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 wineglass, 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 encompassed 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, snatched 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 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 analytical 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 album on the sound system. The 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 gods 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 massive 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 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 passed.
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 shirt stretched over his brawny chest with a blood-red fist and the word Huelga 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 fuck 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 embarrass me, asshole, 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 album, Black Sunday, plain maroon cover dominated by a huge black sun. He was too embarrassed 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 glass and rubber tubing, tamped its bowl full of dope, and lit up. Had Sunflower by herself offered Mark the grass, 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 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.
So began Mark's courtship of Sunflower, née 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 Jap 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. “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 shit,” somebody growled.
“Fuck 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 Nazis 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 you.” The repetition 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 lust 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 cassock and played Bach's 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 . . .
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 you . . .”
He shut his eyes. If I must endure that banal lyric one more time. . . .
“. . . 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 lust—were degraded into a 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 protégé, 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, passionate, brilliant (and at pains to tell you so). Committed. And muscular; 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.
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 classics, 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- 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 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-mâché 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.