Bug Jack Barron

19

Sara Westerfeld dropped the cap, then sat down on the couch facing the dusk lights of Brooklyn to wait for the acid to hit. Supposed to be seven hundred mikes, she thought, but it’s been laying around since I moved in with Jack, never even thought about taking it until… until…

Her body shivered, even though it was June-evening warm. Too warm, in fact, sticky-warm like heavy flowing molasses under her skin, like crawling wetness-things inside her body…

She got up, went to the nearest wall console, threw a switch, and the glass patio-doors glided shut. She turned the thermostat to 70’, the humidity control to “medium dry,” and the air-conditioning unit began pumping in cool dry air through the circular series of vents around the base of the domed ceiling.

She walked to the communications-complex wall, put the surfsound tape on continuous replay cycle, keyed the color organ down toward blues and greens, sat down on the couch again, and stared out at the duskscape across the river. It was like a painted mural now, the glass interface of the patio-doors separating it from the swirling blue-and-green surfsound. Big Sur-pine reality within.

Sara strained against her own mind, testing the swirl of colors and surfsounding melding, trying to feel it, trying to make the LSD hit. A good way to have a bummer, she cautioned herself, so uptight trying to make it hit… Why’d I drop acid in the first place, now, with Jack going on the air soon, with lizardman Howards safe in his bone-white lair of power and bleeding things inside me cut from dead children…

A black chill went through her (the acid starting to hit?) as she remembered how mindlessly she had turned to the LSD, almost as if the acid were taking her instead of she the acid, like a thing waiting to be born or to die within her, a thing with which her conscious mind had no contact at all reaching out through the reflex-arc of her arm, directly, bypassing conscious volition, reaching out to grasp the acid key to its release, a thing with reasons and shapes of its own that might or might not be those of what she thought of as Sara, a blind captain leading the ship of self on an unknown voyage into the dark sea within, and she knew that the acid was hitting.

A visceral fear began to grip her as the Sara within mocked her, reminded her that there were reasons and compulsions to take acid at any given time and some of them could be evil.

Evil… the word had an archaic medieval sound-shape to it, black bishop’s robes swirling, Marquis De Sade dark things from murky European history books… Evil… something ominous and serpent-edged in the knife-shape of the word, dreadful and slimy, but somehow outdated… Evil… a word with bone-white crocodile-teeth, like the smile of Benedict Howards from his bone-white temple of death-god power… Evil… wet green things under moist rocks in blue-green moonlight, sucking life-juices from corpses… corpses of babies bleeding and broken… . Evil…

Evil… The blues and greens swirled reptilian-fashion across the snake-house glass of the domed ceiling like octopus tentacles, and the sound of the surf was a sea-thing sigh from the bowels of a bottomless black ocean, and across the sky outside the dark closed in… Evil… It was cool and dry in the room, like a lizard’s skin… Evil…

Evil… there was a primeval oldness in the word, inevitable and eternal like the dawn-musk of swamps… Evil…

And there’s an oldness in Benedict Howards, she thought, a sick evil oldness as if he’s living his life backward, as if the shadow of a million-year future of power-fear-sweat-stinking madness has already made him something not-human, dead in ways no man’s ever been dead before, dead from a million years of hoarded, fermented oldness, a withered vampire living on blood like a frightened cancer, dead but undying.

Immortality.

“Kiss me, and you’ll live forever. You’ll be a frog, but you’ll live forever.” A grotesque vision of green plastic swam before her eyes, a kit-model she had seen in some Berkeley apartment geological ages ago—a comic-hideous, slime-dripping, cross-eyed disaster of a green plastic giant frog, sitting on a green plastic lily-pad from a Walt Disney swamp with tiny dwarf-frogs beside it leaping like frantic tadpoles at the placard the frog-monster held aloft, proclaiming: “Kiss me, and you’ll live forever. You’ll be a frog, but you’ll live forever.”

And the frog-face began to change as the surf sounds poured over it like a great black tide of evil. The comic cross-eyes became lizard-eyes, cold, black and reptilian, the eyes of Benedict Howards; and the goofy grin became a crocodile-leer, a sharp, bone-white lizardman smile, hungry, totally ruthless and totally knowing. The figures leaping up in worship at the placard were green plastic human beings in a great thronging crowd, a pile of live writhing bodies pillaring to the sky, fighting each other to leap eagerly through the great crocodile-jaws that chewed them to green plastic frog-flesh pieces, green slime fluid drooling past the bone-white teeth, and, above it all, way above it all, holding his placard like a scepter against the shattered sky, black lizard-eyes gaping like holes into the final darkness, Benedict Howards, his crocodile-mouth a vast cavern, and a river of human beings pouring down it, leaping like flames at the sly, knowing sign they worshipped: “Kiss me, and you’ll live forever. You’ll be a frog, but you’ll live forever.”

The sign of immortality.

That, she thought, that’s Howards’ immortality. And oh, oh, have we kissed the frog, with his wet green lips like pulsing gland tissue; lizard-lips running all over our bodies like a dirty old pervert; inside, outside, kissing, sucking, drooling baby-blood spit, green monster-slime of immortality…

She shuddered, trying to throw off the vision, stared through the glass doors at the darkening sky over the city as the surfsounds flowed around her like the eternal moaning of everything everywhere struggling in grim mortal anguish as blue and green sinuous color organ shadows played at the corners of her vision like a sea of frog-green tentacles—and abruptly the interface between the green swamp-reality of miasmic evil engulfing her and the flat mural-reality of the cityscape beyond the glass doors inverted, and she was no longer on the inside looking out but on the outside looking in.

The undulating blue-green light writhing behind her like a forest of tentacles the roar of the surf like the sigh of some great beached and expiring sea animal, seemed to press against the glass reality-interface like a bubble being forced up by decay-gas pressure from the depths of an oily green swamp pool. She felt the weight, the pressure of the whole room pushing behind her as if the blind green monsters that lurked in the most unknowable pits in the ass-end of her mind were bubbling up from the depths and elbowing her consciousness out of her skull.

She moaned, pressed against the glass, keyed the door-switch frantically; but when the doors finally slid open, she found herself caught in the reality-interface itself: the bile-green mists of madness the surfsound sucking behind her becoming an unreal nightmare she now knew was just an acid bummer; but before her, the moist wind from the dark million-light city seemed to be blowing in off a sea-coast jungle that felt as if it might go on forever. Realer than real, there was a vacuum out there, a hole opening on to infinity into which she could fall up and up forever, up and up and up till she might drown in the sea of herself and be lost forever.

Yet she felt the siren-song of that bottomless nothingness calling to her, calling, promising… and she had to look, had to walk the shore of that infinite black sea—and she stepped out on to the patio.

And again reality went through changes.

It was like stepping out into a Tibetan monastery perched atop some ascetic mountain. She felt the interface between her personality and the Universe take a quantum-jump outward, as if an inner telescope had suddenly switched over to a higher power. As she stepped through the doorway she felt the ceiling explode away in shards, like a satellite-shield ejecting, leaving her naked to the bare black marches of infinity that began at the edges of her being and ballooned outward forever.

And far below her, a shimmering arabesque carpet of lights and street sounds, the electric city coruscated like a continuous sheet of incandescent protoplasm, rippling in kinesthop patterns from Brooklyn glowing on the horizon to the base of the concrete mountain on which she stood like a remote eye tipping the pseudopod of a continent-wide human amoeba contemplating its own piebald vastness.

With the surfsound tape sighing behind her, Sara walked to the parapet, leaned over, and it seemed as if she stood on the interface, was the interface between that living, human, upward-reaching organism of lights and the black depths of infinity that yawned above her.

Immortality—was electric-light slime reaching for the stars, and she stood poised on the brink, balanced on the razor-edge between life and death, the flickering and the eternal, the human and the immortal, sanity and the holy madness that was realer than sanity, more cogent, a path to oneness with the timeless infinity that could be hers if she had the courage to cast off her moorings to the shores of self and trust her fate to that all-forgiving sea.

She half-turned as if to look behind her, and the blue-green sinuousness of the sighing chamber inside was a foul mocking reminder of the slime-things dripping stolen secretions of dead children within her that had brought her to this dark place.

And now the surfsound seemed to be coming from below her like a vast invisible sea, its breakers cresting against the concrete parapet against which she found herself leaning vertiginously, calling to her with the wordless voice of forever to cast herself upon its buoying waters and be carried away… away… Away from the mocking lizard-face of Benedict Howards, with his cold reptilian eyes leering out at her from bone-white lair of death… Away even, it promised, from the monstrosities oozing murder… within her… away… away… away…

On a stone pedestal a few yards from her, rested an extension vidphone. The dead gray screen seemed to leap out at her. Jack! Jack! Oh, Jack…

JACK JACK JACK… The shape of his name was a hard-edged shimmer before her, and she found her hand dialing his office vidphone number. JACK JACK JACK…

“Sara…” Jack’s face was a tiny moon of bone-white phosphor on the vidphone screen. “What the hell is it, you know I’m going on the air in half an hour.”

Even on the tiny soft-focus vidphone screen, his wild curling hair and those deep inward eyes crackled phosphorescent electricity into the darkness around her.

“What are you going to do on the show tonight?” she asked. But the she that said the words seemed to be existing a beat ahead of her in time, and Sara knew what she was saying only after the words had left her mouth.

“Come on, baby, you know damn well what the score is,” Jack said. “Bennie Howards calls the shots tonight.”

“You can’t do it,” she found herself saying, and again it was as if the pressures of the words were molding her tongue and lips and cheeks into the necessary configurations—she wasn’t saying them, they were saying themselves. “You’ve got to stop Howards. No matter what it costs, you’ve got to stop him.”

Jack’s face twisted into a withdrawing scowl. “It’s bad enough, for chrissakes!” he said. “Get off my back, will you, Sara!”

Get off my back… get off my back… The words were one more accusation. I am on his back, she thought. He’s doing it to protect me.

“I won’t let you do it,” she heard the strangely reverberating sound of her own voice say. “You’re doing it for me, and I won’t let you, it’s not right. I won’t let Benedict Howards own you just so I can stay alive. I won’t let you do it to yourself.”

“Spare me the martyr-schtick, will you, things are shitty enough as it is,” he said, and she could sense that it was close to an exit-line, that he was handling her the way he would some vip on Bug Jack Barron. “Don’t put yourself on, it wouldn’t make any difference if I was in this alone. I don’t want to die, is all. Why is that so fucking hard for you to understand?”

He’s lying, she thought, he’s lying for me, and I love him for it. But I can’t let him do it.

“You’re doing it for me,” her mechanical inner voice was saying. “I know you are, and I know you’re lying about it for me too. And I’m not going to let you do it, Jack, I’m just not going to let you do it.”

“What in hell is this?” he said, and his voice seemed tinny and unreal yet somehow amplified realer than real over the vidphone circuit. “Delusions of grandeur? Look, baby, you know how I feel about you, but don’t get any funny ideas… nobody works my head, not even you.”

“Not even Benedict Howards?”

Even on the tiny vidphone screen she could see the words that she hadn’t meant to say, that someone else within her had said, biting home cruelly across Jack’s face. “Not even Howards—circumstances, is all. But that’s not letting Bennie work my head, that’s just living in reality. Oughta try it sometime, Sara.”

Sara looked out over the living carpet of light that was the city, the great anguished body of humanity of which she was but an insignificant part, and the blackness above and below seemed to be calling to her with the surfsound of the timeless sea from the buoying depths of forever; calling, promising forgiveness, and a way out… the only way out…

“Didn’t you ever think,” she mumbled, “that there are things better than reality, cleaner, purer, where no one can touch you with death or the blood of children oozing inside you or anything that’s rotten and dirty and evil…”

“Goddamn it,” Jack snarled, “you’re stoned out of your mind! You’re freaked out on acid. Get hold of yourself, Sara, ride it out, baby… Jesus H. Christ, how could you be so dumb, what a time to drop acid! With all this shit going on, you knew you had to have a bummer. Why the hell did you do it?”

Standing there, with Jack’s image a gray on white ghost from a million miles away and a thousand years ago on the vidphone screen, she herself wondered why. A bummer, sure, she had known deep down it would have to be a bummer. But how could anything be worse than reality, worse than torn fragments of murdered children sewn inside her, inside Jack, and Benedict Howards going on and on forever? With or without acid, it was all a bummer, a bummer that would go on and on and on forever, with no way to ever come down, a freakout she could never wait out… unless…

She lifted the vidphone off the pedestal and set it on the parapet lip, the screen now at her chest-level, and Jack’s face was a black and white specter looking back at her with blind, uncomprehending eyes. I’ve got to make him understand… He’s got to understand.

“Please, Jack, you’ve got to understand…” The words gushed out of her in a self-propelled torrent. “There’s no way out, not in what you call reality, it’s a trap, and there’s no way out for either of us except… except death, except turning ourselves off and sleeping dreamless innocent dreams forever… Reality… . Don’t you see, the only answer is something greater than reality, purer, cleaner, infinite, something to give yourself to, something that can wash it all away, something to merge yourself with, something infinite to be one with—”

“Spare me the parlor Buddhism, will you?” Jack said. “I wish you could hear yourself, I mean I wish you could hear yourself baby, ’cause your head’s just not there. You’re gibbering, and you’re starting to scare me. Take it easy, Sara, and for chrissakes do what I tell you. Go inside, sit down on the couch, put on some happy music, and wait it out. You’re stoned. Remember you’re stoned. It’s just a bum trip, is all. You’ll be all right when the acid wears off. Whatever happens inside your head, remember it won’t last forever, you’ll come down. Remember, you’ll come down.”

“Come down!” she found herself screaming at him. “I’ll never come down! It’s not the acid, it’s me. Dead children’s glands inside of me, that’s not the acid, Benedict Howards, that’s not the acid, what I’m doing to you, that’s not the acid… It’s me, me, me, and it stinks!”

“Sara! You haven’t done anything to me, I’ve done it to you…”

She studied his face, and even on the black and white unreality of the vidphone screen, the man, the essence that was Jack, JACK BARRON, leaped out at her from the darkness through layers and layers of phosphorescent reality, pulsing image-waves of his face on the pillow blue and stubbly on the vidphone with Luke naked beside her in the Berkeley attic her knight in soft-flesh armor brave beside her the Black Shade they call him his tongue inside her the taste of his body, wave after wave of JACK BARRON images flashed from the vidphone screen through her, merging and dancing on the back wall of her mind. Overlapping, flashing, reversing, contradicting in a cresting-wave pattern, the sum of the images forming an essence that coalesced like a standing-wave formed from the flux, an essence that shone with an unwavering light—an essence that was pure Jack.

And the Jack that she saw dwarfed and flickering on the tiny vidphone screen before her seemed an anguished denial of the greater Jack that blazed across the screen in her mind. That was the real Jack Barren, a Jack Barren who could never cop out just because he was Jack. No matter what he did, that Jack was still JACK BARRON (in flaming capital letters). And how many times was I sure that Jack was wrong and he turned out to be right? JACK BARRON… a creature bigger in every way than herself, and hadn’t she always known it, even when she hadn’t known she knew, wasn’t it why she loved him? Bigger than herself… bigger than anyone, not her Jack, but Jack’s Sara, how could she ever be anything else? Or want to be.

And that’s what I’m taking from him because he loves me, because he can’t see me die—I’m taking away JACK. And if he loses Jack, I lose Jack, the world loses Jack—because I love him and he loves me. It’s not right!

“Jack… Jack… I love you, I’m sorry, I can’t help it, I love you!”

“I love you too, Sara,” he said quietly, soothingly, and she felt that marvelous gyroscopic sense of tenderness, and she loved him for it and hated herself for his loving her. I’m destroying him…

“I know you do, and I’m sorry… I’m sorry you love me and I love you. It’s destroying you, Jack, it’s making you something less than what you were meant to be. I can’t let that happen… I won’t let it happen!”

Won’t let it happen! The thought filled her mind. I can’t let it happen. Got to save Jack… save him from lizardman Howards… dead things in my body… got to save him from me. From me!

And as she stared out over the endless lights of the amoeboid city spreading out below her like the throng before the Mount, she knew who really stood at the summit of that mountain, who they all looked to, who could do it, could bust it all wide open, destroy the Foundation Black Shade Social Justice President of the United States. Luke was right, it was Jack—Jack all the way, and a whole nation riding with him, and me, only me bringing him down.

I’m all that’s stopping him from being JACK, the Jack that everyone needs. He loves me, he’ll always love me, he’ll never leave me, and as long as I live I’ll never be able to leave him, we’re too deep into each other. As long as I live…

With a sudden, mindless leap she found herself crouched on the narrow concrete parapet beside the vidphone, staring at his image only inches from her face, muscles tensed smoothly like a cat gathering to spring.

“Sara! What the fuck are you doing?” Jack shouted, and she sensed him fighting fear for control and knew he would win. He would always win. “You’re stoned!” he snarled, and the harshness in his voice was a purposeful slap across the face. “Remember you’re stoned, and get the hell off there… but do it slow and easy, don’t get shook, first put one leg on the ground, then put all your weight on it before you step down… Sara! Come on! Snap out of it!”

“I love you Jack,” she said to his tiny distant image. “I love you, and I know you’d always love me. That’s why I’ve got to do it. You’ve got to be free—free of me so you can really be Jack Barron, free to see what you are and what you’ve always been and what you’ve got to do. You’ve got to be free! And so long as I’m alive you’ll never be free. I’m doing it because I love you, because you love me. Goodbye, Jack… Remember, only because I loved you…”

She straightened her legs convulsively, and stood waveringly upright on the narrow parapet as the vidphone beside her feet shouted: “Don’t do it, Sara, God, don’t do it! You’re stoned out of your mind! You don’t know what you’re doing! For chrissakes, don’t jump! Don’t jump!”

But the voice that called to her was mechanical and tiny and seemed to be coming from another world, a black and white unreal vidphone world encapsulated in the meaningless thing by her foot, where she couldn’t even see it; a voice drowned out by the surf-roar that cloaked her shoulders with sighing green tentacles, the fetid wet breath of torn babies within her pushing her forward with an avalanche of dead children a million maggots writhing under her skin. And before her, above her, below her, all around her was the soothing black velvet nothingness of an infinite ocean, buoying like pillows to an endless, dreamless sleep, pure and clean and safe forever from pain and remorse and dead bodies of broken babies, calling, calling, calling, “Give yourself to me.”

“Sara!”

Jack’s voice was a fading cry from a world already abandoned, the memory fading, an unreal nightmare world of frog-green tentacles broken babies dripping slime under her skin the bone-white crocodile-smile of Benedict Howards on his green plastic lily-pad on a pile of dead bodies, forever and ever, and Jack chained to him by a thousand links, and each one of them her body…

For him! For him!

The taste of Jack at last free at last Jack all Jack was a delicious orgasmic spasm through the muscles of her legs (’Sara! Sara!” she heard him scream), and she too was free—free as a bird, with the air whistling through the pinions of her hair, weightless, buoyed, her consciousness expanding outward in rippling waves that merged with the blackness in streamers of mist till all that was left of what was hers alone was a blazing word-shape-smell-taste that whited out every sensory-synapse:

JACK and stars spinning across her retinas JACK and

the skin of her face pulled drumtight JACK free

fall nausea JACK. mass rushing up JACK screams

below JACK fear JACK acid freakout JACK

for you JACK I’m afraid JACK help me

JACK no no JACK don’t want JACK

death JACK forever JACK no

JACK no JACK no no

JACK flash of blinding pain

JAC-

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