"It's stupid," she said. "What?"
"I really believe in that stuff. Magick. The Great Work, Crowley calls it." She pronounced magic with a long a and Crowley with a long o like the bird. "I did the Yoga and learned the Qabalah and the Tarot and the Enochian system. I fasted and did the Bornless Ritual and studied Abramelin. But nothing ever happened."
"What were you trying for?"
"I don't know. A vision. Samadhi. I wanted to see something besides a goddamned Greyhound stop in Virginia where they try to lynch kids for growing out their hair. I wanted out of myself. I wanted what happened to you this afternoon. And it happened to you and you don't even want it."
"I read some of your books tonight," he said. In fact he'd read two dozen of them, nearly half of her collection. "I don't know what's going on, but I don't think it's magic. Not like that guy Crowleys magic. What you did to me set it off, but I think it was something already inside. me."
"You mean that spore thing, don't you? That wild card virus?" She had tensed up involuntarily, just at the mention of it.
"I can't think of anything else it could be."
"There's that Dr. Whatsisname. He could check you out. He could probably even fix you back, if that was what you wanted."
"No," he said. "You don't understand. When I read those books I could feel all those powers they talked about. Like if you were a high diver and you read about some complicated dive you'd never done, but you knew you could do it if you practiced on it. You said I didn't want this, and maybe I didn't, not right at first. But now I do." There was one picture, among the giant sex organs and impossible contortions of a Japanese pillow book: the Tantric magician, forehead swollen with the power of his retained sperm, fingers twisted in mudras of power. He had stared at it until his eyes burned. "Now I want it," he said.
"You've definitely drawn a wild card," the little man said. "An ace, I'd say."
Fortunato had nothing in particular against white people, but he couldn't stand their slang. "Could you put that in plain English?"
"Your genetics have been rewritten by the Takisian virus. Apparently it was dormant in your central nervous system, probably in the spine. The intromission apparently gave you quite a jolt, enough to activate the virus."
"So now what happens?"
"The way I see it, you've got two choices." The little man hopped up onto the examining table across from Fortunato and brushed long red hair back over his ears. He looked like he should be in a rock band or working in a record store. He didn't make a convincing doctor. "I can try to reverse the effects of the virus. No guarantees there-I've got about a thirty-percent success rate. Every once in a while people end up worse than before."
"Or?"
"Or you can learn to live with your power. You wouldn't be alone. I can put you in touch with other people in your situation. "
"Yeah? Like the 'Great and Powerful Turtle'? So I can fly around and pull people out of wrecked cars? I don't think so."
"What you did with your abilities would be up to you."
"What kind of 'abilities' are we talking about?"
"I can't say for sure. It looks like they're still coming on. The EEG shows strong telekinesis. The Kirilian chromatograph shows a very powerful astral body that I expect you can manipulate. "
"Magic, is what you're saying."
"No, not really. But it's a funny thing about the wild card. Sometimes it requires a very specific mechanism to bring it under conscious control. I wouldn't be surprised if you need this Tantric ritual to make it work for you."
Fortunato stood up and peeled a hundred from the roll in his front pocket. "For the clinic," he said.
The little man looked at the money for a long time, and then he stuffed it in his Sgt. Pepper jacket. "Thank you," he said, like it hurt him to get the words out. "Remember what I said. You can call me anytime."
Fortunato nodded and walked out to look at the freaks of Jokertown.
He'd been six years old when Jetboy exploded over Manhattan, had grown up with the fear of the virus, the memory of the ten thousand who'd died on the first day of the new world. His father had been one of them, lying in bed while his skin split open and healed itself over and over again, the whole cycle not taking more than a minute or two. Until one of the cracks opened through his heart, spewing blood all over their Harlem apartment. And even while the old man lay in his coffin, waiting his turn for a two-minute funeral and a mass grave, he kept splitting open and healing, splitting and healing.
The memory never faded, but in time it got pushed aside by newer ones. Gradually Fortunato came to believe that nothing was going to happen to him. For those the virus didn't touch, life went on the way it always had.
He realized early on that he was going to have to make his own way. From listening to his mother complain about American women he came up with the idea of the prostitute as geisha; at age fourteen he brought home a stunning Puerto Rican girl from his high school for his mother to train. That had been the beginning.
He looked up and saw that night had fallen while he'd been walking aimlessly through Jokertown. The grays and pastels had turned to neon, street clothes to paisley and leopard prints. Just ahead of him demonstrators had blocked off the street with a flatbed truck. There were drums and amps and guitars up there and a couple of heavy-duty extension cords running in through the open door of the Chaos Club.
At the moment the stage was empty except for a woman with long red curly hair and an acoustic guitar. A banner behind her read S.N.C.C. Fortunato had no idea what the letters stood for. She had the audience singing along with some folk song or other. They all went through the chorus a couple of times without the guitar, and then she took a bow and they clapped and she got down off the back of the truck.
She wasn't beautiful in the way Lenore was; her nose was a little large, her skin was not that good. She was in the radical uniform of blue jeans and work shirt that didn't do anything for her. But she had an aura of energy he could see without even wanting to.
Women were Fortunato's weakness. He was like a deer in their headlights. Even as low as he felt he couldn't help but stop and look at her, and before he knew it she was standing next to him, shaking a coffee can with a few coins in the bottom.
"Hey, man, how about a donation?"
"Not today," Fortunato said. "I don't have a lot of politics.' "You're black, Nixon's president" and you don't have any politics? Brother, have I got news for you."
"Is all this about being black?" Fortunato didn't see another black face in the crowd.
"No, man, it's about jokers. Whoa, did I strike a nerve or something?" When Fortunato didn't answer she went on anyway. "You know how long the average life expectancy of a joker in 'Nam is? Less than two months. If you take the percentage of jokers in the U.S. population and divide it by the percentage of jokers in 'Nam, you know what you get? You get about a hundred times too many jokers over there. A hundred times, man!"
"Yeah" okay" so what do you want me to do about it?"
"Make a donation. We're going to get lawyers on this and stop it. It's the FBI, man. The FBI and SCARE. It's like McCarthy all over again. They've got lists of all the jokers and they're drafting them on purpose. If they can walk and hold a gun, they're not even getting a real physical" it's off to Saigon. It's genocide" pure and simple."
"Yeah, okay." He dug out a twenty and dropped it in the can.