Summer of Love, a Time Travel (13 page)

“Give
it here,” Stovepipe says.

Susan
does. Her hands are trembling.

Stovepipe
and the Lizard stalk out of the tent into a grove of trees at the edge of the campgrounds.
She sighs with relief, but in a moment they’re back. Stovepipe hands her a
smaller package. Then they disappear as quickly as they came.

The
package could be filled with newspaper for all she knows. It’s not her fault! Why
did Stan make her do this?

She
runs back to the Double Barrel stage. The band is well into their second set.
It’s the usual circus: fans dancing, bobbing their heads. Beautiful girls posing
in exotic costumes. Stan lounges at the edge of the crowd, pointing at
something onstage. A white-blond girl, bone-thin in expensive jeans, stands
beside him, laughing.

Susan
taps his shoulder and hands him Stovepipe’s package.

“Groovy,
Starbright,” he says. His eyes are painfully bloodshot. He’s had more than a
few hits of Professor Zoom’s Gold. He cups a smoking roach beneath the palm of
his hand. “Everything was cool?”

“Sure.”
Her pitch for a share of the profits vanishes in thin air.

The
girl turns to glance at her. She’s got a long bony face and limbs like twigs.
She must be eighteen, the ideal of beauty everyone adores.

“Starbright,
this is Marylou,” Stan says. “Her daddy owns half of Mill Valley.”

“I’m
Marilyn.” The girl laughs and punches his shoulder. “Isn’t he a pig,
Starbright?” Her eyes assess Susan and dismiss her. The difference in their
ages isn’t four years, it’s more like four centuries. “Give me some,” she says
and pries the roach from his fingers.

“I’ll
give you some,” Stan growls in her ear.

Susan
wonders if she can stop the trembling of her lip.

*  
*   *

Give
me some.
Back at the Double Barrel house, this is Marilyn’s big
line. She says it over and over. She provokes the guys into screaming laughter.
Give me some. Marilyn is so enticing, she even upstages Lady May, who pouts and
frets.

Susan
huddles on the swaybacked sofa. She’s so sick to her stomach, she’s afraid
she’s going to puke all over the floor. Has she got a fever? The neverending
party swirls all around her. People pour in the door, laughing, toking,
swigging pints of Wild Turkey.

Give
me some.

Stella
leaps onto the coffee table and begins to dance. She stretches out her arms in
a beckoning gesture.

Susan
recognizes that gesture. Stella reminds her of Juno, the Transparent Woman.

*  
*   *

Only
girls and their mothers were allowed in the auditorium at the Cleveland Health
Education Museum. Juno, the Transparent Woman, stood eight feet tall on her dais,
her clear plastic arms beckoning. The auditorium dimmed and a don’t-be-afraid
voice spoke on the PA system. The Transparent Woman lit up her internal organs.
Her heart beat bright purple. Her arteries pulsed neon-red blood, while her
veins pulsed cool blue. Her yellow lungs billowed, inhaling and exhaling. Her
green stomach showed where food went, her pink bowls showed how waste products
came out.

Then
the Transparent Woman lit up her reproductive organs. The girls stared in
silence as their mothers coughed discreetly. Juno’s ovaries sent tiny turquoise
eggs down her graceful fallopian tubes to the uterus, which glowed redder and redder.
Red light flowed through the cervix and down the vagina. The voice said the
vagina was the birth canal. Like the Panama Canal or the Suez Canal? The birth
canal was where the baby came out.

But
how did the baby get
in?
The Transparent Woman turned dark. The man,
said the voice, planted his sperm—like seeds—in the woman. The Transparent
Woman lit up again. Here is where the man planted his seeds, the voice said. In
the birth canal. Juno stood stiffly on her dais, smiling her transparent smile,
giving no hint of the task at hand.

“Well,
that’s that,” said Susan’s mother as they drove home through the dark. She
never spoke about the Transparent Woman again.

Susan’s
first period came soon after Juno lit up her reproductive organs. She likes to
imagine her uterus glowing redder and redder until red light flows out of her
birth canal. For the past year, the red light has flowed as regular as
clockwork. Every twenty-two days, exactly, between noon and one o’clock, the
red light traces its path.

Well.
Susan sure knows how the seeds get planted now. Losing her virginity and
sleeping with Stan every night has been as powerful a revelation as her trip.
Sex is a lot like tripping. There are people who know and people who don’t.

Sex
is also a lot like a drug. In her eighth-grade science class, the teacher told
them a story about how goslings raised with a bowling ball became imprinted on
it and followed it everywhere as if it were a mother goose. Stan is her sexual
bowling ball.

Now
she swallows hot tears. Her throat is killing her. Her nipples tingle, she can
barely keep food down, and she’s got to pee every half hour. The Transparent
Woman, a.k.a. Stella, dances on the coffee table.

Her
period is three days late.

*  
*   *

Fawn
leaps up on the coffee table and dances with Stella. They proceed to kick
everything off, the grease-lipped beer mugs, rotten apple cores, the can of
half-eaten SpaghettiOs, their clothes. People drift in and out of the living
room, sit on the floor in circles, pass joints around, dance by themselves, roam
off to raid the kitchen, or wander away through the halls.

Stan
the Man has disappeared.

Susan
is feverish, burning up. She’s so exhausted, her bones feel like a Gumby Doll’s.
She just wants to sleep despite the fact it’s only late afternoon. Peace and
quiet, that’s what she desperately needs. She climbs up the three stairways to
her room.

Only
it’s not her room. It’s Stan’s room.

The
door is closed. Susan hears voices, not just his. Laughter, the chuckle of
seduction. She pushes the door, and it swings open. He’s too wasted to have locked
it.

She
gets an eyeful of Marilyn’s Mill Valley thighs and, between them, Stan the Man.

As
she flees down the stairs, Susan wonders if she can stop the trembling in her
heart.

5

White Rabbit

Chi
perches in the catbird seat for his noon-to-four-thirty shift, daydreaming of
imploders, calcite crystals, the awesome dish of the chronometer. Has he really
been gone only ten days? It seems like forever since he’s left his future in
the past. The catbird seat, which Ruby rigged up, is a chair cushion tied on an
amputated chair seat. The seat, in turn, is nailed to the top of a rickety
stepladder set in the back of the Mystic Eye. Ruby is boundlessly resourceful,
but the tachyonic shuttle it’s not.

Chi
folds his arms in the djellaba she gave him, a scarlet-striped robe he pulls
over his clothes that covers him, head to toe. He pulls the hood over his head
and around his face, allowing a lock of his long red hair to fall across his
brow and sunglasses. Ruby gave him the sunglasses, too. Ray-Bans, she calls
them, the color candy-apple red.

Thus
anonymous, swathed in red, hunching over gargoyle-style, he watches people mill
around the shop. Down below, beneath his gaze, shoppers hesitate. Some touch
the merchandise reverentially, glance up at him, and replace a mojo bag or a
conjuring wand just so. Others can’t conceal the larcenous intent crossing
their faces. A boy no more than twelve, in dirty denim and floppy hair like ten
thousand other boys passing through the Haight-Ashbury, fingers a brass
butterfly strung on a leather thong.

Chi
lets loose a booming, “The Mystic Eye Sees All!”

The
would-be knickknacker jumps, so badly startled he drops the butterfly and
dashes out the door.

Two
women smile up at him and whisper to each other, giggling. College students,
maybe twenty, in the uniform of Beat intellectuals—black turtlenecks, jeans,
and sandals, canvas shoulder bags filled with books by Alan Watts or Marshall
McLuhan. The tall slim one is so prime she could compete with Bella Venus,
except for her gooey black hair. He pictures her nude. Without her clothes, of
course, but even more, without the wild extrusions from her scalp, her furry
eyebrows, the fuzz on her forearms where she’s pushed back her sleeves. And
without the trauma to her skin: her suntan. He still can’t get over how people
so young look as weather-damaged as day-laborers without domes or proper Block.
The sight is as disturbing to him as a peg-legged beggar would be to this
vivacious girl.

Chi
longs to tell her:
Stay out of the sun. Even your gentle sun.
Would his
warning violate Tenet Three of the Grandmother Principle? He sighs. He cannot
affect any person in the past, except as authorized by the project directors.
After the disastrous Save Betty Project, the LISA techs were more adamant than
ever about observing the Tenets and the mandate of nonintervention. Still,
dermatologists of this Day know all about malignant melanoma. They’re just not
telling people.

But
it’s tricky. Even if he could tell her, would she believe him? In the pop wisdom
of this Day, a suntan is healthy. Glamorous. A suntan is cool.

“The
lady looks lovely in the tie-dye scarf,” he calls out in the Voice of Doom. The
shopper blushes, pretends to preen in the countertop mirror, and reluctantly
unties the scarf from around her neck.

This
has got to be the most mind-numbing job he, or any other poor fool, has ever
held. He presses his hand over a yawn. Still, sometimes he enjoys the
sacrifices of the catbird seat, like a good cosmicist enjoys a giftday.

A
giftday: To give is best. Be still, and let the world rest. A giftday is the
day when you rise with the sun and fast twenty-four hours, consuming nothing
but a water ration. You go nowhere except by your own exertion and even
wear-and-tear on shoe soles is frowned upon. You read or write on rationed,
recycled paper, meditate on True Value, or work if you can, consuming no resources.
Neither candles nor fires in your fireplace are allowed. Reserves in your solar
cells must be conserved, along with utility credits you’ve bicycled on a Path.
You may talk with friends or sing, but only if you consume no power. You may
make love, but only if you don’t conceive. Then you sleep when the sun sets or
sit in darkness until you tire. Cosmicists are invited to gift twelve days a
year, once a month, but some cosmicists gift more. Chi and Bella Venus gifted
forty-eight days between them, just last year. They had lots to do together
when the sun set.

Two
billion people participate in giftdays, more gifting all the time.

Chi
sighs. These hairy, hungry, noisy, greedy, heedless people of 1967 are just
plain crazy. But—and this is a Big But—are his conscientious, hairless, rigorous,
self-sacrificing people of 2467 a little crazy, too? It’s an outrageous
question that keeps him awake at night. A question he would never have thought
to ask until he t-ported to the Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love.

Ruby
sets the brass butterfly back on the countertop and gives him the thumbs-up. She
loves being in the vanguard. She and Chi have started a trend among hip
merchants. All the shops that can afford to are installing watchmen on
stepladders.

“
Achtung,
Beelzebub,” Leo Gorgon says. He clicks his heels and extends his arm in a
ramrod salute as he lounges behind the counter with Ruby.

Chi
refuses to take the bait. From his vantage point, he can see Gorgon’s hands,
too. He’s also seen the autobiographical novel Gorgon will publish in 1973, which
the Archives preserve. By his own admission, Gorgon is a thief, stealing goods and
food from the community for the Diggers’ Free Store and his own use. Chi
frowns. The Free Thieves were a radical cosmicist faction during the desperate
depths of the brown ages. The faction claimed that taking property when needed
was mandated by the law of necessity. After a long and ugly debate, the
cosmicist majority declared that the Free Thieves were not working toward the Great
Good and suppressed them.

Good
riddance, Chi thinks, to thieves.

Gorgon
never loses a chance to express his contempt for Chi. A contempt earned, it
seems, because Ruby has befriended Chi, given him shelter and a decent job. And
because Chi is helping Ruby turn a profit at the Mystic Eye.

The
contempt is mutual.

“Forget
him,” Ruby says and winks. “You’re cool, Bub.” She glares at Gorgon, who never
sees the sharp looks she aims at the back of his neck. Still, she’s started
sleeping with Gorgon, which Chi cannot understand. But Ruby’s affairs are not
his business. What women have to go through in these primitive times is not his
concern. He can’t get involved.

“You’re
the boss, Ruby,” he says for Gorgon’s benefit.

Gorgon
dubbed him Beelzebub as an insult, but the kids take to the name and call Chi
that or The Bub when he’s perched on the catbird seat. It’s a kick, he has to
admit, becoming a minor celebrity on the Scene.