But he wasn't the last human. He was one of the first of something new, something that had the potential to be better than human.
That woman at the demonstration, C.C. She'd said you should take care of your own. What would it cost him to save hundreds of jokers from dying in the heat and rotting dampness of Vietnam? Not very much. Not very much at all.
He found the flyer in the pocket of his jacket. Slowly, with growing conviction, he dialed the numbers.
TRANSFIGURATIONS
by Victor Milan
November night wind whipped his trousers, stinging skinny legs like triffid tendrils as he shoehorned himself into a small club not far from campus. The murk throbbed like a wound, pulsing red and blue and noise. He stopped, hovering there in the door with the lumpy orange-and-green plaid coat in which his mother had packed him off to MIT three years before hanging on his narrow shoulders like a dead dwarf. Don't be such a coward, Mark, he told himself. This is for science.
The band lunged at "Crown of Creation" and wrestled it to the floor as he instinctively sought the darkest corner, teacup in hand-he'd learned how unhip it was to order Coke or coffee, at least.
Other than that he'd learned none of the moves in weeks of research. The way he was dressed, in his high-water pants and pastel polyester shirt of the sort that always pouched out at the sides like a sail in the wind, he might've been in danger of being taken for a narc-this was the fall that followed Woodstock, the year Gordon Liddy invented the DEA to give Nixon an issue to distract attention from the war-but Berkeley and San Francisco were hip towns, university towns; they knew a science student when they saw one.
The Glass Onion had no dance floor as such; bodies swayed in crepuscular crimson and indigo glow between tables or crowded into a clear space before the tiny stage, with a whisper of beads and buckskin fringe and the occasional dull glint of Indian jewelry. He kept as far from the action's center as he could, but being Mark he inevitably bumped into everyone he passed, leaving a wake of glares and thin embarrassed "excuse me's" behind him. His prominent ears burning, he had almost reached his goal, the little rickety table made out of a Ma Bell cable spool with a single dented green auditorium chair beside it and an unlit candle in an empty peanut butter jar plunked down on it, when he ran smack into somebody.
The first thing that happened was that his massive hornrim glasses slid down the ramp of his nose and disappeared in the dark. Next he grabbed the person he'd bumped with both hands as his balance went. The teacup hit the floor with a crash and a clatter. "Oh, dear, oh, please excuse me, I'm sorry…" tumbled from his mouth like gumballs from a broken machine.
He realized there was a certain softness of the person his skinny hands were clinging to so fervently, and a smell of musk and patchouli detached itself from the general miasma and drilled its way right up into his sensorium. He cursed himself: You had to go and run over a beautiful woman. At least she smelled beautiful.
Then she was patting him on the arm, murmuring that she was sorry, and they both bent down to the floor together in search of teacup and glasses while the bodies went round and round around them, and they bumped heads and recoiled amid apologies, and Mark's fevered fingers found his glasses, miraculously intact, and fit them back in front of his eyes, and he blinked and found himself staring from a distance of five inches into the face of Kimberly Ann Cordayne.
Kimberly Ann Cordayne: the girl, yes, of his dreams. Childhood sweetheart, unrequited, from the moment he'd first beheld her, pinafored and five, riding her trike down the modest suburban SoCal street where they both lived. He'd been so entranced by her Hallmark Card perfection that the raspberry scoop fell off his ice cream cone to hot doom on the sidewalk and he never noticed. She pedaled over his bare toes and cruised on with her pert nose in the air, never acknowledging his existence. From that day his heart had been lost.
Hope and despair surged up like surf within him. He straightened, his tongue too tied to produce words. And she yelled, "Mark! Mark Meadows! Fuck, but it's good to see you." And hugged him.
He stood there blinking like an idiot. No female who wasn't a relative had ever hugged him before. He swallowed spastically. What if I get an erection? Belatedly, he made feeble patting gestures at the small of her back.
She pushed away, held him at arm's length. "Let me look at you, brother. Why, you haven't changed a bit."
He winced. The taunting would begin now, for his skinniness, his clumsiness, his crew cut, the pimples still sprinkled across scrawny, allegedly postadolescent features and his most recent, most aggravating deficit, his utter and complete inability to be anywhere near With It. In high school, Kimberly Ann had evolved from indifference into his foremost tormentor-or, rather, a succession of jocks on whose overelaborated biceps she hung, cooing encouragements, had assumed the role.
But here she was tugging him toward that corner table. "Come on, man. Let's talk about the bad old days."
It was an opportunity for which he'd hopelessly hoped three quarters of his life. Face-to-face with his paragon of love and beauty while the band on stage assaulted the Beatles'
"Blackbird"-and he couldn't think of one damned thing to say. But Kimberly Ann was more than happy to do the talking. About the changes she'd been through since good old Rexford Tugwell High. About the far-out people she'd met at Whittier College, how they turned her on and opened her eyes. How she'd dropped out midway through her senior year and come here, the Bay Area, the bright mecca of Movement. How she'd been finding herself ever since.
Perhaps he hadn't changed, but she most definitely had. Gone was the straight black ponytail, pleated skirts, pastel lipstick and nail polish, the prim stewardess perfection of an up-and-coming Bank of America executive's one daughter. Kimberly's hair had grown long, hanging down well past her shoulders in a great kinky cloudy Yoko Ono mane. She wore a frilly peasant blouse embroidered with mushrooms and planets, a voluminous skirt tie-dyed into what reminded Mark of nothing so much as fireworks displays in Disneyland. He knew her feet were bare, from having stepped on one. She looked more beautiful than he ever could have imagined.
And those pale eyes, winter-sky eyes, that had so often frozen him in the past, were glowing at him with such warmth he could barely stand to look at them. It was heaven, but somehow he couldn't buy it. Being Mark, he had to question. "Kimberly-" he began.
She held up two fingers. "Hold it right there, dude. I left that name behind me with my bourgeois ways. I'm Sunflower now."
He bobbed his head and his Adam's apple. "OkaySunflower."
"So what brings you here, man?"
"It's an experiment."
She eyed him across the rim of her jelly jar wineglass, suddenly wary.
"I just finished my undergrad work at MIT," he explained in a rush. "Now I'm here to get my doctorate in biochemistry from the University of California at Berkeley."
"So what's that got to do with this scene?"
"Well, what I've been working on is figuring out just how DNA encodes genetic information. I published some papers, stuff like that." At MIT they'd compared him to Einstein, as a matter of fact, but you'd never catch him saying that. "But this summer I found something that interests me a lot more. The chemistry of mind."
Blue blankness, her eyes.
"Psychedelics. Psychoactive drugs. I read all the material-Leary, Alpert, the Solomon collection. It really-what's the expression? Really turned me on." He leaned forward, fingers plucking unconsciously at the felt-tip pens nestled in their plastic protector in his breast pocket. In his excitement he sprinkled the spool tabletop with unconscious spittle. "It's a really vital area of research. I think it might lead to answering the really important questions-who we are, and how, and why."