Norman Spinrad - Bug Jack Barron

She lifted the vidphone off the pedestal and set it on the parapet lip, the screen now at her chest-level, and Jack’s face was a black and white specter looking back at her with blind, uncomprehending eyes. I’ve got to make him understand… He’s got to understand.

“Please, Jack, you’ve got to understand…” The words gushed out of her in a self-propelled torrent. “There’s no way out, not in what you call reality, it’s a trap, and there’s no way out for either of us except… except death, except turning ourselves off and sleeping dreamless innocent dreams forever… Reality… . Don’t you see, the only answer is something greater than reality, purer, cleaner, infinite, something to give yourself to, something that can wash it all away, something to merge yourself with, something infinite to be one with—”

“Spare me the parlor Buddhism, will you?” Jack said. “I wish you could hear yourself, I mean I wish you could hear yourself baby, ’cause your head’s just not there. You’re gibbering, and you’re starting to scare me. Take it easy, Sara, and for chrissakes do what I tell you. Go inside, sit down on the couch, put on some happy music, and wait it out. You’re stoned. Remember you’re stoned. It’s just a bum trip, is all. You’ll be all right when the acid wears off. Whatever happens inside your head, remember it won’t last forever, you’ll come down. Remember, you’ll come down.”

“Come down!” she found herself screaming at him. “I’ll never come down! It’s not the acid, it’s me. Dead children’s glands inside of me, that’s not the acid, Benedict Howards, that’s not the acid, what I’m doing to you, that’s not the acid… It’s me, me, me, and it stinks!”

“Sara! You haven’t done anything to me, I’ve done it to you…”

She studied his face, and even on the black and white unreality of the vidphone screen, the man, the essence that was Jack, JACK BARRON, leaped out at her from the darkness through layers and layers of phosphorescent reality, pulsing image-waves of his face on the pillow blue and stubbly on the vidphone with Luke naked beside her in the Berkeley attic her knight in soft-flesh armor brave beside her the Black Shade they call him his tongue inside her the taste of his body, wave after wave of JACK BARRON images flashed from the vidphone screen through her, merging and dancing on the back wall of her mind. Overlapping, flashing, reversing, contradicting in a cresting-wave pattern, the sum of the images forming an essence that coalesced like a standing-wave formed from the flux, an essence that shone with an unwavering light—an essence that was pure Jack.

And the Jack that she saw dwarfed and flickering on the tiny vidphone screen before her seemed an anguished denial of the greater Jack that blazed across the screen in her mind. That was the real Jack Barren, a Jack Barren who could never cop out just because he was Jack. No matter what he did, that Jack was still JACK BARRON (in flaming capital letters). And how many times was I sure that Jack was wrong and he turned out to be right? JACK BARRON… a creature bigger in every way than herself, and hadn’t she always known it, even when she hadn’t known she knew, wasn’t it why she loved him? Bigger than herself… bigger than anyone, not her Jack, but Jack’s Sara, how could she ever be anything else? Or want to be.

And that’s what I’m taking from him because he loves me, because he can’t see me die—I’m taking away JACK. And if he loses Jack, I lose Jack, the world loses Jack—because I love him and he loves me. It’s not right!

“Jack… Jack… I love you, I’m sorry, I can’t help it, I love you!”

“I love you too, Sara,” he said quietly, soothingly, and she felt that marvelous gyroscopic sense of tenderness, and she loved him for it and hated herself for his loving her. I’m destroying him…

“I know you do, and I’m sorry… I’m sorry you love me and I love you. It’s destroying you, Jack, it’s making you something less than what you were meant to be. I can’t let that happen… I won’t let it happen!”

Won’t let it happen! The thought filled her mind. I can’t let it happen. Got to save Jack… save him from lizardman Howards… dead things in my body… got to save him from me. From me!

And as she stared out over the endless lights of the amoeboid city spreading out below her like the throng before the Mount, she knew who really stood at the summit of that mountain, who they all looked to, who could do it, could bust it all wide open, destroy the Foundation Black Shade Social Justice President of the United States. Luke was right, it was Jack—Jack all the way, and a whole nation riding with him, and me, only me bringing him down.

I’m all that’s stopping him from being JACK, the Jack that everyone needs. He loves me, he’ll always love me, he’ll never leave me, and as long as I live I’ll never be able to leave him, we’re too deep into each other. As long as I live…

With a sudden, mindless leap she found herself crouched on the narrow concrete parapet beside the vidphone, staring at his image only inches from her face, muscles tensed smoothly like a cat gathering to spring.

“Sara! What the fuck are you doing?” Jack shouted, and she sensed him fighting fear for control and knew he would win. He would always win. “You’re stoned!” he snarled, and the harshness in his voice was a purposeful slap across the face. “Remember you’re stoned, and get the hell off there… but do it slow and easy, don’t get shook, first put one leg on the ground, then put all your weight on it before you step down… Sara! Come on! Snap out of it!”

“I love you Jack,” she said to his tiny distant image. “I love you, and I know you’d always love me. That’s why I’ve got to do it. You’ve got to be free—free of me so you can really be Jack Barron, free to see what you are and what you’ve always been and what you’ve got to do. You’ve got to be free! And so long as I’m alive you’ll never be free. I’m doing it because I love you, because you love me. Goodbye, Jack… Remember, only because I loved you…”

She straightened her legs convulsively, and stood waveringly upright on the narrow parapet as the vidphone beside her feet shouted: “Don’t do it, Sara, God, don’t do it! You’re stoned out of your mind! You don’t know what you’re doing! For chrissakes, don’t jump! Don’t jump!”

But the voice that called to her was mechanical and tiny and seemed to be coming from another world, a black and white unreal vidphone world encapsulated in the meaningless thing by her foot, where she couldn’t even see it; a voice drowned out by the surf-roar that cloaked her shoulders with sighing green tentacles, the fetid wet breath of torn babies within her pushing her forward with an avalanche of dead children a million maggots writhing under her skin. And before her, above her, below her, all around her was the soothing black velvet nothingness of an infinite ocean, buoying like pillows to an endless, dreamless sleep, pure and clean and safe forever from pain and remorse and dead bodies of broken babies, calling, calling, calling, “Give yourself to me.”

“Sara!”

Jack’s voice was a fading cry from a world already abandoned, the memory fading, an unreal nightmare world of frog-green tentacles broken babies dripping slime under her skin the bone-white crocodile-smile of Benedict Howards on his green plastic lily-pad on a pile of dead bodies, forever and ever, and Jack chained to him by a thousand links, and each one of them her body…

For him! For him!

The taste of Jack at last free at last Jack all Jack was a delicious orgasmic spasm through the muscles of her legs (’Sara! Sara!” she heard him scream), and she too was free—free as a bird, with the air whistling through the pinions of her hair, weightless, buoyed, her consciousness expanding outward in rippling waves that merged with the blackness in streamers of mist till all that was left of what was hers alone was a blazing word-shape-smell-taste that whited out every sensory-synapse: