For years Mark had lived in a haze of marijuana smoke. He dabbled in other drugs, but that was more in the nature of biochemical experimentation with himself as subject-such as had called up the Radical, and subsequently his "friends." Grass was his drug of choice. Way back in those strange days of the late sixties early seventies, actually, but the sixties didn't end until Nixon did-it seemed a perfect solace to someone who had come to terms with the fact that he was doomed to disappoint everyone who expected anything of him. Especially himself.
Now he was emerging from the cushioning fog. Off the weed, the world was a lot more surreal place to be. Someone stepped from the doorway of the Pumpkin, features obscured by the broad straw brim of a hat. Mark's hand moved to the inside pocket of his coat, where he kept a set of his dwindling supply of vials.
Sprout lunged forward with arms outspread. The figure knelt, embraced her, and then violet eyes were looking up at him from beneath the hat brim.
"Mark," Kimberly said. "I had to see you."
The ball bounced across the patchy grass of Central Park as though it were bopping out the lyrics to a sixties cigarette-commercial jingle. Sprout pursued it, skipping and chirping happily.
"What does your old man think of all this?" Mark asked, lying on his elbows on the beach towel Kimberly had brought along with the ball.
"About what?" she asked him. She wasn't showing her agency game face this afternoon. In an impressionistic cotton blouse and blue jeans that looked as if they'd been worn after she bought them instead of before, knees drawn up to support her chin and hair hanging in a braid down her back, she looked so much like the Sunflower of old he could barely breathe.
He wanted to say, "about the trial," but he also wanted to say, "about you seeing me," but the two kind of jostled against each other and got jammed up like fat men trying to go through a men's room door at the same time, and so he just made vaguely circular gestures in the air and said, "About, uh, this."
"He's in Japan on business. T. Boone Pickens is trying to open up the country to American businesses. Cornelius is one of his advisers." She seemed to speak with unaccustomed crispness, but then he'd never been good at telling that kind of thing. It had been one of their problems. One of many.
He was trying to think of something to say when Sunflower-no, Kimberly--clutched his arm. "Mark, look-" Their daughter had followed the bouncing ball into the middle of a large blanket and the Puerto Rican family that occupied it, almost bowling over a stout woman in lime-green shorts. A short, wiry man with tattoos all over his arm jumped up and started expostulating. Half a dozen children gathered around, including a boy about Sprout's own age with a switchblade face.
"Mark, aren't you going to do something?"
He looked at her, puzzled. "What, man? She's okay."
"But those… people. That is, Sprout ran into them, they're justifiably upset-"
He laughed. "Look."
The Puerto Ricans were laughing, too. The fat woman hugged Sprout. The tough kid smiled and tossed her the ball. She turned and came racing back up the slope toward her parents, graceful and clumsy as a week-old foal.
"See? She gets along pretty well with people, even if…" The sentence ran down uncompleted, as they usually did on that subject.
Kimberly still looked skeptical. Mark shrugged, then by reflex touched the pocket of the denim jacket he wore despite the heat.
Maybe he did rely on the implicit promise of his 'friends' too much. He'd have to go cold turkey from that, too, one of these days. He wasn't calling up the personae too often. Occasionally he felt the peevish pressure in his brain, like heckling from the back of an old auditorium, though he had explained to his 'friends' what he had to do and thought most of them accepted it. But eventually the powders would be gone.
As it was, Pretorius would kill him if he knew he still had any of them. Pretorius thought a raid was a real possibility, and the vials contained a wider variety of proscribed substances than a DEA agent was liable to resell in a year.
But what am I supposed to do? Pour them down the drain? That felt like murder.
Then Sprout's arms horseshoed his skinny neck and they went over, all three of them, in a laughing, tickling tangle, and for a moment it was almost like real life.
The Parade of Liars, as Pretorius called the succession of expert witnesses he and Latham took turns deposing, trudged on from spring into summer. The Twenty-eighth Army taught the students in Gate of Heavenly Peace Square what the old dragon Mao had told them so often: where political power springs from. Nur al-Allah fanatics attacked a joker-rights rally in London's Hyde Park with bottles and brickbats, winning praise from Muslim leaders throughout the West. "Secular law must yield to the laws of God," a noted Palestine-born Princeton professor announced, "and these creatures are an abomination in the eyes of Allah."
A skinhead beat a joker to death with a baseball bat. The media swelled with indignation. When it turned out that the chief of staff of the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee had tried the same thing back in '73, liberals called it "a meanness out there, a feeding frenzy" when people took him to task for it. After all, he had helped to pass some very caring legislation, and anyway the bitch survived.
Kimberly flitted in and out of Mark's life like a moth. Every time he thought he could catch hold of her, she eluded him. She seldom kept a date two times running. But she never stayed away long.
The hearings began.
Pretorius turned up precious few character witnesses for Mark. Dr. Tachyon, of course, and Jube the news dealer; Doughboy, the retarded joker ace, broke down and sobbed mountainously as he recounted how Mark and his friends had saved him from being convicted of murder- and, incidentally, saved the planet from the Swarm. His testimony was corroborated by laconic Lieutenant Pilar Arrupe of Homicide South, who chewed a toothpick in place of her customary cigarillo. Pretorius wanted to bring on reporter Sara Morgenstern, but she had dropped from sight after the nightmare of last year's Atlanta convention.
No aces testified on Mark's behalf. The Aces High crowd was laying low these days. Besides, most of them seemed embarrassed by Cap'n Trips and his plight.
He just wasn't an eighties kind of guy.
"Dr. Meadows, are you an ace?"
"Yes."
"And would you mind describing the nature of your powers?"
"Yes."
"What do you mean by that?"
" I mean, -I, uh-I would mind."
"Your honor, I ask that the court take notice of the witness's lack of cooperation."
"Your honor-"
"Dr. Pretorius, you needn't gesticulate. You and Mr. Latham may approach the bench."
Pretorius always thought the rooms of the New Family Court on Franklin and Lafayette had all the human warmth of a dentist's waiting room. The too-bright fluorescents hurt his eyes.
The media were back in force, he noted with displeasure as he gimped to the bench. After the publicity that attended Mark's getting served, the press had lost interest; lots of nothing visible had happened for a while.
"Dr. Meadows is refusing to answer a vital question, your honor," Latham said.
"He can't be compelled to answer. Indiana v. Mr. Miraculous, -I964. Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination apply."
With blue eyes and blond hair worn in a pageboy cut, judge Mary Conower looked more pretty than anything else-ingenue, belying her reputation as a hard-ass. A slight dry tautness to her skin gave her the appearance of a cheerleader gone sour on life.
"This isn't a criminal trial, Doctor," she said. Pretorius bit down hard on several possible responses. He was getting kind of old to pull another night in the Tombs for contempt.