’s just craters and shadows, and the Apollonauts walked around there. But we make it into a face because we want everything to be human. You get that? Otherwise, it’s like we can’t even see it. So the Man in the Moon is really inside us. It’s just something we make in our heads, and then we see it out there, up there, in the sky. I think maybe that’s how it is with the Alien Drift. We want to see it in a way that makes some kind of sense. You said it looked like bombs falling, then angels, then spears. I don’t think it’s really any of that. And neither do you, right?
“It’s like in ‘Radiation Nation’ on the second album. I never understood all the science and mythology in the verses. The chorus is what I love. It was what really got me and pulled me into the whole Django thing to start with.
The rising spirit quits the earth.
Up to the courts of light she flies.
Celestial legions guard her birth
and shout her welcome to the skies.
“The first time I heard that, it felt like Django was singing right to me and about me. The rising spirit was me. Django knew what was going on, even though I was just a girl in a city he’d never been to. Did that ever happen to you, Davi? You listen and it seems like every word and note and drumbeat—and even the silence—is about you and for you.”