Sixty Days and Counting sitc-3

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Places like this first. Someone mentioned that high tides had waves running into the patio wall, a waist-high thing with a stairway cut through it to get to the beach. Frank nursed his margarita and listened to the others talk, and felt Marta’s elbow both metaphorically and sometimes literally in his ribs. He could feel her heat, and was aware of her kinetically, just as he had been years before when they had first started going out, meeting in situations just like this, drinks after work, and she the wild woman of the lab, expert at the bench or out in the waves. Passionate.

  After dinner they went out for a walk on the beach. Del Mar’s was almost the only beach in North County left with enough sand for a walk; development meant all the southern California beaches had lost their sources of sand, but enough was left here to provide a fine white promenade for the sunset crowd. Surfers, shrieking kids in bathing suits, sandcastle engineers, runners, couples, and groups on parade. Frank had played all these parts in his time. All there together in the horizontal light.

  They came to the mouth of the Del Mar River, and turned back. Marta walked beside Frank. Leo and Yann were chattering before them. They fell behind a little bit farther.

  “Happy to be back?” Frank ventured.

  “Oh God yes. You have no idea,” and all of a sudden she collared him and gave him a quick rough hug, intended to hurt. He knew her so well that he could interpret this gratitude precisely. He knew also that she had had a couple of margaritas and was feeling the effects. Although just to be back in San Diego was doubtless the biggest part of her mood, the boisterous high spirits he remembered so well. She had been a very physical person.

  “I can guess,” Frank said.

  “Of course,” she said, gesturing at the sea grumbling on and on to their right. “So—how are you doing out there, Frank? Why are you still there and not back here too?”

  “Well…” How much to tell? His decision gears crunched to a halt with a palpable shudder. “I’m interested in the work. I moved over to the Presidential Science Advisor’s office.”

  “I heard about that. What will you do there?”

  “Oh, you know. Be an advisor to the advisor.”

  “Diane Chang?”

  “That’s right.”

  “She seems to be doing some good stuff.”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “Well, that’s good….” But still: “I bet you wish you could do that from here.” Gesturing again at the sea. “Won’t you have to come back to UCSD pretty soon?”

  “Eventually, sure. But the department and the administration are happy to have someone out there, I think.”

  “Sure, I can see that.”

  She considered it as they walked along behind the other two. “But—but what about the rest of it? What about girls, Frank, have you got a girlfriend?”

  Oh God. Stumped. No idea what to reveal or how. And he had only a second before she would know something was up—

  “Ah ha!” she cried, and crashed her shoulder into him, like she used to—just like Francesca Taolini had in Boston, so familiar and intimate, but in this case real, in that Marta really did know him. “You do have one! Come on, tell me, tell me!”

  “Well yes, kind of.”

  “Kind of. Yes? And? Who is it?”

  She had not the slightest idea that it might be Diane Chang, despite him having said he was following her from NSF to the White House. But of course—people didn’t think that way. And it was not something Frank had told anyone about, except maybe Rudra. It was not even really true.

  But what then could he say? I have two sort-of girlfriends? My boss, whom I work for and who is older than I am and whom I have never kissed or said anything even slightly romantic to, but love very much, then also a spook who has disappeared, gone undercover, a jock gal who likes the outdoors (like you) and with whom I have had some cosmic outdoor sex (like we used to have), but who is now off-radar and incommunicado, I have no idea where? Whom I’m scared for and am desperate to see?

  Oh, and along with that I’m also still freaked out by my instant attraction to an MIT star who thinks I am a professional cheater, and yes I still find you all too attractive, and remember all too well the passionate sex we used to have when we were together, and wish you weren’t so angry at me, and indeed can see and feel right now that you’re maybe finally giving up on that, and aren’t as angry as you were in Atlanta….

  He too had had a couple of margaritas in the restaurant.

  “Well? Come on, Frank! Tell me.”

  “Well, it isn’t really anything quite like that.”

  “Like what! What do you mean?”

  “I’ve been busy.”

  She laughed. “You mean you’re too busy to call them back afterward? That’s what too busy means to me.”

  “Hey.”

  She crowed her laugh and Yann and Leo looked over their shoulders to see what was going on. “It’s all right,” Marta called, “Frank is just telling me how he neglects his girlfriend!”

  “Am not,” Frank explained to them. Yann and Leo saw this was not their conversation and turned back to their own.

  “I bet you do though,” she went on, chortling. “You did me.”

  “I did not.”

  “You did too.”

  “Did not.”

  “Did too.”

  Frank shrugged. Here they were again.

  “You wouldn’t even go dancing with me.”

  “But I don’t know how to dance,” he said. “And we still went anyway, all the time.” Except when you wanted to go by yourself to meet new guys and maybe disappear with them for the night.

  “Yeah right. So come on, who is it? And why are you so busy anyway? What do you do besides work?”

  “I run, I climb, I play frisbee golf, I go for walks—”

  “Go for walks?”

  “—snowshoeing, tracking animals—”

  “Tracking animals?” Now she had gotten to the snorting phase of her laughter.

  “Yes. We follow the animals that escaped from the National Zoo, and do feral rescue and the like. It’s interesting.”

  She snorted again. She was thinking like the Californian she was: there were no such things as animals.

  “I go ice-skating, I’m going to start kayaking again when the river thaws. I stay busy, believe me.”

  “When the river thaws. But big deal, so what! You’re never too busy for company.”

  “I guess.”

  “So. Okay.”

  She saw that he wasn’t going to say anything to her about it. She elbowed him again, and let it pass. She caught them up to the others.

  The sun was almost down now, and the ocean had taken on the rich glassy sheen that it often did at that hour, the waves greenly translucent.

  “Have you been out surfing yet?” he asked.

  “Yeah, sure. What about you?”

  “Not on this trip.”

  They came back to their restaurant, went through to the parking lot, stood in a knot to say good-byes.

  “Yann and I are going to go dancing,” Marta said to Frank. “Do you want to come along?”

  “Too busy,” Frank said promptly, and grinned as she cried out and punched him on the arm.

  “Oh come on, you’re out here visiting! You don’t have any work at all.”

  “Okay,” he said. Dancing, after all, was on his paleolithic list of Things To Do. “What is it, some kind of rave again? Do I have to blast my mind with ecstasy to get with the beat?”

  “Rave. That isn’t even a word anymore. It’s just a band at the Belly-Up.”

  “A rave band,” Yann confirmed.

  Frank nodded. “Of course.” That was Marta’s thing.

  “Come on,” Marta said. “It only means you’ll know how to do it. No swing or tango. Just bop up and down and groove. You could use it, if you’re so busy out there.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  Leo had already driven off. He was outside Marta’s sphere of influence.

>   So he followed Yann and Marta up the Coast Highway to Solana Beach, and turned inland to the Belly-Up, a big old Quonset hut by the train tracks that had hosted concerts and dances and raves for many years now.

  This night’s bill appeared to Frank to be catering to the gay and lesbian crowd, or maybe that was just what the Belly-Up audience always looked like these days. Although the band was a mostly butch all-girl acid reggae kind of thing, with perhaps a score of people on the little stage, and a few hundred bopping on the dance floor. So he could join Yann and Marta both on the dance floor, and start dancing (that curious moment when the rules of movement changed, when one began to dance) and then it was bop rave bop rave bop, in the heavy beat and the flashing lights, easy to lose one’s mind in, which was always good, dionysiac release into shamanic transcendence, except when it involved losing his sense of all that had gone on between him and Marta (Yann was somewhere nearby) and also his sense of just how dangerous it would be to regard her only as a sexy woman dancing with him, seemingly oblivious to him but always right there and deep in the rhythm, and occasionally giving him a light bang with hip or shoulder. (In the old days these bumps would have come from pubic bone as well.) He had always loved the way she moved. But they had a history together, he struggled to remember. A really bad history. And he was already overcommitted and overentangled in this realm, it would be crazy and worse to have anything more to do with Marta in that way. He had gotten her back to San Diego as a way to make up for taking their money out of their house without telling her, and that was that—they were even! No more entanglements needed or wanted!

  Although he did want her. Damn those softball players anyway.

  “Here eat this,” she shouted in his ear, and showed him a pill between her forefinger and thumb. Ecstasy, no doubt, as in the old days.

  “No!”

  “Yes!”

  The paleolithics had gotten stupendously stoned, he recalled, in the midst of their dionysiac raves. Some of their petroglyphs made this perfectly clear, depicting people flying out of their own heads as birds and rockets. He remembered the feeling of peace and well-being this particular drug used to give him when he danced on it; and let her shove the pill in between his teeth. Nipped her fingers as she did. Leap before you look.

  He danced with his back to her, and felt her butt bumping his as he looked at the other dancers. Quite a radical scene for good old San Diego, which Frank still thought of as a sun-and-sports monoculture, a vanilla Beach Boys throwback of a place, hopelessly out of it in cultural terms. Maybe one had to stay out in the water all the time for that to be true anymore. Although in fact the surf culture was also crazed. Certainly it was true that in the Belly-Up of the beast, in the cacophonous sweaty strobed space of the rave, there were plenty of alternative lifestyles being enacted right before his very eyes. Most provocatively in fact. Some very serious kissing and other acts, dance as simulated standing sex, heck actual standing sex if you were at all loose with the definition. A very bad context in which to keep only pure thoughts about his bouncing surfer-scientist ex, who always had been a party gal, and who was now looking like someone who did not remember very well the bad parts of their past together. That was not what dancing was about.

  Maybe there was such a thing as being too forgiven.

  Random thoughts began to bounce to their own rave in his head. Oh dear he was feeling the buzz. Could one get away with just one night of sex without consequences? Go out to Black’s Cliffs, for instance, and then later pretend it was just an aberration or had not happened at all? Marta had certainly done that before. It was pretty much a modus vivendi for her. But practical problems—she had rented a house with Yann again, Yann would know: bad. He didn’t have a hotel room to go to, and didn’t want Marta to know that—bad. So—no place to go, even though the cliffs would have been so nice, a trysting place of spectacular memory, in fact he had gone out there with two or three different women through those undergraduate years, among them some of the nicest of all the women he had ever met. It had been so nice, it would be so nice, it was all jostling in his head, Caroline, Diane, the dance, two young beauties nearby, groping each other in the crush of bouncing bodies, oh my, it was having an effect on him—an unusually vivid effect. Not since a well-remembered dance in a bar on the Colorado River during spring break of 1973 had he gotten an erection while on a dance floor dancing. It was not the effect ecstasy usually had on him. He really must be feeling it, Marta and her vibe, and her butt. And yes, that was her pubic bone too.

  Maybe that was the cause of the erection. He turned to her again, and naturally now when she bumped against him she hit something else, and felt it, and grinned.

  They had to shout in each other’s ears to be able to hear each other within the surround sound of the crunchingly loud bass line.

  “I guess you liked the tab!”

  “I don’t remember ecstasy doing this!”

  She laughed. “They mix in Viagra now!” she shouted in his ear.

  “Oh shit!”

  “Yann’s friends make them, they’re great!”

  “What the fuck, Marta!”

  “Yeah well?”

  “No way! You’re kidding me!”

  Angry, even fearful, he stopped dancing and stared at her bopping in front of him. “I don’t like it! It’s making me feel sick!”

  “You’ll get used to it!”

  “No! No! I’m gonna go, I’ll see you later!”

  “Okay go then!”

  She looked surprised, but not horribly displeased. Amused at him. Maybe it really was just the new dance drug. Maybe it was revenge. Or an experiment. Or that for Marta there would still be a lot of potential partners there, for dancing or anything else, so it didn’t matter what he did. Who knew San Diego could be so depraved? People were totally making out right in front of his eyes. There were so many doing it they had a kind of privacy in numbers.

  “See you then!” Marta said in his ear, and gave him a swift sweaty hug and a kiss, already looking around for Yann or whomever. Happy, he thought—maybe even happy at becoming free from her anger at him—or happy at her last little tweak of revenge. Happy to see him go! Maybe all the prurient thoughts about the two of them together had been his only and not hers. And the pill just the new dance pill.

  He pondered this as he walked through the dark gravel parking lot to his rented van, cooled swiftly by his sweat and the salty night air, his erection like a rock in his pants. She didn’t care!

  The erection was not a comfortable feeling, not a natural feeling, not a sexual feeling. Normally Frank was as happy as the next guy to have an erection, meaning very happy, but this was ridiculous. He was drugged by drugs, it had no connection to his feelings—he might as well be at the doctor’s, undergoing some horrible diagnostic! People were so stupid. Talk about technology replacing the natural pleasures, this really took the cake!

  He cursed Marta viciously as he drove. Marine layer gusting in, lit by the city from underneath, then out over the sea darker, lit only by moonlight from above. Marta, angry at him: would he miss that when it was gone? A feeling was a relationship. Then again, now he was angry at her. There was something pressing on his brain, even more than the usual; a headache was coming on, the likes of which he had never felt before. A migraine, perhaps, and at the same time as a drug-induced hard-on that hurt. It was like priapism—maybe it was priapism! The side-effects warnings on the TV ads mentioned this ever so quickly, but it was a serious danger. Terrible permanent damage could result. Shit—he was going to have to go find an ER somewhere and confess all. Tell the truth that he hadn’t known he was taking it, and get laughed at as a liar.

  He cursed again, drove up the long hill of Torrey Pines, past their new facility and UCSD. Park on La Jolla Farms Road and walk out onto the bluff in the dark, his stuff in a daypack.

  He had spent some sexy nights out here, he thought as he throbbed. Oh well. Now he just wanted to be free of it. Just embrace the cliff and make love
to Mother Earth. But it hurt and his head pounded and he was afraid. It felt as if an orgasm would blow out every little sac, or shoot his spine right out of him while his head exploded. Horror movie images—damn Marta anyway. What a horrible drug thus to ruin one of the best feelings of all. Some guys must be so desperate. But of course. Everyone desperate for love, so now you could buy it, of course, but it hurt. Would he have to give up and go to the ER and explain—have to feel the needles stuck in there to drain him?

  Abruptly he got up and downclimbed over the lip of his little scallop, out onto the cliff. Now he was hanging there in space, and could slip and die at any moment. Not a good move really. Fear, real fear, stuck him like a stab in the ribs, and his blood rushed everywhere in him, hot and fast. Suddenly the sandstone was as if lit from within. His left foot was on a gritty hold, and slipping slightly. He grasped a shrub that had sent a branch over the lip, wondered if it would hold his weight. It was terrible climbing rock, gritty and weak, and suddenly he was angry as well as afraid. Sound of the surf cracking below—350 feet below. Hanging by a shrub on Black’s Cliffs. He set his feet and pulled smoothly back up onto the scallop, a desperately graceful little move.

  And the blood had indeed evacuated his poor penis. Detumescence, a new pleasure, never before experienced as such. Blessed relief. Even his head felt a little better. And he had worked his will over a powerful drug, and over Marta too. Hopefully he had survived undamaged. Little sacs, all overfull; he was going to be sore, he could tell. It felt like last winter’s brush with penile frostbite.

  Scared back to normality. Not a smart move. The margaritas might be implicated in that one. Leap before you look, sure—but not really.

  He took a deep breath, feeling foolish in multiple ways. Well, no one knew the full extent of his folly. And he was back in his scallop. He could sit on his sleeping bag, breathe deeply, shake his head shuddering, like someone casting off a nightmare.