Summer of Love, a Time Travel (39 page)

“Stop
it,” Susan says, recoiling.

“Oh,
and Granma died. She loved Starbright more than anyone, but she died, anyway,
and Starbright was sad. And Daddy? He works so hard, he doesn’t have time for
Starbright except to yell at her and take her to France for Christmas, poor
thing.”

“I
said stop it, Penny Lane.”

“That’s
what I said, too!” Nance mimes surprise. “When Handy Andy came to my bedroom? I
said, Don’t. Stop. Don’t. Stop. Don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop.” She rocks
with that awful laughter.

“I’ve
got to go.” Susan stands, ready to bolt this time.

“Hey,
I’m shucking you. Don’t you know when you’re being shucked? Wait, wait.
Please?”

“No.”
Her voice clogs in her throat. “I’ve got to be somewhere.”

“Hey,
what a reunion.” Tearful eyes, a trembling lip. “Don’t you love me anymore,
Starbright?” Dramatic Nance.

Susan
has no answer.

“Look,
I’ve got a joint,” Nance says brightly. She opens her ratty handbag and shows
Susan the fat, hand-rolled cigarette tucked inside. She switches instantly to a
flirty look. “Come smoke a joint with me, sweetheart? For old times’ sake?”

*  
*   *

No
pot-smoking is allowed in the Blue Unicorn Café, so Susan and Nance take the
joint to the ladies’ room. They crowd into a narrow stall.

Susan
stares down at the toilet bowl. The place is clean, but the porcelain is
ancient, stained tobacco brown. Someone has tossed in several cigarette butts.
Hot pink lipstick stains the filters. The side of the stall is covered with
graffiti.

Nance
tucks the joint in her mouth, pulls it over her tongue and through her lips,
dampening the paper. She lights it, drags deep, and hands it to Susan.

Susan
takes the joint. She’s never liked grass. She tokes, but exhales the smoke
right away. As usual, the grass stings her eyes and her throat.

She
hands the joint back, but Nance holds up her hand and commands, “Take another
hit. Hold it in your lungs, for Pete’s sake.”

“That’s
okay.” She presses the joint into Nance’s fingers. “I’m, like, allergic or
something.”

Just
that hit instantly slides through her consciousness, rearranging things.
Righteous shit, as Professor Zoom would say. Suddenly she feels claustrophobic and
paranoid in the stall. She doesn’t want to be here. The graffiti swirls. She
doesn’t want to look at Nance, this bristling gaunt stranger who, with her
white crew cut and lined forehead, looks much older than her fourteen years.

Nance
shrugs and finishes the joint herself. With a sly smile, she blows smoke in
Susan’s face. “You’re mad at me, huh.”

The
words resonate and tangle, spinning off implications. “I don’t know what you
mean.”

“Well,
don’t be.”

“I’m
not mad at you, Penny Lane.”

“You’re
the only person in the whole world I don’t want mad at me, Starbright.”

Susan
wants to weep at the sorrow in her voice. Nance Payne, the pretty little
dark-haired girl from Euclid Heights. The edge of mockery in her voice suggests
that Susan has betrayed her, too, along with the rest of the world.

Nance
unzips her jeans. “Gotta pee. All that coffee.”

Susan
reaches for the bolt on the stall door, but Nance says, “It’s okay. You can stay.”

She
pulls down her jeans. She wears no panties. Her thighs look like those pictures
you see of starving people in Asia. She sits on the seat, tinkles, and stands.
She turns around deliberately, pulling up her jeans, and Susan flinches at the
dark scarlet rash starting at the middle of her thighs, dappling her pelvis to
her waist.

For a
moment, still reeling from that awful hit, Susan doubts her eyes. A
hallucination? A trick of the light?

Nance
grins at her astonishment. “Gross, huh? Don’t worry. It’s just a dose of the
clap.”

“You’ve
got to go to the Free Clinic! Get some medicine!”

“Oh,
it looks worse than it is. Anyway, they’re too wasted to notice. They usually
want to do it in the dark.”

“They?
Who’s they?”

“The
tricks, sweetheart, the tricks. The guys who want to do it for money.”

“What
are you
talking
about?”

“I’m
talking about survival. Don’t give me that look. I never had a gig at Mr. G’s
art supply store. I had no bread when I split. I just had to get away from
Handy Andy, okay? How did you get to San Francisco? Did you fly? Pan Am or
United? Not me. I hitchhiked, baby, inch by inch, mile by mile.” She smiles her
heartbreaking smile. “It was an experience. Are you experienced?” She hums the
riff from the Jimi Hendrix tune.

Susan
knocks the bolt back, stumbles out of the stall. She runs to the sink, turns
the knob for hot water, and watches rivulets swirling in the basin. The faucet
is smudged with greasy fingerprints. Same for the plunger on the soap
dispenser.

A
sudden recollection of the smeary bus window assaults her the way recollections
do when she’s stoned. How well she recalls peering through Chi’s scope. How Chi
scolded her. Oh, Chi!

She
pulls down a paper towel, wraps the towel over the plunger, and squirts a ton of
soap into her palm. She scrubs her hands, turning soap and hot water around and
around the way Chi uses his freaky wipes. She goes to turn off the water and
stares again at the greasy knob. The smudges remind her of the rash on Nance’s
thighs. She can practically see bacteria swarming all over the chrome.

And
it strikes her--in one of those Summer of Love lightning flashes--
that’s
what Chi has been carping about. About doorknobs and bongs passed around. His
clean thing. His prophylaks and wipes. He’s talking about disease.

And
survival? Oh, yeah.

Suddenly
she gets it. She pulls down another paper towel, uses
that
to turn the
water knob off, and takes another towel to dry her hands. The thought of
touching anything in the ladies’ room with her bare hands nearly makes her ill.

Nance
bangs out of the stall. “You ever want to party with me, sweetheart, you let me
know. There’s plenty of bread to be scored during the Summer of Love. I’d love
to turn you on.”

“That’s
not my scene,” Susan says bluntly. Who in the Haight-Ashbury can argue with
that?

“Sure,”
Nance says, splashing water on her hands. “I understand. I mean, why should you
party with a no-good so-and-so? You don’t need to turn tricks, right? You’ve
got plenty of money.”

“Penny
Lane, I’m down to my last dollar. Stan the Man owes me the hundred bucks he
stole from me for the dragon’s blood deal.”

“That’s
really true?”

“Yes,
it’s true.”

They
stare at each other in the mirror over the sink.

“Tell
you what.” Nance bends and pulls something out of her boot. A twenty-dollar
bill. “I was saving this for a bag of doo, but I’m giving it to you.”

“No,
that’s okay,” Susan says. “It’s not your responsibility.”

“My
postcard brought you here. It
is
my responsibility.” Nance savors the
word. She cocks her head at Susan as if she’s just discovered a new way to mock
her.

“Penny
Lane, no. Keep your money. Forget it.”

Nance’s
eyes darken. She juts out her chin. “Don’t tell me to forget it. Don’t tell me
I’m not responsible.”

Everything
has twisted around again. Does Nance need to feel that Susan is in her debt?
This strikes Susan as absolutely fair. She
is
in Nance’s debt. “You’re
right. If it weren’t for you, Penny Lane, I wouldn’t be here at all.”

“Plus,
I named you, sweetheart.”

“You
did, you really did! You named me as surely as my parents once named me.”

Nance
is triumphant. “I’ll get that hundred bucks for you, Starbright. I’ll get it
somehow, I swear.”

Susan’s
hands are reasonably clean, but now she’s got to touch the smeary door handle
to get out of here. She wraps another paper towel around her hand the way Chi
would wrap a prophylak.

Nance
dogs her heels. “If Ruby Maverick ever kicks you out, and you need a place to
stay, you come to me.” Nance seizes her shoulders and kisses her on the mouth.
“You were the one thing I could care about all those years. I love you,
Starbright. I’ve always loved you.”

“I
love you, too.” And it’s true. Susan has always loved Nance like a sister. A
weird feeling rises in her throat. As she plunges through the door, she turns
back for a moment.

Hollow
cheeks, hollow eyes, spare white hair, and the skinny body of a waif. Nance is
a puzzle. An optical illusion of the heart. Is she a pretty young girl gazing
in a mirror or a monstrous crone with death on her face?

Which
are you, Nance? Which are you?

14

Piece of My Heart

Chi
stalks down Haight Street, searching for her. People are buzzing about the news
of the hippie murders, but that’s nothing compared to the darkness in his
heart.

Some
smart strategy, Chi. He thought he could play with a young girl’s heart.
Starbright. So easy to win. So easy to lose.

He
doesn’t give a damn about the arrest of Shank, who is a loudmouthed freak,
always wasted and on the make. As for the Syndicate moving in, what do these
people expect? Peace and love? Anytime there’s illegal bread to be scored--lots
of it--mobsters will make the scene, sooner or later.

That’s
why President Alexander decriminalized illegal drugs in 2093 and instituted the
registration system, regulating the ingestion of everything from nicotine to
heroin. The system took decades to become fully operational and was legally
challenged during the brown ages more than once. But tax revenues in the first
year financed the start-up of education and detox programs that went hand-in-hand
with registration. Plenty of anti-big-government protesters objected but the
good news was an effective lockdown of the borders and an end to the drug
cartels freed up lots of funding to benefit American citizens and private
enterprise.

Reallocation
of resources from an inefficient and often corrupt criminal justice sector to
the private civil sector, from black market economies to legitimate capitalist
business accountable to reasonable regulation proved so successful, Chi finds
it hard to believe American policy was so shortsighted for so long. In the
centuries following, comicists always supported President Alexander’s vision.

He
jogs all the way to Stanyan where a dozen people sprawled on the grass pass
around a gallon jug of Papa Cribari, joints, and paper plates of greasy fried fish
and chips. He turns right and jogs to Oak Street, starts a sweep down the
Panhandle.

Of
course Chi has always supported President Alexander’s vision. He’s a survivor
of the world’s tragedies of the past half-millennium. A student of history with
twenty-twenty hindsight. One of the superior few who finally understands how to
live lightly on the Earth. If humanity cocreates reality with the Cosmic Mind,
then humanity must live responsibly or die.

Yet
two women of this ancient day who know nothing of these things have managed to
undermine the Grandmother Principle and then—as if that isn’t enough—the theory
of probability physics that’s the very foundation of t-porting. The very reason
t-porting works, even if no one completely understands why. No one completely
understands gravity or electromagnetism, either. But they work.

The
Grandmother Principle and Schrodinger’s Cat. Are these ugly symptoms of a moral
disease corrupting the very root of t-porting?

At
first, Chi was furious with Ruby. She deliberately set out to sway him from the
path he was required to follow. The policy under which he was expected to live
for a mere seventy-six days. She laughed at his nutribeads, then tempted him
with her food and wine. With the scent of frying onions and garlic toast, she
broke his will. And then—when he was prime, heavy with food and slow with
contentment—she broke his belief.
The way you think about things shapes the
way your reality is.