Wild Cards by George R. R. Martin
“Look at this shit,” she said with a gesture that bisected the walls at breastbone level. “How can a human being live like this? Living on processed sugar”—a nod at a plate of half-devoured cookies and a glass of brown soda that had been flat last week—“and wadding your mind with that pig-authoritarian bullshit”—another knife-edge gesture toward Turtle, lying in a crumpled heap on the floor. She shook her head. “You're eating yourself alive, Mark. You've cut yourself off from your friends, the people who love you. This has got to stop.”
Mark just stood there. He'd never seen her look so beautiful, though she was berating him, talking like his mother—or more correctly, his father. And then his skinny body began to vibrate like a tuning fork, because it struck him that she had said she loved him. It wasn't the sort of love he'd yearned and burned for from her. But emotionally he couldn't be a chooser.
“It's time you came out of your shell, Mark. Out of this wombroom of yours. Before you turn into something from Night of the Living Dead.”
“I've got work to do.”
She cocked an eyebrow and nudged Turtle 92 with a booted toe.
“You're coming with us.”
“Where?” He blinked. “Who?”
“Haven't you heard?” A shake of the head. “Of course not. You've been locked here in your room like some kind of monk. Destiny's back in town. They're playing a concert at the Fillmore tonight. My dad sent money. I have tickets for us—you, me, and Peter. So get your clothes on; we've got to leave now so we don't have to stand in line forever. And for god's sake try not to dress like such a straight.”
Peter looked like a surfer and thought he was Karl Marx. His looks reminded Mark uncomfortably of an earlier boyfriend of Kimberly Ann's, the football team captain who'd busted his nose in high school for staring at her too avidly. Standing outside in a threadbare tweed jacket and his one pair of jeans, breathing humid air and used smoke, he listened while Peter delivered the same lecture on the Historical Process all Sunflower's boyfriends gave him. When Mark didn't agree avidly enough—he could never make enough sense out of all these manifestos to form much of an opinion—Peter fixed him with an ice-blue Nordic glare and growled, “I will destroy you.”
Later Mark found the line was a direct steal from the old man with the beard himself. Right now it made him want to melt through the tired pavement outside the auditorium. It didn't help that Sunflower was standing there beaming at the two of them as if they'd just won her a prize.
Fortunately Peter got into a screaming argument with the cops who frisked them for booze at the door, diverting his wrath from Mark. Guiltily, Mark hoped the cops would slam Peter over his blond head with a nightstick and haul him off to the slammer.
But Destiny was concluding its most tumultuous tour ever. Tom Douglas, whose consumption of booze and mind-altering chemicals was as legendary as his ace powers, had been getting mean drunk before every show. The Lizard King was on a rampage; last week's New Haven concert had culminated in a riot that trashed Yale's Old Campus and half the town. In their own clumsy way the cops were trying to avoid confrontation tonight. Frisking wasn't the shrewdest way to go about it, but the cops—and the Fillmore management—weren't eager to have the kids getting any wilder than Tom Douglas was going to make them anyway. So the audience got shaken down as they came in, but gingerly. Peter and his golden head went unbusted.
Mark's first Destiny concert was everything he might have imagined, raised to the tenth power. Douglas, characteristically, was two hours late onstage—equally characteristically, so fucked up he could barely stay standing, much less keep from pitching off into the mob of adoring fans. But the three musicians who made up the rest of Destiny were among the tightest performers in rock. Their expertise covered a multitude of sins. And gradually, around the solid skeleton of their playing, Douglas's ramblings and inchoate gestures resolved into something magical. The music was a blast of acid, dissolving Mark's lucite prison around him, until it reached his skin, and stung.
At the end of the set the lights went out like the shutting of a great door. Somewhere a drum began a slow, thick beating. From darkness broke a tormented guitar wail. A single blue spot spiked down to illuminate Douglas, alone with the mike in the center of the stage, his leather pants glittering like snakeskin. He began to sing, a soft low moan, increasing in urgency and volume, the intro to his masterpiece, “Serpent Time.” His voice soared in a sudden shriek, and the lights and the band boomed suddenly about him like storm surf breaking against rocks, and they were launched on an odyssey to the furthest reaches of the night.
At last he took upon him the aspect of the Lizard King. A black aura beat from him like furnace heat and washed across the audience. Its effect was elusive, illusive, like some strange new drug: some onlookers it lifted to pinnacles of ecstasy, others it crammed down deep into hard-packed despair; some saw what they most desired, others stared straight down the gullet of Hell.
And in the center of that midnight radiance Tom Douglas seemed to grow larger than life, and now and again there flickered in place of his broad half-handsome features the head and flaring hood of a giant king cobra, black and menacing, darting left and right as he sang.
As the song climaxed in a howl of voice and organ and guitar, Mark found himself standing with tears streaming unabashed down his thin cheeks, one hand holding Sunflower's, the other a stranger's, and Peter sitting glumly on the floor with his face in his hands, mumbling about decadence.
The next day was the last of April. Nixon invaded Cambodia. Reaction rolled across the nation's campuses like napalm.
Mark found Sunflower across the Bay, listening to speeches in the midst of an angry crowd in Golden Gate Park. “I can't do it,” he shouted over the oratory din. “I can't cross over—can't get outside myself.”
“Oh, Mark!” Sunflower exclaimed with an angry, tearful shake of her head. “You're so selfish. So—so bourgeois.” She whirled away and lost herself in the forest of chanting bodies.
That was the last he saw of her for three days.
He searched for her, wandering the angry crowds, the thickets of placards denouncing Nixon and the war, through marijuana smoke that hung like scent around a honeysuckle hedge. His superstraight attire drew hostile looks; he shied away from a dozen potentially ugly encounters that first day alone, despairing ever more of his inability to become one with the pulsating mass of humanity around him.
The air was charged with revolution. He could feel it building like a static charge, could almost smell the ozone. He wasn't the only one.
He found her at an all-night vigil a few minutes before midnight of May third. She was crosslegged on a small patch of etiolated grass that had survived the onslaught of thousands of protesting feet, idly strumming a guitar as she listened to speeches shouted through a bullhorn. “Where have you been?” Mark asked, sinking to the ankles in mud left by a passing shower.
She just looked at him and shook her head. Frantic, he plopped himself down beside her with a small squelching splash. “Sunflower, where have you been? I've been looking all over for you.”
She looked at him at last, shook her head sadly. “I've been with the people, Mark,” she said. “Where I belong.”
Suddenly she leaned forward, caught him by the forearm with surprising strength. “It's where you belong too, Mark. It's just that you're so—so selfish. It's as if you're armored in it. And you have so much to offer—now, when we need all the help we can get, to fight the oppressors before it's too late. Break out, Mark. Free yourself.”
Surprised, he saw a tear glimmering off in one corner of her eye. “I've been trying to,” he said honestly. “I . . . I just can't seem to do it.”
A breeze was blowing in off the sea, cool and slightly sticky, occasionally shouldering aside the words garbling out of the megaphone. Mark shivered. “Poor Mark. You're so uptight. Your parents, the schools, they've locked you into a straitjacket. You've got to break out.” She moistened her lips. “I think I ca
Eagerly he leaned forward. “How?”
“You need to tear down the walls, just like the song says. You need to open up your mind.”
She fumbled for a moment in a pocket of her embroidered denim jacket, held out her closed hand, palm up. “Sunshine.” She opened her hand. A nondescript white tablet rested on the palm. “Acid.”
He stared at it. Here it was, the object of his long vicarious study: quest and quest's goal alike. The difficulty of obtaining LSD legally—and his deeply engrained reluctance to attempt to attain it on the black market, along with his instinctive fear that his first attempt to purchase any would land him in San Quentin—had helped him put off the day of reckoning. Acid had been offered him before in hip camaraderie; always he refused it, telling himself it was because you never could be sure what was in a street drug, secretly because he'd always been afraid to step beyond the multiplex door it presented. But now the world he yearned to join was surging about him like the sea, the woman he loved was offering him both challenge and temptation, and there it sat slowly melting in the rain.
He grabbed it from her, quickly and gingerly, as if suspecting it would burn his fingers. He poked it well down into a hip pocket of his black pipestem trousers, now so thoroughly imbued with mud they resembled an inept experiment in tie-dyeing. “I've got to think about it, Sunflower. I can't rush something like this.” Not knowing what more to say or do, he started to untangle his lanky legs and stand.
She caught him by the arm again. “No. Stay here with me. If you go home now you'll flush it down the john.” She drew him down beside her, closer than he'd ever actually been to her before, and he was suddenly acutely aware that her usual blond vanguard fighter was nowhere in evidence.
“Stay here, among the people. Right beside me,” she husked beside next to his ear. Her breath fluttered like an eyelash on his lobe. “See what you have to gain. You're special, Mark. You could do so much that really matters. Stay with me tonight.”
Although the invitation wasn't as comprehensive as he might have wished, he settled himself back into the mud, and so the night passed in cold communion, the two of them huddling inside the dubious shelter of her jacket, shoulder to shoulder, while orators thundered revolution—the final confrontation with Amerika.
By early-morning gray the demonstration began to autolyze. They drifted together to a little all-night coffeehouse near the campus, ate an organic breakfast Mark couldn't taste, while Sunflower spoke urgently of the destiny lying in his reach: “If only you could break out of yourself, Mark.” She reached out and took one of his long, pale hands in a tan compact one. “When I ran into you at that club last fall, I was glad to see you because I guess I was homesick for the old days, bad as they were. You were a friendly face.”
He dropped his eyes, blinking rapidly, startled by her open admission that she sought him out because of what he was rather than who he was. “That's changed, Mark.” He looked up again, tentative as a deer surprised in an early morning garden, ready to flee at the slightest hint of danger. “I've come to appreciate you for what you are. And what you could be. There's a real person hiding beneath that crew cut and those horn-rimmed glasses and uptight Establishment clothes you wear. A person crying to be let out.”
She put her other hand on top of his, stroked it lightly. “I hope you let him out, Mark. I very much want to meet him. But the time's come for you to make the decision. I can't wait any longer. The time has come to choose, Mark.”
“You mean—” His tongue tripped. To his fatigue-fogged mind she seemed to be promising much more than friendship—and at the same time threatening to withdraw even that, if he could not bring himself to act.
He walked her home to the backstairs apartment. On the landing outside she grabbed him suddenly behind the neck, kissed him with surprising ferocity. Then she vanished inside, leaving him blinking.
* * *
“They finally taught them little Commie fuckers a lesson. Right on, I say; right fuckin' on.”
Standing to one side of the base of the skyscraper-in-progress, sipping hot tea from a thermos, Wojtek Grabowski listened to his coworkers discussing the news they'd just heard on the omnipresent transistor: the National Guard had fired into a rally on Ohio's Kent State University campus, several students known dead. They seemed to think it was high time.
He did too, but the news filled him with sadness, not elation.
Later, walking the beams up above the world so high, he reflected on the tragedy of it all. American soldiers were fighting to defend American values and rescue a brother nation from Communist aggression—and here were fellow Americans spitting on them, reviling them. Ho Chi Minh was portrayed as a hero, a would-be liberator.
Grabowski knew that was a lie. He had bled to learn just what Communists meant by “liberation.” When he heard them hailed as heroes, his murdered friends and family rose up in a chorus at the back of his mind, crying denunciations.
It just wasn't what the protesters stood for, it was who they were. Children of privilege, overwhelmingly upper-middle-class, lashing out with the petulance of the spoiled against the very system that had given them comfort and security unparalleled in human history. “Amerika eats its young,” they screamed—but he saw it differently: America was in danger of being devoured by its young.
They were led by false prophets, led horribly astray. By men like Tom Douglas. He'd read up on the singer since his song had so shocked him, last November. He knew now that Douglas was one of the tainted, marked by the alien poison released that afternoon in September of 1946, a child of the evil new dawn whose birth Grabowski himself had witnessed from the deck of a refugee ship moored off Governor's Island. No wonder the children rose like serpents to strike their elders, when they were counseled by men Satan had marked his own.
“Hey,” shouted the huge ex-Marine with the radio. “Them hippie bastards are filling the streets down at city hall, bustin' windows and burnin' American flags!”
“The fuckers!”
“We gotta do something! It's revolution, right here and now.”
The young vet pulled on his Levi's jacket and settled his steel hat on his crew cut head. “It's only a few blocks from here. I don't know about you, but I am gonna do something about it.” He led a rush toward the lift cage.
Grabowski would have shouted, No, wait, don't go! You must leave this to the authorities—if brother begins fighting brother, the forces of disorder will have won. But speech was denied him.
Because he was as furious as the rest, and fearful, for he alone had seen firsthand the consequences of this revolution everyone talked about. And in his emotion he had gripped a girder with all his might.
His fingers had sunk into the steel as if it were the soft sticky paste Americans called ice cream.
He was himself marked with the mark of the Beast.
Mark passed the rest of the day in a strange haze compounded of lust, hope, and fear. He missed the word from Kent State. While the rest of America reacted in horror or approbation, he spent the night locked in his apartment with a plateful of cookies, poring through his papers and well-thumbed books on LSD, taking out the acid tablet, turning it over and over in his fingers like a talisman. When the sun was weakly established in the sky a transient surge of resolution made him pop it in his mouth. A quick slug of flat orange soda pop washed it down before nerve could fail him again.
From his reading he knew acid generally took between an hour and an hour and a half to kick in. He tried to slide past the time by flipping from the Solomon anthology to Marvel comics to the Zap comix he'd accrued in his pursuit of understanding. After an hour, too nervous to await the drug's effects by himself any longer, he left his apartment. He had to find Sunflower, tell her he'd found his manhood, had taken the fateful step. Also, he was afraid to be alone when the acid hit.
Finding Sunflower was always like tracking a flower petal kicked about by the breeze, but he knew she gravitated toward UCB, which had
For one brief shining moment, everyone—Establishment and enemies alike—knew the time had come for fighting in the streets. If the revolution was coming, it was coming now, in the first hot flush of fury following the Kent State massacre. Bay Area radical leaders had called a mammoth rally that morning in People's Park—and not just the police forces of the Bay Area but Ronald Reagan's own contingent of the National Guard had turned out to take them on.
By a quarter to ten the police had withdrawn from the park, establishing a cordon sanitaire around the campus area to prevent conflagration from spreading. It was just the kids and several deuce-and-a-half trucks spilling National Guardsmen in battle dress and gas masks from under their canvas covers forty meters away. With a loose clattering squeal and diesel chug, an M113 armored personnel carrier pulled to a halt behind the line of fixed bayonets, treads chewing at the sod like mouths. A man in captain's bars sat stiff and resolute in the cupola behind a fifty-caliber machine gun, wearing what looked like a Knute Rockne football helmet on his head.
Students ebbed from the green line like mercury from a fingertip. They'd been shouting to bring the war home; like their brothers in Ohio, it seemed they'd succeeded in doing just that. The Guard was regularly called in to break up demonstrations—but the boxy, ugly shape of the APC represented something new, a note of menace even the most sheltered couldn't miss. The crowd faltered, buzzing alarm.
Into the space between the lines a single figure stepped, slim in black leather. “We came to be heard,” said Thomas Marion Douglas, his voice pitched to carry, “and we're damned well going to be heard.”