(Beautiful land or landscape. Bella is beautiful, Gio is short for geography.)
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Raff reached into the trunk of his car, lifted blankets aside, and began to carefully pull out his prized folk guitar. He yelled across the campsite clearing to Peter and Jonny:
“Hey, I’ve got a surprise for you guys!”
“What is it? ” Peter said, “Did you bring a rocket with you?”
All three smiled. Rocket-Scientist was what they’d called him in college, and all these twenty years later, the moniker emerged as an opening salvo to their reunion at this gorgeous campsite. He was known otherwise as Raff, short for his last name of Rafferty.
They were a trio in college, having been tossed into a small house rental- split three ways. They’d got along famously despite arriving from different walks of life: Peter the athlete, Jonny the business kid, and Raff the science guy. But all three were serious about college and they united in that little house, laughing and studying all the way to successful graduations. After that, Peter and Jonny had corresponded occasionally but even that trailed off and they hadn’t seen one another for the last twenty years until Peter had suddenly arranged this camping reunion for the three of them―near Bright Angel Falls at the Grand Canyon, no less!
“No, it’s a guitar!” Raff said, striding to where they stood, proudly showing the stately and elegant guitar to them both, holding it high.
Peter and Jonny stood quiet and surprised.
Finally, Peter said: “You play?”
They were both wondering how Raff could have gotten interested in something so cool; it was a substantial change from what they knew of him. So much so that, despite the declaration, and actual brandishing of a guitar, they were still skeptical.
“What―for how long? Are you any good? Are we getting a campfire song?” said Jonny.
They’d both stopped what they were doing.
Just like Jonny to say that, Raff thought. Jonny was always diminishing things; somehow, he drew strength from it, he would sip on it like brandy when something big was happening. He was like that even with his girlfriend, Kristin, who was at the house a lot. God, what a fetching, sweet girl. And smart, and somehow. . . classy. Jonny never could see what he had in her and would diminish her with little comments as the four of them sprawled around the little house cooking or watching T.V. Jonny seemed to be more concerned with his movie-star looks, his hair, and his preppy-looking sweaters. Raff would support Kristin in these household tiffs, riding in like Don Quixote to rebuff Jonny and Jonny would laugh and Kristin would give Raff a kiss on the cheek. But that little kiss from her, or squeeze of the arm, set his cheeks on fire, and he’d fight to not let it show. But it showed at night in his bed, when he’d stare at the ceiling and dream all over her. In all these twenty years, Kristin had never left the room.
Peter was the rougher of the two, less refined than Jonny, more fun, and more aggressive in his appetites. He played the field with women. When high-speed bicycling became all the rage, Peter became a local celebrity in the college and town circuits and even began to win races. He had a singular focus for long stretches of time, racing, training, eating, sleeping and ratcheting up his engine of lungs and thighs. Raff and Jonny both respected his ability to keep this up while maintaining his good grades.
Raff answered: “Been playing awhile now. Just by myself.”
“Wow. No shit! Let’s hear something!”
This was a moment Raff had been thinking about. In all the time since college that he’d been playing guitar, he’d never played for anyone else. He’d grown confident in other areas of his life but had never let anyone in on his love of guitar and song. He’d risen quite high in the world of polycarbonates, spearheading his company’s development of strength and temperature tolerances never before seen in plastics and acrylics. This is what Peter and Jonny might have expected of him, of course, but neither would expect him to have music in his soul. But he’d found it. Just after college, his first apartment was above a music store, and one thing led to another. He’d work all day in the labs and come home to his apartment. Nothing with women ever worked out beyond the rare date or two, at the most. There were never any hard feelings―just no real chemistry. This irony wasn’t lost on him. So, he’d come home to his apartment and he’d learned to tell his guitar what loneliness sounded like. Night after night. Year after year.
But he’d never played for anyone before, and so when Pete’s invitation for the reunion came, he’d brought the guitar to have something, something at least, to show for the time. Pete was married, two kids, normal life. Jonny and Kristin had in fact split after college, and Jonny was working on Wall Street somewhere. Married also now, rich, a traveler, four kids.
Raff thought he’d sounded ok on guitar at home, strumming and singing, but you never know. Risking some humiliation here would have scared Raff off twenty years ago, but not now. He was tired.
“OK, I’ll play a song I wrote.” Raff walked to the back of his little dome tent, fussed with his guitar strap, and stood with his back to the burbling of Bright Angel Creek. The sun was behind him. The bent trees and grass were moving easily with the warm breeze. Peter and Jonny had moved closer and sat on a little log bench a short distance away to be a proper audience. They were clearly intrigued.
Raff strummed a minor chord and the notes sprung from the stings: clear, warm, sad and slow. He’d learned to live in such minor chords. A National Park Ranger who was walking a train of donkeys along a narrow trail stopped and looked over. The donkeys looked. Two tents further down the creek, a woman who was adjusting a guy line to her tent stood up and looked in their direction.
He began to play, fell into the song, and, by watching his fret hand, became present to himself. He was playing like he did at home, as if he were back in his apartment strumming and singing and aching. He finished with a final mournful but playful flourish. He bowed low theatrically, and, as he was rising back up thought to himself “Well, not bad old man, you weren’t that scared after all.”
He rose up to complete silence. Everyone was stopped in the postures he’d last seen them in. Mouths slightly open. Raff began to stutter “It’s called Bellagio. . . it’s just something about a girl . . . “
Suddenly everyone was talking: “Dude, that was un-fucken-believable!” “Are you kidding me?” “You sound great!” “Oh my God, I want to cry!” “That was -wow-, do you have other songs?!”
Indeed, he did have other songs. Lots of them.
The donkey lady threw her rope around a tree and walked over. “I was going to ask if you’re somebody” she said with a light laugh, “so, are you somebody?!”
“Maybe,” Raff said. “Maybe.”
That’s how Raff got started. They barely talked about anything else for the rest of the weekend, not even much of an update on Kristin was to be had. She’d married and divorced out east, was the last vague word. So, while Raff played, and sat by the creek with his feet in the water, Peter and Jonny made plans. Peter became a de-facto agent on the spot, and Jonny became the money and business guy.
After the camping trip, they were very soon managing road appearances. Small venues led to big venues; real agents and accountants were hired. Peter and Jonny became like original groupies while Raff became the new Bob Dylan, the new voice of a newly tortured generation. Bellagio had been pressed into being as a single and was an instant radio hit.
During this rise to fame, Kristin had reappeared, single. She is just as pretty, Raff thought, just as nice. She gushed over his music, his burgeoning celebrity, and she was laughing at all his jokes. This is the way it should be, he thought, she just never really got to know me back then―otherwise . . . The four of them were in contact regularly now, and it was no small secret that Raff and Kristin were getting quite cozy. Jonny had let it be known that all was fine and fair, and so no hard feelings about ‘before’ was declared, and the four of them could be seen on tour together quite frequently, with Kristin showing great flair as an ambassador for the group. Things had turned out funny romantically but they were now all living like royalty and that kind of wealth can drown anything in honey.
Even, Raff thought, even that one time right before graduation when he’d caught Peter in bed with a young lady in his small, crowded bedroom one Saturday morning. He’d barged in on him very early, thinking Peter was alone, and saw a long naked female leg just visible along the edge of a long red blanket. Peter’s tousled blond curls poked out the top of the blanket and neither body fully awoke before Raff quickly and quietly exited. The next day, Sunday evening, when the three of them were back in the house -Jonny having gone home for the weekend- Raff had made a passing reference to how Peter had gotten ‘lucky’ Friday night, but, oddly, Peter shot a glance at Jonny and denied it. Raff insisted, laughing at Peter’s uncharacteristic denial of conquest. But, again, a serious denial. A strange moment passed with everyone looking at each other. “Why is Peter being so prudish about it” Raff thought and dropped it. Weeks later, he was driving with the windows down when the answer hit him, and he couldn’t make eye contact with either Peter or Kristin for awhile after that.
Raff was on his third album now and becoming an international Superstar. He was showing some Bono-level gravitas in celebrity circles with his growing charitable efforts towards addressing climate change and Green Party causes.
Jonny was the first to suggest an epic benefit concert and they all ran wildly with the idea.
Raff had a surprise. Two surprises actually, but he only told one: He’d kept his ties with his industry and had long been working with his former company to develop a polycarbonate material strong enough to lay a vast clear ‘glass’ floor over the Grand Canyon at its narrowest point to use as a venue―the most scenic venue in the world―for entertainment events. They had recently finished testing the material and validating the premise.
Why not make the maiden voyage of this concept be this benefit concert? Plans went into motion and the event was planned for the following Earth Day. It was going to be a coordination behemoth, but the engineering piece had been deemed sound. The floor was created onsite at the Powell Plateau on the North Rim and would be lifted by Sky Crane helicopters and lowered a short distance away to bridge the 600-yard stretch. Stress tests had shown that a tank could be driven across, and a ball with four hundred people sitting at tables would be just fine. The platform would be lifted off afterwards and stored, officially the property of the National Park Service for future event use. A contagion of generosity resulted in the event running into the black by hundreds of millions of dollars despite the cost of the Ball―platform and all. It gained further impetus of largesse when Kristin suggested it be a Costume Ball, specifically recreating the famous Vanderbilt Ball of 1883. That Ball defined who was the ‘in-crowd’ of New York Society at the time and now the Grand Canyon Ball was going to define who was the in-crowd among the Whole World’s Rich. The top 400 donors would be seated for the festivities seemingly suspended in the sky with decadent food and drink while Raff sent his music to echo across the great divide and up into the heavens. And, all the while, they’d be saving the planet.
Everybody wanted in on the spectacle and it was to be televised around the world. Every entertainment medium was devoted to the running list of attendees and what costumes they were preparing. Getting to the Grand Canyon Ball was the first competition among the celebrities and the wealthy, the second competition was to display wit, currency, and charm through the selection and execution of their outfits. Fashion designers in Hollywood and the world over were having their Superbowl.
Of course, many people were scared. It was soon called The Floating Ball once they decided that even the chairs and tables were to be made out of the clear polycarbonate. Further, and brilliantly, Raff had suggested that the necessary electrical lines be run underneath, and be designed to appear from above as wild cracks and splits in thin ice. He designed the exact array of cracks, and even himself had installed the entire electrical network underneath the platform. “It has to be perfect” he’d said, explaining the various issues with the ‘Joule effect’ and ‘line loss’ over the distances. You can take the guy out of science, they ribbed, but you can’t take science out of the guy.
The titillation of fear around the event became a living thing, like the fire of expectation that surrounds children standing in line at a roller coaster. Lights, noise and fear rush at their little hearts, but they stay in line.
The day came.
The floor was lowered into place, and Raff himself stepped onto the ice first as the cameras rolled. He jogged out into the center while the world cheered, he jumped up and down once or twice, and he jogged back. It was an incredible image; the platform was so clear that he appeared to be running through the sky like a superhero.
Legions of stage crew and caterers in neat attire went into action for setup of the ball. Everyone laughed nervously as they darted about 3,700 feet above a thin ribbon of Colorado River. They were unable to stop themselves at first from lightly hopping over the ‘cracks’. After a couple of hours, the space was transformed. White linen tablecloths floated in neat rows, adorned with silver, china, hothouse orchids, and gold nameplates. Tens of thousands of flowers sprouted across the platform, arranged in various fairy-tale displays, and fountains of champagne bubbled crisply in the clean air. The orchestra was settling in on each side of the cordoned-off dance floor as the guests began to arrive.
It was one of those resplendent early spring days; and warm enough to be comfortable and cool enough to flirt with exhilaration upon drawing a deep breath. A sweet tingling of a day.
The guests paraded down a paparazzi-lined red carpet and onto the platform in their costumes and, oh my lord, it was delicious. The selections were fueled by color, imagination, history, the scandalous and the bizarre―and money had been no object. Everybody was in high plume. The feast began and, after a decent interval, Raff went to the podium on the stage.
He thanked all the appropriate people and entities, promised that the planned Earth Day agenda of speakers and music was about to begin, but first he had a surprise:
With the eyes of the world upon him, he walked to the center table where Kristin was sitting with Peter and Jonny. A long-stemmed red rose, a bended knee, a staggering diamond ring―and a YES!
Applause and tears everywhere.
He told the orchestra to play his own Bellagio song while he whisked Kristin onto the dance floor. They held each other tightly as they swayed to the slow rhythms, suspended in space and time. Twitter went wild, and every media entity in the world zoomed in on the too fabulous couple celebrating this commitment of love.
Kristin was lost in the moment as any princess would be, but Raff was thinking about something else. He was remembering the only vacation he ever took since college that meant something to him. He’d gone to Las Vegas and walked by the Bellagio Hotel in the midafternoon, just as the famed Bellagio Fountains spurted into action for a show. Beyond the normal delight of watching the majestic jets of water dance about and shoot hundreds of feet high into the sky with the music, he could not take his eyes off the top of each fountain as the water hit its peak. He could see perfectly when the drops of water hit the apex and stopped, suspended in space and time, to hang in that moment after leaving the pull of earth and before gravity repossessed it, to pull it down, down, dropping into the namelessness of the pool and back into invisibility. At the top, the sun imbued the drops of water with fractured prisms of light and clarity that compelled him to feel. He’d felt something so strange that he couldn’t shift his gaze from the fountain tops. That feeling was happiness. Satisfaction. Fulfillment. That’s where I want to be, he’d thought back then.
Other couples were joining them on the dance floor now.
He slid his hand into his jacket pocket and began to trace his finger over the button of a small wireless trigger device. The device was electronically partnered with receivers in all of the explosives-filled junction boxes arrayed throughout the underneath of the platform.
That’s where I am now, he thought.
“And that’s where I’ll stay” he said out loud.
Kristin lifted her head dreamily off his shoulder and said “What, honey?” The song was reaching its crescendo.
“This” he said.
He pressed the button hard.
Penultimate 
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