Bug Jack Barron

4

“Benedict Howards?” Jack Barron repeated into his office intercom, as if disbelief might make the wraith vanish in a puff of ectoplasm. Oughta stay away from this goddamned office, he thought, let network have me for one hour a week then lie doggo in the pad the rest of the time, trouble like Howards comes looking for me, at least it’d be on my own turf. But the powers that be, are, insist I warm dumb chair under network noses on Fridays to deal with screams of anguish after cooling-off Thursdays, Mondays to plot new Wednesday screams of wounded vips to soothe again next Friday—sado-masochistic daisy chain.

“Send Howards in,” Barron half-groaned, hoping Carrie had the intercom volume up so Bennie would know how pleased he was to see him, but knowing she ran tight ship under network orders (try to keep Barron from devouring vips for chrissakes, Miss Donaldson) cool, competent Carrie, efficient and distant even in bed. (Network orders there too? he often wondered.)

The office door opened, held by willowy, dark, suppressing-her-distaste-for-sloth’s-den (I sit here on sufferance) decor of inner office Carrie, as ’70s-elegant (black buttonless silk suit, white ascot over red ruff-collared shirt), tall, pink-skinned, thin-hair-worn-long, semi-chubby Benedict Howards bustled by her to stand wordlessly in front of the randomly-littered desk.

“Split, Carrie,” Barron said, knowing it would bug Howards, who wouldn’t publicly first-name secretary he had been balling for five years. (Wonder if he is balling that iceberg of his?) As Carrie left, Barron motioned Howards to the moldy ancient leather-covered chair in front of the desk, and grinned as Howards gingerly planted his ass on the edge of the chair like a man thoroughly convinced you could too get clap from a toilet seat.

“Well, Howards,” Barron said, “to what do I owe the somewhat dubious pleasure of your company?”

“You’re not on camera, Barron, so you’re wasting your smart-ass cleverness on me,” Howards said. “And you know goddamned well why I’m here. I don’t like knives in my back, and I warn you, no one does it three times to Benedict Howards. First time you get a warning, second time you get squashed like a bug.”

“If you weren’s so fucking charming, Howards, I’d take that as a threat,” Barron said. “Fortunately for you, I’ve got an easy-going disposition. Because I don’t like threats, man: they bug me. And this Wednesday you got a small taste of what happens when you bug Jack Barron. But it was just a taste, Howards, nobody got really hurt, and we both know it. I made some points because that’s the name of the game, but I gave you a chance to get out from under. It wasn’t my fault you didn’t take me up on it. I hope you got yourself a big one.”

Barron smiled as he saw Howards’ face go blank for a moment. (Mr Howards is on a hunting and fishing trip in Canada, Mr Barron.) “I thought so,” Barron said. “I don’t know why you thought it was a smart move to be out to me when I was on the air, but I didn’t like it. You got cut up, it was strictly your own fault. You had your chance to make points for your goddamned Freezer Bill, and you blew it. I run a simple show, Howards. You make me look dumb. I return the favor. Whis is why I cut up Yarborough and gave Luke Greene the floor.”

“I seem to remember that you and Greene were pretty tight at one time,” Howards said. “For all I know, you’re still involved with the Social Justice Coalition. The way you made Yarborough look like an asshole, and then let that goddamned coon spout his Communistic—”

“Let’s get a couple things straight,” Barron snapped. “One, John Yarborough is a self-made asshole. Two, I’m in show business, Howards, I’m not a politician. I kissed the SJC goodbye when I got this show, and I consider it good riddance. I’m interested in my ratings, and selling cars and dope and nothing else. You don’t like me, fine, but give me credit for being a cut above an imbecile. I use the show to roll any party’s little red wagon, I get stomped by the FCC quicker than you can pass the word to your two tame commissioners and then I can really go back to waving picket-signs. But there’s mighty little bread in that line of work, and I like the way I’m living now a lot better than I liked scrounging around Berkeley and Los Angeles.

“And, finally, Howards, while I don’t give a shit about Luke’s politics, he is an old friend of mine, and if you call him a coon or a nigger to my face again, I’ll kick your ass all around this office.”

“Do you know who you’re talking to?” Howards shouted. “No one gives lip to Benedict Howards! I’ll squeeze your sponsors and the network and put pressure on the FCC, and I’ve got more than enough muscle to do it. Cross me, and I’ll cut you to dogmeat and feed you to the fishes.”

“And how long do you think that’d take?” Barron asked mildly.

“I can have you off the air in a month, and you’d better believe it.”

“Four weeks, four weeks,” said Jack Barron. “Think about that. Think about what I could do to you if I had nothing to lose because you were killing my show anyway. Four weeks’ worth of sheer spite. Four hours in front of a hundred million people, and me with nothing better left to do than take revenge on you and your Foundation.

“Sure you can destroy me if you want to commit hara-kiri—and, for that matter, I can always kamikaze you. We’re both big boys, Bennie, too big for either of us to do the other in without making it a Samson-smash. I don’t like you, and you don’t like me, but you’ve got nothing to worry about from me unless you back me into a corner. But if I go, you go too, and don’t you forget it.”

Suddenly, unpredictably, Howards went smooth. “Look,” he said, with jarring reasonableness. “I don’t come here to trade threats with you. You hurt my Freezer Bill, cost me a few votes, but—”

“Don’t blame me,” Barron said. “Blame that schmuck Hennering. He’s your boy, and that’s why I put him on, to let your side make points and even things out. It’s not my fault if the dum-dum—”

“That’s all ancient history, Barron,” Howards said. “I’m interested in the future. Man like me’s gotta take the long view. (Howards smiled a weird beatific smile. What the hell’s that? Barron thought.) The real long view… And the Freezer Utility Bill’s mighty important to my future, to the future of the human—”

“Aw, spare me that crap, will you…” Barron drawled. “You want a bill passed to give you a Freezer Monopoly, that’s your bag, but don’t try to bullshit me about the future of the human race. You’re looking out for Number One, period. Keep it on that level, and maybe I’ll listen.”

“All right, Barron, I’ll lay it on the line. You’ve got something I need—Bug Jack Barron. You’ve got a pipeline to a hundred million Americans, and what they think about the bill can swing some votes in Congress, not as many votes as they’d like to think, maybe, but some. I want those votes. I want you to do the kind of shows that will get me those votes—not every week, we can’t be too obvious, but just the right touches here and there. You’ve got the following and the know-how to pull it off. That’s what you can do for me, Barren, and in return—”

“You’re crazy, you know that?” said Jack Barron. “You expect me to risk the show by grinding your private ax? Where’s the percentage, Howards? I knock down four hundred thou in a good year, and I got a lot of years left with Bug Jack Barron. Show biz gives me enough money to let me live exactly the way I want to, and I dig it. Forget it man, you can’t buy me the way you buy loxes like Teddy Hennering. You just don’t have anything I want that bad.”

Benedict Howards smiled a smug smile. “Don’t I?” he said. “I’ve got something everyone wants, something you can’t buy with money—life, Barron, life itself. Immortality. Think about it, man, a life that goes on and on, not for a lousy century but millenium after millenium, young and strong and healthy forever. Think about what that means every morning when you wake up, knowing it’s all there forever—the way food tastes, the way a woman’s body feels, the smell of the air—all of it yours, and all of it forever. Wouldn’t you sell your soul for that? Wouldn’t anyone? Because you wouldn’t need a soul to go somewhere and play a harp when you croak. You’d have it all, right here on terra firma. Forever… Forever…”

“You sound like you’re about to breathe fire and brimstone and ask me to sign a contract in blood,” Barron remarked dryly.

Howards seemed to start; his hot eyes suddenly contracted to cold boar-shrewdness as if he were talking about something he suddenly realized he shouldn’t—or, Barron thought, as if old Bennie just realized how loopy he sounds.

“I’m talking about a Freeze Contract,” Howards said. “A free Freeze. No assignment of assets. I got tentacles, Barron, and I know you spend money as fast as you make it. You’ll never hold on to enough to buy a Freeze. And just between you and me, even if you did, I’d never let you buy it now. Because I don’t want your money when you die. I want you, Barron, live, right now. That’s the deal—you play ball with me and have your chance at immortality, or when you die you’re wormfood. Forever is a long time to be dead, Barron.”

What goes? thought Barron. Bennie’s bill’s a ten votes to spare in the Senate thirty in the House shoo-in, all over but the shouting. Why’s he so hot for my bod? Free Freeze is fat-cat Senator-Cabinet-Supreme-Court-Justice level bribe, and way out of line for purchasing kick-’em-in-the-ass Jack Barron. He’s popping cookies all over the lot—admitting to me Freezes can be bought or withheld for other than money. What’s the schtick, what’s he know I don’t, why’s got-it-in-the-bag Bennie Howards running so scared? Scared of me…

But shit, a Freeze beats a fancy funeral anyday Immortality… who knows what the next century can bring? Live forever, young, healthy, strong…? Nothing to lose in a free Freeze, worst thing can happen it’s all a shuck, and, baby, you’re dead then either way. Could I pull it off? Play Howards’ game, but subtly enough to keep the show? No sweat anyway, once Freeze Contract is signed in triplicate, Bennie can’t welch… But honest Jack Barron’d have nothing to hold legal water on paper, could cop-out on Bennie any time. Got Bennie by the balls, it seems. But why? Why? Fun and games out of my league? Play it cool, Jack, baby!

“I can smell the wood burning,” Howards said. “You can taste it, can’t you, Barron? Forever, a million years of life, for at most a few months of playing ball. Every man’s got his price, old saying, eh? But I’m something new; the coin I can pay, everyone’s selling.”

“Not so fast, Bennie-boy,” said Barron. “This smells like a dead flounder. Okay, so I admit that a Freeze Contract sounds interesting, buying my flesh at top dollar, and maybe, just maybe, I might like to take you up on it. But why’re you going so high to get me? You’ve got your Freezer Bill in the bag; you’ve got the muscle and grease to put it over in Congress, and we both know it. And besides, if you’re willing to offer Freezes as bribes, why bribe me, why not deal with the Foghorns direct? Jeez, I’m only thirty-eight, and the idea of a Freeze interests me, Senator or Congressman carrying around another thirty years should really be interested. It appears that I need you more than you need me, and you’re just being generous. But I just don’t figure you for the philanthropist type. Beware of Greeks and freaks bearing gifts, I always say, ’cause gift means poison in German.

“You’re holding out on me, Howards, and you’re playing in the big leagues. I find that a paranoid situation. You’re scared, don’t try to con me. You’re uptight about your Freezer Bill’s chances, and from what I know you shouldn’t be. Therefore I don’t know everything, but I damn well will before I even think about talking turkey.”

“It’s the race angle your goddamned show stirred up,” Howards told him with an obviously-put-on vehemence that put Barron uptight on guard. “All that crap from Greene and the rest of it turning every coon in the country against—”

“Hold it, Howards!” Barron snapped, bugged, but at the same time coldly calculating. “For openers, I told you I don’t like the word ‘coon,’ and besides, that’s all bullshit. Eighty per cent of the Negroes in the country vote SJC anyway, and the SJC is dead set against your bill, so how can you claim I cost you votes you never had in the first place? So you got the SJC and the Republicans against you for separate reasons, but that shouldn’t be uptighting you with Teddy Hennering your front-man and even Teddy the Pretender forced to cool it with the weight you swing in the Democratic party. Democrats control what—nearly two-thirds of Congress? And you got the other factions too spooked to make waves, and Hennering & Co is in your hip pocket. So what’s—”

“You mean you haven’t heard?” Howards asked.

“Heard what?”

“About Hennering.” Howards reached into his inside breast-pocket, then tossed a ragged clipping across the desk. Barron read:

“Happened late last night,” Howards said. “Now you see why I’m a little nervous. Hennering was our big front-man on the bill. With him dead, we’re not exactly in trouble but we’ve lost a piece of the edge we had and I don’t believe in taking chances. You can get that edge back for me and cool it with the coo—er, Negroes. That’s why I’m offering you a Freeze, Barron. Without you, the bill is almost certain to pass. But I don’t like almosts. I want it locked up. I want certainty.”

Hennering dead, thought Barron, so that’s it, Bennie-boy, you lost your chief presidential-puppet stooge means next President is Teddy the Pretender for sure, and he’s not quite in the old hip pocket. Yeah, that sure would uptight you, but…

But not about the Freezer Bill, he suddenly realized. Nothing really lost there but Hennering’s one lousy vote, and you got plenty of votes to spare. So why—?

Chill danger signals from somewhere from years of reflex-reaction to gambits of men of power flashed to Barron’s mind from gut-nerve endings saying: Big! Big! Big! All too pat too many loose ends not loose ends!

Hennering acting like walking corpse Wednesday night dead for real Friday morning, prepared clipping, prepared chain of answers from Howards each one more nitty-gritty seeming as if extracted under pressure. Buy Jack Barron to make shoo-in triple certain? Don’t add up, adds up to something bigger offstage that scares even Howards…

Play your cards right, Jack, baby! Gambler’s instinct: you’re holding the high ones, Bennie knows it, knows what they are, you don’t, so raise, raise, don’t call till you know how many aces you’re holding.

“Look Howards,” he said. “I haven’t had lunch yet, and I’m getting tired of being waltzed around the block. You’re holding out on me. I don’t know what you’re sitting on, but you’re sure as hell sitting on something. Hennering or no Hennering, you’ve got that Freezer Bill locked up, and don’t waste both our time by telling me otherwise. Let’s say I am interested in playing ball with you, why not, a free freeze you don’t throw away because your heart is pure. But I don’t go into anything blind, and that’s what you’re asking.”

Howards hesitated, pursed his lips, breathed heavily, picked his nose, opened his mouth, closed it, paused, opened it again, and said, “I want you to do a job for me, I don’t want a goddamn partner. You’re asking partner-type questions that’re none of your business. I’m paying you more than the job deserves, and I’m doing it only because I can easily afford it. Make it something other than easy, and you’ve blown it. I’m way out of your league, Barron, don’t push your luck.”

That’s exactly where it’s at, thought Barron. Bennie wants to buy himself another flunky, wants it real bad. Too bad. So I’m out of your league, Bennie-boy? Bread-wise, powerwise, maybe. Keep thinking that way, Howards, and you go home in a barrel. Maybe I’m in the wrong league, but you’re in the wrong game. Too much power too long to play bluff with me. Three yards and a cloud of dust’s where you’re at, can’t match fancy footwork with good old Jack Barren’s been thinking immelmanns around fatter cats too long, Mr Howards.

“Don’t push yours, Howards,” he said. “You can’t buy me only rent me as a free agent. You don’t buy me as a flunky or no deal. You tell me the truth, the whole truth and maybe you rent yourself an ally. You mickey mouse me much longer, and you’ve got yourself an enemy. I don’t think you can afford me as an enemy—if you could you wouldn’t be so hot for my bod.”

“Take my word for it, you don’t want to know what you think you do,” Howards said. “I’m not peddling cars or dope, and I’m not an entertainer. I play for the… the blood. Let it go, Barron, you’re out of your depth. This is so big… it’s none of your business. You got a chance to live forever, don’t blow it by trying to stick your nose in a meatgrinder. Yes or no, Barron, right here, right now. No more fencing.”

“You’ve had my final word,” Barron said, “and you can take it or leave it.”

“Look, let’s not be hasty,” Howards said, again with a weird shift of verbal gears to incomprehensible sweet reason. “I’ll give you a week. Think about it. Think about wormfood—and think about living forever.”

Schmuck! Barron thought. Bennie-boy, you blew it. Bennie Howards doesn’t back down from take-it-or-leave-it unless he thinks the answer will be leave it, and knows he can’t afford a leave it from Jack Barron. You’re hot for my bod, baby, and before you get it, do I put you through changes!

“Okay,” he said. “A week. For both of us to think about it.” And will you get something to think about next Wednesday, Mr Benedict Howards!

“That’s what I want, Vince,” Jack Barron said as Gelardi’s gray basilisk image did a double take on the vidphone screen. “That’s what I want, and it’s my show, and that’s what I’ll get.”

“I don’t get it,” Gelardi said. “This week you give me static for feeding you a call that just played footsie too hard with Howards, and now you want to aim a boot at his testes. What happened between Wednesday and today, man?”

Barron paused, considered, felt vidphone-camera circuitry carrying his image-words to Gelardi camera-to-camera, screen-to-screen-phosphor-dot patterns talking to each other, in control cool, keep it cool. Big stakes, Jack, baby, with free Freeze maybe just for openers, got to see what Howards has in the hole, how many cards he takes on draw. Play your own hand in this game, sorry, Vince, no kibitzers allowed.

“So Bennie Howards happened,” Barron said. “He happened all over this office about an hour ago.”

“So the show did put him uptight?”

“Uptight!” said Baron. “Bennie was uptight like Shabazz is black. I’m going to have to have the rug replaced, and there are still toothmarks on my throat. Howards blew his gourd. He threatened to strong-arm the network, lean on the sponsors, and get his flunkies on the FCC to put me on the shitlist, is all.”

“Did you cool him?” Gelardi asked nervously. Directing show and monkey block’s best gravy train you ever rode, eh, Vince? Barron thought. Get conniptions when I make waves.

“Cool him?” Barron said. “Cool him? I cooled him, all right, I told him to go take a flying fuck.”

Gelardi made a rude headshaking bellynoise, rolled his eyes upward. Barron smiled calculatingly inward. Need a good wrong reason to do the right thing, he thought, make Vince think highest all-time stakes still the show. Need Bug Jack Barron-oriented reason to knee Bennie in the groin.

“You’re crazy, you know that, Jack?” Gelardi said in dead earnest. “You keep telling me we don’t twist tigers’ tails, and now what do you do, you get Bennie Howards uptight, and then instead of cooling it you tell him to go fuck himself. And now we don’t have enough tsouris, you want a whole show aimed at Howards’ jugular. You on something stronger than our sponsor’s grass?”

“In words of one syllable, Vince,” Barron said, “we are in trouble. Howards was convinced I’m out to get him, and I couldn’t unconvince him. Therefore he informed me that he was going to get me, and we both know he can do it, given the time. At which point, knowing sweet reason would do no good, I told Bennie to fuck off, and I threatened him. I told him that what happened this week was just good clean fun compared to what would happen to him if he got fancy with me. Which is why we go after his ass on the next show—to give proof positive that I mean what I say, that there’s no percentage in really bugging Jack Barron even if you’ve got the muscle Howards’ got. We give Howards a taste of the fire next time, and he’ll back off. He thinks he’s got his Freezer Bill all locked up; I want to show him I can put it in doubt if he gives me reason enough to run the risk. We show him our claws, and he’ll suck in his, comprende, paisan?”

“Oh, my bleeding ulcer!” Gelardi said. “I dig the necessity now, but the network will have a shitfit.”

“Screw the network,” Barron said. “There’s three other networks would love to have Bug Jack Barron, and they know it. As long as we scare Howards off our backs they’ll rant and rave, but they won’t do squat. And that goes in spades for the sponsors. For the bread the show makes for all concerned, they can afford the milk to baby their ulcers. Question is, what kind of call can we count on getting next week that I can use against Howards? We can concoct a put-up job if we have to, but I don’t like that idea very much. If Howards or the network or the FCC found out we were faking calls…”

“How about a deathbed scene?” Gelardi suggested instantly. Good old Vince, Barron thought, give him an angle he can buy and he’s off to the races.

“Deathbed scene?” Barron asked.

“Sure,” said Gelardi. “We get at least half a dozen every week, crank stuff, I got standing orders with the monkey block not to let ’em past the first screen. Some cat’s croaking from something slow, usually cancer, usually on Social Security or Guaranteed Annual Wage, you know, like broke, and the whole goddamn family gathers ’round the vidphone with the prospective corpse as a prop and wants you to get the Foundation to give the old man a free Freeze. Tear-jerker stuff. Chances are we’ll even get one where the dying man does some of the talking. And it’s a safe bet we can add on the race angle again if we want to.”

Yeah, thought Barron, just the right touch. Milk it for maybe ten, fifteen minutes’ worth of hot angry tears, then put Bennie on (you know he’ll be answering his phone this time) for the rest of the show. Give him a taste of the whip, then it’s his option, then the knife again, then he makes more points, then another kick in the balls—cat and mouse, show him just where it’s at. Show him you can kill him stone-cold-dead, but back off the coup de grace, leaving the goose bleeding but with one more chance to give with the golden egg—and a fucking good show in the bargain!

“I like, I like,” Barron said. “But let’s lay off the race schtick this time round. He’ll be ready for that, and we want to hit him where he ain’t. Have the first screen boys feed all deathbed calls directly to you, and give me the best lily-white one you get.”

“You’re the boss, Jack,” Gelardi said. “But personally the whole schtick has me shaking. You hurt Howards too bad and you won’t scare him off, you’ll goad him into a kamikaze. You gonna really have to walk that line, man—and with both our jobs riding on it.”

“That’s the name of the game, Vince,” Barron told him. “You shove me out on the high wire, and I walk it. Trust old Uncle Jack.”

“Trust you like my brother,” Gelardi said.

“I didn’t know you had a brother.”

“Yeah,” Gelardi said, grinning. “He’s doing five to ten in Sing Sing for fraud. See you in the frying pan, Jack.”

“Clean?” said Benedict Howards, looking past the head of the faceless, bookkeeperish man, out the picture window at the soothing white walls of the main Freezer of the Long Island Freezer Complex, monolith of immortality power, safe from crawling maggots of incompetence like this Wintergreen, random servants of the fading black circle of death like Jack Barren. “No man’s clean, Wintergreen, and certainly not a man with a past as rank as Jack Barren’s—a founder of the Social Justice Coalition, ex-Berkeley rabble-rouser, boyhood buddy of every Peking-loving Commie son of a bitch in the country, and you tell me Barren’s clean? He’s about as clean as an open cesspool.”

Wintergreen fondled the fat manila folder he kept shuffling from his lap to the desk and back, worried it like a goddamned nervous kangaroo. “Well, of course, not that way, he’s not, Mr Howards,” he said. (Rabbity yes-man bastard! Howards thought.) “But this is a complete dossier on Barren, and there’s nothing in here we can use against him, nothing. I stake my reputation on that, sir.”

“You’re staking a hell of a lot more than your nonexistent reputation on it,” Howards told him. “Your job’s on the line, and your place in a Freezer too. I don’t keep a head of ‘Personnel Research’ to produce a shitload of useless paper on a man I want nailed to the wall, I pay you to find me a handle I can grab on a man. Every man’s got a handle, and you’re paid to find it.”

“But I can’t manufacture something that isn’t there,” Wintergreen whined. “Barren was never a member of any organization on the old Attorney General’s list even though plenty of his friends were. There’s nothing to link him to anything more damaging than technically-illegal demonstrations, and these days that kind of thing makes a man a hero, not a criminal. He isn’t even a member of the SJC anymore, hasn’t been since a year after he got his TV show. He makes large amounts of money, spends it freely, but keeps out of debt. He sleeps with large numbers of unattached women, engages in no illegal perversions, and takes no illegal drugs. There’s nothing in any of it we can use against him, and in that sense, which I trust is the sense you’re interested in, sir, he’s totally clean.” Wintergreen picked up the folder again, began bending down the edges.

“Stop playing with that damned thing!” Howards snapped. (Goddamn cretin, whole country’s full of cretins who can’t find their asses without a roadmap.) “So we can’t blackmail Barren,” he said, and saw Wintergreen wince at plain truth-word blackmail. Imagine him living forever, clerk forever, rabbity coward forever. Immortality’s for men with the balls to grab it, fight for it, fight from dry windy Panhandle to circles of power circles of forever, toss the rest to the fading black circle garbage disposal, only what they deserve—like damned fool coward Hennering.

“So some men can’t be blackmailed,” Howards said. “But every man can be bought, once you know his price. So we buy Jack Barren.”

“But you’ve already offered him the biggest possible bribe, a place in a Freezer,” Wintergreen said, “and he hasn’t taken it.”

“He hasn’t turned it down either,” said Howards. “I know men, which means I got a nose for their prices. That’s why I’m where I am today. Way I know your price down to the dollar—more money than you can spend, and a place in the Freezers when you croak, and you’re mine simply because I know the price you set on yourself and I can afford to meet it fully. Barron’s no different from you or anybody else; he wants that Freeze Contract, you can make book on that. He wants it just enough to let me use him on his terms. With that coin, I can buy his services just until he thinks he can double-cross me and get away with it. And once those contracts are signed, he will be able to get away with it. And a man like Barron, he won’t play ball till I do sign. You don’t screw around with a man like that; you’ve got to own him down to the soles of his shoes. And a free Freeze just won’t buy that. For that fee, he’ll play ball so long as I answer all his questions and he likes the answers.

“But that’s not the way Benedict Howards does business. It’s easier to buy a Jack Barron than to destroy him, good business too. What I need from you is something that will let me meet the rest of the price he sets on himself. There’s got to be something the man’s hungry for and can’t get for himself.”

“Well… there’s his ex-wife,” Wintergreen said hesitantly. “But there’s no way we can deliver her.”

“Ex-wife?” Howards hissed. (You dumb puffed-up three-score-and-ten errand-boy bastard, sitting right in front of you all the time, egomaniac like Barron’s got to have some woman means something more to him than a good lay. What they call it, mindfucker, yeah, hippie Bolshevik mindfucker’s got to have some woman’s mind to play with, means she’s got to be able to screw around with his.)

“Well what about his ex-wife, idiot? What’s her name? Why’d they break up, if Barron still wants her? This is what I was looking for from the beginning, man! Do I have to do all the thinking around here?”

“I’m afraid it’s hopeless, Mr Howards,” Wintergreen answered, again toying with the folder. Howards started to bark, then thought—what the hell, forget it, take the long view, patience, patience, easy when you got all the time in creation.

“Her name’s Sara Westerfeld. She lives right here in New York, in the Village. Does kinesthop interior effects. Barron met her when he was still a student at Berkeley. They lived together for a couple of years before they were married, and were divorced about two years after he got the show. I anticipated this coming up, Mr Howards, and had her investigated. It’s all bad, sir. She holds a membership card in the Social Justice Coalition, and she’s a loud supporter of the Public Freezer League, and you know how that kind feels about us. And from what we’ve been able to learn, she seems to hate Barron as much as she hates us. Seems to have something to do with his being a television star; she actually moved out on him only six months after he got the show.”

“Sounds like the last of the red-hot hippies,” Howards said. Dammit, he thought, figures Barron would have the hots for a Berkeley Bolshevik artsy-fartsy, hair-halfway-down-her-ass Berkeley Bolshevik loser-bitch! But she hates him, good, means he can’t get her himself, buy her, you’ve bought Jack Barron. Question is how you buy screwball kook Sara Westerfeld…?

“And who’s she sleeping with?” Howards asked on sudden, shrewd impulse.

“An easier question to answer,” Wintergreen said primly, “would be who isn’t she sleeping with. She seems to have gone to bed with every social misfit in the Village at one time or another—and without too many repeat performances. Obviously a nymphomaniac”

Click! Howards felt pieces of the pattern come together in his mind: Jack Barron screwing everyone in creation, ex-wife doing likewise but they were together a long time not likely they both go for one-night stands for no reason, no one does nothing for no reason. Probably both for the same reason. Barron’s got the itch for her, can’t scratch, is why he tries so hard, so she…

“Wintergreen,” he said, “it’s obvious that you don’t know a damn thing about women. She’s obviously still got an itch for Barren whether she hates his guts or not, and that’s why she’s working overtime trying to scratch it because she can’t scratch it without Barren—and she wants no part of him. And that’s the easiest kind of woman to buy, because she’s half bought already. Half loves Barren, half hates him. Give her an extra reason to go back to him and she’ll do it in a minute, because she wants an excuse to crawl back into bed with Barren. It means she wants to be bought, even if she doesn’t know it yet.”

Howards smiled, because best part is once I get her into bed with Barron I’ve bought her all the way because then the worst thing in the world for Miss Sara Westerfeld is for Barron to find out I’ve bought her, she’s a whore, my whore, she’ll do as she’s told, buy her, and you’ve bought Jack Barron.

“I want Sara Westerfeld in this office within five hours,” Howards said. “And I don’t care how you do it. Grab her, if you have to. Don’t worry. She won’t open her mouth, and won’t be pressing any charges after I get through with her.”

“But, Mr Howards, a woman like that, how can you…?”

“You let me worry about that. Obviously this is a girl with worms where her brains should be, and that kind you can always buy in the bargain basement. Get to it, man—and stop playing with that goddamned folder!”

Christ, I’m tired, Benedict Howards thought. Tired of having to do it all myself tired of dumb-ass politicians with qualms of conscience like Hennering tired of fighting from cold empty plains to oilfields stocks Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Washington circles of power, fighting doctors’ heads nodding nurses’ needles plastic tube up nose down throat life leaking away in plastic bottles, fighting fading black circle with money-fear power of life against death, fighting, fighting all the way alone idiots all the way incompetent phony sycophants useless fumbling fools lunatics stupidity lies all on the side of death, side of the fading black circle of nothingness closing in, smaller, smaller…

Won’t get Benedict Howards! Push you back, open you up, got you now, damn you! Palacci, Bruce, doctors, endocrinologists, surgeons, internists, Foundation flunkies, all against you, all owned by Benedict Howards, say I’ve got you this time, it works, endocrine balance stabilized Homeostatic Endocrine Balance, young, strong, healthy—feel it when I get up eat piss touch woman hot strong quick like in Dallas Los Angeles oilfield days, all night long, and hungry and strong in the morning, forever, Mr Howards, anabolism balances katabolism, Mr Howards, immortality, Mr Howards.

Fight, fight, fight, and now I’ve got it all. Got money-power, life-versus-death power, Senators (damn Hennering!), Governors, President…? (Goddamn bastard Hennering!), Mr Howards, got forever, Mr Howards.

And nobody takes forever away from Benedict Howards!

Not Teddy Hennering not Teddy the Pretender not nigger bastard Bolshevik Greene not smart-ass organ-grinder-monkey Jack Barron… Buy ’em, kill ’em, own ’em, all, men on the side of death, till only two kinds of men left: Foundation men and dead men, wormfood men, Mr Howards.

One last night to keep forever safe forever mine forever. Pass Utility Bill, find new flunky (son of a bitch Hennering), make him President, control it all, control Congress, White House, Freezers, power of life against death, immortality-power, all power against fading black circle, hold it back, push it back, open it up forever…

Then rest, rest ten thousand years of smooth cool women in air-cooled arenas of power, young, quick, strong, ten million years, rest spoils of battle forever, my women, my power my country my forever…

“Smart-ass Bolshevik con-artist Jack Barron thinks he can stand against me, con me, milk me, play power-games, threat-games, death-games with Benedict Howards no one plays games with Benedict Howards. Out of his league, squash him like a bug, buy him, own him, use him to pass Utility Bill despite coward Hennering. Own Barron own private pipeline to hundred million loser-slobs own them own fears minds votes bodies Congress White House country, safe when they find out safe, forever, safe.…

Last piece in pattern of power, Jack Barron, that’s all you are, smart-ass. Just last little piece to fit into pattern of Foundation life against death Senators, Governors, President, safety-power, little gear in big forever machine, little tin gear, Barron.

Stomp me, I stomp you, eh, Barron? Clean Jack Barron, nosy question-man bastard, Jack Barron. Think Foundation-power money-power life-against-death power can’t touch you? No one says no to Benedict Howards. I got the handle on you, Barron, find the handle on everyone, sooner or later.

Sara Westerfeld. Howards savored the name, tasted the syllables with his tongue. Dumb loser kook whore, but she’s got you by the balls, hasn’t she Barron? Think you’re strong, Barron, strong enough to play games with Benedict Howards…

Howards smiled, leaned back in his chair, waited, waited for Sara Westerfeld, Sara Westerfeld, the handle on Jack Barron. No man’s strong who’s weak for someone weak, he knew. Chain of command: Benedict Howards to Sara Westerfeld to Jack Barron to hundred million dumb slobs to Senators, Congressmen, President…

And all the links were already in place except the first one, the easiest one—Sara Westerfeld. Sara Westerfeld -bargain-basement stuff. Hates the Foundation, eh? Member of Public Freezer league…?

“Yeah,” Howards breathed aloud. That was it, that had to be it! Public freezer kooks want Federal Freezer Program so they (deadbeat-loser-slobs) can have place in a Freezer. Offer kook free Freeze, and she’ll sell out faster than you can buy. Price-tag on Sara Westerfeld: Jack Barron and Forever. And one’s her excuse to go get the other!

“Barren’s in my pocket, good as bought,” Howards thought. Sara Westerfeld, price of Jack Barron—lucky Sara Westerfeld!

Curiosity, fear, fascination, and contempt were a knot in her stomach… lightheadedness sense of vision bursting out of her head instead of coming in, stoned-electric-scalp-tingling, as Sara Westerfeld stepped out of the car, stood before the evil white dying-place-blankness of the main Freezer of the Long Island Freezer Complex.

Temple, she thought, it’s like an Aztec-Egyptian temple, with priests sacrificing to gods of ugliness and praying for alliances with snake-headed idols to ward off the god with no face, and all the time worshipping him with their fear. No-faced death-god, like a big white building without windows; and inside mummies in cold cold swaddling, sleeping in liquid helium amnion, waiting to be reborn.

She shivered as the balding man touched her elbow silently, priestlike, shivered as if she could feel the liquid helium space-cold sympathetic magic of the Foundation itself in his touch, the decayed-lizard death-touth of Benedict Howards, waiting for her, there in his bone-white windowless lair… Why? Why?

She followed the man who had come to her apartment with his all-too-polite invitation—politeness of dictators of Los Angeles cops Berkeley cops sinister Peter Lorre-secret-police politeness with paddy wagons riot cops cells guns booted feet waiting behind the crocodile smile—across a wide, green, somehow-plastic-seeming lawn, thinking it can’t happen here, we’ve got rights, writ of habeas corpus…

Sara shuddered. A corpus abducted into the Freezer could not be freed by all the court writs since the beginning of time, Not until the Foundation found a way to unfreeze bodies…

Get hold of yourself! No one’s going to Freeze you, just a little talk, the slimy creature said. With Benedict Howards. A little talk between an ant and an elephant. I’m afraid, she admitted, I don’t know of what, but oh, oh, I’m afraid. Power, that’s what he’d say, the arena, where it’s really at, nitty-gritty market-place of power baby.

That’s what he’d say, the cop-out bastard. Two of a kind, Jack and Howards. Jack’d know what to say, what not to say in fifteen different ways to tie that slimy lizard in knots. Just Jack’s bag.

Jack…

Across the lawn, down a path by the side of the Freezer, and into a smaller, windowed, outbuilding; cold, blue pastel hall with plush red carpeting, walnut doors, smells of secretaries, coffee, soft clickings of muted typewriters, human voices—an office building, no operating theaters, gurgling pumps bottled-blood chemical smells of Freezer building feel of layer on layer of Frozen dead waiting bodies bulging cold graveyard (colder than any graveyard) weight into the air of the corridor. Just an office building, lousy-decor office building, Texan industrially-designed tastelessness of Benedict Howards’ office building.

But it made her more afraid. Faceless building like windowless faceless Freezer faceless death-god Howards’ faceless polite message faceless polite messenger faceless-ness of Jack’s damned real world, power-world where people are faceless images to each other pawns on chessboard faceless game of life and death.

Never my world, she thought. Like overdose bummer-style reality, bad acid freakout, A head world, all sharp cutting edges paranoia. Feel like soft-flesh creature in metal forest world of knives, cocks like steel pistons.

Jack… Jack, you son of a bitch, why aren’t you here with me? Jack’d give you yours, Benedict Howards! Warm loving courage to light up the world, gauntlets thrown in faces of cops Berkeley cops Los Angeles cops Alabama cops rednecks’ fists judges, me and my man against all comers balling in open airy spaces feel of his body beside me in bed on one elbow on the phone with Luke setting the world straight our friends listening faces shining to the voice of hope in my bed making it all seem possible. A man is all, Benedict Howards, not perambulating lizard-creature, sweet cylinder of flesh, stronger, more enduring than oiled steel piston.

Oh, Jack, where did you lose it where is it where are you I need you now my knight in soft-flesh armor arms around my waist, facing down, shaming, howling mob with only your voice for a sword, our love for armor…

She shuddered as the bald man opened a door, led her through a deserted outer office—half-cup of coffee still on empty secretary’s desk, as if witness suddenly cleared away from scene of ghastly lizard-human flesh-steel assignation. And she remembered how alone, how totally alone, how separated in time and space she was from her one and only knight in rusty armor—all that was left of the Jack that was the pain of the memory.

And she remembered his last words to her, sad, lorn words, with not even the warmth of anger: “The time of the Children’s Crusade is over, baby. Find yourself a nice idealistic boy with a nice big dick, and maybe you’ll be happy. You can’t cut it with my world, you can’t cut it with me. I’ve got my piece of the action, and I don’t go back to being a loser even for you, Sara.” And he hadn’t even kissed her goodbye.

The chill of the memory forged a kind of steel within her. Holding the memory of the Jack that had been to her for warmth, and the image of the Jack that was for anger. She stepped into the inner office as the bald man stepped aside, holding the door for her, said: “Mr Howards, this is Sara Westerfeld.”

And closed the door behind her.

The man behind the ultra-stark, bare, teakwood desk (not his desk, she thought, he doesn’t use this office often, desk hasn’t been lived on) looked more like someone’s rich Uncle Bill—pink, square-dressed, loosely-pudgy in old-time 70s maroon suit and ascot—than Benedict Howards, swimming sharklike in currents of death-madness-power.

He motioned her to an expensive, badly-designed, uncomfortable teak-and-horsehide chair in front of the desk with a soft heavy hand, said: “Miss Westerfeld, I’m Benedict Howards.” And looked at her with eyes like black holes feral rodent eyes kinesthop eyes shiny shifting flashes of power-fear eyes junkie-intensity eyes that said here there be tigers.

“What do you want from me?” she asked, sinking on to the chair which she suddenly realized was purposely uncomfortable, cunningly designed to uptight asses, hotseat-interrogation chair, focus of paranoid A-head pattern of power.

Howards smiled a crocodile smile of false-uncle geniality, snapping pink face into a basilisk dead-flesh pattern around his shrewd mad eyes, said: “What I want from you, Miss Westerfeld, is nothing beside what I’m prepared to offer.”

“There’s nothing I could ever want from you,” she said, “and I can’t imagine what you could want from me. Unless (could it be as silly-safe as that?) you’d like some kinesthop pieces for this office. Maybe designs for the whole building? I’ve done office buildings before, and this place could certainly use—”

Howards cut her off with a pseudo-chuckle sound. “I’m much more interested in life than in art, aren’t you, Sara?” he asked. “Isn’t everyone?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. Then, with little-girl prim petulance: “And I never said you could call me Sara.”

Howards ignored it all as if speaking into a one-way vidphone connection. “You’re in the kinesthop business,” he said, “and I’m in the life business. The business of eternal life. Don’t you find that the least bit interesting?”

“I don’t find you or your horrid Foundation interesting at all,” she said. “You’re a loathsome man, and what you do is sickening and disgusting, setting a price on… on life itself. The only interesting thing about you, Mr Howards, is how you manage to look into a mirror without puking. What do you want from me, why did you drag me here?”

“No one dragged you here,” Howards said smoothly. “You came of your own free will. You weren’t abducted.”

“And if I hadn’t come of my own free will, I would’ve been abducted, wouldn’t I?” she said, feeling anger burning away fear. “You can go fuck yourself with your stainless-steel cock, Benedict Howards!”

“I’ll tell you why you came here of your own free will,” said Benedict Howards. “You can’t con me with that purity crap; no one cons Benedict Howards. You came here because you’re fascinated, like everyone else, you came here to get a whiff of forever. Forget about conning me, I’ve seen it all, isn’t a man or woman on Earth wouldn’t like a place in a Freezer ready and waiting when they die, wouldn’t want to know that when that black circle closes in, snuffs you out like a candle, it’s not forever, blackness isn’t forever they don’t fill you with formaldehyde and feed you to the worms, and no more Sara Westerfeld, not ever. Better to close your eyes that last time knowing it’s not the last time, doesn’t have to be a last time, in a century or a millenium—doesn’t matter ’cause all you feel is a good night’s sleep—they’ll thaw you out, fix you better than new, and you’re young, and healthy and beautiful forever. That’s why you came here, and no one’s twisting your arm, you can leave any time you want to. Go ahead, turn your back on immortality, I dare you.”

And all the while his eyes were measuring her like a sausage, cold weasel-eyes sulphur-satan eyes, watching his own words bounce back to him off her face, feeding back to his calm, sure, basilisk smile that said he knew it all, knew next words she would say why she would say them knew her insides knew her buttons better than she did, and for reasons of his own which she could never encompass, was about to push them.

“I… I don’t suppose you brought me here to discuss existential philosophy,” she said, wanly.

“Philosophy?” Benedict Howards said, making the word shit in his mouth. “I’m not giving you some Berkeley academic bullshit, I’m talking hard reality, woman—death, hardest reality there is. You know anything harder? I don’t, and I’ve looked death square in his ugly face, and you’d better believe that, fading closing circle of black with your life leaking away in tubes and bottles, is the ugliest face there is. And that’s going to happen to you, Sara Westerfeld, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Next week, or next year, or sixty years from now you’re gonna be looking down into that pit with no bottom, and the last thing you’ll ever think is that you’re never gonna think anything again. You took that in Philosophy at Berkeley, Miss Westerfeld?”

“What are you trying to do to me?” Sara screamed from the rim of a dark ug]y crater bottomless hole being nothingness spume of evil festering lizardman scrawling unspeakable terminal fear-images on the shithouse walls of her mind.

“I’m trying to buy you, Miss Westerfeld,” he said softly. “And believe me, you’ll be selling. No one says no to Benedict Howards. Because I pay good coin; I buy you totally, but I pay totally too. I buy with what everyone wants.”

“You’re insane!” Sara said. “I don’t want any part of you at any price for any reason at any time.”

“Think what it’s like to be dead,” Benedict Howards almost cooed hypnotically. “Dead… nothing but a pile of worm-eaten flesh rotting underground. That’s the end of you, Sara, the end of all your goddamned principles, the end of everything you ever were or wanted to be. You don’t beat death, Miss Westerfeld; everything else you ever do or don’t do adds up to nothing but a pile of garbage sooner or later. And it’s always sooner.”

“Why… why…” Sara mumbled. No one talks about things like that, she thought. You live with it by ignoring it, whiting it out, or they peel you screaming off walls. Why don’t you scream when you hear yourself, Benedict Howards?

“I’m telling you about death so you’ll value your life,” Howards continued, “your immortal life. Because you don’t have to die, Miss Westerfeld, not permanently, not ever. A place in a Freezer, secure, yours when you die—but you’ll never really die. You’ll just go to sleep old one day and wake up young the next. Doesn’t that beat being dead, Miss Westerfeld?”

“A place in the Freezer—in return for what? I don’t have that kind of money. Besides, it’s not fair—a few people who have something you want going on and on, and everyone else dying and gone forever. That’s what’s so horrid about you and your Foundation—people dying by the thousands and a couple million rich bastards like you living forever! A Public Freezer Program would—”

“Now who’s a goddamned philosopher?” sneered Benedict Howards. “Sure, no one should die. But since I can’t Freeze everyone, I Freeze those who have something to offer in return. I’m a monster because I can’t do favors for everyone? Public Freezer horseshit! I’ve got the only viable Freezer system that exists or ever’ll be; you do business with me, or you’re eaten by the worms. You’ll feel goddamned virtuous when you die, but it won’t make you any less dead. What do you say, you can get up and leave and never hear from me again?”

Aware only of her flesh, lips, blood-filled tongue, as she shaped the words, saliva-taste, tooth-feel of mortality, Sara said, “All right, so I’m still sitting here. Sure, I don’t want to die, but you don’t have me yet. There are still a few things I’d never do, not even to live forever.”

She flashed horror-images of fates worse than death on the screen of her mind: Mutilating Jack’s crotch with her teeth devouring living puppy whole rotting in ordure for a thousand years murdering her mother fucking Howards… Hungry hoping search for prices too high to pay to smug, ferret-eyed, all-knowing, A-head satan, she felt powerless in cutting-edge monster reality, knowing truth unbearable—death is the end, what crime too terrible to make her embrace it? Please, she prayed to her mind, let it be something too terrible to stomach!

“Relax,” said Benedict Howards. “I don’t want you to murder anyone, and I’m not hot for your body. You want to live forever you gotta do just one little thing. You gotta go get your ass in the sack with Jack Barron.”

It hit her where she wasn’t through no defenses at all to the soft womanflesh of her mind. No unspeakable blood-crime, just Jack’s mouth on mine again body hard angles filling me tearing me apart with sweetness laughing tongues together in our secret places mingling of juices—Jack! Jack!

But she saw the cold measuring eyes of Benedict Howards and it all made hard-edged power-sense. How much does this slimy thing know? she thought and knew that Howards must know everything, everything that factored into his pattern of power. Jack’s an important power-creature now, measurable quantity of A-head reality-power, measured by Howards, wanted by Howards, maybe feared by Howards too, and I’m just the price Jack sets on delivery: Sara Westerfeld, back in bed, in love like Berkeley days, but on now-Jack cop-out terms. Go back to Jack, and then live forever with lying ghost of years-dead Jack sunk so low he sends lizardman Howards to pimp for him…

“So Jack’s sunk this low?” she asked cynically. “And what’s he supposed to do for you when you deliver my body?”

Benedict Howards laughed. “You’ve got it all wrong. Barron knows nothing at all about this, and he never will. Not from me… and not from you either, eh? I’m not selling you to Barron. You’re going to get Barron to sell something to me. I want Jack Barron to sign a Freeze Contract just like the one I’m offering you. And that’s the deal. The day you get Barron to sign a Freeze Contract with the Foundation, I sign yours. And that’s all you’ll ever have to do with me, after that you and me are even. You can leave Barron or stay with him or even tell him the whole truth, it’s no skin off my teeth then. What do you say, isn’t it the bargain of a lifetime? A long, long lifetime…?”

“But I don’t love Jack,” she insisted. “I despise him almost as much as I despise you.”

“Your love life doesn’t concern me,” Howards said, “even though I’m reasonably sure you’re lying. Let’s not kid around, you’re not Little Mary Sunshine. You’re humping everything in creation. Tell me you’re in love with all of them. So make it with one more man who means… nothing to you for a couple of weeks, long enough to get him to sign that contract, and you’ve got immortality, and that’s more than you get for screwing half the Village. And we both know you can get him to sign, we both know he still loves you, eh? And who knows, you may find yourself liking it, we both know that too, don’t we, Miss Westerfeld?”

“You’re a foul, slimy man,” Sara whined. “I hate you! I hate you!” Turn your back on it, she told herself. Walk away walk away from forever forever walk away from horrid power-reality walk away from Jack from Howards let two lizard-men tear each other to pieces, they deserve each other.

But Jack… Jack’s in danger; sleepwalking through a forest of hard steel knives poor blind Jack surrounded by—blind… Yes! Yes! Blind! Oh, you fool, Benedict Howards, you horrid blind fool! And it spread itself out before her like a kinesthop gestalt vision in her mind: Jack, poor blind, cop-out Jack, sleepwalking dream of plastic success, faceless death-god Howards’ spiderweb trap spun from bone-white lair around him. Me, last thread in web of evil; love, my love, Jack’s love, used like spiderspit cable in pattern of power.

Could it really be Benedict Howards is such a foool? Fool, yes! Blind to love, tuned out from love’s power—the fatal flaw in the bone-white lizard-plan. Because turned-on Jack, angry Jack, love-filled Berkeley Jack-and-Sara Jack would become apocalyptic angel to destroy Howards destroy Foundation lovers strong against the night against which no faceless lizardman death-god could stand, against the old Jack Barron that was meant to awaken…

I’ll give you Jack Barron! she thought, but I’ll give you my Jack Barron. Be brave. Yes, yes, take the deal, go to Jack, love him, get him to sign the contract…

“Those contracts,” she said, tightly-contained, shrewd, “they’ll be the usual contracts, public irreversible? We both get to keep the legal copies?”

Howards smiled a knowing smile. “I’d hardly expect either of you to trust me,” he said. “You’ll both get standard contracts, in triplicate.”

“You’re a shrewd, ruthless, ugly man,” Sara said. “You knew you’d win in the end, and you have. It’s a deal.”

Yes, she thought, a deal. Dance to your tune till the contracts are signed, Jack and me together again, this time forever. Forever! And not the new-style cop-out Jack, but the old Berkeley Jack-and-Sara Jack. Yes! Drag Jack down, rub his nose in lizardman shit, then tell him, tell him every dirty word, how Howards used me, used him, uses everyone, made me his whore…

Then an angry Jack, apocalyptic angel to destroy you, Benedict Howards, Jack, my Jack, awake and alive again, Jack and Sara back together again the way it was meant to be. And this time, forever. Forever!

“A pleasure doing business with a girl like you,” said Benedict Howards with a sly smile, flashing ferret-eyes seeing into her belly, sending a cold fear-tremor through her secure have-cake-and-eat-it-too plans—how much does the lizardman know, how deeply do his weasel-eyes see?

Be brave, be brave! she told herself. Lizardman death-god’s blind to power of love color wavelength he just can’t see, can’t factor love into spiderweb of power. What kind of man could suppose he could turn warm soft love into cold steel-edged weapon of paranoid power?

“Marry me, Carrie baby,” Jack Barron said in the warm, naked afterglow of all night long as the morning sun shone through the bubble-skylight of the bedroom on the plastigrass greenery ivy-covered bedstead rubberplant patio off-pink flesh of Carrie Donaldson and wrote an Adam-and-Eve scenario for the penthouse bedroom set.

Carrie Donaldson muttered unintelligible sarcasm into the pillow beside him. She always wakes up hard, Barron thought, can’t stand a woman does the whole bleary, bruised, wilted-orchid schtick the morning after; Sara used to wake up on the bounce, on me, all over, bang-bang, wake me up, not vice-versa. You asked for it, Miss Donaldson, keep an eye-body-lock-on-the-kook-Jack-Barron network orders smart-ass chick.

He reached behind, fumbling through reptile-warm bedstead ivy, flipped a switch on the control console, waited for reaction as the glass wall-door to the patio slid aside and a naked May morning twenty-third floor breeze rippled plastigrass, tingled his toes, goosefleshed the trim uncovered ass of Carrie Donaldson. She squealed, reflex-fetaled against him, and looked up from the pillow hard-awake, said: “Fuck you, you goddamned sadist. I’m freezing!”

Barron turned a rheostat on the console to an intermediate position; electric heating coils built into the mattress began to send warmth up through their bodies, blood-temperature bed in crisp outdoor breezes. “I hope you don’t mean that literally; that was quite a night, and I don’t feel up to it. Let me catch my breath, anyway.”

“About as serious as your proposal,” she said, rolling over on her back away from him, small breasts foreshortened mounds bellyskin drumtight from protruding ribcage, juncture of long muscular legs still suffused with redness, Barron noted with masculine me-Tarzan satisfaction. “I think I know how Benedict Howards must feel.”

Barron arched an interrogative eyebrow.

“Thoroughly screwed,” Carrie Donaldson said with punchline deadpan flash-smile timing.

Barron uttered a short, pro forma laugh. Good old Carrie, he thought, favorite all-business nobullshit network watchdog All-American lay. He stared at her tight cool face, hard-edged, composed even under rat’s nest morning-after long black hair, wondered what went on in that network-flunky head of hers. Too good a fuck to fake it, he thought, but where’s the connection between her cunt and her head at, anyway? What’s she really getting off me? No better balling than she’d get from anyone else who could keep up with her one for one, and all the emotion of an anaconda. Head filled with open-secret network orders, box with plenty of heat for anyone who can cut it, and no gut-connection at all between. Just once, Miss Carrie Donaldson, I’d like to really fuck with you, fuck with that so-called mind of yours, that is. But how do you mindfuck network-programmed electric-circuitry-computer with sexy long black hair?

You bug me, Carrie, he thought, ball you week after week, lots of body action, and nothing going on with your head at all. Network calculation that fine? Are powers that be aware good old Jack Barron digs perpetual cool-head challenge without gut-involvement, stasis spice of sex-life, or too much smarts for network bigwig monkeys’?

“What’s going on in that furry head of yours?” Carrie said, flicking at hairs dribbling around his ears with fingers cool against his earshells.

“Now there’s a turn-around question if ever I—” Barron was interrupted by the chime of the bedroom vidphone extension. He twisted over on his back on one elbow to face the control console, punched the hold button, transferred the call to the living room complex, remote-activated the gas jets of the living room firepit, jumped out of bed, walked bare-ass into the living room, noted with wry amusement that Carrie, alerted to possible business function of call by network head-programming, was trailing, just as mother-naked, a few steps behind him.

Barron went to the wall complex, took the standard vidphone out of its niche next to the automatic vidphone recorder, sprawled on the deep-pile red carpeting, positioned the vidphone camera to show only his face, made the connection, impulsively turned on the recorder and said, “Jack Barron here,” as Carrie squatted down to his left, judiciously out of range of the vidphone camera.

Barron started as the vidphone screen showed the egg-bald skull, broad neoslavic face of Gregory Morris. Republican fluke (squeaking in between powerful SJC and Democratic candidates) Governor of California, de facto head of the semivestigial Republican Party, saw that Carrie recognized Morris—cool secretary-eyes a shade wider—he recovered his cool as he added up the points Morris had just made for him with Carrie.

“Good morning, Mr Barron,” Morris said, confident voice-of-power, fake-power, thought Barron, without a hell of a lot to back it up. “And congratulations.”

What the hell’s this? Barron thought, sneaking a glance at Carrie, eyes ever wider, wet lips open, digging bossman spoiled-brat network-charge lover flapping jaws with real live Governor in the altogether, knowing that whatever the fuck Morris wanted, what he meant to Jack Barron was a way to play with Carrie’s head, at last, knowing just how and for what he would play this call, with Brackett Audience Count of exactly one, namely Carrie Donaldson.

“Congratulations for what, Morris?” He said, flunky-accenting the name, and yes, now Carrie’s eyes were strictly eating him up.

“For your last show,” Morris said. “A first-rate hatchet-job. You must’ve cost Howards’ Freezer Bill five votes in the Senate, maybe a dozen in the House. You’re about to make history, Mr Barron. That show impressed a lot of people, important people. You know that the Republican Party opposes the Utility Bill because it would stifle free enterprise in the—”

“Horseshit,” Barron said, digging effect of word on notorious prude Morris, effect of effect on Carrie as Morris pretended the breach of fartsy gentleman etiquette hadn’t happened. “You oppose the Freezer Bill because there’s big Foundation money behind various Democrats, and you know you’re permanently off Howards’ gravy train, and you’d love to sell out too except Howards ain’t buying. It’s a little early in the day for mickey mousing, Morris. What’s on your mind?”

“Very well, Mr Barron,” Morris said, seeming to swallow enormous distaste according to some prearranged plan. “I’ll come right to the point. How would you like to be President of the United States?”

Barron froze around a smart-ass wisecrack reply that wouldn’t take form behind his eyes, froze in déjà vu Berkeley attic other girl seated on other floor big eyes honey-blonde hair digging him watching Luke Greene, Woody Kaplan, Markowitz, the girl with the pigtail, dark roomful of other eyes glowing, looking at him—birthplace of the Social Justice Coalition now controlled two Southern states, twenty-eight Congressmen, pivotal must-buy force in New York, every Southern state, Illinois, California. Full circle from Baby Bolshevik messiah dreaming of power in Berkeley attic Sara worshipfully staring to leader of screwball third party to Jack Barron plugged into electronic-circuitry-hundred-million-Americans to listening to pathetic relic gibber impossible desperation-dreams of returning expiring (now kook third party itself) GOP to power.

“Do I get to choose Luke Greene for my running mate?” Barron shot back a matching improbability.

“Conceivably,” said Morris. Barren’s turn to be jarred again at incomprehensible answer; the SJC and the Republicans were at opposite extremes of everything except for a mutual loathing for the monolithic center-dominating Democratic one-party government Party. Morris must really be around the bend, or… what?

Barron clocked Carrie, now totally absorbed in the dialogue he saw she saw as jockeying between two men of power, not private, for-her-benefit-only performance of Bug Jack Barron—at last a scene to swallow up network programming in that head of hers, blow secretary-network-watchdog cool. At least Carrie’s buying Morris’ load of bull, hook, line, and sinker.

“Okay, Morris,” said Barron, “so you’ve got a pitch to make; go ahead and make it.”

“It’s simple, Barron,” Morris said. (Barron could sense him shifting into set-spiel pattern.) “The Republican Party has elected only two Presidents since Roosevelt, and we’ve got to win next year to continue to be taken seriously. And we can’t afford to be choosy as to how. The only way we can conceivably win the election is as part of a coalition with the SJC behind a common presidential candidate and on an overriding common issue.

“The only common ground we have with the Social Justice Coalition is opposition to the Freezer Utility Bill.

They want public Freezing and we want competitive private Freezing. But we can both agree on opposing the Democratic position, which amounts to the Foundation position. The only man we can nominate who could also get the SJC nomination is you. You’re a founder of the SJC, you’ve just knifed Benedict Howards, you’re a close friend of Luke Greene, and you’ve got Bug Jack Barron.

“A hundred million people will see you every week from now till Election Day. We can do with you what we did with Reagan, and do it in spades, using the program, and by the time you’re nominated you’ll already have a bigger following than any possible Democratic candidate. I’m dead serious, Barron. Play our game, and we’ll make you President of the United States.”

President of the United States. The words made weird acid music (’Hail to the Chief,” with electric guitar beat, natch) even coming from a pathetic lunatic. Barron was vastly amused at the reflex-response in his own gut, recalling aural memories of the Inauguration of JFK, more amused pleased at pole-axed Carrie Donaldson staring at him, eyes as bright with little-girl wonder as Sara’s had ever been in Berkeley days. Didn’t know you were balling the next President of the United States, eh, baby? Jesus H. Christ on a Harley-Davidson!

Barron leaned back accidentally on purpose, kicked the vidphone, tilting it sideways and up, giving Morris a nice shot of Carrie’s boobs, fumbled it enough, smiling, to show Morris he was speaking to totally bare-ass Jack Barron, watched Morris blanch.

“Come on, man,” Barron said, scratching his balls ostentatiously, “even the next President’s gotta get laid once in a while.” (Let’s just see how much crap this stuff-shirt fruitcake will really take.)

“Well,” Morris said through miser-purse drawstring-lips, “what do you say, Barron?”

“What do I say?” exclaimed Jack Barron. “I say you’re out of your fucking mind, is all. For openers… openers,” This is all so loopy there ain’t no openers, gotta hand it to you, you’re a nut, but at least you’re a nut with style. First of all, I loathe everything you stand for. The Republican Party these days is nothing but a collection of Little Old Ladies from Pasadena, Wallacite screwballs and paranoid fat-cat misers whose idea of a good President is someone about ten light-years to the right of Adolph Hitler. You couldn’t win a Presidential election with Jesus Christ and John Fitzgerald Kennedy on the ticket. Why don’t you crawl back under your wet rock where you belong? Way I see it, a Republican label is a dose of political tertiary syphilis. Do you get the impression I don’t care for your Party, Governor Morris?”

“I didn’t think you were all that naive, Barron,” said Morris, and now Barron saw the naked, ugly, raw, nobullshit nitty-gritty in his face, in his voice, remembered that fluke or not, this was the Governor of the largest state in the Union, that hopeless, kook, perpetual-loser party that it was, the GOP still had great gobs of industrialist Madison Avenue Wall Street insurance company banking money behind it, and now Morris was reminding him of it with face, voice, bearing. “You think we don’t know exactly what you are, what you’ve been, and what you think of us? You really believe we’re all that stupid, Barron?”

“And you’re still trying to sell me the Republican nomination,” Barron said, sudden déjà vu of Morris’ face becoming Howards’ face, Morris’ deal becoming Howards’ deal, intimations of wheels within wheels within wheels of power meshing, clashing, one invisible Frankenstein Monster, with Howards and Morris but two visible aspects of the same unseen iceberg.

“Yes,” said Morris, “but not because we like your smell. I loathe you as much as you loathe me, but we both know that when you reach the upper levels of power there are times when you’ve got to set all that aside for strategic reasons. You’re a marketable commodity, Barron, like a nice ripe Limburger, an image behind which we can unite with the SJC to win the Presidency, the only image that can create a Republican-SJC fusion against the Democrats and Howards. Image, Barron, image is what counts—like Eisenhower or Reagan—not the man. We need your image, and Bug Jack Barron to sell it, and never mind what the real man behind the image is like. That doesn’t win elections. All the voters ever see is the image.”

For a hot moment Jack Barron forgot Carrie, wide-eyed, naked, power-adoring beside him; forgot economic sponsor-network squeezing-power of GOP, forgot Bug Jack Barron, was back in Berkeley Los Angeles red-hot Baby-Bolshevik Sara beside him close to the blood-innocent-fury days.

“And if I accept—and if I’m elected,” he said coldly, “think I’d really make a good little Republican President?”

“That’s our problem,” Morris said. “We both know you’re no politician, but neither was Eisenhower. You’ll have plenty of the right advisors, men of substance and experience to run the government for you. You won’t have to worry about—”

“I’m nobody’s whore, and don’t you forget it!” Barron shouted. “You don’t sell Jack Barron like soap, then toss him aside like a used condom when you’ve gotten what you came for. You can take your goddam nomination and shove it up your ass! You’re right, I’m no politician, and if you want the reason, look in a mirror sometime if you’ve got a strong enough stomach. You’re lower than a Mexican bordertown pimp; you’d have to stand on top the Empire State Building to reach a cockroach’s balls. You and your kind are vermin, lice, clots in the bloodstream of humanity. You’re not fit to clean my toilet bowl. I’m an entertainer, not a whore. Value given for value received. You’re the last of the dinosaurs, Morris, and it’ll be a pleasure to watch you sink screaming into the tarpits where you belong.”

“Who the hell do you think you are?” Morris practically snake-hissed. “You don’t talk to me like that, and get away with it! You play my game, or I’ll destroy you, lean on your sponsors, pressure the—”

Jack Baron laughed a harsh, false, tension-release laugh. Every schmuck in the country thinks he’s got more going than poor old Jack Barron, he thought. Howards, Morris—matched pair of cretins.

“You’re pathetic, you know that, Morris?” he said, “Know why? Because I’ve got this whole call on tape, that’s why. Your fat face and your big mouth, all ready to run on Bug Jack Barron any time I find you—shall we say, tiresome? You’ve taken your cock out in front of cameras, and I can play it back to a hundred million people any time I want to. You’re naked, Morris, bare-ass naked! I get a hint, or even just a vibration that you’re making waves in my direction, and, baby, I lower the boom. Go stick your tongue out at babies, Morris, you’re wasting your time trying to scare me.”

“Think it over,” Morris said, suddenly forcing himself back into a tone of sweet-pimp reason. “You’re letting the chance of a lifetime go—”

“Ah, fuck off!” Barron said, as he broke the connection, shut off the recorder.

“Jack…” Carrie Donaldson sighed, throwing arms around his waist, wilting to her knees, lips sucking him in naked-lap, wish-fulfilment fantasy Carrie blowing him, her mind blown network orders blown cool blown going down on bossman mindfucker, raped by simple Bug Jack Barron style vip putdown session. But now Barron saw it for the silly-ass goddamned inverted Sara-fantasy it was: Carrie-Sara turned on all the way by Bug Jack Barron scene, turned off the genuine article. Last thing I want now, he thought, pulling away from her, is to be blown by a wet-dream ghost.

“Later, baby,” he said, “that lox just turned me off.” And on impulse (Bug Jack Barron subliminal walk-that-line balancing-act impulse, he thought wryly even as he dialed) he dialed the unlisted home vidphone number of Lukas Greene.

Greene’s angular black face bleared at him on the vidphone screen over a coffee cup, the master bedroom of the Governor’s Mansion vaguely opulent in the background. “It’s you, eh, Claude,” Greene said, glancing at something off-camera. “Jack Barron—at this hour?”

“Come on, Lothar,” said Barron, “you know I’m a clean liver.”

“Percy,” Greene said, “I’ve seen cleaner livers smothered in onions in Harlem greasy-spoons. Speaking of which—where the hell’s my breakfast?” And almost immediately a white-clad Negro flitted briefly across the screen carrying a breakfast tray, set it down on the bed, and disappeared silently into the woodwork.

“Beauregard,” Barron said grinning, “gotta hand it to you Southern gentlemen types. Really got them darkies trained right, don’t you?”

Greene nibbled a slice of bacon, dabbed at egg yolk with a roll, said: “You Commie nigger-loving Northern Liberal faggots is just jealous of Southern-style gracious living. We loves our darkies down here. We just loves ’em, and they loves us; any that don’t, why we just hang ’em from a sour-apple tree. Hey, why you bugging an important man like me at this hour, shade? It ain’t Wednesday night, and we’re not on the air—I hope.”

“Guess who I just got a call from?” Barron said, clocking how Carrie was even more zonked out at the nitty-gritty race-humor between shade Jack Barron and the black Governor of Mississippi.

“The ghost of Dylan? Teddy the Pretender?”

“Would you believe Daddy Warbucks?” said Jack Barron.

“Huh?”

“Greg Morris,” said Barron. “Amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it? Would you believe you’re talking to the next President of the United States?”

Greene took a long drink of coffee. “A little early for you to be stoned, isn’t it?” he said seriously.

“Straight poop, Kingfish,” Barron answered. “Morris offered me the Republican Presidential nomination.”

“Come on, man, stop putting me on, and come to the punchline already.”

“I’m not kidding,” said Barron, “it’s for real, Luke. The schmuck thinks I could get the SJC to nominate me too, put together a fusion ticket, and we could all go out and zap the Pretender.”

“I still think you’re putting me on,” said Greene. “You, a Republican and the SJC in bed with those Neanderthals? Either you’re putting me on, or the good Governor of California’s finally gone around the bend. How could the Republicans and the SJC possibly get together on anything?”

“Morris seems to think opposition to the Freezer Bill’s a big enough common issue to brush everything else under the rug,” Barron said. “The fusion ticket doesn’t run on any common platform, way he sees it, it just runs against Bennie Howards. Loopy, eh, Rastus?”

Barron felt a long loud silence as Greene sipped coffee, eyes becoming cold, hard, calculating, saw Carrie, still looking at him hungrily, shift her eyes to stare at the vidphone image of Luke, smelt flesh-wood of Carrie, image-wood of Luke burning. Doesn’t anyone have a sense of humor left but me?

“This is for real, isn’t it, Jack?” Lukas Greene at last said quietly.

“For chrissakes, Luke—”

“Hold on, Vladimir,” said Greene. “I’m getting a flash. You. Bug Jack Barron. Republican bread—and they are still flush. You know, it could work. It just might work. Bennie Howards as bogey-man, we wouldn’t really have to run you against Teddy. Yeah, we just ignore the Pretender, link the Democrats with the Foundation, and we’ve got your show to do it with. A Social Justice President

“Come on, man, what planet did you say you came from?” Barron said, the joke no longer funny. Crazy Luke thinks he’s back in Berkeley wet-dream power-fantasy delusion of grandeur. “You can’t be that dumb, Morris just wants to use the SJC to elect a Republican President, and if he does, he’ll feed all you overgrown Baby Bolsheviks to the fishes. He just wants a fusion figurehead image to lurk behind, is all.”

“Sure,” agreed Greene, “but that figurehead is good old Jack Barron. Even Morris knows what a cop-out you are, so he thinks you’d be a tame flunky. But I know you better, Adolph. Comes nitty-gritty time, I think you’ll remember who you once were. I may be crazy, but I’d be willing to trust you that far. I think the National Council would too, after I got through working on their heads. You get that Republican nomination, and I can get you the SJC nomination. Maybe I am talking to the next President. What did you tell Morris?”

“What do you think I told him?” Barron snapped. “I told him to go fuck himself. You gone around the bend too, Rastus?”

Greene frowned. “You and your big mouth,” he said.

“Hmmm… Morris has got to know where you’re at for openers, so maybe you haven’t gone and blown it. You got that call on tape?” Greene smiled knowingly. “Sure you have. Claude, I know how your head works. How about blipping me the audio?”

“Forget it, Luke,” Barron said. “This is your line of evil, not mine, not anymore. I’m not selling out to Morris or to you either. I sell out to anyone it’s to—” Barron caught himself short; name he was about to say was Bennie Howards. Yeah, he thought, you sell out at all, risk blowing the show, you damn well do it for the big forever boodle and not a half-assed pipedream… Hey wait… . All these silly-ass politicians can maybe give me an extra ace up my sleeve in a poker game with Howards. Why not?

“Come on man,” Greene cajoled, “humor me. Blip me the call. You got your jollies out of it, let me get mine. Nothing else, maybe we can use it against whoever the Republicans—do come up with. That doesn’t hurt you, does it, oh noble hero Jack Barron? Might even boost your ratings.”

“Since you’re twisting my arm, I’ll blip it to you on one condition,” said Barron. “Unless I give you the go-ahead—and I won’t—you keep it strictly private. Just between you and me. Okay?”

“Beggars can’t be choosy,” Greene said. “I’ll set my recorder for the blip.” He did something off camera. “Fire when ready, Gridley.”

Barron took the tape reel off his recorder, placed it on the input spool of the blipper built into his wall complex, fed it into the blipper. “Ready at this end,” he said.

“Blip away,” said Lukas Greene.

Barron pressed the blip button; the blipper compressed the sound of the phone conversation into about ninety seconds of high-pitched chipmunk gabble over the vidphone circuit to Greene’s recorder in Mississippi, to be fed into a deblipping circuit, give Luke his Machiavellian eat-your-heart-out-baby jollies.

“Got it,” Greene said. “Unless you have any more Earth-shaking revelations, Claude, I think I better tend to the business of the state of Mississippi. Later.”

That hot to hear it, eh, Rastus? Barron thought. “I never deprive a maroon of his simple-minded pleasures. Later, Lothar,” he said, broke the connection.

“Jack…” Carrie snaked across the rug arms around his chest wide eyes visions of larger than life sugar-plums of power tickets to circles where it’s at, magic image-musk goddamned eyes why always those goddamned fever-coated eyes same eyes every bitch knows my name sees my dick, gets eyes like fucking vacuum cleaners suck-me-dry eyes for living-color latest Brackett Count hundred million Americans Jack Barron. Now you too, Carrie Donaldson, cool network-programmed secretary-robot with red-hot cunt don’t buy bargain-basement Bug Jack Barron image-bullshit too close to home, but let schmuck Morris, crazy Luke whistle “Hail to the Chief,” and it’s welcome to the club, Carrie, baby.

Hey what’s with you man? Barron asked himself as Carrie Donaldson worried his lips with her moist, frantic tongue. Ten minutes ago you wanted action you’re getting right now—Carrie’s mind totally blown fucked out whited out overscrewed in all mental orifices—and you played it for this, is why you riffed with Morris in the first place. Well, isn’t it?

A sudden flash of insight as Carrie directed her demands to nitty-gritty primary limp and pouting organ, bugged ego-extension of him in her smooth cool hands cradling, wheedling, finally stimulating cold reflex hard-on as he felt blood, attention, desire flow mechanically into it—no chick since Sara had done as much time in the sack as Carrie Donaldson, steady couple-times-a-week cool detached lay for months and months, static strictly belly-to-belly nonrelationship had bugged him with network-orders, head unattached to warm-flesh cunt. But now, with Carrie’s cool blown the way he thought he had wanted it, Barron saw that the cool itself was why he kept screwing Carrie—sanity-contrast to an endless string of image-fucking Wednesday-night honey-haired Saras. And now she was a member of Bug Jack Barron goddamned vacuum-eyed fan club, giving him Wednesday-night-style déjà vu head wet-dream Sara dream on-her-knees dream eating-kick-’em-in-the-ass world-famous Presidential timber so dumb bitch thinks Jack Barron wet-dream wish-fulfilment déjà vu Carrie, like all the others déjà vu masturbation-ghosts, not the real thing, one more flesh-and-hair ersatz, not Sara, no longer Carrie. And not Sara. Not ever Sara.

His betraying organ stiff and hard, his mind cold, cold light-years distant and nothing but nothing inbetween, Barron rose to his feet, haughty-ironic Great Man hands-on-hips statue, held the immobile mock-heroic posture as warm undulating lips, caressing tongue, frantic rolling half-closed eyes sent waves of hot thick pleasure through thighs, balls, mindless pulsing independent organ: pleasure-waves that stopped stone-cold dead at his waist.

Enjoy, enjoy, Carrie baby, he thought, feeling the spasm building through ten thousand miles of electric circuit insulation. Make it good, old hot-mouthed Carrie, ’cause it’s the last action you’ll ever get from Jack Barron.

Staring into the naked orange flames of the firepit, naked flesh, naked Carrie Donaldson on the bare rug in exhausted, sated semi-sleep beside him, Jack Barron felt a carapace of image-history-skin encysting him like steel walls of a TV set, a creature imprisoned in the electronic circuitry of his own head perceiving through promptboard vidphone fleshless electronic speed of light ersatz senses, separated from the girl beside him by the phosphor-dot impenetrable glass TV screen Great Wall of China of his own image.

First time I remember being blown feeling like wet putdown ugliness, he brooded. Ugly, he told himself, is a thing you feel—truth is ugly when it’s a weapon, lie is beautiful when an act of love ugly when it’s one-sided fuck is beautiful when it’s simple, mutual, nobullshit balling, ugly when chick gets her kicks off you that really isn’t there, is why you feel like a rotten lump of shit, man. Getting blown Sara go down being dug by woman’s a pure gas; being sucked off, image-statue living lie, someone else’s lie being eaten (Let me eat you, let me eat you, baby!) is a dirty act of plastic cannibalism, her dirtiness, not mine.

Whole world’s full of plastic cannibals feeding their own little bags off meals of my goddamned image-flesh, eating Jack Barron ghost that isn’t there. And now Morris and my so-called friend Luke are hot to package my living-color bod into TV dinners, sell to hundred million viewer-voter cannibals for thirty pieces of power silver.

Anyone sells my body, he thought, it’ll be me, the real thing to Howards for life eternal in the flesh, not to Luke or Morris for an asterisk losing candidate gravemarker in a history book nobody reads. But something’s happening there too, and you don’t quite know what it is, do you, Mr Jones? Howards-Morris-Luke daisy-chain of power-wheeler-dealers at each other’s throats, all with eyes for Jack Barron as a spare set of false fangs. Too much action in too scary a league to be pure coincidence, something’s up, big glob of shit about to hit National fan, and no one ready to give the straight scam to Jack Barron.

Well, we’ll see about that on Wednesday night, Bennie Howards, see how much cool you keep in Bug Jack Barron hotseat, after all, man, you’re now playing poker with goddamned Presidential timber hotshot, gonna have to lay all your cards on the table to stay in that bullshit game, Bennie-baby. Yeah, you’re in the catbird-seat man, like top trick in a high-class whorehouse, you are—

The vidphone chime interrupted his Germanic self-pity petulance, and good riddance, Jack Barron thought as the familiar stimulus triggered ironic Jack digging vidphone Jack Barron conditioned cynical response. Even money it’s Teddy the Pretender himself, he thought wryly, every other power-junkie around’s tried to score off dealer Jack Barron already.

But the honey-blonde, big dark-brown-eyed (mind’s eye supplying living-color to black and white vidphone image) face on the vidphone screen blew his cool to the far side of the moon as he made the connection and the best he could do was to stammer: “Sara…”

“Hello, Jack,” said Sara Westerfeld.

Barron felt a moment of empty, aware-of-his-bare-ass-nakedness blank numbness, sensed the same helpless vacuum behind Sara’s frightened-deer eyes, searched for cue to a reaction-pattern on the blank promptboard in his mind, heard his irony-armored voice saying, “Sadism or masochism, what’s on your acid-soaked mind, baby?”

“It’s been a long time,” Sara began, and Barron frantically scrabbling for a protocol-reaction-pattern to the ghost of a thousand body-to-body aching memory nights, fell on the inanity like a starving man on a slice of moldy bread.

“No shit?” he said. “I thought you went out to cop some pot six years ago. Get stuck in traffic, Sara?”

“Do you have to, Jack?” she pleaded helplessly with her eyes. “Do we have to chop each other to pieces?”

“We don’t have to do anything,” he said, felt bitterness rising. “You called me, I didn’t call you. I’d never call you. What in hell can I possibly say to you? What can you say to me? You stoned? You freaking out? Whose head are you playing with now, yours or mine?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry for everything. Hang up if you want to. Who could blame you? I… I want to see you, Jack, I want to talk to you. I…”

“You got a TV, turn it on Wednesday night, and you can see me. Pick up a vidphone and call the monkey block, make it good, and Vince’ll put you on the air. What’s this all about? It’s been six years, Sara, six fucking years, and now you say ‘Hello, Jack,’ and expect me to come running? Where did you leave your head, Sara?”

“Please…” she said, with the iron defenses of softwoman defenselessness. “You think this is easy for me? I—” (A blankness, a panic seemed to move like a cloud across the sky of her eyes; she hesitated, then began to talk faster and faster.) “I saw your last show, by accident, I admit, but I saw something there I thought was dead. Saw flashes, just flashes in all that bullshit, but they were flashes of you. I mean the real you, like flickering, but it was there, and it was you, and every time it flashed through it went through me like a knife. And, God help me, I couldn’t help loving you, all alone there inside that TV set, all alone inside, flashing between the real Jack and the cop-out Jack, not knowing which was real, and I didn’t know which was real—the Jack I loved, or the Jack I hated and I loved you, and I hated you, and I knew I still had a piece of you inside me, couldn’t get rid of it, and… and…”

“You were stoned, weren’t you?” Barron said with intentional cynical cruelty. “Acid, wasn’t it?”

Again that hesitation, like a slot-machine mechanism behind her eyes, before she spoke. “I… yes, it was a trip. Maybe… maybe that was it, seeing your show with new eyes, old eyes, like old-new eyes, I mean part of me was back in Berkeley, and part of me was with you that last time, and part of me was inside that TV set with you, and… I’ve got to see you, got to know whether it was the acid or…”

“So now I’m a goddamned zonk!” Barron snapped. “Like a kaleidoscope or one of your old Dylan records, something to freak out to. Did you bring yourself off? See colored lights? I don’t want to be any part of your bum trips—not even by proxy. You’re turning my stomach, calling me up like this, stoned out of your mind. Forget it, baby. Go ride the Staten Island Ferry and pick up a horny sailor and fuck with his head, because I’m not about to let you play acid games with mine, not any more. Not ever again.”

“I’m not stoned now, Jack,” she said quietly. “I’m straight, maybe straighter than I’ve ever been in my life. We all go through changes. I watched you go through yours, and I couldn’t take it. Now I think I’ve gone through one of my own, a big one. It happens like that sometimes, six years of things just happening to you but not really getting through to your head, and then something, acid plus something, maybe something silly and meaningless triggers the big flash, and suddenly all those six years come through all the way at once and you feel them, feel the years before too, and all the possible futures, all in a moment, and nothing’s happened in that moment that anyone else can see, but you’re just not the same you anymore. There’s a gap, a discontinuity, and you know you can’t go back to being what you’ve been but you don’t yet know what you are.

“And only you can tell me, Jack. I’ve got no present now, and you’re my past, and maybe—if I’m not just finally flipping out—if you still want me, my future too. I see another side of you now. I see that you can see things I don’t, and now I’m not so certain that they’re all bad. Help me, Jack. If you ever loved me, please help me now.”

“Sara—” Sara, you crazy bitch, don’t do this to me, put me on, stretch me out like piano wire, play arpeggios on my skull, Ping-Pong with my balls, Barron thought, trying desperately to hug his cynicism-shield to him against the tide washing over him tide of Berkeley cool love-stained sheets tongue in his ear hour-glass comfort-shape unseen by his side to lean on warm breezes cool bougainvillea-fragrant California nights in Los Angeles, Berkeley, Acapulco breathing potsmoke-musk mouth to mouth in rumpled snuggle-beds close to the blood years innocent tomorrow the world years lost years, six years lost and gone and buried in the bodies of Wednesday-night image-balling blondes, and the song of those years that she sang with her off-key beautiful girl-voices sad, wistful, in happy laughing times, prescient sadness of Christmas future song:

And when will you ever learn, Jack Barron? In your guts, you know she’s nuts; but in your heart… In your heart is an empty Sara-sized hole, not Carrie, not Wednesday night déjà vu, not anyone but Sara can ever fill if you live million years geological ages promise of Benedict Howards… You’re a Sara-junkie, nothing you can do about it, baby, she’s the only dealer in town.

“Jack… say something, Jack…”

“Do I have to?” he said—soft surrender to the ghost of hope that would not die. I can do it. I can do it, he told himself. I’m kick-’em-in-the-ass Jack Barron can handle Senators, vips, Howards, Morris, Luke, big-league curve-ball artists; Jack Barron afraid to play the big game, love game (game is all!) for only woman I ever love? I’ll help you, baby, give you the boost to nitty-gritty reality. You and me in Bug Jack Barron twenty-third-story penthouse catbird-seat home, fill the rooms with your taste-smell-feel song of home. All for you, Sara, where you should’ve been all these years. And if it was really acid that opened your eyes, then three big ones for Crazy Tim Leary.

“When can I see you?” he asked.

“As soon as you can get here.”

“I’ll be down in forty-five minutes,” Jack Barron said. “God, oh God, how I’ve missed you!”

“I’ve missed you too,” she said, and he thought he could see her eyes misting.

“Forty-five minutes,” he said, then broke the connection, rose, turning for bedroom clothes and shoes and car keys.

And stood there nose to nose with naked, white-faced Carrie Donaldson, her breasts limp and drooping like wilted hospital flowers.

“Don’t say it,” she said in her office-secretary voice. “Don’t say anything, Mr Barron. It’s all been said, hasn’t it? All explained nice and neat. And I thought it was just because you were too… too big and important and filled with your work to have room to care about… I thought if I made you comfortable, made it easy, no hang-ups, no bullshit, call me when you want me, warm your bed whenever it got cold, then someday maybe you’d wake up nice and easy, slowlike and see that… that… But I was wrong, I misjudged you… I wonder what it’s like to be loved the way you love her. Way the world is, I wonder if I’ll ever get to know…”

“Carrie, I didn’t… I couldn’t… I thought the network…”

“The network! I may be a lot of nasty things, Jack Barron, but as I just heard someone else say, I’m nobody’s whore!” she shouted. “Sure I was supposed to keep an eye on you, but you don’t think that…” She began to tremble, tears formed in her eyes and she tilted her head back to hide them, making her look proud, gutsy.

Oh, Christ, what a blind shit you are, Jack Barron! he thought as she stood there, taller in his eyes than she had ever been, and yet he still felt nothing for her, never had, couldn’t even fake a moment of it now. “Why didn’t you say something?” was all he could say.

“Would it have mattered? You know it wouldn’t. You’ve always been too hung on her to look at me or any other woman and see anyone that counted. And at least this way… you’ve been a good lay, Jack Barron. Too bad… Too bad I’ll never be able to bring myself to touch you again.”

And all he could throw to her was a tiny morsel as he went to the bedroom to dress and allowed her the dignity of crying alone.