Norman Spinrad - Bug Jack Barron

“You really think that matters, Howards?” he howled. “Think that’ll save you? With… with (scrunching his body in anguish) these things inside me, you so sure I want to live? I’ll get you, Howards, there’s not a thing you can do about it. I’ll get you even if it does cost me my life.”

“Not just your life,” said Benedict Howards. “You don’t like immortality, okay, you got a right to be crazy. Who cares? You feel rotten, want to die, that’s your business. But if finding out did this to you, what’ll it do to your wife?”

“Sara—”

“You’ve got a short memory, Barron. Your wife signed the same contract too—makes her an accessory to murder just like you. There’s any murder trial, it’ll be a triple trial, she’s in it with us. And she never knew what was coming off, did she? You got her into it, and if you don’t play ball it’ll be you killing her. Don’t hand me any crap about murder. You’re a murderer too, Barron, whichever way you turn.”

“You… you’ve told her…?”

“Do I really look that dumb?” Howards said. “You’re a lunatic, who knows what you might do, even with your own life on the line. But Miss Sara Westerfeld, or Mrs Jack Barron—whichever the hell it is—we know what she’s like, don’t we? Of course I haven’t told her. Why should I, that’s my final insurance. I don’t tell her a thing, so long as you play ball. That’s how I know I’ve got you. And I do have you now, don’t I, Barron? Come on, say it, I want to hear you say it.”

Shit, Barron thought, he does have me. He knows it, I know it, he knows I know… I’m trapped! Can’t tell Sara, she’d… worse than leave me, she’d freak out altogether. Gotta… gotta… what? What the fuck can I do?

“All right, Howards, for the moment we’ll play it your way.”

“For the moment! That’s good, that’s real good, Barron. For the moment. For the next million years! And you know something, friend? Sooner or later you’re gonna thank me, you’ll see what I mean. You can’t help wanting to stay alive, can you? Immortal… fifty years or so, and you’ll understand it’s worth anything to be immortal, anything… eviscerated nigger bodies in heaps of… You’ll thank me, Barron. You’re immortal, you’re more than a man, your life’s worth a million of theirs. Give it time. You’ll learn to like it, my guarantee.”

And from Howards’ mad eyes Barron sucked a fear, a mortal fear the like of which he had never felt before: fear that Howards might be right, fear that in fifty or a hundred or a thousand years the things inside him would rot him to a gutted hulk, fear that someday he might stare into those paranoid monster eyes and see— himself.

No way out, such a goddamned neat trap, Jack Barron thought as he paced the patio under the gray, overcast New York sky, feeling the damp chill of the lull between down-pours through the upturned collar of his sportjac. The setting sun painted the cloud layer with ugly smears of dirty purple, and the waning rush-hour street noises seemed to have been made more savage by the wet black mulch (compounded of rain and good old New York filth) like in the onrushing dusk twenty-three stories below.

Tuesday night. Yeah, soon it’ll be night, and then morning, and then dusk again, and then 8:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. And then… what, man, then what? What the fuck you gonna do? What can you do?

Inside, Sara was playing one of the scratchy old Dylan albums she had brought up from her pad, and the grating old ricky-ticky voice from the simple funky past mocked him with a random moment of worn-out irony:

Poor old Dylan should be alive now, get a charge out of how close to the nitty-gritty he comes twenty years later. Poor paranoid bastard was just a little too early for real Paranoiasville, is all. Knew then where it’s at now, and wouldn’t it be cool if it could be that simple, the good old Samson-smash schtick, get in that studio chained to the satellite network and bring the whole fucking schmear down around everybody’s ears.

And you could do it as easy as playing the tapes, riffing on Bennie and giving that hundred million Brackett Count audience the straight scam on slimy green glands drip-dripping the vampire life-blood of broken babies forever and ever into your veins, and how they got there, who put ’em there and why, tear ’em out bleeding and dripping and throw them in the faces of a hundred million dumb slobs and let ’em see just what a fucking hero their kick-’em-in-the-ass Black Shade Jack Barron really is, foam at the mouth and rip Howards and his Foundation and all his flunkies to little bloody pieces… All you gotta do is reach out and push, and all those stone walls come smashing down, pounding everything to pieces, you got the balls to stand there screaming and do yourself in, do Sara in…

Barron winced as it came to him that the name of the song Sara was playing was “ Tombstone Blues. ” And that’s where it’s at, exactly where it’s at.

Howards may be crazy as a bedbug, but he sure knows where one thing is at, and who knows, maybe he’s right, maybe only one thing does matter—life, is all, just staying alive. Comes nitty-gritty time, no man’s got the choice’ll do the kamikaze schtick. Sara… yeah, Sara in there, stoned silly on adrenalin since we got back from Colorado, thinking now we got it all made, immortal and together forever, and tomorrow night is Judgment Day for Bennie Howards, with Baby Bolshevik back-to-the-people Jack Barron ready to bring the Apocalypse and we march arm and arm into the sunrise, Battle Hymn of the Hail to the Chief Republic coming on in the background as we fade in on Forever.

Sara… Sure, con yourself into believing it’s all for Sara; wasn’t for Sara, you’d kamikaze right into Howards, right into accessory to murder and banzai for the Emperor, live a thousand years.

Sure you would. A thousand years… a million years, throw it all away. Sure you would. Wasn’t for Sara, you’d kill yourself dead to take Howards with you. Sure you would. The fuck you would!

Dead… dead… Barren rolled the word around his mind, squeezed it like a lemon for the acid juice of gut-reality. Dead… death… No one ever came back to give you the straight scam on how it felt. Maybe someday they’ll thaw someone out of the Freezers and then you’ll know what it’s like to be dead before you die. But no slot for murderers in the Freezers, no flash-freeze straight from the electric chair sizzle—“If you black, when you go you don’t come back.” The Black Shade… Yeah, there’s another side to Luke’s Madison Avenue mickey mouse slogan, like dead, like death, like a million years of everything shot to shit or a million years of nothing. Sure you would. It’s all for Sara, old Jack Barren’s not afraid to die. The fuck he isn’t!

Tombstone Blues…

Yeah, you got class, Barren, you make the hero scene, you do it up brown; throw away more than thirty, forty years, throw away a million years forever, and who knows, maybe a hundred years from now, there’ll be losers huddling in some fucking attic thinking what a noble cat old Jack Barren was (remember him?) and a lot of good it’ll do you when you’re dead. The fucking Black Shade…

“But if you black, when you go you don’t come back.”

That what they see when they see a shade? Pale white papier-mache mask over black reality color of death black color of Forest black color of emptiness black color of loser black color of the jungle inside black babies black pit of black blood feeding a pale white forever-vampire?