Part 32 (1/2)

So began Mark's courts.h.i.+p of Sunflower, nee Kimberly Ann Cordayne.

”I want you . . .” The words spilled across the wind, insolent, suggestive, the voice like molten amber with a whiskey edge for all the New Year's-noisemaker quality of the little j.a.p transistor. Wojtek Grabowski pulled his windbreaker tighter over his wide chest and tried not to hear. . . .” The words spilled across the wind, insolent, suggestive, the voice like molten amber with a whiskey edge for all the New Year's-noisemaker quality of the little j.a.p transistor. Wojtek Grabowski pulled his windbreaker tighter over his wide chest and tried not to hear.

The crane reared back like a zombie dinosaur, swayed a girder toward him. He gestured to the operator with exaggerated underwater moves. ”I want you . . .” the voice insisted. He felt a flash of irritation. ” . . .” the voice insisted. He felt a flash of irritation. ”A blast from the past-1966, and Destiny's first hit song,” the announcer had warbled in his professional-adolescent voice. These Americans, Wojtek thought, they think 1966 is ancient history.

”Turn off that boogie-woogie s.h.i.+t,” somebody growled.

”f.u.c.k you,” the radio's owner said. He was twenty years old, two meters tall, and six months out of 'Nam. Marine. Khe Sanh. The argument ended.

Grabowski wished the boy would turn the radio off, but he didn't like to push himself forward. He was tolerated-a solid worker, who could drink the strongest man on-site under the table of a Friday night. But he kept to himself.

As the girder came down and the crew swarmed up to fix it in place and the cold wind off the bay drilled through thin nylon and aging skin, he thought how strange it was to find himself here-him, the middle child of a prosperous Warsaw household, the small sickly one, the studious. He was going to be a doctor, a professor. His brother Kliment-half envied, wholly admired, big, bold, das.h.i.+ng, with a cavalryman's black mustache-was going into the Officers' Academy, was going to be a hero.

Then the Germans came. Kliment was shot in the back of the head by the Red Army in Katyn Wood. Sister Katja disappeared into the field-brothels of the Wehrmacht. Mother died in the last bombardment of Warsaw, while the Soviets squatted on the Vistula and let the n.a.z.is do their dirty work for them. Father, a minor government functionary, outlived the war a few months before collecting his own bullet in the back of the neck, purged by the puppet Lublin regime.

Young Wojtek, dreams of university forever shattered, spent six and a half years as a partisan in the woods, ended them a fugitive, exiled to a foreign land with only a single hope to keep his blood beating.

”I want want you you.” The repet.i.tion was beginning to grate on him. He'd grown up with Mozart and Mendelssohn. And the message . . . This was no love song, it was a l.u.s.t song-an invitation to rut.

Love meant more to him-a moment of cool moisture, sluicing across his vision, wiped away by the wind's chill hand. He remembered marrying Anna, his partisan girl, in what the Stukas had left of a village church, and afterward the priest himself had hitched up his threadbare ca.s.sock and played Bach's Toccata and Fugue Toccata and Fugue on the organ, miraculously intact, while a starveling girl crouched to work the bellows. Next day they'd lie in ambush for the facists, but that night, that night . . . on the organ, miraculously intact, while a starveling girl crouched to work the bellows. Next day they'd lie in ambush for the facists, but that night, that night . . .

Another girder rose. Anna had left before him, smuggled out by helpful British operatives in June of 1945, bound for America with their child in her womb. He fought as long as he could, then followed.

Now he dwelt in a land he loved almost as a lover. He had nothing else. In twenty-three years he had found no sign of the woman he loved and the child she must have borne. Though, sweet Mary, how he'd searched.

”I waaaaaant waaaaaant you you . . .” . . .”

He shut his eyes. If I must endure that ba.n.a.l lyric one more time. . . .

”. . . to die with me to die with me.”

The music diminuendoed in an eerie wail. For a moment he stood very still, as if the wind had turned the sweat to ice within his s.h.i.+rt. What had seemed a mere syrup confection was infinitely more-more evil. Here was a man, anointed spokesman of youth, for whom the blandishments of love-or even l.u.s.t-were degraded into a totentanz totentanz, a ritual of death.

The girder clipped an upright and rang like a cracked bell. Grabowski shook himself, gestured the crane man to stop. At the same time, he strained, heard the announcer say the name Tom Douglas.

It was a name he would remember.

Mark hoped it was a courts.h.i.+p. Two days later Sunflower caught him coming out of a meeting with his sponsor and took him for a walk in the park. She let him tag along to the night spots and late-night rap sessions, to protest rallies in People's Park, to concerts. Always as her friend, her protege, the childhood friend she had made it her personal crusade to redeem from straightness. But not, unfortunately, in the exalted role of her Old Man.

He found reason to hope, however. He never saw the studly Philip again. In fact, he never saw one of Sunflower's boyfriends more than once. They were all intense, pa.s.sionate, brilliant (and at pains to tell you so). Committed. And muscular; that that much of Kimberly's taste hadn't changed. That gave Mark many choice moments of despair, but deep inside his skinny bosom he nursed the notion that someday she would feel the need of a rock of stability, and would come to him as a seabird to land. much of Kimberly's taste hadn't changed. That gave Mark many choice moments of despair, but deep inside his skinny bosom he nursed the notion that someday she would feel the need of a rock of stability, and would come to him as a seabird to land.

But still, he never, never made it across the gap that yawned between him and the world he yearned for-the world Sunflower inhabited and personified.

He survived that winter on hope and the chocolate-chip-oatmeal cookies his mother sent.

And music. He came from a household where they sang along with Mitch, and Lawrence Welk occupied the same pinnacle as J.F.K. Rock 'n' roll was never permitted to sully the air of his parents' house. He himself had been as oblivious to it as to everything outside of his lab and his private fantasies. He hadn't been aware of the Beatles' invasion, Mick Jagger's arrest for lycanthropy at the Isle of Wight concert, of the Summer of Love and the acid-rock explosion.

Now it all came rus.h.i.+ng in on him. The Stones. The Beatles. The Airplane. The Grateful Dead. Spirit and Cream and the Animals, and the Holy Trinity: Janis, Jimi, and Thomas Marion Douglas.

Tom Douglas most of all. His music brooded like an ancient ruin, dark, foreboding, hooded. Though his real affinity was to the gentler Mamas & Papas sound of an era already history, Mark was drawn to the Douglas touch-dark humor, darker twists-even as the Nietzschean fury implicit in the music repelled him. Perhaps it was that Douglas was everything Mark Meadows wasn't. Famous and vibrant and courageous and With It and irresistible to women. And an ace.

Aces and the Movement: in many ways they blasted into the mainstream of public consciousness flying formation like the heavy-metal warbirds Mark's father had led into battle over North Vietnam. There were more rock 'n' roll aces than among any other segment of the population. Their powers tended not to be subtle. Some had the ability to project dazzling displays of lights, others made extravagant music without the need of instruments. Most, though, played mind games with the audience by means of illusion or straight emotional manipulation. Tom Douglas-the Lizard King-was the head-trip master of them all.

Spring arrived. Mark's faculty adviser pressured him for results. Mark began to despair, hating himself for his lack of resolution, or whatever defect of manhood kept him from precipitating himself into the drug scene, unable to continue his research until he did. He felt like the fly preserved in a lucite ice cube his parents had inexplicably possessed when he was a child.

April saw him withdraw from the world into microcosm, to the paper reality inside his peeling walls. He had all Destiny's records, but he couldn't play them now, or the Dead, or the Stones, or martyred Jimi. They were a taunt, a challenge he could not meet.

He ate his chocolate cookies and drank his soda pop and emerged from his room only to indulge a nostalgic childhood vice: love of comic books. Not only the old cla.s.sics, fables of Superman and Batman from the days of innocence before humanity drew the wild card, but also their modern successors, which featured the fictionalized exploits of real aces, like the penny dreadfuls of the Old West. He devoured them with addict's fervor. They fulfilled by proxy the longing that had begun to eat him up from inside.

Not for metahuman powers; nothing so exotic. Not his craving for acceptance into the mysterious world of Counterculture, nor the desire for the lithe braless body of the former Kimberly Ann Cordayne that kept him awake night after sweaty night. What Mark Meadows desired more than anything in the world was effective per- effective per- sonality sonality. The ability to do, to achieve, to make a mark; good or bad, it scarcely mattered.

An evening toward April's end, Mark's retreat was shattered by a knock on his apartment door. He just lay there on his thin mattress on sheets unchanged in living memory, burying his long nose farther in the pages of Cosh Comics' Turtle Turtle number 92. His first reaction was fear, then anger at the intrusion. The world, he'd decided, was too much for him; he'd resolved to let it alone. Why couldn't it do as much for him? number 92. His first reaction was fear, then anger at the intrusion. The world, he'd decided, was too much for him; he'd resolved to let it alone. Why couldn't it do as much for him?

Again the knock, imperative, threatening the thin veneer of wood over emptiness. He sighed.

”What do you want?” He edged the words with a whine.

”Are you going to let me in, or am I going to have to smash through this papier-mache thing your pig landlord calls a door?”

For a moment Mark just lay there. Then he laid the comic on the mottled hardwood floor by the bed, and in his dingy tired socks padded to the door.

She stood there with hands on hips. She had on another Fourth of July skirt and a faded pink blouse, and against the spring Bay chill she'd pulled on a Levi's denim jacket with a black United Farm Workers eagle stenciled on the back and a peace symbol sewn on the left breast. She pushed into the room and slammed the door behind her.

”Look at this s.h.i.+t,” 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 gla.s.s of brown soda that had been flat last week-”and wadding your mind with that pig-authoritarian bulls.h.i.+t”-another knife-edge gesture toward Turtle 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 sh.e.l.l, Mark. Out of this wombroom of yours. Before you turn into something from Night of the Night of the Living Dead Living Dead.”

”I've got work to do.”

She c.o.c.ked an eyebrow and nudged Turtle Turtle 92 with a booted toe. 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 G.o.d's sake try not to dress like such a straight.”