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 hi s. She had on another Fourth of July skirt and a faded pink louse, 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 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 womb-room 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 usyou, 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 mindaltering 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 managementweren'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."