Bug Jack Barron

10

The vidphone chime began to sound again. Sara Westerfeld walked barefooted over to the wall complex, reached for the phone, hesitated, then once again let it lapse into silence without answering it.

Still feels like this is strictly Jack’s pad, with me just hanging around, she thought, not our place, with me having as much right to move things around or answer the phone as he does. Phone keeps ringing, but would Jack want me to answer it? Who knows, might be more of this President thing… or even Howards. (No, Jack’s supposed to be seeing Howards himself now.)

Truth is, she thought, I still can’t start thinking again like Sara Barron. Sara Barron’d answer the phone if Jack wasn’t here, ’cause she’d know who she was, where she stood, where Jack stood, be able to react to anything. But Sara Westerfeld was still someone from the past, someone who didn’t know where she stood in Jack’s present world, didn’t even know the shape or limits of that world, and when she did, might or might not accept them, might or might not be able to make the quantum-jump back to being Sara Barron.

And might or might not be able to cut it with Jack, she knew. It was easy to let the lizardman bulldoze me into going back to a Jack I thought I hated—Howards’ high-paid whore was all I started out to be—had nothing to lose, either be able to bring back the Jack I once loved or walk away with no regrets from cop-out Bug Jack Barron Jack.

But how could I know I’d start seeing for real the Jack I thought I’d have to fake seeing? Is it real? Is the old Jack back already, my Jack Berkeley boy now a man playing real man-game to make the old boy-dreams real, destroy Howards, Social Justice President of the United States, attic dream becoming a reality in ways we never imagined? Wouldn’t that Jack hate me, knowing I thought so little of him that I could use him to get us Frozen, gamble like a cold-blooded windowless white lizard that I could shock him into becoming what he really was all along? And if Jack’s really involved in some dirty deal with Howards, wouldn’t it just help the lizardman get Jack for whatever filth he wants him for if he knew that Howards was able to buy and use even me? Could… could that be what Howards was planning all along? Seeing through me seeing through him, letting me think I was putting one over, and that setting me up as his secret weapon against Jack…? Wanting me to tell Jack everything?

But if it’s half one thing, half the other, plans in conflict, neither Jack nor Howards’s in control, and Jack on the knife-edge between being the old Berkeley Jack or taking the biggest cop-out of all, then I’ve got to tell him. It’s all up to me…

The unbearable choice weighed heavy on her; existential choice holding past and future timelines in mortal balance, a woman-choice, she knew, and it was still hard not to think of herself as a girl, helpless in a larger-than-life man’s world.

The vidphone began chiming again.

Maybe it’s Jack? Maybe that’s why it keeps ringing, anyone else’d figure no one’s here, but Jack knows I’m here, knows I might not answer till I knew it was him ringing again and again…

Pissed at herself for being unable to make even such a piddling decision, she forced herself to the vidphone and made the connection.

And felt abysmal regret, cold numb terror clean through her, as the windowless white face of Benedict Howards stared out at her with knowing rodent eyes from the vidphone screen.

“It’s about time you decided to answer the phone,” he said. “I’ve been trying to get you for half an hour. What’s the matter with you.?”

“You… you were calling me?” Sara stammered, feeling serpent-coils winding themselves around her.

“I wouldn’t be calling Barron, would I? Not since I just spoke to him in the flesh. Of course I’m calling you. We’re… business associates. Remember?” and Howards smiled an awful I-own-you crocodile smile.

“Now you listen, and you listen good,” he said. “Barron is on his way home, far as I know. I’ve made my final offer to him, and he’s got about twenty-three hours to accept. Which means you’ve got about twenty-three hours to complete your end of our little bargain—or no Freezer for either of you. So you start working on him the moment he gets there, and you better make it good.”

From the greater fear of losing the Jack she had found again, Sara mustered the courage to face the lesser fear, held up her head in her mind’s eye, said: “I don’t care about that anymore. I’ve got Jack now, and nothing’s as important to me as that. You brought us together for your own dirty reasons, but you didn’t understand that we love each other, always have, always will. And that’s all that matters now.”

“Have it your way,” Howards said. “But just remember, all I have to do is tell Barron what you are, my whore, Miss Westerfeld, and where’s your great love then?”

“Jack will understand…”

“Will he? Will he want to? Will he believe you or me? He’ll believe me because he’ll want to, after what I’ve offered him.”

“You think you’re so smart,” Sara said, “but you’re a fool. You don’t understand what love is, stronger than anything you can use to buy people…”

Howards leered at her, and she realized he had anticipated her every action in the serpent-lair of his mind. “You think so?” he said. “But there’s something stronger than any… mortal love—immortal love. Barron loves you, eh? Would a man who loves you be willing to let you die, when instead he could give you the greatest gift a man can give a woman? Greatest gift a man can give himself?”

Sara felt something foul and gigantic in Howards’ voice that spoke of things she didn’t want to know, things that might really be stronger than love, monstrous jungle truths with great gleaming fangs of bone leering from lipless reptile mouths; but she felt herself fascinated, drawn on by the primal dawn-marsh stink that seemed to hover over Howards’ image on the vidphone screen.

“What… what could be stronger than love?” she asked.

“Life,” said Benedict Howards. “Without life, you got nothing—no love, no taste of good food in your mouth, no nothing. Whatever anyone wants the most, he loses it all when he’s dead.”

“You call that life—a body lying stiff and cold in a Freezer? You think Jack’d give up what really mattered to him for that, thirty or forty years from now?”

“He might,” said Howards. “He just might. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the real thing, Miss Westerfeld, immortality. Look at me! I’m immortal now, my scientists have made the breakthrough. Immortal! I’ll never get older, I’ll never die. Words, just words to you, what else can they be? But there are no words for what it’s really like to wake up in the morning knowing you’re gonna live for centuries—forever.

“That’s what I’m offering Barron, the next million years, immortality. Think he’d rather have you? Would you rather have him if the choice were yours? Immortality, Miss Westerfeld. Can you imagine what it’s like to know you’re not like ordinary men—don’t have to die? Can you imagine anyone turning his back on it? Can you imagine anything Barron wouldn’t do to live forever? Can you imagine anything you wouldn’t do? Love? How much is love worth when you’re dead?”

“It’s not true!” she cried. “You can’t be able to do it, not you . . .” Not you, you bloodless reptile, not with your plastic frozen money, not buying it like you buy everyone and everything, not Benedict Howards with power over death forever, on and on and on, webs of hate and power spinning on and on, forever, from your bone-white lizard-lair, it just isn’t right.

But Howards’ cold eyes stared straight through her, his lips parted in a thin smile, and she felt him digging her thoughts, sucking up her hate, fear, sense of wrongness, letting her know he knew the loathing she felt. And letting her know he found it amusing.

“It is true, isn’t it?” she said quietly. “You really can make Jack immortal…?” And she imagined Jack, knowing what could be his, loving her, being Jack Barron and… and what? Can he love me enough to die with me in forty or fifty years, when he can have forever? And I thought I had an impossible decision to make! But Jack… to choose between love and immortality… And it struck her like a sledgehammer: Howards has to be working on me because he knows Jack hasn’t decided. He wants me to make Jack choose immortality. And… and maybe he’s right, how can I want anything less than immortality for Jack, sell him on… on death, even though I die and Jack has to go on alone forever…? Oh, you miserable shit, Howards! Why is a bastard like you so damn clever?

“Not only Barron,” Howards said. “Anyone I choose. You, for instance. You’re right about one thing: Barron loves you. First thing he asked when I made the offer was for immortality for you too. And…”

The cruelty in Howards’ eyes raped her as he smirked, waited for her to ask the question, sucking pleasure like a junkie from watching her squirm.

“And?”

Howards laughed. “Why not?” he said. “I can afford it. It’s a nice little daisy-chain this way—I buy Barron with immortality for the both of you, and I buy you with the same thing, and I buy your help in making sure he sells. Three for the price of one. You can have love and life, both forever. Think about that, you and Barron, forever. And if you don’t deliver, I tell Barron everything and you’ve blown it all—him and immortality. That’s not such a hard choice, is it, Miss Westerfeld? You’ve got twenty-three hours. I won’t be talking to you again. I don’t really have to, do I?”

And he broke the connection.

Sara knew how right he was, how right he had been every step of the way. Eternal life with Jack or… nothing. She thought of Jack, young and strong beside her, together for a million years, growing and growing together in the innocent strength of adolescence—the strength that comes from not really believing you’ll ever have to die—but based now on truth, not self-delusion, giving the courage to do anything, dare anything, soft-flesh knight in the armor of immortality, and the world what they could make it forever and ever… Growing without growing older, like that ocean sunfish that keeps getting bigger and bigger, never ages, never dies… Jack like that, and me with him forever!

And Benedict Howards forever, a small sly voice reminded her. Feeding forever on power and fear and death and Jack… Jack his flunky, keeping him there in his bone-white temple of death while aeons and billions of people are born and die and are gone forever like smoke, while Howards and those who fawn on him like on some awful death-god live forever at the price of their souls… With a pang of despair she realized that this was the world that was coming, Jack or no Jack, with his help or despite him, inexorable as Judgment Day, and no one could stand against it, against Foundation power of money and life eternal against death. Benedict Howards was right. He was almost a god, god of life and death. God on the side of evil and nothingness; the Black Christ, and no one his size to stand against him.

No one but… but Jack Barron! she thought. Oh, yes! yes! Jack’s smarter than Howards, stronger than me. If Howards makes us immortal, what hold can he have over Jack then? If Jack’s already gotten all that Howards has to give, and if he hates Howards the way I hate him… Not even Benedict Howards could stand Jack Barron then—the full, true Jack Barron, fighting for me and for himself and for hate and for everything we ever believed in, armored in immortality!

She felt both proud and afraid, realizing what lay in her hands, and hers alone. Billions of immortal lives, and hers, and Jack’s. Jack was strong, clever; he would know how to keep immortality, and destroy Howards too, bring immortality to the whole world. President, maybe…? Luke thinks so… What could Howards do then? Yes! Yes! It was all in her hands, she could make Jack immortal, make him hate, wake him up to what he was always meant to be. She could do it; she only had to be brave alone for one moment in a life that could be endless. And I will, she vowed. And as she waited for Jack to arrive she savored what it was to at last think of herself as a woman—as Sara Barron.

Catching him preoccupied, the stomach-drop of the elevator was just one more jolt in a day of jolts for Jack Barron. He stubbed out the butt of his Acapulco Gold in the elevator ashtray, caught up with his belly tried to catch up with his head as the elevator sucked up the sealed shaft to his slice of California twenty-three stories away from New York’s stinking paranoid gutters. And he got a flash of what the penthouse playpen (with genuine authentic Sara Westerfeld at last installed) really meant to him.

Time machine is all, he thought. California science-fiction time machine to a past that never was, pot-dream California of the mind that never could be, big league action through the eyes of Baby Bolshevik kid didn’t know where the big leagues were really at, dream made real by Bug Jack Barron bread—but making it real changed the dreamer. What Sara just can’t understand—got the balls to do it, sure you can make dreams real, but getting out in the nitty-gritty’s gotta change the dreamer, ’cause he ain’t dreaming anymore; he’s real, doing real things, fighting real enemies, and when he’s cut he bleeds real blood, not ectoplasm. Which is why I’m a winner, and all the old Baby Bolsheviks except maybe Luke are all losers. Too hung-up on big beautiful acidhead dreams to risk losing it, risk losing Peter-Pan selves by getting their hands dirty making it real. Stay a dreamer, and you’ll never have your dream; get down in the nitty-gritty, and when you get your dream you see what horseshit it was in the first place.

Game of life’s run by an ex-con cardshark, he thought morosely as the elevator came to a stop and the door opened. Deck’s marked, dice loaded, and the only way you don’t go home in a barrel is to play by the house rules, namely no holds barred.

He crossed the foyer, entered the dark hall, heard a Beatle album playing, picked up on the subliminal presence of Sara. And he remembered that he had to decide for her too; her immortality was in the big pot too. Feeling her presence filling the apartment with Saraness, making the joint at last a home, it was impossible to believe that the gestalt that was the total Sara could ever cease to be, become nothing more than a random pattern of inert food for the worms.

But it can, he thought. Doesn’t have to now, but it can, and the cat who can do it is Jack Barron. Say “no” to Howards, and you’re not only coming on with the kamikaze schtick, you’re murdering the only woman you ever loved, and so what if it’s forty years from now? So what if she never knows it? It’s still murder, is all. Ugliest word there is, murder. No holds barred is the name of the game, but don’t put yourself on, Barron, at murder even you draw the line. Only crime that’s always wrong no matter what the circumstances, murder. Blowing Bennie’s brains out’d just be killing, and that’s cool, but letting Sara die when you can save her just by signing your name, that’s murder.

Yeah, sure, but how do you know what you’re getting into if you do sign that contract? Could be things worse than murder. Like genocide—and isn’t that Bennie’s bag, save the winners and let the losers die, and wouldn’t Sara be a loser on her own if Howards didn’t want me, to the worm-ovens with the rest of the untermenschen losers…? Choose one from column A, or one from column B (eggroll and won-ton included in the dinner): genocide or murder.

He knew it was not a decision he had the right to make alone. Sara’s life too, not just mine. I’ve gotta tell her the whole thing, what a woman’s for, isn’t it, someone in the whole shit-eating world you can be up front with, take it or leave it? Got enough trouble playing footsie with Howards, at least I can have truth between me and Sara.

She was out on the patio, leaning against the parapet, staring out over the East River at Brooklyn, long dusk-shadows twilighting the rush-hour traffic in the street far below.

“Jack…” she said, turning as he stepped out on the patio; and he saw a strange manic desperation in her eyes, glazed over pool-deep darknesses, and something grim and fragile in the lines of her face, and she seemed to be looking into him and at the same time through him. In a weird way, he almost recognized that look… yes, look of some vip on the show about to parrot a memorized set-spiel.

“I’ve got something I’ve gotta tell you,” Barron said, crossing the terrace, leaning against the parapet close enough to taste her breath but unable to bring himself to touch her.

“And I’ve got something I have to tell you,” she said, and he saw her jawline go white, a pulse twitch in her left temple.

“Later, baby,” Barron said, knowing it was now or never. Whatever’s uptighting you can wait, Sara, he thought. Either you’ll forget all about it, or you’ll be really uptight after I lay it all on you.

“It’s about me and Howards,” he began. “I suppose by now you know there’s some hanky-panky going on there, and I owe it to you to let you in on what’s shaking. And big things are shaking, bigger than you could ever imagine, bigger than all this President bullshit, bigger than… bigger than anything’s ever been, bigger than anything you can even think of. Bennie Howards is hot for my bod, Sara. He needs me. He needs Bug Jack Barron to push through his Freezer Bill, to… to put over something… well, something people just won’t stomach. He’s desperate, he’s hotter for my bod than Luke or Morris or—”

“I know,” she said in a tiny voice all but drowned out by the rush-hour traffic-roar from the street below, and he sensed a huge electric-potential-tension charge building between them, reached out for her hand gripping the cement lip of the parapet to bleed off the electric hum in the air between them; and her skin was rubber, cold and dry, as if she were a thousand miles away talking through vidphone circuit-insulation, and he found with a kind of relief that he was slipping into the Bug Jack Barron cool Wednesday-night-feedback game, hating himself for doing it, hating himself worse for being thankful. And what the fuck does she mean she knows?

“Yeah,” he said, “I suppose it’s been pretty obvious. (But has it? he wondered, feeling danger-signals of future-shock precognition surging down time lines toward him.) But before you do the whole cop-out number, you better hear the coin he’s paying. Immortality, Sara, immortality. Bennie’s boys have licked aging. He’s keeping it real quiet ’cause there’s a big catch—it’s real expensive, like he’s talking about a quarter of a million bucks per treatment, and even with that kind of bread, he claims he can only treat about a thousand people a year. But it’s no shuck; it’s the real thing. He says he’s had the treatment himself, and when you listen to him gibbering about it you know he’s not bullshitting. That’s where it’s at, immortality for maybe a thousand people a year, people who can get up a quarter million, people who Bennie chooses, and everyone else is stuck with three score and ten, is all. And that’s why he’s so hot for me—he wants me to help him shove that down the throat of the General Unwashed: immortality for the few, and death for everyone else. A lot harder to peddle than Chevys or dope. But…”

He stared into the unreadable vacuum of her eyes that seemed to mock him, accuse him, and he sensed his words going straight through her like a commercial out across the city to Brooklyn and beyond, and she seemed to be waiting for something, and he waited for her to speak, scream, yell, jump up and down, do something, anything, react. But she just stood there, and even the pressure of her hand in his didn’t change, and Barron felt cold and afraid and didn’t know why.

“Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” he said. “But for us, free. That’s the deal, Sara. I agree to play ball with Howards, and we both get ironclad contracts out in front. That’s the decision I’ve gotta make by tomorrow—sign the contracts, and we both have immortality, or tell Howards to fuck off and throw it all away. And not just immortality—he’ll cream me, try to cost me the show, and I’ll have to play games with Greg Morris & Co just to keep our heads above water. Some choice! But it’s got to be our choice, not just mine.”

“I know, Jack,” Sara said. “I know it all.”

“Come on, will you?” Barron snapped, bugged at the deep unreadable pools behind her eyes (damn big soulful brown eyes, Christ knows what’s really behind them, Christ knows if anything’s behind ’em but Peter-Pan acid bullshit—where is your head at, Sara?). “Okay, so it’s hard to get down, but don’t just stand there gaping at me. And what the hell you mean you know it all?”

She pulled her hand away from his, touched his cheek, then let her hand fall to her side, and when she spoke, she looked away from him, down, down at the brawling honking streets of rush-hour Manhattan, and from the set of her jaw and the quaver in her voice, Barron knew she was staring down, deep down, into some private freakout snakepit.

“You’re not the only person Benedict Howards’s used,” she said, “that… that monster can buy anyone—anyone, Jack. He’s the most thoroughly evil man in the world, and now he can go on buying people and using people and holding life-and-death power over people forever… He’s evil, and clever, and totally amoral, and he can give anyone anything they want. Everyone’s got his price, and Howards can afford anyone he needs to buy, that’s what he told me, and I didn’t believe it. But now… now… oh, Jack, is it wrong to want to live forever? Everyone wants to live forever, and I want you to live forever, does that make me so rotten, so…? Jack!”

And she whirled, flung herself into his arms, not sobbing but clutching him to her with manic strength. But even as his reflexes passed soothing hands over her back, Barron went steel-cold as he struggled with her words, rejected them, felt them stinging back like dry-ice bees.

He pushed her away, holding her shoulders at arms’ length, stared into her stricken face, muttered: “You…? Howards…?”

“You’ve got to, Jack…” she said. (Her lips began to quiver, her eyes were wet, she was shaking in his rough hands.) “Don’t you see? If you sign the contracts, then we’re immortal, we’ve got all that Howards can give and no one can take it away from us. Don’t you see? You’re the only man in the world can stop him, destroy him. You’re the only man big enough to stand up to Benedict Howards and his loathsome Foundation. You’ve got to! There’s no one else! But I don’t want to die, I don’t want you to die… Sign the contracts, and then… then we can fight him together, and he can’t do anything to hurt us…”

Barron shook her, shaking himself. “What the fuck is this? Stop gibbering, damn you, Sara, and tell me what all this is about!” But he knew with dread certainty what it was all about. Bennie got to her, he thought. Somehow, somewhen, the slimy motherfucker got to her, found the handle… The—

“I love you,” she sobbed. “You’ve gotta believe I love you. I did it because I love you. I love you, Jack, I’ve always loved you, I’ll always—”

Barron slammed her body up against the parapet. “Cut the shit,” he said cruelly, feeling the cruelty cut into her, cut into him, grim razor of reality and way down below he heard the sounds of metal and rubber and concrete abrading synthetic world of steel cutting edges way down there below him. “In words of one syllable—what’s the scam with you and Benedict Howards?” And he felt himself coming on like living-color Jack Barron backing a vip into a corner. And knew no other way to react.

He saw Sara stare blankly into his eyes with numb wet eyes like those of a mindless parrot as she spat it out, spat it all out like pieces of rotten meat.

“He…He had me dragged to his Long Island Freezer. He promised me a free Freeze Contract if I got you to sign one. I told him to go to hell. But… but that man sees right into your guts, sees what he wants to see, and he knows how to use it, knows more about the dirty places inside you than you do yourself. He knew… knew deep down that I still loved you… Don’t you see I wanted you, I never stopped wanting you, just stopped knowing it, and when Howards gave me an excuse to go back to you, a good excuse… He conned me into conning myself into thinking I could con you. I thought I hated you, but I thought maybe I could change you back to the Jack you were meant to be if I went back to you and got you to sign the contracts and then… then did just what I’m doing now, tell you everything, show you what a swine Howards is, kind of man you’re involved with stops at nothing, and how a man like that can make anyone climb right down there in his sewer with him… Oh, Jack, how you must hate me now!”

Barron let her go, smiled crookedly as he saw her crying big wet tears like a cocker spaniel just shit on the rug waiting to be kicked. Hate you? he thought. Hate you for playing games with Howards, where does that leave me! Don’t have enough hate for you, too much hate for that cocksucker Howards playing with my silly chick’s head—shit, who wouldn’t play footsie for a free Freezer chance to live forever, wouldn’t you? Didn’t you? Aren’t you? Where it’s at, is all.

He looked past her at the dusk-lights of Brooklyn, past the East River murk, over the roaring, cursing New York traffic, steel-jungle-carnivore noises clashing twenty-four hours a day, and even in his little California twenty-three stories above it all, he knew there was no escaping the gutter-reality, daisy-chain power-reality that made the world go round chasing its tail up its asshole—not for Sara or Luke or Brackett Audience Count estimated hundred million people.

Or Jack Barron.

Either you grow teeth, or you end up fed to the fishes.

“I’m too pissed to hate you,” he said. “Maybe I even owe Bennie a favor for growing you up, way I never could. Maybe you won’t yell cop-out so loud now, ’cause Bennie’s right, we all got a price. Cat thinks he don’t, just hasn’t been offered his price yet. Hate you, I gotta hate myself, and you came back to me, did it to have a chance to live forever, play Baby Bolshevik games with my head on the side. In a funny way, I respect that—what I would’ve done in your place, after all. Question is, do you really love me now?”

“I’ve never loved you more in my whole life,” she said, and he saw the funky worship-look in her eyes, and warmth went through him from the tip of his toes, curled around his ears as he clocked the hot hungry love for him, not for living-color image-Jack-Barron, not Baby Bolshevik Galahad cheap-talk bullshit hero… Me, he thought. Maybe she finally digs me, where I’m really at—wherever the fuck that is!

“Likewise,” he said, and he kissed her soft and tender first-kiss type kiss, mouths open tasting each other like for the first time, but tongues apart, love-kiss without passion, and he never remembered kissing her quite like this before.

“You’ll do it?” she asked, arms around his waist, face inches from his, earnest little-girl conspiracy face, playing games even now, and how can I put it down when it’s so like me?

“Do what?” he said, smiling a vidphone gambit put-on smile.

“Sign the contracts.”

“I’d be a schmuck not to, wouldn’t I?” Jack Barron said. And that’s where it is at, isn’t it? he thought. Who’s a big enough schmuck to choose death? You know that real good, don’t you Bennie?

“But you won’t… you won’t play that horrible reptile’s game…?” she said (and he saw that damned old Berkeley look creep back into her eyes, Jack and Sara versus the Forces of Evil, won’t she ever grow up all the way? Do you really want her to?). “All those people out there who trust you, whether you like it or not.… You can’t sell out all those people who believe in you, let them die just because we’ve got ours. I mean, once we’ve got immortality for ourselves you’ve gotta fight Howards. You’re the only man can stop him, the man a hundred million people believe in, the only man Howards is afraid of, you’re… you’re Jack Barron, and sometimes I think you’re the only one doesn’t know what Jack Barron is. You can’t be Howards’ flunky, a stooge, a… You’re Jack Barron.”

Barron hugged her to him, looked out over the teeming streets, the lights of Brooklyn stretching from coast to coast, as she buried her face in his neck, a hundred million TV-antenna Wednesday-night-eyes all on him and what would they say, those image-vampires, if they knew it all?

Play our game, is what they’d say, he knew. Lay your ass on the line for us, boy, you owe it to us. No different from Luke or Morris or Bennie, all thinking they own my bod—except they don’t have the stake to play the game.

Yeah, just like Bennie. Everybody wants to own poor old Jack Barron, and nobody’s got the word that Jack Barron owns himself, is all.

Jack Barron pulled the warmth of his woman to him. “Don’t worry Sara,” he said, “I don’t play Howards’ game.” (Or anyone else’s.)

Fuck you, Bennie, he thought. Fuck you all! None of you, not Bennie, not Luke, not the Great Unwashed losers down there, not even you, Sara—is gonna own Jack Barron!