The girder clipped an upright and rang like a cracked bell. Grabowski shook himself, gestured the crane man to stop. At the same time, he strained, heard the announcer say the name Tom Douglas.
It was a name he would remember.
Mark hoped it was a courtship. Two days later Sunflower caught him coming out of a meeting with his sponsor and took him for a walk in the park. She let him tag along to the night spots and late-night rap sessions, to protest rallies in People's Park, to concerts. Always as her friend, her protege, the childhood friend she had made it her personal crusade to redeem from straightness. But not, unfortunately, in the exalted role of her Old Man.
He found reason to hope, however. He never saw the studly Philip again. In fact, he never saw one of Sunflower's boyfriends more than once. They were all intense, passionate, brilliant (and at pains to tell you so). Committed. And muscular; that much of Kimberly's taste hadn't changed. That gave Mark many choice moments of despair, but deep inside his skinny bosom he nursed the notion that someday she would feel the need of a rock of stability, and would come to him as a seabird to land.
But still, he never, never made it across the gap that yawned between him and the world he yearned for-the world Sunflower inhabited and personified.
He survived that winter on hope and the chocolate-chip-oatmeal cookies his mother sent.
And music. He came from a household where they sang along with Mitch, and Lawrence Welk occupied the same pinnacle as J. F K. Rock 'n' roll was never permitted to sully the air of his parents' house. He himself had been as oblivious to it as to everything outside of his lab and his private fantasies. He hadn't been aware of the Beatles' invasion, Mick Jagger's arrest for lycanthropy at the Isle of Wight concert, of the Summer of Love and the acid-rock explosion.
Now it all came rushing in on him. The Stones. The Beatles. The Airplane. The Grateful Dead. Spirit and Cream and the Animals, and the Holy Trinity: Janis, Jimi, and Thomas Marion Douglas.
Tom Douglas most of all. His music brooded like an ancient ruin, dark, foreboding, hooded. Though his real affinity was to the gentler Mamas amp; Papas sound of an era already history, Mark was drawn to the Douglas touch-dark humor, darker twists-even as the Nietzschean fury implicit in the music repelled him. Perhaps it was that Douglas was everything Mark Meadows wasn't. Famous and vibrant and courageous and With It and irresistible to women. And an ace.
Aces and the Movement: in many ways they blasted into the mainstream of public consciousness flying formation like the heavy-metal warbirds Mark's father had led into battle over North Vietnam. There were more rock 'n' roll aces than among any other segment of the population. Their powers tended not to be subtle. Some had the ability to project dazzling displays of lights, others made extravagant music without the need of instruments. Most, though, played mind games with the audience by means of illusion or straight emotional manipulation. Tom Douglas-the Lizard King-was the head-trip master of them all.
Spring arrived. Mark's faculty adviser pressured him for results. Mark began to despair, hating himself for his lack of resolution, or whatever defect of manhood kept him from precipitating himself into the drug scene, unable to continue his research until he did. He felt like the fly preserved in a Lucite ice cube his parents had inexplicably possessed when he was a child.
April saw him withdraw from the world into microcosm, to the paper reality inside his peeling walls. He had all Destinys records, but he couldn't play them now, or the Dead, or the Stones, or martyred Jimi. They were a taunt, a challenge he could not meet.
He ate his chocolate cookies and drank his soda pop and emerged from his room only to indulge a nostalgic childhood vice: love of comic books. Not only the old classics, fables of Superman and Batman from the days of innocence before humanity drew the wild card, but also their modern successors, which featured the fictionalized exploits of real aces, like the penny dreadfuls of the Old West. He devoured them with addict's fervor. They fulfilled by proxy the longing that had begun to eat him up from inside.
Not for metahuman powers; nothing so exotic. Not his craving for acceptance into the mysterious world of Counterculture, nor the desire for the lithe braless body of the former Kimberly Ann Cordayne that kept him awake night after sweaty night. What Mark Meadows desired more than anything in the world was effective personality. The ability to do, to achieve, to make a mark; good or bad, it scarcely mattered.
An evening toward April's end, Mark's retreat was shattered by a knock on his apartment door. He just lay there on his thin mattress on sheets unchanged in living memory, burying his long nose farther in the pages of Cosh Comics' Turtle number 92. His first reaction was fear, then anger at the intrusion. The world, he'd decided, was too much for him; he'd resolved to let it alone. Why couldn't it do as much for him?
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."