Nashville Chrome by Rick Bass Page A

ensued once the lights came on her and the applause began all memory leaves her, if ever it was in her in the first place. Unconscious, owned, possessed, they sang, moved through their repertoire unthinking, giving themselves over to the audience with a complete selflessness.
    What she does remember, beyond the first shine of the lights, is the end: the thing she lived for, the moment of perfect stillness when, after the last note had fallen upon the audience and was still settling over them, loosening, spreading out and then disappearing, there was the sweet and hallowed space in which the audience, saturated and bewitched, realized the songs were over but, entranced as they were, could not yet quite lift their hands to clap.
    It was almost like a moment of confusion, as if the audience had been caught deep in some middle place between the dreaming and the waking and did not want to leave, though finally, like divers surfacing, came back up to the top, reluctantly at first, but gradually and—as if realizing only then where they were—enthusiastically.
    Those full three or four seconds of silence, and the delight of her terror—
What if they do not clap at all? What if they do not rise to their feet?
—were more powerful than anything she had ever known.
    Only when it did come—the first few waves of applause, then the sea roar, and then the rising—would she relax a tiny bit, and glance over at her brother and sister. The three of them somehow closer, out there on the stage, than they ever were in so-called real life. Relaxing, finally, after so long a wait and so long a journey, for a short period, before winding up tight all over again on their way to the next show, next audience, next state.
    She remembers too the parties afterward. The ones she remembers most are those that took place in winter: the warmth, the heat of so many gathered together inside on a cold night; the post-performance excitement, the echo of it lingering. There was nowhere near as much as there had been in that perfect, single shining moment at the end of the song, but still, some of that same lingering.
    She understood that it would go away—was going away—but she stood there at the parties, or moved through their midst, keen-eyed, determined to milk every last bit of it. A trawler far at sea with an immense net, never stopping, pushing farther.

THE MOVIE
    F OR AS LONG as she can remember—which is to say, since she stopped drinking almost thirty years ago—she has been wanting a movie. It is a desire that burns in her every bit as intensely as did once her ambition for making music, for getting her voice out into the world, but she doesn't have any idea how to go about it. Mostly, she thinks, she has to just sit quietly, desiring it, burning, and wait for it to come to her. Waiting for her old contract with the world to reassert itself.
    The silver screen,
she calls it, whenever she talks to Bonnie on the phone. Wouldn't it make a marvelous movie? She fantasizes about the three of them being at the premiere, imagines various outfits she might wear, and is certain that at such a gala there would be a request for the three of them to sing again. She's certain they would comply, and certain, also, that it, the tempered harmony—this otherworldly phenomenon—would excite an entire new generation, and that once again, as always before, the audience—a thousand, two thousand, all in evening dresses and tuxedos—would leap to their feet, leaping as if summoned by violent jerks of invisible strings from above, and that the waves of applause, of love, would roll over and through her again: always, one more time.
    Everyone else has a movie. Johnny Cash had a couple. Charley Pride had one, Loretta Lynn had a couple; the Beatles had twenty or more. Patsy Cline had one, Hank Williams had one. Elvis had maybe half a hundred, which, though she understands it, gnaws at her; for when they first started out,