Norman Spinrad - Bug Jack Barron

“Let me show you something that’s us,” he said, taking her hand. “A dream made real we can both dig together.” And he led her across the red carpet to a small door. “Remember, Sara?” He opened the door to the bedroom, and she stepped inside—and saw and felt. And remembered.

Oh, she remembered! She remembered sun-warmed grass against her back pushed to rich wet earth by him open sighing flash of stars glowing blue-black skylight above bed open to the stars tropical night-smells heard Acapulco breakers in the taped surfsounds that came on at the touch of his hand; patio foliage outlined against the dusk-glow of Brooklyn against sunset clawing through leaf-frond windows of Los Angeles bedroom his face blue and stubbly arms sleeping around her. Ivy-walled bedstead of Berkeley attic first-time thrill gray wood texture of college-fuck walls. Saw plastigrass carpet, console in bedstead, surfsound recording, sliding panels, scenery, props—the backside of a dream.

Her dream.

She turned toward him, and he was smiling, fey, knowing buddha-eyes like scalpels, the conscious creator of her midnight-tears dream.

Do I love him, or hate him? She wondered if she’d ever know, if it mattered, for no other man so knew her, no other man gave off that dangerous heat. She could hate him and love him in her innermost being (where love and hate might be the same thing)—beside JACK BARRON (in flaming capital letters) who else could be real?

“Jack…” she croaked, crying and laughing, flinging herself at him, her self- bundle of hate, love, thirty-five years of girlhood—open, reservations forgotten. Poor fool lizardman Howards, thinking he can use me against Jack Barron—a handful of sand thrown against the sea.

She was on the bed under him without remembering moving, swimming in tides of total sensation, a balloon of diffused nerve-endings living the moment on her sentient skin. And he was…

Exploding within her, imploding around her, filling her, gorging her with electrical being, blunt lances of pleasure around which she surrounded, caressing it, feeling it, digging it, taking it in. Feeling him gasping in spiraling spasms, feeling molecule by molecule wet scorching osmosis, him-her symbiotic flashing interface where skin touched skin, she screamed with his throat as he flashed through her, and time jumped a long beat of unbearable pleasure and she soared in a dream of Islamic heaven -slow-grinding orgasm for ten million years.

Opening her eyes, she saw his closed and dreaming. Jack! Jack! she thought. I’m a phony, a liar. I came here like some damned Mexican whore. And she teetered on the edge of telling him all—Benedict Howards using her, and she using him.

But she felt his weight on her, the touch of his skin, his hair tickling her nipples, and the thought of his body lying in humus, dead, gone and forgotten, tied her belly and tongue in constricted knots. She remembered that she stood between him and oblivion. If she were brave a little longer, held it back for a while, all that was Jack, all that was between them, never had to die.

Oh, Jack, Jack! she wanted to shout but didn’t, someone like you should never die!

“Deathbed at go” the promptboard flashed, and Jack Barron, clocking Vince’s smart-ass Sicilian-type grin, was sure Gelardi had to have Mafiosa blood in him somewhere even though he claimed to be strictly Neapolitan. The promptboard flashed “45 Seconds,” and Barron shuddered as the last seconds of the opening commercial reeled by—schtick was a bunch of diplomats relaxing around the old conference table with good old Acapulco Golds. Ain’t as funny as it looks, he thought, vips run the world like they’re stoned half the time anyway, and for the other half things are worse. Wonder what Benny Howards would be like high? Well, maybe tonight all hundred million Brackett Count chilluns gonna see—they say adrenalin’s like a psychedelic, and before I’m through tonight, Bennie’s gonna go on an adrenalin bummer he won’t believe.

Watching the commercial fade into his own face on the monitor, Barron felt a weird psychedelic flash go through him, the reality of the last week compressed into an instantaneous image flashed on the promptboard of his mind: Sitting in the studio chair, electronic feedback-circuitry connecting him with subsystems of power—Foundation power SJC-Democrat-Republican power, hundred million Brackett Count power—he was like the master transistor in a massive satellite network confluence circuit of power, gigantic input of others’ power feeding into his head through vidphone circuits, none of it his, but all feeding through him, his to control by microcosmic adjustment; for one hour, 8-9 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, that power was de facto his.

He felt his subjective head-time speeding up, like an alien drug in his bloodstream, at the focus of forces far beyond him yet at his command as letters crawled across the promptboard an electronic-dot message that seemed to take ten million years: “On the Air.”

“And what’s bugging you out there tonight?” Jack Barron asked, playing to the kinesthop-darkness shapes double-reflected (backdrop off desktop) in his eye hollows ominous with foreknowledge of the shape of the show to come. “What bugs you, bugs Jack Barron,” he said, digging his own image on the monitor, eyes picking up flashes as never before. “And we’ll soon see what happens when you bug Jack Barron. The number is Area Code 212, 969-6969, and we’ll take our first call right… now.”

Now, he thought, making the vidphone connection, nitty-gritty time, Bennie-baby, better be good and ready, here it comes now. And the screen split down the middle; left half a pallid gray on gray image of a dough-faced middle-aged woman with deep lines of defeat-tension etched around her hollow-bagged eyes like dry kernels of mortal disaster, a hag-gray ghost begging her living-color image for alms from the gods.

“This is Bug Jack Barron, and you’re on the air, plugged into me, plugged into one hundred million Americans (drawing out the words for special audience of one, one hundred million, count ’em Bennie, 100,000,000) and this is your chance to let ’em all know what’s bugging you and get some action, ’cause action’s the name of the game when you bug Jack Barron. So let’s hear it all, the right here right now live no time-delay nitty-gritty; what’s bugging you?”

“My… my name is Dolores Pulaski,” the woman said, “and I’ve been trying to talk to you for three weeks, Mr Barron, but I know it’s not your fault. (Vince gave her three-quarters screen, put Barron in upper righthand corner catbird-seat, living-color Crusader dwarfed by yawning gray need. Just the right touch, Barron thought.) I’m calling for my father, Harold Lopat. He… He can’t speak for himself.” Her lips quivered on the edge of a sob.

Jesus Christ, Barron thought, hope Vince didn’t feed me a crier, gotta underplay this schtick or I’ll push Howards too far. “Take it easy, Mrs Pulaski,” he soothed, “you’re talking to friends. We’re all on your side.”

“I’m sorry,” the woman said, “it’s just so hard to…” Her eyes frightened and furtive, her jaw hardened to numbness, the tension came across beautifully as she forced herself calm. “I’m calling from the Kennedy Hospital for Chronic Diseases in Chicago. My father, he’s been here ten weeks… die… die… he’s got cancer, cancer of the stomach, and it’s spread to the lym… lymphatics, and the doctors all say… we’ve had four specialists… He’s dying! He’s dying! They say they can’t do anything. My father, Mr Barron. My father… He’s going to die!”