Wild Cards Part 31

You have the power, he told himself. Can you walk away from here, knowing you have the power, refusing to use it?

Sweat ran down his face and arms.

The power was in the yod yod, the rasa rasa, the sperm. Incredible power, more than he knew how to control yet. Enough to bring the dead back to life.

No, he thought. I can't do it. Not just because the thought made him sick to his stomach, but because he knew it would change him. It would be the point of no return, the point where he gave up being completely human.

But the power had already changed him. He had already seen things that those without it would never understand. Power corrupts, he'd been told, but now he saw how naive that was. Power enlightens. Power transforms.

He unfastened the dead boy's belt, unzipped the bell-bottomed jeans, and pulled them off. The boy had c.r.a.ped and p.i.s.sed in them when he died, and the smell made Fortunato wince. He threw the jeans in a corner and rolled the dead boy onto his stomach.

I can't do this, Fortunato thought. But he was already hard, and the tears rolled down his face as he knelt between the dead boy's legs.

He came almost immediately. It left him weak, weaker than he'd thought possible. He crawled away, pulling his pants back up, sick and disgusted and exhausted.

The dead boy began to twitch.

Fortunato got to the wall, pulled himself onto his feet. He was dizzy and his head throbbed with pain. He saw something on the floor, something that had fallen out of the dead boy's pants. It was a coin, an eighteenth-century penny, so fresh that it looked reddish in the harsh light of the loft. He put the penny in his pocket in case it meant something later.

"Look at me," he said to the dead boy.

The dead boy's hands clawed at the floor, gouging out b.l.o.o.d.y splinters. Slowly he pulled himself onto his hands and knees, and then lurched clumsily onto his feet. He turned and looked at Fortunato with empty eyes.

The eyes were horrible. They said that death was nothingness, that even a few seconds of it had been too much.

"Talk to me," Fortunato said. Not anger anymore, but the memory of anger, kept him going. "G.o.dd.a.m.n your white a.s.s, talk to me. Tell me what this means. Tell me why."

The dead boy stared at Fortunato. For an instant something flickered there, and the dead boy said, "TIAMAT." The word was whispered, but perfectly clear. Then the dead boy smiled. With both hands he reached up to his own throat and ripped it bloodily out through the skin of his neck and then, while Fortunato watched, tore it in half.

Lenore was asleep. Fortunato threw his clothes into the garbage and stood in the shower for thirty minutes, until the hot water ran out. Then he sat by candlelight in Lenore's living room and read.

He found the name TIAMAT in a text on the Sumerian elements of Crowley's magick. The serpent, Leviathan, KUTULU. Monstrous, evil.

He knew beyond question that he had found only a single tentacle of something that defied his comprehension.

Eventually he slept.

He woke up to the sound of Lenore closing the latches on her suitcase.

"Don't you see?" she tried to explain. "I'm just like a-a wall outlet that you come home to plug into to recharge. How can I live like that? You got what I always wanted, real power to do real magick. And you lucked into it, without even wanting it. And all the study and practice and work I did all my life doesn't mean s.h.i.+t because I didn't catch some f.u.c.king alien virus."

"I love you," Fortunato said. "Don't go."

She told him to keep the books, to keep the apartment too if he wanted. She told him she would write, but he didn't need magick to know she was lying.

And then she was gone.

He slept for two days, and on the third Miranda found him and they made love until he was strong enough to tell her what happened.

"As long as he's dead," Miranda said. "The rest I don't care about."

When she left him that night for her client, he sat in the living room for over an hour, unable to move. Soon, he knew, he would have to start looking for the other being whose traces he'd seen in the dead boy's loft. Even the thought of it paralyzed him with loathing.

Finally he reached for Crowley's Magick Magick and opened it to Chapter V. "Sooner or later," Crowley said, "the gentle, natural growth is succeeded by depression-the Dark Night of the Soul, an infinite weariness and detestation of the work." But eventually would come a "new and superior condition, a condition only rendered possible by the process of death." and opened it to Chapter V. "Sooner or later," Crowley said, "the gentle, natural growth is succeeded by depression-the Dark Night of the Soul, an infinite weariness and detestation of the work." But eventually would come a "new and superior condition, a condition only rendered possible by the process of death."

Fortunato closed the book. Crowley knew, but Crowley was dead. He felt like the last human on a barren rock of a planet.

But he wasn't the last human. He was one of the first of something new, something that had the potential to be better than human.

That woman at the demonstration, C.C. She'd said you should take care of your own. What would it cost him to save hundreds of jokers from dying in the heat and rotting dampness of Vietnam? Not very much. Not very much at all.

He found the flyer in the pocket of his jacket. Slowly, with growing conviction, he dialed the numbers.

TRANSFIGURATIONS.

by Victor Milan

November night wind whipped his trousers, stinging skinny legs like triffid tendrils as he shoehorned himself into a small club not far from campus. The murk throbbed like a wound, pulsing red and blue and noise. He stopped, hovering there in the door with the lumpy orange-and-green plaid coat in which his mother had packed him off to MIT three years before hanging on his narrow shoulders like a dead dwarf. Don't be such a coward, Mark Don't be such a coward, Mark, he told himself. This is for science This is for science.

The band lunged at "Crown of Creation" and wrestled it to the floor as he instinctively sought the darkest corner, teacup in hand-he'd learned how unhip it was to order c.o.ke or coffee, at least.

Other than that he'd learned none of the moves in weeks of research. The way he was dressed, in his high-water pants and pastel polyester s.h.i.+rt of the sort that always pooched out at the sides like a sail in the wind, he might've been in danger of being taken for a narc-this was the fall that followed Woodstock, the year Gordon Liddy invented the DEA to give Nixon an issue to distract attention from the war-but Berkeley and San Francisco were hip towns, university towns; they they knew a science student when they saw one. knew a science student when they saw one.

The Gla.s.s Onion had no dance floor as such; bodies swayed in crepuscular crimson and indigo glow between tables or crowded into a clear s.p.a.ce before the tiny stage, with a whisper of beads and buckskin fringe and the occasional dull glint of Indian jewelry. He kept as far from the action's center as he could, but being Mark he inevitably b.u.mped into everyone he pa.s.sed, leaving a wake of glares and thin embarra.s.sed "excuse me's" behind him. His prominent ears burning, he had almost reached his goal, the little rickety table made out of a Ma Bell cable spool with a single dented green auditorium chair beside it and an unlit candle in an empty peanut b.u.t.ter jar plunked down on it, when he ran smack into somebody.

The first thing that happened was that his ma.s.sive horn-rim gla.s.ses slid down the ramp of his nose and disappeared in the dark. Next he grabbed the person he'd b.u.mped with both hands as his balance went. The teacup hit the floor with a crash and a clatter. "Oh, dear, oh, please excuse me, I'm sorry . . ." tumbled from his mouth like gumb.a.l.l.s from a broken machine.

He realized there was a certain softness of the person his skinny hands were clinging to so fervently, and a smell of musk and patchouli detached itself from the general miasma and drilled its way right up into his sensorium. He cursed himself: You had to go and run over a You had to go and run over a beautiful woman beautiful woman. At least she smelled smelled beautiful. beautiful.

Then she was patting him on the arm, murmuring that she was sorry, and they both bent down to the floor together in search of teacup and gla.s.ses while the bodies went round and round around them, and they b.u.mped heads and recoiled amid apologies, and Mark's fevered fingers found his gla.s.ses, miraculously intact, and fit them back in front of his eyes, and he blinked and found himself staring from a distance of five inches into the face of Kimberly Ann Cordayne.

Kimberly Ann Cordayne: the girl, yes, of his dreams. Childhood sweetheart, unrequited, from the moment he'd first beheld her, pinafored and five, riding her trike down the modest suburban SoCal street where they both lived. He'd been so entranced by her Hallmark Card perfection that the raspberry scoop fell off his ice cream cone to hot doom on the sidewalk and he never noticed. She pedaled over his bare toes and cruised on with her pert nose in the air, never acknowl- edging his existence. From that day his heart had been lost.

Hope and despair surged up like surf within him. He straightened, his tongue too tied to produce words. And she yelled, "Mark! Mark Meadows! f.u.c.k, but it's good to see you." And hugged him.

He stood there blinking like an idiot. No female who wasn't a relative had ever hugged him before. He swallowed spastically. What What if I get an erection? if I get an erection? Belatedly, he made feeble patting gestures at the small of her back. Belatedly, he made feeble patting gestures at the small of her back.

She pushed away, held him at arm's length. "Let me look at you, brother. Why, you haven't changed a bit."

He winced. The taunting would begin now, for his skinniness, his clumsiness, his crew cut, the pimples still sprinkled across scrawny, allegedly postadolescent features-and his most recent, most aggravating deficit, his utter and complete inability to be anywhere near With It. In high school, Kimberly Ann had evolved from indifference into his foremost tormentor-or, rather, a succession of jocks on whose overelaborated biceps she hung, cooing encouragements, had a.s.sumed the role.

But here she was tugging him toward that corner table. "Come on, man. Let's talk about the bad old days."

It was an opportunity for which he'd hopelessly hoped three quarters of his life. Face-to-face with his paragon of love and beauty while the band on stage a.s.saulted the Beatles' "Blackbird"-and he couldn't think of one d.a.m.ned thing to say.

But Kimberly Ann was more than happy to do the talking. About the changes she'd been through since good old Rexford Tugwell High. About the far-out people she'd met at Whittier College, how they turned her on and opened her eyes. How she'd dropped out midway through her senior year and come here, the Bay Area, the bright mecca of Movement. How she'd been finding herself ever since.

Perhaps he hadn't changed, but she most definitely had. Gone was the straight black ponytail, pleated skirts, pastel lipstick and nail polish, the prim stewardess perfection of an up-and-coming Bank of America executive's one daughter. Kimberly's hair had grown long, hanging down well past her shoulders in a great kinky cloudy Yoko Ono mane. She wore a frilly peasant blouse embroidered with mushrooms and planets, a voluminous skirt tie-dyed into what reminded Mark of nothing so much as fireworks displays in Disneyland. He knew her feet were bare, from having stepped on one. She looked more beautiful than he ever could have imagined.

And those pale eyes, winter-sky eyes, that had so often frozen him in the past, were glowing at him with such warmth he could barely stand to look at them. It was heaven, but somehow he couldn't buy it. Being Mark, he had to question.

"Kimberly-" he began.

She held up two fingers. "Hold it right there, dude. I left that name behind me with my bourgeois ways. I'm Sunflower now."

He bobbed his head and his Adam's apple. "Okay-Sunflower."

"So what brings you here, man?"

"It's an experiment."

She eyed him across the rim of her jelly-jar winegla.s.s, suddenly wary.

"I just finished my undergrad work at MIT," he explained in a rush. "Now I'm here to get my doctorate in biochemistry from the University of California at Berkeley."

"So what's that got to do with this scene?"

"Well, what I've been working on is figuring out just how DNA encodes genetic information. I published some papers, stuff like that." At MIT they'd compared him to Einstein, as a matter of fact, but you'd never catch him saying that. "But this summer I found something that interests me a lot more. The chemistry of mind."

Blue blankness, her eyes.

"Psychedelics. Psychoactive drugs. I read all the material-Leary, Alpert, the Solomon collection. It really-what's the expression? Really turned me on." He leaned forward, fingers plucking unconsciously at the felt-tip pens nestled in their plastic protector in his breast pocket. In his excitement he sprinkled the spool tabletop with unconscious spittle. "It's a really vital area of research. I think it might lead to answering the really important questions-who we are, and how, and why."

She looked at him with half a frown and half a smile. "I still don't get it."

"I'm doing fieldwork to establish a context for my research. On the drug culture-the, uh, the counterculture. Trying to get an angle on how hallucinogen use affects people's outlook."

He moistened his lips. "It's really exciting. There's a whole world I never knew existed-here." A nervous tic encompa.s.sed the Onion's smoky confines. "But somehow I can't really, well, make contact. I've bought all the Grateful Dead records, but I still feel like an outsider. I-I almost feel I'd like to be part of this whole hippie thing."

"Hippie?" she said with a patrician snort. "Mark, where've you been? It's 1969. The hippie movement's been dead for two years." She shook her head. "Have you actually done any of these drugs you're trying to study?"

He flushed. "No. I . . . uh-I'm not ready to get to that stage."

"Poor Mark. You're so uptight. Looks as if I'm going to have my work cut out for me, trying to show you what it is that's happening, Mr. Jones."

The reference skimmed his flattop, but suddenly his face brightened and his nose and cheekbones and whatnot went in happy directions, and he showed his horsy teeth. "You mean you'll help me?" He grabbed her hand, s.n.a.t.c.hed his fingers away as if afraid they'd leave marks. "You'll show me around?"

She nodded.

"Great!" He picked up the teacup, clinked it against an upper tooth, realized it was empty and clacked it down again. "I've been wondering why-that is, I-well, you've never, ah, talked talked to me like this before." to me like this before."

She took one of his hands in both of hers and he thought his heart would stop. "Oh, Mark," she said, tenderly, even. "Always the a.n.a.lytical one. It's just that since my eyes have been opened, I've realized that everyone's beautiful in his own way, except the pigs who oppress the people. And I see you-still straight. But you haven't sold out, man. I can tell; I can read it in your aura. You're still the same old Mark."

His head whirled like a carousel out of control. Cynical, his left brain tossed up the hypothesis that she was homesick, that he was part of a childhood and past she had cut herself off from, perhaps, too completely. He brushed it aside. She was Kimberly Ann, invulnerable, unapproachable. Any minute now she'd recognize him for the impostor he was.

She didn't. They talked on into the night-or rather, she talked and he listened, wanting to believe but still unable to. When the band took a long-overdue break, somebody cued up side one of Destiny's new alb.u.m on the sound system. The gestalt gestalt burned itself irrevocably in: darkness and colored lights playing in the hair and face of the most beautiful woman in his world, and behind it the husky baritone of Tom Marion Douglas singing of love and death and dislocation, of elder G.o.ds and destinies best not hinted at. It changed him, that night. But he didn't know yet. burned itself irrevocably in: darkness and colored lights playing in the hair and face of the most beautiful woman in his world, and behind it the husky baritone of Tom Marion Douglas singing of love and death and dislocation, of elder G.o.ds and destinies best not hinted at. It changed him, that night. But he didn't know yet.

He was almost too surfeited with wonder to be elated or even surprised when, halfway through the band's exiguous second set, Kimberly stood up suddenly, clutching his hand. "This is getting to be a drag. These guys don't know where it's at. Why don't you come over to my pad, drink a little wine, get a little high?" Her eyes challenged, and there was a bit of that old haughtiness, the old ice, as she pulled on waffle-stomper boots with red laces. "Or are you too straight for that?"

He felt as if he had a cotton ball sitting in the middle of his tongue. "Ah, I-no. I'd be more than happy to."

"Far out. There's hope for you yet."

In a daze Mark followed her out of the club, to a liquor store with a ma.s.sive sliding San Quentin grating over the windows, where a balding pasty-faced proprietor sold them a bottle of Ripple under a gaze of fish-eyed distaste. Mark was a virgin. He had his fantasies, the Playboy Playboy magazines with their pages stuck together stacked among the scientific papers under the tumbledown bed in his apartment on the fringes of Chinatown. But not even in fantasy did he ever dare to imagine himself coupled with the resplendent Kimberly Ann. And now-he drifted the streets as if weightless, barely noticing the freaks and street people who exchanged greetings with Sunflower as they pa.s.sed. magazines with their pages stuck together stacked among the scientific papers under the tumbledown bed in his apartment on the fringes of Chinatown. But not even in fantasy did he ever dare to imagine himself coupled with the resplendent Kimberly Ann. And now-he drifted the streets as if weightless, barely noticing the freaks and street people who exchanged greetings with Sunflower as they pa.s.sed.

And he barely noticed on the rickety backstairs when Sunflower said, ". . . meet my old man. You'll love him; he's a really heavy dude."

Then the words crunched into his brain like a lead mallet. He stumbled. Kimberly caught him by the arm, laughing. "Poor Mark. Always so uptight. Come on, we're almost there."

So he wound up in this little one-lung apartment with a hot plate and a leaky faucet in the bathroom. By one wall a salvaged mattress with a madras-print coverlet rested on a door propped on cinder blocks. Crosslegged on the spread beneath a giant poster of the beatified Che sat Philip, Sunflower's Old Man. He was dark-eyed and intense, a black tee s.h.i.+rt stretched over his brawny chest with a blood-red fist and the word Huelga Huelga lettered under it. He was watching clips of a demonstration on a little rumpsprung portable TV with a coat-hanger aerial. lettered under it. He was watching clips of a demonstration on a little rumpsprung portable TV with a coat-hanger aerial.

"Right on," he was saying as they came in. "The Lizard King has his head together. These clean-for-Gene work-within-the-system aces like Turtle don't know what it's all about: confrontation with fascist Amerika. Who the f.u.c.k are you?"

After Sunflower took him off to one corner and explained to him in a fierce whisper that Mark was not a police spy but an old, old friend, and don't embarra.s.s me, a.s.shole, he consented to shake Mark's hand. Mark craned past him at the TV; the bearded face of the man now being interviewed looked familiar somehow.

"Who's that?" he asked.

Philip lifted a lip corner. "Tom Douglas, of course. Lead singer for Destiny. The Lizard King." He scanned Mark from flattop to penny loafers. "Or maybe you've never heard of him."

Mark blinked, said nothing. He knew of Destiny and Douglas-as research he'd just bought their new alb.u.m, Black Sunday Black Sunday, plain maroon cover dominated by a huge black sun. He was too embarra.s.sed to say so.

Sunflower's eyes went faraway. "You should have seen him today at the demonstration. Facing down the pigs as the Lizard King. Truly far out."

Amenities out of the way, the two of them broke out a contrivance of gla.s.s and rubber tubing, tamped its bowl full of dope, and lit up. Had Sunflower by herself offered Mark the gra.s.s, he would have accepted. But now he was feeling strange and alien again, as if his skin didn't fit him right, and he refused. He slouched in the corner next to a pile of Daily Workers Daily Workers while his host and hostess sat on the bed and smoked dope and stocky intense Philip lectured him about the Necessity for Armed Struggle until he thought his head was going to fall off, and he drank the whole bottle of sickly sweet wine by himself-he didn't drink, either-and finally Kimberly began to snuggle up close to her Old Man and fondle him in a way that made Mark distinctly uneasy, and he mumbled excuses and stumbled out and somehow found his way home. As the first light of dawn drooled in the windows of his own dingy flat, he regurgitated the contents of the Ripple bottle into his cracked porcelain toilet, and it took him fifteen flushes to get it clear again. while his host and hostess sat on the bed and smoked dope and stocky intense Philip lectured him about the Necessity for Armed Struggle until he thought his head was going to fall off, and he drank the whole bottle of sickly sweet wine by himself-he didn't drink, either-and finally Kimberly began to snuggle up close to her Old Man and fondle him in a way that made Mark distinctly uneasy, and he mumbled excuses and stumbled out and somehow found his way home. As the first light of dawn drooled in the windows of his own dingy flat, he regurgitated the contents of the Ripple bottle into his cracked porcelain toilet, and it took him fifteen flushes to get it clear again.