Bug Jack Barron

by Norman Spinrad

  He felt-saw her cringe in a fetal-spasm, shoulders hunching away from his chest knees upward along his thighs, like paper wilting in a fire. Her jaw went slack, the depths of her eyes seemed to take a discontinuous jump backward like a quick-cut reverse-zoom camera image. “Murder…murder…murder…” She mouthed the word over and over, chewing it to two meaningless gibberish syllables.

  Barron grabbed her cheeks in both hands, shook her. Her body relaxed, but her eyes were still way out there, light-years away, buried in electric-circuit insulation, and when she spoke it was like a message from a spacecraft commander, cold and detached, from somewhere north of Pluto.

  “Inside of us? Children’s glands? Children? Cutting apart children? Cutting open living children, tearing out pieces of living flesh and sewing them inside of me? Children?”

  “Please, Sara, for chrissakes, don’t freak out now,” Barron said stridently, feeling strident as he said it, but not knowing what to say, what to do. “Imagine how I feel—knowing Bennie tricked me, outsmarted me, made me ask to be made immortal, made me fight for it, connive for it, go through a million changes, and then I finally get it, win it, for you and me, and when I wake up, I find out…find out inside of me—”

  “You didn’t know?” she said, pouncing like a cornered cat. “He tricked you into it? You didn’t know what it was, and you woke up, and then he told you?”

  “What the fuck do you think I am?” Barron shouted. “You think I’d let him do a thing like that if I knew? Think I’d let them cut apart some poor kid so I could live forever? What do you think I am, a goddamn monster?”

  “He did it to us,” Sara whispered shrilly, eyes filming to a blank flatness. “He did it, that monster Howards, with his money and his frozen bodies and his murderers and his dirty lizard eyes seeing right through you, measuring your price like a piece of meat…We never had a chance, no one has a chance, Howards can make anyone do anything, trick him or kill him or force him or buy him. No one can stop him. He’ll go on and on and on forever, buying children, chopping them up, owning them, owning us, everybody, forever, always that lizard and his cold white…”

  “Sara! Sara! For chrissakes!”

  Suddenly she grabbed the flesh of his chest, fingers convulsed into talons, digging in, bruising cruelly. “You’ve got to stop him, Jack! You’ve got to stop him! We can’t live with ourselves, we can’t live with each other, can’t stand being alive with murdered things in our bodies till you stop him! You’ve got to be able to stop him!”

  Wanting to shout yes! yes! yes!, Barron instead found himself confronting the same old cold reality. Kamikaze’s the only way to stop Bennie, take us down to the electric chair with him…To die, to be dead rotting in maggots, tasting nothing, hearing nothing, seeing nothing, feeling nothing, being nothing…throw away being young and together for a million years. A million years of broken babies’ slug-green glands drip-dripping stolen life-juices inside us…

  “I can’t! I can’t!” he cried. “Bennie was too smart for me. Those contracts we signed prove us accessories to murder, evidence that’ll stand up in any court. You understand what that means? It means we’re murderers, is all. I blow the whistle on Bennie, he blows it on us, and we all waltz to the electric chair together. Dead. I knife Bennie, we die. You know what dead mean? Know what we’d be throwing away?”

  “It’s not fair!” she shouted. “We haven’t done anything! We’re not really murderers, we’re victims, just like the children. We didn’t know.”

  “Nazis?” Barron said in a bitter mock-Prussian accent. “Ve vasn’t Nazis, ve vas all in der Resistance, all of us, all eighty million of us Chermans. Ve didn’t know, ve vas chust following orders. Jawohl, Mein Herr, chust following orders! Yeah, baby, go tell it to the judge—see how far you get when Bennie trots out twenty paid witnesses say we knew exactly what the treatment was when we got into it. He’s got us, Sara, there’s not a thing we can do and live to tell about it.”

  “But you’ve got to do something. We can’t let him go on like this! There’s gotta be a way to stop him!”

  “Only one way to stop him,” Barron said, “and that’s the old kamikaze schtick. You ready for that? You ready to die—now, when we can stay alive for the next million years? You got the balls to make yourself die?”

  “No,” she said simply, but there were volumes of torture in her eyes.

  “Well, neither have I,” he said, and felt his consciousness withdrawing to the safety of electric-circuit phosphor-dot ersatz reality.

  “It’s just not right…it’s just not fair…” she muttered, and he felt her skin shrinking away, and her eyes were as opaque and unreadable as stainless-steel mirrors.

  “Right, schmight,” he said, her body now a dead weight of cold, unreal flesh pressing obscenely against him. “It’s where it’s at, is all. And we’re stuck with it.”

  And suddenly the air in the room was cold gooseflesh on his naked skin. And they got up and dressed without saying a word to each other. Like strangers.

  19

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Immortality.

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

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

  The sign of immortality.

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

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

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

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

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

  And again reality went through changes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Not even Benedict Howards?”

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