Wildcards

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 pi

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."

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.