Muscle and metal, a compromise at your centre.

Muscle and metal, a compromise at your centre.

So what will it be, Hersh? Do you still feel the music, the conviction that led you to that scar by your heart?

I can feel the bullet. It pounds like a drum.

Another instrument in your symphony.

Not enough slots.

It was just youth. Scar's no more than a bad tattoo.

A tattoo would be able to be removed.

Out in the streets, free and young -- This was the summer of riots, youth movements, and the monotheist coup.

Masses following their material interests, their dogmas, or their orders.

Real street politics.

It was more than that -- a conflux of force and desire that only repeats once or twice per lifetime. And there you were, following not some idea, but the music.

Music was my force and my desire.

An open-air gig on Landau's grand boulevard, in the shadow of the founding father's monument. Headlined by young greasy demi-gods who called themselves 'The Whole Sick Crew'.

The last gasp of heroic rock. They never lied and never sold out! The image and the reality were one.

Something that can never be said about you.

Let's stop the memory here, while it's still beautiful.

Memory doesn't work like that.

Crack of rifle fire in the summer humidity. Soldiers on the roof. Monotheist agents in the crowds. Dozens killed, shot by the 'security' forces or trampled by their own panicking friends.

I ran...

You meant to, but the 10mm bullet caught you first. Fate screaming your name from 200 metres.

UNAUTHORISED CONTACT WITH FOREIGN BODIES.

The surgeon didn't expect you to survive. Metal was too near the heart... he'd have to crack you open like a pistachio.

What became of the Whole Sick Crew?

Arrested, disappeared. Every few years there's a sighting -- the lead singer spotted with a heavy beard in a distant airport bar -- but it's just people wanting to believe.

False.

The bullet by your heart tells you their bones are at the bottom of a reservoir in the Mircean countryside.

Dissolved and lost, much like the network you named in their honour, your private commemoration.

Put your hand over the scar.

But the bullet and I made peace with one another.

You make compromises in order to live. That's just one of them.

I hid...

It was all lame, worshipping rock stars is lame.

It was actually 'idolatry' according to the monotheists. Serious stuff.

And then...

I always do my own thing.

I was young, I didn't know shit.

But not me.

No. You followed the music.