Norman Spinrad - Bug Jack Barron

JACK and stars spinning across her retinas JACK and

the skin of her face pulled drumtight JACK free

fall nausea JACK. mass rushing up JACK screams

below JACK fear JACK acid freakout JACK

for you JACK I’m afraid JACK help me

JACK no no JACK don’t want JACK

death JACK forever JACK no

JACK no JACK no no

JACK flash of blinding pain

JAC-

*

*

Sara

No! it can’t have happened. Sara you’re not

Sara dead no! not dead

not down there on the sidewalk

in a puddle of—Sara! Sara! no no no,

You can’t be dead! Can’t be dead! No! No! Sara!

Sara you crazy bitch, how could you do a thing like this to me!

How could you do a thing like this to me… The foulness, the utter selfish foulness brought Jack Barren’s mind back into reality from the point of anesthetic blackout into which it had retreated like a whipped dog howling.

The vidphone screen before him showed a crazy slash of black sky over a section of the concrete parapet off which—

He reached out, snapped off the vidphone, and in the same motion fumbled an Acapulco Gold out of the pack on his desk. He jammed it into his mouth, lit it with the table-lighter, and sucked the smoke in-out-in-out-in-out in savage compulsive pants.

How could you do a thing like this to me—oh, Barren, you shit you! How could you do it to her? You bastard! You heartless motherfucker! Sara! Sara! You… you…

He flagellated himself with images of her eyes: pool-deep eyes before she blew him wide and shiny my hero little girl eyes naked beside him in Berkeley attic cold eyes boring through him shouting cop-out! the day they broke up eyes glazing and opaqueing to stainless steel mirrors as their flesh crawled from each other the last night (last night! last night there ever was between them and a night spent as strangers!) poor lost phosphor-dot eyes like windows into gray blind acid jungle inside naked and writhing, and I could see it building and building like runaway cancer, and all I could do was gibber into the fucking phone while her eyes grew crazier and crazier as she was sucked deeper and deeper into the acid freakout nightmare, eyes from the nowhere nonreality of LSD insanity, and all I could do was watch on the phone while she jumped; poor crazy lost eyes, and I couldn’t do a fucking thing but watch her jump!

SaraSaraSara… No Sara any more, never, no Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara-shaped hole against the sky of his night that would never be filled, not in a million years, and he had a million years, dammit, a million years to be without her, a million years to watch her jump, million years to know he killed her—

Bullshit, man! he thought. Stop trying to con yourself… Guilty, maybe you should feel, but you don’t. You didn’t kill her, damn it, it was the acid, was nothing you did or could’ve done, was Sara freaking out into her own crazy bag again, doing it to save me, make me free; to be the fucking Baby Bolshevik hero I never was… to save me… From what, from living? From caring? From giving a shit about what happens next? Sara… Sara . I didn’t kill you, you killed me!… killed the best things inside me, is all. Tore out my flesh-and-blood guts, replaced with electronic circuitry, can’t even make myself cry knowing you’re dead. Was nothing I did that killed you, Sara, was what I was. Murderer… vampire off babies… not even that, was it Sara?

Was fucking cop-out, is all! Was seeing my bod owned by that fucker Howards, body not even my own, with slug-green pieces of immortality-slime drip-dripping inside me, was seeing me selling out to Bennie… You didn’t kill me, and I didn’t kill you, we were both dead already, died when we couldn’t stand to touch each other last night, that motherfucker Howards killed us both. Killed us both by making us immortal, now ain’t that a pisser?

Sara… I can’t cry for you Sara, don’t have any tears left in me. But… I can kill for you, baby, kill that fucker Howards! Oh, yeah, I can kill for you, all right! Can hate, all right! Maybe you were right in your own dumb way, ’cause you’re gonna get what you wanted, you and those hundred million dumb bastards out there.

Yeah, I’ll do a show like no-one’s ever seen! They want their fucking hero, I’ll give him to them on a silver platter, see how they like it! Let the stupid bastards out there see where it’s really at for once in their lives… How’s that for a television first?

The vidphone began to chime. Barron made the connection, and Vince Gelardi’s face appeared on the screen, ashen, stunned, and Barron knew that he knew even before Vince muttered: “Jack… the police just called… Sara…”

“I saw it all happen, Vince,” he said quickly, determined to spare Vince the agony of telling him. “Don’t say anything. Don’t even tell me how sorry you are. I know… I know…”

“Jack… I hate to have to bring it up but we go on the air in nine minutes. I’m trying to get through to the network brass so we can run an old tape, so you don’t have to…”

“Forget it!” Barron snapped. “I’m gonna do the show tonight, gonna do it for Sara! Show biz, baby… the show must go on, and words from the same picture…”

“Jack you don’t have to—”

“But I do, man! More than any show in the history of this whole dumb business, this one’s gotta go on! See you in the studio, Vince—but thanks anyway.”

“Jack,” Vince Gelardi said over the intercom circuit, his face gray and lifeless, all too real to come off real in the network-reality world behind the control booth glass, “look, you don’t have to go on the air. I checked with the powers that be, and I got the okay to run one of last month’s tapes if you… I mean…”

Jack Barren sat down in the white chair behind the black-wash-over-kinesthop background, clocked the cameraman (cameraman he never noticed during the show) staring ashen-faced at him, saw that the promptboard was live and showed “3 Minutes,” and somehow he could sense the disaster-aura reaching all the way to the monkey block behind the control room.

And it bugged him. Fucking network brass coming on like they really care how I feel with Sara Sara… Yeah, sure, all they want to know is does it mean a fiasco if I go on the air with her body not yet cold, where’s that crazy Barren’s head at now, Gelardi, think he can go on the air? Jeez, if we do a rerun unannounced now, after the stuff he’s been rapping out these past few weeks… Oh, my aching Brackett Count!

But that, Barren thought, is show biz. The show must go on, there’s no business like show business, and like that. But why must the show go on? No big secret, it don’t go on, that audience out there might get the idea that there was only a human being like them behind the image, and that would screw up the ratings. Which is enough reason in this business to do anything.

Yet Barren felt pissed that the whole damn crew was preparing its ulcers for a massive disaster. The show must go on—bullshit, sure, just a dumb ass-game, but what the hell isn’t? This show’s gonna go on, all right, and the brass won’t believe the ratings ’cause this is kamikaze night, and they’re gonna get the Big All, the topper to end all toppers, the greatest show on earth: Two living-color stars of stage, screen, and gutter politics going at each other for blood.

“Snap out of it, Vince!” Barron said, cracking his voice like a whip for control. “I’m going on the air, and this is gonna be a show like no one’s ever seen. Stick with me, baby, keep me on the air no matter what I do, believe me, I know what I’m doing, and if you cut me off, and the network doesn’t back you up, you’re fired.”