Jack’s face twisted into a withdrawing scowl. “It’s bad enough, for chrissakes!” he said. “Get off my back, will you, Sara!”
Get off my back… get off my back… The words were one more accusation. I am on his back, she thought. He’s doing it to protect me.
“I won’t let you do it,” she heard the strangely reverberating sound of her own voice say. “You’re doing it for me, and I won’t let you, it’s not right. I won’t let Benedict Howards own you just so I can stay alive. I won’t let you do it to yourself.”
“Spare me the martyr-schtick, will you, things are shitty enough as it is,” he said, and she could sense that it was close to an exit-line, that he was handling her the way he would some vip on Bug Jack Barron. “Don’t put yourself on, it wouldn’t make any difference if I was in this alone. I don’t want to die, is all. Why is that so fucking hard for you to understand?”
He’s lying, she thought, he’s lying for me, and I love him for it. But I can’t let him do it.
“You’re doing it for me,” her mechanical inner voice was saying. “I know you are, and I know you’re lying about it for me too. And I’m not going to let you do it, Jack, I’m just not going to let you do it.”
“What in hell is this?” he said, and his voice seemed tinny and unreal yet somehow amplified realer than real over the vidphone circuit. “Delusions of grandeur? Look, baby, you know how I feel about you, but don’t get any funny ideas… nobody works my head, not even you.”
“Not even Benedict Howards?”
Even on the tiny vidphone screen she could see the words that she hadn’t meant to say, that someone else within her had said, biting home cruelly across Jack’s face. “Not even Howards—circumstances, is all. But that’s not letting Bennie work my head, that’s just living in reality. Oughta try it sometime, Sara.”
Sara looked out over the living carpet of light that was the city, the great anguished body of humanity of which she was but an insignificant part, and the blackness above and below seemed to be calling to her with the surfsound of the timeless sea from the buoying depths of forever; calling, promising forgiveness, and a way out… the only way out…
“Didn’t you ever think,” she mumbled, “that there are things better than reality, cleaner, purer, where no one can touch you with death or the blood of children oozing inside you or anything that’s rotten and dirty and evil…”
“Goddamn it,” Jack snarled, “you’re stoned out of your mind! You’re freaked out on acid. Get hold of yourself, Sara, ride it out, baby… Jesus H. Christ, how could you be so dumb, what a time to drop acid! With all this shit going on, you knew you had to have a bummer. Why the hell did you do it?”
Standing there, with Jack’s image a gray on white ghost from a million miles away and a thousand years ago on the vidphone screen, she herself wondered why. A bummer, sure, she had known deep down it would have to be a bummer. But how could anything be worse than reality, worse than torn fragments of murdered children sewn inside her, inside Jack, and Benedict Howards going on and on forever? With or without acid, it was all a bummer, a bummer that would go on and on and on forever, with no way to ever come down, a freakout she could never wait out… unless…
She lifted the vidphone off the pedestal and set it on the parapet lip, the screen now at her chest-level, and Jack’s face was a black and white specter looking back at her with blind, uncomprehending eyes. I’ve got to make him understand… He’s got to understand.
“Please, Jack, you’ve got to understand…” The words gushed out of her in a self-propelled torrent. “There’s no way out, not in what you call reality, it’s a trap, and there’s no way out for either of us except… except death, except turning ourselves off and sleeping dreamless innocent dreams forever… Reality… . Don’t you see, the only answer is something greater than reality, purer, cleaner, infinite, something to give yourself to, something that can wash it all away, something to merge yourself with, something infinite to be one with—”
“Spare me the parlor Buddhism, will you?” Jack said. “I wish you could hear yourself, I mean I wish you could hear yourself baby, ’cause your head’s just not there. You’re gibbering, and you’re starting to scare me. Take it easy, Sara, and for chrissakes do what I tell you. Go inside, sit down on the couch, put on some happy music, and wait it out. You’re stoned. Remember you’re stoned. It’s just a bum trip, is all. You’ll be all right when the acid wears off. Whatever happens inside your head, remember it won’t last forever, you’ll come down. Remember, you’ll come down.”
“Come down!” she found herself screaming at him. “I’ll never come down! It’s not the acid, it’s me. Dead children’s glands inside of me, that’s not the acid, Benedict Howards, that’s not the acid, what I’m doing to you, that’s not the acid… It’s me, me, me, and it stinks!”
“Sara! You haven’t done anything to me, I’ve done it to you…”
She studied his face, and even on the black and white unreality of the vidphone screen, the man, the essence that was Jack, JACK BARRON, leaped out at her from the darkness through layers and layers of phosphorescent reality, pulsing image-waves of his face on the pillow blue and stubbly on the vidphone with Luke naked beside her in the Berkeley attic her knight in soft-flesh armor brave beside her the Black Shade they call him his tongue inside her the taste of his body, wave after wave of JACK BARRON images flashed from the vidphone screen through her, merging and dancing on the back wall of her mind. Overlapping, flashing, reversing, contradicting in a cresting-wave pattern, the sum of the images forming an essence that coalesced like a standing-wave formed from the flux, an essence that shone with an unwavering light—an essence that was pure Jack.
And the Jack that she saw dwarfed and flickering on the tiny vidphone screen before her seemed an anguished denial of the greater Jack that blazed across the screen in her mind. That was the real Jack Barren, a Jack Barren who could never cop out just because he was Jack. No matter what he did, that Jack was still JACK BARRON (in flaming capital letters). And how many times was I sure that Jack was wrong and he turned out to be right? JACK BARRON… a creature bigger in every way than herself, and hadn’t she always known it, even when she hadn’t known she knew, wasn’t it why she loved him? Bigger than herself… bigger than anyone, not her Jack, but Jack’s Sara, how could she ever be anything else? Or want to be.
And that’s what I’m taking from him because he loves me, because he can’t see me die—I’m taking away JACK. And if he loses Jack, I lose Jack, the world loses Jack—because I love him and he loves me. It’s not right!
“Jack… Jack… I love you, I’m sorry, I can’t help it, I love you!”
“I love you too, Sara,” he said quietly, soothingly, and she felt that marvelous gyroscopic sense of tenderness, and she loved him for it and hated herself for his loving her. I’m destroying him…
“I know you do, and I’m sorry… I’m sorry you love me and I love you. It’s destroying you, Jack, it’s making you something less than what you were meant to be. I can’t let that happen… I won’t let it happen!”