She looked at him at last, shook her head sadly. "I've been with the people, Mark," she said. "Where I belong." Suddenly she leaned forward, caught him by the forearm with surprising strength. "It's where you belong too, Mark. It's just that you're so-so selfish. It's as if you're armored in it. And you have so much to offer-now, when we need all the help we can get, to fight the oppressors before it's too late. Break out, Mark. Free yourself."
Surprised, he saw a tear glimmering off in one corner of her eye. "I've been trying to," he said honestly. "I… I just can't seem to do it."
A breeze was blowing in off the sea, cool and slightly sticky, occasionally shouldering aside the words garbling out of the megaphone. Mark shivered. "Poor Mark. You're so uptight. Your parents, the schools, they've locked you into a straitjacket. You've got to break out." She moistened her lips. "I think I can help."
Eagerly he leaned forward. "How?"
"You need to tear down the walls, just like the song says. You need to open up your mind."
She fumbled for a moment in a pocket of her embroidered denim jacket, held out her closed hand, palm up. "Sunshine." She opened her hand. A nondescript white tablet rested on the palm. "Acid."
He stared at it. Here it was, the object of his long vicarious study: quest and quest's goal alike. The difficulty of obtaining LSD legally-and his deeply engrained reluctance to attempt to attain it on the black market, along with his instinctive fear that his first attempt to purchase any would land him in San Quentin-had helped him put off the day of reckoning. Acid had been offered him before in hip camaraderie; always he refused it, telling himself it was because you never could be sure what was in a street drug, secretly because he'd always been afraid to step beyond the multiplex door it presented. But now the world he yearned to join was surging about him like the sea, the woman he loved was offering him both challenge and temptation, and there it sat slowly melting in the rain.
He grabbed it from her, quickly and gingerly, as if suspecting it would burn his fingers. He poked it well down into a hip pocket of his black pipestem trousers, now so thoroughly imbued with mud they resembled an inept experiment in tie-dyeing. "I've got to think about it, Sunflower. I can't rush something like this." Not knowing what more to say or do, he started to untangle his lanky legs and stand.
She caught him by the arm again. "No. Stay here with me. If you go home now you'll flush it down the john." She drew him down beside her, closer than he'd ever actually been to her before, and he was suddenly acutely aware that her usual blond vanguard fighter was nowhere in evidence. "Stay here, among the people. Right beside me," she husked beside next to his ear. Her breath fluttered like an eyelash on his lobe. "See what you have to gain. You're special, Mark. You could do so much that really matters. Stay with me tonight."
Although the invitation wasn't as comprehensive as he might have wished, he settled himself back into the mud, and so the night passed in cold communion, the two of them huddling inside the dubious shelter of her jacket, shoulder to shoulder, while orators thundered revolution-the final confrontation with Amerika.
By early-morning gray the demonstration began to autolyze. They drifted together to a little all-night coffeehouse near the campus, ate an organic breakfast Mark couldn't taste, while Sunflower spoke urgently of the destiny lying in his reach: "If only you could break out of yourself, Mark." She reached out and took one of his long, pale hands in a tan compact one. "When I ran into you at that club last fall, I was glad to see you because I guess I was homesick for the old days, bad as they were. You were a friendly face."
He dropped his eyes, blinking rapidly, startled by her open admission that she sought him out because of what he was rather than who he was. "That's changed, Mark." He looked up again, tentative as a deer surprised in an early morning garden, ready to flee at the slightest hint of danger. "I've come to appreciate you for what you are. And what you could be. There's a real person hiding beneath that crew cut and those horn-rimmed glasses and uptight Establishment clothes you wear. A person crying to be let out."
She put her other hand on top of his, stroked it lightly. "I hope you let him out, Mark. I very much want to meet him. But the time's come for you to make the decision. I can't wait any longer. The time has come to choose, Mark."
"You mean-" His tongue tripped. To his fatigue-fogged mind she seemed to be promising much more than friendship-and at the same time threatening to withdraw even that, if he could not bring himself to act.
He walked her home to the backstairs apartment. On the landing outside she grabbed him suddenly behind the neck, kissed him with surprising ferocity. Then she vanished inside, leaving him blinking.
"They finally taught them little Commie fuckers a lesson. Right on, I say; right fuckin' on."
Standing to one side of the base of the skyscraper-inprogress, sipping hot tea from a thermos, Wojtek Grabowski listened to his coworkers discussing the news they'd just heard on the omnipresent transistor: the National Guard had fired into a rally on Ohio's Kent State University campus, several students known dead. They seemed to think it was high time.
He did too, but the news filled him with sadness, not elation.
Later, walking the beams up above the world so high, he reflected on the tragedy of it all. American soldiers were fighting to defend American values and rescue a brother nation from Communist aggression-and here were fellow Americans spitting on them, reviling them. Ho Chi Minh was portrayed as a hero, a would-be liberator.
Grabowski knew that was a lie. He had bled to learn just what Communists meant bv "liberation." When he heard them hailed as heroes, his murdered friends and family rose up in a chorus at the back of his mind, crying denunciations. It just wasn't what the protesters stood for, it was who they were. Children of privilege, overwhelmingly uppermiddle-class, lashing out with the petulance of the spoiled against the very system that had given them comfort and security unparalleled in human history. "America eats its young," they screamed-but he saw it differently: America was in danger of being devoured by its young.
They were led by false prophets, led horribly astray. By men like Tom Douglas. He'd read up on the singer since his song had so shocked him, last November. He knew now that Douglas was one of the tainted, marked by the alien poison released that afternoon in September of 1946, a child of the evil new dawn whose birth Grabowski himself had witnessed from the deck of a refugee ship moored off Governor's Island. No wonder the children rose like serpents to strike their elders, when they were counseled by men Satan had marked his own.
"Hey," shouted the huge ex-Marine with the radio. "Them hippie bastards are filling the streets down at city hall, bustin' windows and burnin' American flags!"
"The fuckers!"
"We gotta do something! It's revolution, right here and now."
The young vet pulled on his Levi's jacket and settled his steel hat on his crew cut head. "It's only a few blocks from here. I don't know about you, but I am gonna do something about it." He led a rush toward the lift cage.
Grabowski would have shouted, No, wait, don't go! You must leave this to the authorities-if brother begins fighting brother, the forces of disorder will have won. But speech was denied him.
Because he was as furious as the rest, and fearful, for he alone had seen firsthand the consequences of this revolution everyone talked about. And in his emotion he had gripped a girder with all his might.
His fingers had sunk into the steel as if it were the soft sticky paste Americans called ice cream.
He was himself marked with the mark of the Beast.
Mark passed the rest of the day in a strange haze compounded of lust, hope, and fear. He missed the word from Kent State. While the rest of America reacted in horror or approbation, he spent the night locked in his apartment with a plateful of cookies, poring through his papers and wellthumbed books on LSD, taking out the acid tablet, turning it over and over in his fingers like a talisman. When the sun was weakly established in the sky a transient surge of resolution made him pop it in his mouth. A quick slug of flat orange soda pop washed it down before nerve could fail him again.