“So, don’t let ’em catch you, okay?” Theo said mildly in that last moment as it got too busy to answer him. I don’t know what I would have said anyway.

Strange scratchy sounds moved through the room, hung on moaning bass notes like the lowing of cows lost underwater. The image I’d grabbed to start with was the old black-and-white test pattern and countdown spinner: nine, eight, seven, six… At one it froze and began to melt, iridescent color oozing slowly out of the monochrome rings and crosshairs. Theo would have called the effect “trippy.”

Suddenly Theo segued to his other deck, pulled in something that went thump-thump-thump against a harmonica that went chigga-chigga-chigga. So I switched sources, too; because I knew how Theo’s mind worked, I had a bit ready from a fifty-year-old war movie that put the viewer nose to nose with an assault rifle on full auto. Pull back on bronzed beefcake sneering under his visor, spewing hot lead at whoever it had been that week, budda-budda-budda-thwakow! I grinned at Theo: That for your chigga-chigga. He grinned back and poked the pan controls as a flute riff seared the room and sent me back to my decks for the next image. We were just warming up.

On most nights our partnership would snag on some piece of equipment; something would fail. Everything we had was old, and hardly any of it was built for the kind of industrial-weight use we gave it. The regular after-closing ritual turned the sound balcony into a repair shop where we fixed anything that had broken during the show. But that night, we had the hoodoo working.

Christopher Lee sank his fangs into someone just as Theo cranked to a horrible reverbed wail from Morticia just as lightning shattered the air between two clouds outside the window. Uma Thurman, with a look that would melt glass, stretched out a glimmering hand to the Beast in the Forman remake of Beauty and, while Theo raised a Zimbabwean singer’s plaintive high note into the rafters, while blown rain broke the view outside into a moiré pattern. Lightning lashed at the City like artillery; Ego’s top was lost in cloud, but the hits on the obelisk shape of the Foshay looked like pointing fingers. Theo put both decks to work at once, overlapping and cutting between something that was entirely percussion and something else that was all singing. I took a feed off the camera, panning the dance floor in dizzy swoops, then zooming in on anyone who took my fancy.

I had a lot of people to choose from. The place seemed to have filled up suddenly; but that only meant I’d been absorbed in what I was doing. Then, on one of my video strafing runs, I noticed a hand waving, an oval of face looking straight at the camera. I zoomed in, startled. “My God,” I said aloud, “it’s Sher.” Sherrea’s pointed chin and big, shadowy eyes, under a mass of black-and-purple headwrap, filled my monitor. Just then she turned to glance at the screens and saw her own profile ten feet high. She turned back to the camera and gave me the finger. “What?” Theo asked.