Norman Spinrad - Bug Jack Barron

“Since you’re twisting my arm, I’ll blip it to you on one condition,” said Barron. “Unless I give you the go-ahead—and I won’t—you keep it strictly private. Just between you and me. Okay?”

“Beggars can’t be choosy,” Greene said. “I’ll set my recorder for the blip.” He did something off camera. “Fire when ready, Gridley.”

Barron took the tape reel off his recorder, placed it on the input spool of the blipper built into his wall complex, fed it into the blipper. “Ready at this end,” he said.

“Blip away,” said Lukas Greene.

Barron pressed the blip button; the blipper compressed the sound of the phone conversation into about ninety seconds of high-pitched chipmunk gabble over the vidphone circuit to Greene’s recorder in Mississippi, to be fed into a deblipping circuit, give Luke his Machiavellian eat-your-heart-out-baby jollies.

“Got it,” Greene said. “Unless you have any more Earth-shaking revelations, Claude, I think I better tend to the business of the state of Mississippi. Later.”

That hot to hear it, eh, Rastus? Barron thought. “I never deprive a maroon of his simple-minded pleasures. Later, Lothar,” he said, broke the connection.

“Jack…” Carrie snaked across the rug arms around his chest wide eyes visions of larger than life sugar-plums of power tickets to circles where it’s at, magic image-musk goddamned eyes why always those goddamned fever-coated eyes same eyes every bitch knows my name sees my dick, gets eyes like fucking vacuum cleaners suck-me-dry eyes for living-color latest Brackett Count hundred million Americans Jack Barron. Now you too, Carrie Donaldson, cool network-programmed secretary-robot with red-hot cunt don’t buy bargain-basement Bug Jack Barron image-bullshit too close to home, but let schmuck Morris, crazy Luke whistle “Hail to the Chief,” and it’s welcome to the club, Carrie, baby.

Hey what’s with you man? Barron asked himself as Carrie Donaldson worried his lips with her moist, frantic tongue. Ten minutes ago you wanted action you’re getting right now—Carrie’s mind totally blown fucked out whited out overscrewed in all mental orifices—and you played it for this, is why you riffed with Morris in the first place. Well, isn’t it?

A sudden flash of insight as Carrie directed her demands to nitty-gritty primary limp and pouting organ, bugged ego-extension of him in her smooth cool hands cradling, wheedling, finally stimulating cold reflex hard-on as he felt blood, attention, desire flow mechanically into it—no chick since Sara had done as much time in the sack as Carrie Donaldson, steady couple-times-a-week cool detached lay for months and months, static strictly belly-to-belly nonrelationship had bugged him with network-orders, head unattached to warm-flesh cunt. But now, with Carrie’s cool blown the way he thought he had wanted it, Barron saw that the cool itself was why he kept screwing Carrie—sanity-contrast to an endless string of image-fucking Wednesday-night honey-haired Saras. And now she was a member of Bug Jack Barron goddamned vacuum-eyed fan club, giving him Wednesday-night-style déjà vu head wet-dream Sara dream on-her-knees dream eating-kick-’em-in-the-ass world-famous Presidential timber so dumb bitch thinks Jack Barron wet-dream wish-fulfilment déjà vu Carrie, like all the others déjà vu masturbation-ghosts, not the real thing, one more flesh-and-hair ersatz, not Sara, no longer Carrie. And not Sara. Not ever Sara.

His betraying organ stiff and hard, his mind cold, cold light-years distant and nothing but nothing inbetween, Barron rose to his feet, haughty-ironic Great Man hands-on-hips statue, held the immobile mock-heroic posture as warm undulating lips, caressing tongue, frantic rolling half-closed eyes sent waves of hot thick pleasure through thighs, balls, mindless pulsing independent organ: pleasure-waves that stopped stone-cold dead at his waist.

Enjoy, enjoy, Carrie baby, he thought, feeling the spasm building through ten thousand miles of electric circuit insulation. Make it good, old hot-mouthed Carrie, ’cause it’s the last action you’ll ever get from Jack Barron.

Staring into the naked orange flames of the firepit, naked flesh, naked Carrie Donaldson on the bare rug in exhausted, sated semi-sleep beside him, Jack Barron felt a carapace of image-history-skin encysting him like steel walls of a TV set, a creature imprisoned in the electronic circuitry of his own head perceiving through promptboard vidphone fleshless electronic speed of light ersatz senses, separated from the girl beside him by the phosphor-dot impenetrable glass TV screen Great Wall of China of his own image.

First time I remember being blown feeling like wet putdown ugliness, he brooded. Ugly, he told himself, is a thing you feel—truth is ugly when it’s a weapon, lie is beautiful when an act of love ugly when it’s one-sided fuck is beautiful when it’s simple, mutual, nobullshit balling, ugly when chick gets her kicks off you that really isn’t there, is why you feel like a rotten lump of shit, man. Getting blown Sara go down being dug by woman’s a pure gas; being sucked off, image-statue living lie, someone else’s lie being eaten (Let me eat you, let me eat you, baby!) is a dirty act of plastic cannibalism, her dirtiness, not mine.

Whole world’s full of plastic cannibals feeding their own little bags off meals of my goddamned image-flesh, eating Jack Barron ghost that isn’t there. And now Morris and my so-called friend Luke are hot to package my living-color bod into TV dinners, sell to hundred million viewer-voter cannibals for thirty pieces of power silver.

Anyone sells my body, he thought, it’ll be me, the real thing to Howards for life eternal in the flesh, not to Luke or Morris for an asterisk losing candidate gravemarker in a history book nobody reads. But something’s happening there too, and you don’t quite know what it is, do you, Mr Jones? Howards-Morris-Luke daisy-chain of power-wheeler-dealers at each other’s throats, all with eyes for Jack Barron as a spare set of false fangs. Too much action in too scary a league to be pure coincidence, something’s up, big glob of shit about to hit National fan, and no one ready to give the straight scam to Jack Barron.

Well, we’ll see about that on Wednesday night, Bennie Howards, see how much cool you keep in Bug Jack Barron hotseat, after all, man, you’re now playing poker with goddamned Presidential timber hotshot, gonna have to lay all your cards on the table to stay in that bullshit game, Bennie-baby. Yeah, you’re in the catbird-seat man, like top trick in a high-class whorehouse, you are—

The vidphone chime interrupted his Germanic self-pity petulance, and good riddance, Jack Barron thought as the familiar stimulus triggered ironic Jack digging vidphone Jack Barron conditioned cynical response. Even money it’s Teddy the Pretender himself, he thought wryly, every other power-junkie around’s tried to score off dealer Jack Barron already.

But the honey-blonde, big dark-brown-eyed (mind’s eye supplying living-color to black and white vidphone image) face on the vidphone screen blew his cool to the far side of the moon as he made the connection and the best he could do was to stammer: “Sara…”

“Hello, Jack,” said Sara Westerfeld.

Barron felt a moment of empty, aware-of-his-bare-ass-nakedness blank numbness, sensed the same helpless vacuum behind Sara’s frightened-deer eyes, searched for cue to a reaction-pattern on the blank promptboard in his mind, heard his irony-armored voice saying, “Sadism or masochism, what’s on your acid-soaked mind, baby?”

“It’s been a long time,” Sara began, and Barron frantically scrabbling for a protocol-reaction-pattern to the ghost of a thousand body-to-body aching memory nights, fell on the inanity like a starving man on a slice of moldy bread.