Norman Spinrad - Bug Jack Barron

Not this time, Sara. Too much to lose, Bug Jack Barron, maybe a free shot at forever. Throw that away for a surge of Presidential bullshit Samson-smash junk? Would you? Would anyone? Gonna be a junkie, be an immortality-junkie—at least that monkey gives as good as it gets.

Screw this whole scene! Barron thought bitterly. Truth, justice, you beautiful cat bullshit—no different from the rest, all want my bod for your own bags.

I’m tired of it all, Machiavellian motherfuckers, Howards, Luke, Morris, all losers; maybe you too, Sara, who knows? Goddamn paranoid nightmare! Show you all Jack Barron’s his own man, nobody’s flunky. I’ll get what I want, one way or another, and on my own fucking terms!

Wonder who did this stuff? Sara Westerfeld thought behind her shield of purposeful cynicism against Jack-reality as the elevator door opened, revealing the entrance foyer to his little-boy treehouse-penthouse and the crude, not-quite-making-it kinesthop mural on the wall (should be whole kinesthop wall around the hallway entrance, really suck in all those chicks he’s supposed to be balling, she thought professionally).

Jack smiled a little-boy smile, hair all curls like fresh from pillow years flaking away dig my pad baby smile of first meeting first love first lay in dingy Berkeley attic. She reached out and pinched his ass—still firm cute ass-flesh felt the about-to-be-fucked-for-the-first-time thrill of the unfolding unknown.

He put his arm around her waist, led her past doors down a dark hallway toward a vast space she could kinesthetically sense beyond, paused suddenly, yanked her off her feet into arms around shoulder hand firm under her ass caressing divide, and she went with it, arms around him, face muzzled into wild curls roughness around his neck as he laughed, said: “I never got to carry you over any threshold, baby, so better late than never.”

She giggled with semi-sincere, go-with-it-it’s-his-bag pleasure, said: “Darling, there are times when you’re so beautifully square.”

He carried her forward (she could feel muscles deliciously tight straining against her), paused at the brink of something (she could see stars, night-tree-shapes across bulking distance), fiddled with some panel on the wall and…

Flames leapt up billowing orange from huge firepit in the center of a vast scarlet-carpeted room, dancing ruby shadows across chairs, pillow-piles, furniture, huge gizmo electronic wall consoles to a California patio beyond, rubber-trees against the naked sky scintillating firelight glow from the faceted-dome skylight-ceiling reflecting sparks into the dead New York sky, and she saw they were on a deck-balcony above the huge living room as rock-montage music began to play from somewhere and color-organ spectral flashes swirling with the music spun acid-reality magic in the air, and she felt him quiver against her, waiting for a reaction to his externalized head like a cornucopia before her—or just as like some silly-ass Hollywood set.

She hugged him silently, unsure of the truth of her reactions: so like Jack, magic, cop-out, phony, extravagant, bullshit and yet… and yet…

Yet it’s real, real fantasy playpen, no interior-decorated-calculated baloney, straight from Jack’s head to reality, with nothing in between. It’s him, it’s his dream—Berkeley, Los Angeles, California candy-store window, unafraid naked garish conscious-subconscious Jack Barron day-dream, sugar-plum reality that money had made real.

Sara felt herself teetering on the brink of a dangerous truth: Who was really the cop-out, Jack who went and got what he needed to make his dream real, molding a Jack Barron reality to the shape of his dreams, or me, shaping dreams to the size of mundane reality (takes balls to be garish ’cause garishness is your bag)? A hero’s a man with the courage to live in his dreams.

“How’s that grab you, baby?” he said, carrying her down to the lush-carpeted surface, setting her on her feet, staring into her eyes, giving the question pregnant ego-involvement intensity.

I don’t know how it grabs me she thought vertiginously. Your bag, not mine, little-boy stuff, like tin soldiers, silly Hollywood crap. But you dig it, I dig you, and, Jack darling, it’s real. “ It’s you, Jack,” she said quite truthfully.

“You think it’s a lot of silly bullshit,” he said. “I can see it in your eyes.”

“No!” she said loudly, impulsively, aware that she meant it only after she said it. “It’s just… I’ve never seen anything like it before. It’s like… like seeing your head, I mean, the inside of your head, out there. It’s so… naked, I mean it’s the nakedest room I’ve ever seen. Like you had a magic wand and just waved it and everything that you wanted in your head suddenly was. I won’t con you, Jack, you know it’s not my bag out there, it’s yours, and if I was waving the wand, it’d be all different. But the idea of waving the wand in the first place—that’s such a pure groove! I dig this place because it’s you, exactly what you wanted to make it. It’s a whole new bag, a whole new idea to me—wanting something like this, a dream, and having the power to make it reality. I… I… I’m not sure what I feel.”

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.