Won’t let it happen! The thought filled her mind. I can’t let it happen. Got to save Jack… save him from lizardman Howards… dead things in my body… got to save him from me. From me!
And as she stared out over the endless lights of the amoeboid city spreading out below her like the throng before the Mount, she knew who really stood at the summit of that mountain, who they all looked to, who could do it, could bust it all wide open, destroy the Foundation Black Shade Social Justice President of the United States. Luke was right, it was Jack—Jack all the way, and a whole nation riding with him, and me, only me bringing him down.
I’m all that’s stopping him from being JACK, the Jack that everyone needs. He loves me, he’ll always love me, he’ll never leave me, and as long as I live I’ll never be able to leave him, we’re too deep into each other. As long as I live…
With a sudden, mindless leap she found herself crouched on the narrow concrete parapet beside the vidphone, staring at his image only inches from her face, muscles tensed smoothly like a cat gathering to spring.
“Sara! What the fuck are you doing?” Jack shouted, and she sensed him fighting fear for control and knew he would win. He would always win. “You’re stoned!” he snarled, and the harshness in his voice was a purposeful slap across the face. “Remember you’re stoned, and get the hell off there… but do it slow and easy, don’t get shook, first put one leg on the ground, then put all your weight on it before you step down… Sara! Come on! Snap out of it!”
“I love you Jack,” she said to his tiny distant image. “I love you, and I know you’d always love me. That’s why I’ve got to do it. You’ve got to be free—free of me so you can really be Jack Barron, free to see what you are and what you’ve always been and what you’ve got to do. You’ve got to be free! And so long as I’m alive you’ll never be free. I’m doing it because I love you, because you love me. Goodbye, Jack… Remember, only because I loved you…”
She straightened her legs convulsively, and stood waveringly upright on the narrow parapet as the vidphone beside her feet shouted: “Don’t do it, Sara, God, don’t do it! You’re stoned out of your mind! You don’t know what you’re doing! For chrissakes, don’t jump! Don’t jump!”
But the voice that called to her was mechanical and tiny and seemed to be coming from another world, a black and white unreal vidphone world encapsulated in the meaningless thing by her foot, where she couldn’t even see it; a voice drowned out by the surf-roar that cloaked her shoulders with sighing green tentacles, the fetid wet breath of torn babies within her pushing her forward with an avalanche of dead children a million maggots writhing under her skin. And before her, above her, below her, all around her was the soothing black velvet nothingness of an infinite ocean, buoying like pillows to an endless, dreamless sleep, pure and clean and safe forever from pain and remorse and dead bodies of broken babies, calling, calling, calling, “Give yourself to me.”
“Sara!”
Jack’s voice was a fading cry from a world already abandoned, the memory fading, an unreal nightmare world of frog-green tentacles broken babies dripping slime under her skin the bone-white crocodile-smile of Benedict Howards on his green plastic lily-pad on a pile of dead bodies, forever and ever, and Jack chained to him by a thousand links, and each one of them her body…
For him! For him!
The taste of Jack at last free at last Jack all Jack was a delicious orgasmic spasm through the muscles of her legs (’Sara! Sara!” she heard him scream), and she too was free—free as a bird, with the air whistling through the pinions of her hair, weightless, buoyed, her consciousness expanding outward in rippling waves that merged with the blackness in streamers of mist till all that was left of what was hers alone was a blazing word-shape-smell-taste that whited out every sensory-synapse:
JACK and stars spinning across her retinas JACK and
the skin of her face pulled drumtight JACK free
fall nausea JACK. mass rushing up JACK screams
below JACK fear JACK acid freakout JACK
for you JACK I’m afraid JACK help me
JACK no no JACK don’t want JACK
death JACK forever JACK no
JACK no JACK no no
JACK flash of blinding pain
JAC-
*
20
*
Sara
No! it can’t have happened. Sara you’re not
Sara dead no! not dead
not down there on the sidewalk
in a puddle of—Sara! Sara! no no no,
You can’t be dead! Can’t be dead! No! No! Sara!
Sara you crazy bitch, how could you do a thing like this to me!
How could you do a thing like this to me… The foulness, the utter selfish foulness brought Jack Barren’s mind back into reality from the point of anesthetic blackout into which it had retreated like a whipped dog howling.
The vidphone screen before him showed a crazy slash of black sky over a section of the concrete parapet off which—
He reached out, snapped off the vidphone, and in the same motion fumbled an Acapulco Gold out of the pack on his desk. He jammed it into his mouth, lit it with the table-lighter, and sucked the smoke in-out-in-out-in-out in savage compulsive pants.
How could you do a thing like this to me—oh, Barren, you shit you! How could you do it to her? You bastard! You heartless motherfucker! Sara! Sara! You… you…
He flagellated himself with images of her eyes: pool-deep eyes before she blew him wide and shiny my hero little girl eyes naked beside him in Berkeley attic cold eyes boring through him shouting cop-out! the day they broke up eyes glazing and opaqueing to stainless steel mirrors as their flesh crawled from each other the last night (last night! last night there ever was between them and a night spent as strangers!) poor lost phosphor-dot eyes like windows into gray blind acid jungle inside naked and writhing, and I could see it building and building like runaway cancer, and all I could do was gibber into the fucking phone while her eyes grew crazier and crazier as she was sucked deeper and deeper into the acid freakout nightmare, eyes from the nowhere nonreality of LSD insanity, and all I could do was watch on the phone while she jumped; poor crazy lost eyes, and I couldn’t do a fucking thing but watch her jump!
SaraSaraSara… No Sara any more, never, no Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara-shaped hole against the sky of his night that would never be filled, not in a million years, and he had a million years, dammit, a million years to be without her, a million years to watch her jump, million years to know he killed her—
Bullshit, man! he thought. Stop trying to con yourself… Guilty, maybe you should feel, but you don’t. You didn’t kill her, damn it, it was the acid, was nothing you did or could’ve done, was Sara freaking out into her own crazy bag again, doing it to save me, make me free; to be the fucking Baby Bolshevik hero I never was… to save me… From what, from living? From caring? From giving a shit about what happens next? Sara… Sara . I didn’t kill you, you killed me!… killed the best things inside me, is all. Tore out my flesh-and-blood guts, replaced with electronic circuitry, can’t even make myself cry knowing you’re dead. Was nothing I did that killed you, Sara, was what I was. Murderer… vampire off babies… not even that, was it Sara?
Was fucking cop-out, is all! Was seeing my bod owned by that fucker Howards, body not even my own, with slug-green pieces of immortality-slime drip-dripping inside me, was seeing me selling out to Bennie… You didn’t kill me, and I didn’t kill you, we were both dead already, died when we couldn’t stand to touch each other last night, that motherfucker Howards killed us both. Killed us both by making us immortal, now ain’t that a pisser?