He smiled a knowing smile, kissed her lightly, and said, “There’s hope for you after all, Sara. You’re getting a taste of it, Sara, a taste of where the world’s really at. It’s all out there, every dream, everything anyone wants. But you don’t get it by talking about it or dropping acid and wishing. You gotta get out there in the nitty-gritty and grab it, take as much of what’s out there as what’s inside you can get you. That’s reality. Not what’s inside or what’s outside, but how much of what’s inside you can make real. If that’s copping out—getting your hands dirty—well, then I’d rather be a cop-out than a one-eyed cat forever peeing in a seafood store. Wouldn’t you? Is being hungry all your life really being true to yourself?”
Jack Barron, she thought. Jack Barron. Jack Barron. JACK BARRON. Christ, it’s hard to think of him as anything but JACK BARRON in great big red capital letters. Hate him, love him, cop-out comic-book-monster hero lover, whatever he is, it’s impossible to keep your cool around him. Jack’s Jack, makes his own rules no one else can even follow, lies become truth becomes cop-out becomes psychedelic vision—reality becomes lover becomes power becomes rock-bottom honesty, comes on like acid-flash white-out reversal-images; foreground-background indeterminate interface of dynamic instability, and what he is is the paradox interface itself—not figure, not ground, but the standing-wave-pattern between. JACK BARRON.
And she knew fear, knowing he was something greater than herself, something hyperreal, encompassing her reality as a facet of himself, only one facet; knew fear that he saw through her like through glass, saw lizardman Howards pushing them together in chessboard gambit from bone-white windowless temple of power. And she knew guilt at her own cop-out, holding within her Howards’ plan within her plan, playing the very same game she put Howards down for. But Jack himself had given her the path from guilt to resolution—reality, truth—is how much of what’s inside you that you can make real. And she knew hunger for him, for his body-reality love, for inside-head dreams made real, not for a moment or a year or a century, but forever. Forever. She knew hunger, and knew she had never hungered like this before.
But she also knew a feeling that filled her with soul-jeopardy dread: guile. She felt the serpent-shaped slithering word within her, holding a piece of her back in cool rock lairs coil in reptile coil, waiting basilisk cold centuries ready to pounce; knew she was faced with an order of decision-reality she had not believed existed—life external with Jack forever knight in soft-flesh armor against a million years of worm-eaten nothingness. Knew in her hands was the darkness-power of life versus death for her, for Jack… for how many millions? And she knew with infinite sadness that at age thirty-five she was no longer girl Sara Westerfeld, but woman Sara Westerfeld, playing adult-deadly game with man Jack Barron for the highest stakes of all, for the right to think of herself really as Sara Barron in great big red capital letters forever. Sara BARRON. SARA BARRON.
“Let me show you something that’s us,” he said, taking her hand. “A dream made real we can both dig together.” And he led her across the red carpet to a small door. “Remember, Sara?” He opened the door to the bedroom, and she stepped inside—and saw and felt. And remembered.
Oh, she remembered! She remembered sun-warmed grass against her back pushed to rich wet earth by him open sighing flash of stars glowing blue-black skylight above bed open to the stars tropical night-smells heard Acapulco breakers in the taped surfsounds that came on at the touch of his hand; patio foliage outlined against the dusk-glow of Brooklyn against sunset clawing through leaf-frond windows of Los Angeles bedroom his face blue and stubbly arms sleeping around her. Ivy-walled bedstead of Berkeley attic first-time thrill gray wood texture of college-fuck walls. Saw plastigrass carpet, console in bedstead, surfsound recording, sliding panels, scenery, props—the backside of a dream.
Her dream.
She turned toward him, and he was smiling, fey, knowing buddha-eyes like scalpels, the conscious creator of her midnight-tears dream.
Do I love him, or hate him? She wondered if she’d ever know, if it mattered, for no other man so knew her, no other man gave off that dangerous heat. She could hate him and love him in her innermost being (where love and hate might be the same thing)—beside JACK BARRON (in flaming capital letters) who else could be real?
“Jack…” she croaked, crying and laughing, flinging herself at him, her self- bundle of hate, love, thirty-five years of girlhood—open, reservations forgotten. Poor fool lizardman Howards, thinking he can use me against Jack Barron—a handful of sand thrown against the sea.
She was on the bed under him without remembering moving, swimming in tides of total sensation, a balloon of diffused nerve-endings living the moment on her sentient skin. And he was…
Exploding within her, imploding around her, filling her, gorging her with electrical being, blunt lances of pleasure around which she surrounded, caressing it, feeling it, digging it, taking it in. Feeling him gasping in spiraling spasms, feeling molecule by molecule wet scorching osmosis, him-her symbiotic flashing interface where skin touched skin, she screamed with his throat as he flashed through her, and time jumped a long beat of unbearable pleasure and she soared in a dream of Islamic heaven -slow-grinding orgasm for ten million years.
Opening her eyes, she saw his closed and dreaming. Jack! Jack! she thought. I’m a phony, a liar. I came here like some damned Mexican whore. And she teetered on the edge of telling him all—Benedict Howards using her, and she using him.
But she felt his weight on her, the touch of his skin, his hair tickling her nipples, and the thought of his body lying in humus, dead, gone and forgotten, tied her belly and tongue in constricted knots. She remembered that she stood between him and oblivion. If she were brave a little longer, held it back for a while, all that was Jack, all that was between them, never had to die.
Oh, Jack, Jack! she wanted to shout but didn’t, someone like you should never die!
8
“Deathbed at go” the promptboard flashed, and Jack Barron, clocking Vince’s smart-ass Sicilian-type grin, was sure Gelardi had to have Mafiosa blood in him somewhere even though he claimed to be strictly Neapolitan. The promptboard flashed “45 Seconds,” and Barron shuddered as the last seconds of the opening commercial reeled by—schtick was a bunch of diplomats relaxing around the old conference table with good old Acapulco Golds. Ain’t as funny as it looks, he thought, vips run the world like they’re stoned half the time anyway, and for the other half things are worse. Wonder what Benny Howards would be like high? Well, maybe tonight all hundred million Brackett Count chilluns gonna see—they say adrenalin’s like a psychedelic, and before I’m through tonight, Bennie’s gonna go on an adrenalin bummer he won’t believe.
Watching the commercial fade into his own face on the monitor, Barron felt a weird psychedelic flash go through him, the reality of the last week compressed into an instantaneous image flashed on the promptboard of his mind: Sitting in the studio chair, electronic feedback-circuitry connecting him with subsystems of power—Foundation power SJC-Democrat-Republican power, hundred million Brackett Count power—he was like the master transistor in a massive satellite network confluence circuit of power, gigantic input of others’ power feeding into his head through vidphone circuits, none of it his, but all feeding through him, his to control by microcosmic adjustment; for one hour, 8-9 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, that power was de facto his.