Wild Cards Part 32

So began Mark's courtship of Sunflower, nee Kimberly Ann Cordayne.

"I want you . . ." The words spilled across the wind, insolent, suggestive, the voice like molten amber with a whiskey edge for all the New Year's-noisemaker quality of the little j.a.p transistor. Wojtek Grabowski pulled his windbreaker tighter over his wide chest and tried not to hear. . . ." The words spilled across the wind, insolent, suggestive, the voice like molten amber with a whiskey edge for all the New Year's-noisemaker quality of the little j.a.p transistor. Wojtek Grabowski pulled his windbreaker tighter over his wide chest and tried not to hear.

The crane reared back like a zombie dinosaur, swayed a girder toward him. He gestured to the operator with exaggerated underwater moves. "I want you . . ." the voice insisted. He felt a flash of irritation. " . . ." the voice insisted. He felt a flash of irritation. "A blast from the past-1966, and Destiny's first hit song," the announcer had warbled in his professional-adolescent voice. These Americans, Wojtek thought, they think 1966 is ancient history.

"Turn off that boogie-woogie s.h.i.t," somebody growled.

"f.u.c.k you," the radio's owner said. He was twenty years old, two meters tall, and six months out of 'Nam. Marine. Khe Sanh. The argument ended.

Grabowski wished the boy would turn the radio off, but he didn't like to push himself forward. He was tolerated-a solid worker, who could drink the strongest man on-site under the table of a Friday night. But he kept to himself.

As the girder came down and the crew swarmed up to fix it in place and the cold wind off the bay drilled through thin nylon and aging skin, he thought how strange it was to find himself here-him, the middle child of a prosperous Warsaw household, the small sickly one, the studious. He was going to be a doctor, a professor. His brother Kliment-half envied, wholly admired, big, bold, dashing, with a cavalryman's black mustache-was going into the Officers' Academy, was going to be a hero.

Then the Germans came. Kliment was shot in the back of the head by the Red Army in Katyn Wood. Sister Katja disappeared into the field-brothels of the Wehrmacht. Mother died in the last bombardment of Warsaw, while the Soviets squatted on the Vistula and let the n.a.z.is do their dirty work for them. Father, a minor government functionary, outlived the war a few months before collecting his own bullet in the back of the neck, purged by the puppet Lublin regime.

Young Wojtek, dreams of university forever shattered, spent six and a half years as a partisan in the woods, ended them a fugitive, exiled to a foreign land with only a single hope to keep his blood beating.

"I want want you you." The repet.i.tion was beginning to grate on him. He'd grown up with Mozart and Mendelssohn. And the message . . . This was no love song, it was a l.u.s.t song-an invitation to rut.

Love meant more to him-a moment of cool moisture, sluicing across his vision, wiped away by the wind's chill hand. He remembered marrying Anna, his partisan girl, in what the Stukas had left of a village church, and afterward the priest himself had hitched up his threadbare ca.s.sock and played Bach's Toccata and Fugue Toccata and Fugue on the organ, miraculously intact, while a starveling girl crouched to work the bellows. Next day they'd lie in ambush for the facists, but that night, that night . . . on the organ, miraculously intact, while a starveling girl crouched to work the bellows. Next day they'd lie in ambush for the facists, but that night, that night . . .

Another girder rose. Anna had left before him, smuggled out by helpful British operatives in June of 1945, bound for America with their child in her womb. He fought as long as he could, then followed.

Now he dwelt in a land he loved almost as a lover. He had nothing else. In twenty-three years he had found no sign of the woman he loved and the child she must have borne. Though, sweet Mary, how he'd searched.

"I waaaaaant waaaaaant you you . . ." . . ."

He shut his eyes. If I must endure that ba.n.a.l lyric one more time. . . .

". . . to die with me to die with me."

The music diminuendoed in an eerie wail. For a moment he stood very still, as if the wind had turned the sweat to ice within his shirt. What had seemed a mere syrup confection was infinitely more-more evil. Here was a man, anointed spokesman of youth, for whom the blandishments of love-or even l.u.s.t-were degraded into a totentanz totentanz, a ritual of death.

The girder clipped an upright and rang like a cracked bell. Grabowski shook himself, gestured the crane man to stop. At the same time, he strained, heard the announcer say the name Tom Douglas.

It was a name he would remember.

Mark hoped it was a courtship. Two days later Sunflower caught him coming out of a meeting with his sponsor and took him for a walk in the park. She let him tag along to the night spots and late-night rap sessions, to protest rallies in People's Park, to concerts. Always as her friend, her protege, the childhood friend she had made it her personal crusade to redeem from straightness. But not, unfortunately, in the exalted role of her Old Man.

He found reason to hope, however. He never saw the studly Philip again. In fact, he never saw one of Sunflower's boyfriends more than once. They were all intense, pa.s.sionate, brilliant (and at pains to tell you so). Committed. And muscular; that that much of Kimberly's taste hadn't changed. That gave Mark many choice moments of despair, but deep inside his skinny bosom he nursed the notion that someday she would feel the need of a rock of stability, and would come to him as a seabird to land. much of Kimberly's taste hadn't changed. That gave Mark many choice moments of despair, but deep inside his skinny bosom he nursed the notion that someday she would feel the need of a rock of stability, and would come to him as a seabird to land.

But still, he never, never made it across the gap that yawned between him and the world he yearned for-the world Sunflower inhabited and personified.

He survived that winter on hope and the chocolate-chip-oatmeal cookies his mother sent.

And music. He came from a household where they sang along with Mitch, and Lawrence Welk occupied the same pinnacle as J.F.K. Rock 'n' roll was never permitted to sully the air of his parents' house. He himself had been as oblivious to it as to everything outside of his lab and his private fantasies. He hadn't been aware of the Beatles' invasion, Mick Jagger's arrest for lycanthropy at the Isle of Wight concert, of the Summer of Love and the acid-rock explosion.

Now it all came rushing in on him. The Stones. The Beatles. The Airplane. The Grateful Dead. Spirit and Cream and the Animals, and the Holy Trinity: Janis, Jimi, and Thomas Marion Douglas.

Tom Douglas most of all. His music brooded like an ancient ruin, dark, foreboding, hooded. Though his real affinity was to the gentler Mamas & Papas sound of an era already history, Mark was drawn to the Douglas touch-dark humor, darker twists-even as the Nietzschean fury implicit in the music repelled him. Perhaps it was that Douglas was everything Mark Meadows wasn't. Famous and vibrant and courageous and With It and irresistible to women. And an ace.

Aces and the Movement: in many ways they blasted into the mainstream of public consciousness flying formation like the heavy-metal warbirds Mark's father had led into battle over North Vietnam. There were more rock 'n' roll aces than among any other segment of the population. Their powers tended not to be subtle. Some had the ability to project dazzling displays of lights, others made extravagant music without the need of instruments. Most, though, played mind games with the audience by means of illusion or straight emotional manipulation. Tom Douglas-the Lizard King-was the head-trip master of them all.

Spring arrived. Mark's faculty adviser pressured him for results. Mark began to despair, hating himself for his lack of resolution, or whatever defect of manhood kept him from precipitating himself into the drug scene, unable to continue his research until he did. He felt like the fly preserved in a lucite ice cube his parents had inexplicably possessed when he was a child.

April saw him withdraw from the world into microcosm, to the paper reality inside his peeling walls. He had all Destiny's records, but he couldn't play them now, or the Dead, or the Stones, or martyred Jimi. They were a taunt, a challenge he could not meet.

He ate his chocolate cookies and drank his soda pop and emerged from his room only to indulge a nostalgic childhood vice: love of comic books. Not only the old cla.s.sics, fables of Superman and Batman from the days of innocence before humanity drew the wild card, but also their modern successors, which featured the fictionalized exploits of real aces, like the penny dreadfuls of the Old West. He devoured them with addict's fervor. They fulfilled by proxy the longing that had begun to eat him up from inside.

Not for metahuman powers; nothing so exotic. Not his craving for acceptance into the mysterious world of Counterculture, nor the desire for the lithe braless body of the former Kimberly Ann Cordayne that kept him awake night after sweaty night. What Mark Meadows desired more than anything in the world was effective per- effective per- sonality sonality. The ability to do, to achieve, to make a mark; good or bad, it scarcely mattered.

An evening toward April's end, Mark's retreat was shattered by a knock on his apartment door. He just lay there on his thin mattress on sheets unchanged in living memory, burying his long nose farther in the pages of Cosh Comics' Turtle Turtle number 92. His first reaction was fear, then anger at the intrusion. The world, he'd decided, was too much for him; he'd resolved to let it alone. Why couldn't it do as much for him? number 92. His first reaction was fear, then anger at the intrusion. The world, he'd decided, was too much for him; he'd resolved to let it alone. Why couldn't it do as much for him?

Again the knock, imperative, threatening the thin veneer of wood over emptiness. He sighed.

"What do you want?" He edged the words with a whine.

"Are you going to let me in, or am I going to have to smash through this papier-mache thing your pig landlord calls a door?"

For a moment Mark just lay there. Then he laid the comic on the mottled hardwood floor by the bed, and in his dingy tired socks padded to the door.

She stood there with hands on hips. She had on another Fourth of July skirt and a faded pink blouse, and against the spring Bay chill she'd pulled on a Levi's denim jacket with a black United Farm Workers eagle stenciled on the back and a peace symbol sewn on the left breast. She pushed into the room and slammed the door behind her.

"Look at this s.h.i.t," she said with a gesture that bisected the walls at breastbone level. "How can a human being live like this? Living on processed sugar"-a nod at a plate of half-devoured cookies and a gla.s.s of brown soda that had been flat last week-"and wadding your mind with that pig-authoritarian bulls.h.i.t"-another knife-edge gesture toward Turtle Turtle, lying in a crumpled heap on the floor. She shook her head. "You're eating yourself alive, Mark. You've cut yourself off from your friends, the people who love you. This has got to stop."

Mark just stood there. He'd never seen her look so beautiful, though she was berating him, talking like his mother-or more correctly, his father. And then his skinny body began to vibrate like a tuning fork, because it struck him that she had said she loved him. It wasn't the sort of love he'd yearned and burned for from her. But emotionally he couldn't be a chooser.

"It's time you came out of your sh.e.l.l, Mark. Out of this wombroom of yours. Before you turn into something from Night of the Night of the Living Dead Living Dead."

"I've got work to do."

She c.o.c.ked an eyebrow and nudged Turtle Turtle 92 with a booted toe. 92 with a booted toe.

"You're coming with us."

"Where?" He blinked. "Who?"

"Haven't you heard?" A shake of the head. "Of course not. You've been locked here in your room like some kind of monk. Destiny's back in town. They're playing a concert at the Fillmore tonight. My dad sent money. I have tickets for us-you, me, and Peter. So get your clothes on; we've got to leave now so we don't have to stand in line forever. And for G.o.d's sake try not to dress like such a straight."

Peter looked like a surfer and thought he was Karl Marx. His looks reminded Mark uncomfortably of an earlier boyfriend of Kimberly Ann's, the football team captain who'd busted his nose in high school for staring at her too avidly. Standing outside in a threadbare tweed jacket and his one pair of jeans, breathing humid air and used smoke, he listened while Peter delivered the same lecture on the Historical Process all Sunflower's boyfriends gave him. When Mark didn't agree avidly enough-he could never make enough sense out of all these manifestos to form much of an opinion-Peter fixed him with an ice-blue Nordic glare and growled, "I will destroy you."

Later Mark found the line was a direct steal from the old man with the beard himself. Right now it made him want to melt through the tired pavement outside the auditorium. It didn't help that Sunflower was standing there beaming at the two of them as if they'd just won her a prize.

Fortunately Peter got into a screaming argument with the cops who frisked them for booze at the door, diverting his wrath from Mark. Guiltily, Mark hoped the cops would slam Peter over his blond head with a nightstick and haul him off to the slammer.

But Destiny was concluding its most tumultuous tour ever. Tom Douglas, whose consumption of booze and mind-altering chemicals was as legendary as his ace powers, had been getting mean drunk before every show. The Lizard King was on a rampage; last week's New Haven concert had culminated in a riot that trashed Yale's Old Campus and half the town. In their own clumsy way the cops were trying to avoid confrontation tonight. Frisking wasn't the shrewdest way to go about it, but the cops-and the Fillmore management-weren't eager to have the kids getting any wilder than Tom Douglas was going to make them anyway. So the audience got shaken down as they came in, but gingerly. Peter and his golden head went unbusted.

Mark's first Destiny concert was everything he might have imagined, raised to the tenth power. Douglas, characteristically, was two hours late onstage-equally characteristically, so f.u.c.ked up he could barely stay standing, much less keep from pitching off into the mob of adoring fans. But the three musicians who made up the rest of Destiny were among the tightest performers in rock. Their expertise covered a mult.i.tude of sins. And gradually, around the solid skeleton of their playing, Douglas's ramblings and inchoate gestures resolved into something magical. The music was a blast of acid, dissolving Mark's lucite prison around him, until it reached his skin, and stung.

At the end of the set the lights went out like the shutting of a great door. Somewhere a drum began a slow, thick beating. From darkness broke a tormented guitar wail. A single blue spot spiked down to illuminate Douglas, alone with the mike in the center of the stage, his leather pants glittering like snakeskin. He began to sing, a soft low moan, increasing in urgency and volume, the intro to his masterpiece, "Serpent Time." His voice soared in a sudden shriek, and the lights and the band boomed suddenly about him like storm surf breaking against rocks, and they were launched on an odyssey to the furthest reaches of the night.

At last he took upon him the aspect of the Lizard King. A black aura beat from him like furnace heat and washed across the audience. Its effect was elusive, illusive, like some strange new drug: some onlookers it lifted to pinnacles of ecstasy, others it crammed down deep into hard-packed despair; some saw what they most desired, others stared straight down the gullet of h.e.l.l.

And in the center of that midnight radiance Tom Douglas seemed to grow larger than life, and now and again there flickered in place of his broad half-handsome features the head and flaring hood of a giant king cobra, black and menacing, darting left and right as he sang.

As the song climaxed in a howl of voice and organ and guitar, Mark found himself standing with tears streaming unabashed down his thin cheeks, one hand holding Sunflower's, the other a stranger's, and Peter sitting glumly on the floor with his face in his hands, mumbling about decadence.

The next day was the last of April. Nixon invaded Cambodia. Reaction rolled across the nation's campuses like napalm.

Mark found Sunflower across the Bay, listening to speeches in the midst of an angry crowd in Golden Gate Park. "I can't do it," he shouted over the oratory din. "I can't cross over-can't get outside myself."

"Oh, Mark!" Mark!" Sunflower exclaimed with an angry, tearful shake of her head. "You're so selfish. So-so Sunflower exclaimed with an angry, tearful shake of her head. "You're so selfish. So-so bourgeois bourgeois." She whirled away and lost herself in the forest of chanting bodies.

That was the last he saw of her for three days.

He searched for her, wandering the angry crowds, the thickets of placards denouncing Nixon and the war, through marijuana smoke that hung like scent around a honeysuckle hedge. His superstraight attire drew hostile looks; he shied away from a dozen potentially ugly encounters that first day alone, despairing ever more of his inability to become one with the pulsating ma.s.s of humanity around him.

The air was charged with revolution. He could feel it building like a static charge, could almost smell the ozone. He wasn't the only one.

He found her at an all-night vigil a few minutes before midnight of May third. She was crosslegged on a small patch of etiolated gra.s.s that had survived the onslaught of thousands of protesting feet, idly strumming a guitar as she listened to speeches shouted through a bullhorn. "Where have you been?" Mark asked, sinking to the ankles in mud left by a pa.s.sing shower.

She just looked at him and shook her head. Frantic, he plopped himself down beside her with a small squelching splash. "Sunflower, where have you been? I've been looking all over for you."

She looked at him at last, shook her head sadly. "I've been with the people, Mark," she said. "Where I belong."

Suddenly she leaned forward, caught him by the forearm with surprising strength. "It's where you belong too, Mark. It's just that you're so-so selfish. It's as if you're armored in it. And you have so much to offer-now, when we need all the help we can get, to fight the oppressors before it's too late. Break out, Mark. Free yourself."

Surprised, he saw a tear glimmering off in one corner of her eye. "I've been trying to," he said honestly. "I . . . I just can't seem to do it."

A breeze was blowing in off the sea, cool and slightly sticky, occasionally shouldering aside the words garbling out of the megaphone. Mark shivered. "Poor Mark. You're so uptight. Your parents, the schools, they've locked you into a straitjacket. You've got to break out." She moistened her lips. "I think I can help."

Eagerly he leaned forward. "How?"

"You need to tear down the walls, just like the song says. You need to open up your mind."

She fumbled for a moment in a pocket of her embroidered denim jacket, held out her closed hand, palm up. "Sunshine." She opened her hand. A nondescript white tablet rested on the palm. "Acid."

He stared at it. Here it was, the object of his long vicarious study: quest and quest's goal alike. The difficulty of obtaining LSD legally-and his deeply engrained reluctance to attempt to attain it on the black market, along with his instinctive fear that his first attempt to purchase any would land him in San Quentin-had helped him put off the day of reckoning. Acid had been offered him before in hip camaraderie; always he refused it, telling himself it was because you never could be sure what was in a street drug, secretly because he'd always been afraid to step beyond the multiplex door it presented. But now the world he yearned to join was surging about him like the sea, the woman he loved was offering him both challenge and temptation, and there it sat slowly melting in the rain.

He grabbed it from her, quickly and gingerly, as if suspecting it would burn his fingers. He poked it well down into a hip pocket of his black pipestem trousers, now so thoroughly imbued with mud they resembled an inept experiment in tie-dyeing. "I've got to think about it, Sunflower. I can't rush something like this." Not knowing what more to say or do, he started to untangle his lanky legs and stand.

She caught him by the arm again. "No. Stay here with me. If you go home now you'll flush it down the john." She drew him down beside her, closer than he'd ever actually been to her before, and he was suddenly acutely aware that her usual blond vanguard fighter was nowhere in evidence.

"Stay here, among the people. Right beside me," she husked beside next to his ear. Her breath fluttered like an eyelash on his lobe. "See what you have to gain. You're special, Mark. You could do so much that really matters matters. Stay with me tonight."

Although the invitation wasn't as comprehensive as he might have wished, he settled himself back into the mud, and so the night pa.s.sed in cold communion, the two of them huddling inside the dubious shelter of her jacket, shoulder to shoulder, while orators thundered revolution-the final confrontation with Amerika.

By early-morning gray the demonstration began to autolyze. They drifted together to a little all-night coffeehouse near the campus, ate an organic breakfast Mark couldn't taste, while Sunflower spoke urgently of the destiny lying in his reach: "If only you could break out out of yourself, Mark." She reached out and took one of his long, pale hands in a tan compact one. "When I ran into you at that club last fall, I was glad to see you because I guess I was homesick for the old days, bad as they were. You were a friendly face." of yourself, Mark." She reached out and took one of his long, pale hands in a tan compact one. "When I ran into you at that club last fall, I was glad to see you because I guess I was homesick for the old days, bad as they were. You were a friendly face."

He dropped his eyes, blinking rapidly, startled by her open admission that she sought him out because of what he was rather than who he was. "That's changed, Mark." He looked up again, tentative as a deer surprised in an early morning garden, ready to flee at the slightest hint of danger. "I've come to appreciate you for what you are. And what you could be. There's a real person hiding beneath that crew cut and those horn-rimmed gla.s.ses and uptight Establishment clothes you wear. A person crying to be let out."

She put her other hand on top of his, stroked it lightly. "I hope you let him out, Mark. I very much want to meet him. But the time's come for you to make the decision. I can't wait any longer. The time has come to choose, Mark."

"You mean-" His tongue tripped. To his fatigue-fogged mind she seemed to be promising much more than friendship-and at the same time threatening to withdraw even that, if he could not bring himself to act.

He walked her home to the backstairs apartment. On the landing outside she grabbed him suddenly behind the neck, kissed him with surprising ferocity. Then she vanished inside, leaving him blinking.

"They finally taught them little Commie f.u.c.kers a lesson. Right on, I say; right f.u.c.kin' on." on."

Standing to one side of the base of the skysc.r.a.per-in-progress, sipping hot tea from a thermos, Wojtek Grabowski listened to his coworkers discussing the news they'd just heard on the omnipresent transistor: the National Guard had fired into a rally on Ohio's Kent State University campus, several students known dead. They seemed to think it was high time.

He did too, but the news filled him with sadness, not elation.

Later, walking the beams up above the world so high, he reflected on the tragedy of it all. American soldiers were fighting to defend American values and rescue a brother nation from Communist aggression-and here were fellow Americans spitting on them, reviling them. Ho Chi Minh was portrayed as a hero, a would-be liberator.

Grabowski knew that was a lie. He had bled to learn just what Communists meant by "liberation." When he heard them hailed as heroes, his murdered friends and family rose up in a chorus at the back of his mind, crying denunciations.

It just wasn't what the protesters stood for, it was who they were. Children of privilege, overwhelmingly upper-middle-cla.s.s, lashing out with the petulance of the spoiled against the very system that had given them comfort and security unparalleled in human history. "Amerika eats its young," they screamed-but he saw it differently: America was in danger of being devoured by its young.

They were led by false prophets, led horribly astray. By men like Tom Douglas. He'd read up on the singer since his song had so shocked him, last November. He knew now that Douglas was one of the tainted, marked by the alien poison released that afternoon in September of 1946, a child of the evil new dawn whose birth Grabowski himself had witnessed from the deck of a refugee ship moored off Governor's Island. No wonder the children rose like serpents to strike their elders, when they were counseled by men Satan had marked his own.

"Hey," shouted the huge ex-Marine with the radio. "Them hippie b.a.s.t.a.r.ds are filling the streets down at city hall, bustin' windows and burnin' American flags!"

"The f.u.c.kers!"

"We gotta do something! It's revolution, right here and now."