Norman Spinrad - Bug Jack Barron

She moaned, pressed against the glass, keyed the door-switch frantically; but when the doors finally slid open, she found herself caught in the reality-interface itself: the bile-green mists of madness the surfsound sucking behind her becoming an unreal nightmare she now knew was just an acid bummer; but before her, the moist wind from the dark million-light city seemed to be blowing in off a sea-coast jungle that felt as if it might go on forever. Realer than real, there was a vacuum out there, a hole opening on to infinity into which she could fall up and up forever, up and up and up till she might drown in the sea of herself and be lost forever.

Yet she felt the siren-song of that bottomless nothingness calling to her, calling, promising… and she had to look, had to walk the shore of that infinite black sea—and she stepped out on to the patio.

And again reality went through changes.

It was like stepping out into a Tibetan monastery perched atop some ascetic mountain. She felt the interface between her personality and the Universe take a quantum-jump outward, as if an inner telescope had suddenly switched over to a higher power. As she stepped through the doorway she felt the ceiling explode away in shards, like a satellite-shield ejecting, leaving her naked to the bare black marches of infinity that began at the edges of her being and ballooned outward forever.

And far below her, a shimmering arabesque carpet of lights and street sounds, the electric city coruscated like a continuous sheet of incandescent protoplasm, rippling in kinesthop patterns from Brooklyn glowing on the horizon to the base of the concrete mountain on which she stood like a remote eye tipping the pseudopod of a continent-wide human amoeba contemplating its own piebald vastness.

With the surfsound tape sighing behind her, Sara walked to the parapet, leaned over, and it seemed as if she stood on the interface, was the interface between that living, human, upward-reaching organism of lights and the black depths of infinity that yawned above her.

Immortality—was electric-light slime reaching for the stars, and she stood poised on the brink, balanced on the razor-edge between life and death, the flickering and the eternal, the human and the immortal, sanity and the holy madness that was realer than sanity, more cogent, a path to oneness with the timeless infinity that could be hers if she had the courage to cast off her moorings to the shores of self and trust her fate to that all-forgiving sea.

She half-turned as if to look behind her, and the blue-green sinuousness of the sighing chamber inside was a foul mocking reminder of the slime-things dripping stolen secretions of dead children within her that had brought her to this dark place.

And now the surfsound seemed to be coming from below her like a vast invisible sea, its breakers cresting against the concrete parapet against which she found herself leaning vertiginously, calling to her with the wordless voice of forever to cast herself upon its buoying waters and be carried away… away… Away from the mocking lizard-face of Benedict Howards, with his cold reptilian eyes leering out at her from bone-white lair of death… Away even, it promised, from the monstrosities oozing murder… within her… away… away… away…

On a stone pedestal a few yards from her, rested an extension vidphone. The dead gray screen seemed to leap out at her. Jack! Jack! Oh, Jack…

JACK JACK JACK… The shape of his name was a hard-edged shimmer before her, and she found her hand dialing his office vidphone number. JACK JACK JACK…

“Sara…” Jack’s face was a tiny moon of bone-white phosphor on the vidphone screen. “What the hell is it, you know I’m going on the air in half an hour.”

Even on the tiny soft-focus vidphone screen, his wild curling hair and those deep inward eyes crackled phosphorescent electricity into the darkness around her.

“What are you going to do on the show tonight?” she asked. But the she that said the words seemed to be existing a beat ahead of her in time, and Sara knew what she was saying only after the words had left her mouth.

“Come on, baby, you know damn well what the score is,” Jack said. “Bennie Howards calls the shots tonight.”

“You can’t do it,” she found herself saying, and again it was as if the pressures of the words were molding her tongue and lips and cheeks into the necessary configurations—she wasn’t saying them, they were saying themselves. “You’ve got to stop Howards. No matter what it costs, you’ve got to stop him.”

Jack’s face twisted into a withdrawing scowl. “It’s bad enough, for chrissakes!” he said. “Get off my back, will you, Sara!”

Get off my back… get off my back… The words were one more accusation. I am on his back, she thought. He’s doing it to protect me.

“I won’t let you do it,” she heard the strangely reverberating sound of her own voice say. “You’re doing it for me, and I won’t let you, it’s not right. I won’t let Benedict Howards own you just so I can stay alive. I won’t let you do it to yourself.”

“Spare me the martyr-schtick, will you, things are shitty enough as it is,” he said, and she could sense that it was close to an exit-line, that he was handling her the way he would some vip on Bug Jack Barron. “ Don’t put yourself on, it wouldn’t make any difference if I was in this alone. I don’t want to die, is all. Why is that so fucking hard for you to understand?”

He’s lying, she thought, he’s lying for me, and I love him for it. But I can’t let him do it.

“You’re doing it for me,” her mechanical inner voice was saying. “I know you are, and I know you’re lying about it for me too. And I’m not going to let you do it, Jack, I’m just not going to let you do it.”

“What in hell is this?” he said, and his voice seemed tinny and unreal yet somehow amplified realer than real over the vidphone circuit. “Delusions of grandeur? Look, baby, you know how I feel about you, but don’t get any funny ideas… nobody works my head, not even you.”

“Not even Benedict Howards?”

Even on the tiny vidphone screen she could see the words that she hadn’t meant to say, that someone else within her had said, biting home cruelly across Jack’s face. “Not even Howards—circumstances, is all. But that’s not letting Bennie work my head, that’s just living in reality. Oughta try it sometime, Sara.”

Sara looked out over the living carpet of light that was the city, the great anguished body of humanity of which she was but an insignificant part, and the blackness above and below seemed to be calling to her with the surfsound of the timeless sea from the buoying depths of forever; calling, promising forgiveness, and a way out… the only way out…

“Didn’t you ever think,” she mumbled, “that there are things better than reality, cleaner, purer, where no one can touch you with death or the blood of children oozing inside you or anything that’s rotten and dirty and evil…”

“Goddamn it,” Jack snarled, “you’re stoned out of your mind! You’re freaked out on acid. Get hold of yourself, Sara, ride it out, baby… Jesus H. Christ, how could you be so dumb, what a time to drop acid! With all this shit going on, you knew you had to have a bummer. Why the hell did you do it?”

Standing there, with Jack’s image a gray on white ghost from a million miles away and a thousand years ago on the vidphone screen, she herself wondered why. A bummer, sure, she had known deep down it would have to be a bummer. But how could anything be worse than reality, worse than torn fragments of murdered children sewn inside her, inside Jack, and Benedict Howards going on and on forever? With or without acid, it was all a bummer, a bummer that would go on and on and on forever, with no way to ever come down, a freakout she could never wait out… unless…