by Lisa Mason
Everyone drifts away from the meadow. Kids jam onto flatbed trucks, others crowd into vans or buses bound for Stinson Beach. They want to see the sunset. “Come on, Starbright,” someone calls. “You’re either on the bus or off the bus.”
Yes. You’re on the bus. You’ve been initiated. You’ve seen trees sway to the music, arabesques sprout in the dandelions. You’ve stripped the plastic face off civilization and glimpsed Truth.
But Susan is not on their bus, not this time. She waves bye-bye and watches the kids go. Night lights flash. The world is humming in a different way. The excitement of nocturnal things. Of darkness. Of the hunt.
The bands are breaking down, packing up to go.
Where will she go?
People gather up blankets and picnic baskets and wander off into the dusk. Children grumble sleepily and tug on their mothers’ sleeves. They all have some place to go to sleep.
Where will she sleep?
So many things that were a unity are separating now. With her new awareness, Susan understands this, the constant process of unity and separation. She and Granma, she and Nance, she and Mom and Daddy. So many painful separations. But where are the unities?
How she longs for a new unity.
Plus she’s really, really hungry. Where will she eat?
The city has become a citadel, gleaming with electric jewels. In the dawn before, Susan saw only empty streets, tired shopfronts, trash-strewn sidewalks. Now it’s the Scene. On a Wednesday night in June, people mill around, so many! Bongo drums quicken Susan’s pulse. Plum incense mingles with the stench of car exhaust.
The big city at night makes her so lonely.
Nance, oh Nance, where are you?
*
In May, Nance Payne ran away from her home in Euclid Heights. She didn’t have the decency to wait until she graduated from the eighth grade. Since Nance and Susan had been best friends for years before Dr. Bell moved his family to a tonier neighborhood in Shaker Heights, Nance’s mother and stepfather came looking for Susan to see what she knew about it.
Susan’s father turned Nance’s parents away at the front door. “That girl is a bad influence,” Susan heard him telling them as she crouched at the top of the second-story stairs. He was using That Tone. Susan knew he’d been listening in on her conversations with Nance. He was no good at picking up the phone in the den without making a click.
Nance’s parents said something about Susan being the bad influence. Then her father said, “Since we’ve moved, I’ve kept my daughter away from that no-good girl. Susan doesn’t know a thing about where she went.” More words, loud words. God, Daddy! Susan ran to her bedroom, embarrassed, and slammed the door.
Then, a week ago, she collected the mail from the chute at the front door. Her mother was walking in from the garage to the kitchen with grocery bags. She managed to slip the postcard down the front of her jeans. Later, locked behind her bedroom door, she studied it.
The postcard was addressed to “Starbright.” On the front, a Technicolor Golden Gate Bridge stood against a turquoise sea and sky. “Monterey popped! Meet me, meet me, meet me! And be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.” She’d signed it, “Haight Is Love, Penny Lane.”
Susan called Pan Am and counted out her secret bank account hidden in the bottom of her toy chest. But it was a fantasy, running away to San Francisco to meet Nance. Only a fantasy, however thrilling. She didn’t decide to go for real until her mother found the postcard in her underwear drawer beneath the Tampax.
They summoned her to the kitchen. It was like going to an inquisition. She began twirling a hank of hair around her finger, biting the split ends, and spitting them out.
“Get me some scissors,” her mother said. “I’m cutting her hair off right now.”
Daddy had That Look. “What the hell is this?” He shook the Golden Gate Bridge in front of her nose.
Bad news. She was grounded for the summer, her telephone privileges were taken away, and she was forbidden to ever speak with Nance again. There was serious doubt about new clothes for the ninth grade. Her mother sat beside her father on the other side of the table, grim satisfaction on her face. Two against one.
She defended herself, defended her friend. “Nance is cool. She never puts me down. She’s like my sister. She’s my best friend!”
“You have new friends at school.”
“No, I don’t. They’re all stuck up.”
Her mother started saying, “You haven’t even tried… .” when her father cut in, “You are stupid, Susan. You are wasting your time with that little tramp.”
He said more horrible things, but she didn’t hear them. All she heard was the one word her father had never applied to her before. A violation of the one thing she thought he respected her for. The foundation of the fragile trust she possesses with him—that he knows she’s smart.
Now she’s stupid?
He tore the postcard into scraps, dumped the scraps in an ashtray, and lit them with a match. He ordered Susan to sit and stir the scraps until nothing but ashes was left.
She packed her overnight bag left that night. When Mom and Daddy went out, Susan booked Pan Am flight 153 and called a cab. They would return home from dinner and the theater an hour after she lifted off. She didn’t leave a note.
It felt like the time when she and Nance climbed the old oak tree in Cheryl Long’s front yard. On a dare from Cheryl—who they thought was very stuck up—they leapt off the big branch fifteen feet up. It wasn’t hard. It wasn’t hard at all until Susan hit the ground.
*
“Starbright,” Stan the Man says. “Got a place to stay?”
If she’s stupid, she may as well be really stupid. Does he guess she’s fourteen? Who cares?
“No, Stan,” she says. “I’ve got nowhere to go.”
“Come with me, flower child.”
He takes her to a three-story Victorian with peeling paint where the Double Barrel Boogie Band and their entourage camp out in the heart of the Haight-Ashbury. The house must be about a thousand years old. A steep stairway angles up from the street to the porch and front door. A crumbling fireplace and scuffed wood floors lend some charm to a living room furnished with hand-me-down chairs and a swayback sofa. The place smells of wood rot, burnt chocolate, and sandalwood incense.
Professor Zoom cuts chunks from a brick of vegetable matter on the coffee table. Grease-lipped beer mugs, rotten apple cores, a kazoo, a brass pipe, and a can of half-eaten SpaghettiOs with the lid bent back decorate the table. The floor is thick with more of the same.
Susan recalls her mother’s precise living room. The curving peach couch with its plastic slipcover she only takes off for company. The white wall-to-wall carpet. Mom would faint dead away at the sight of this pigsty.
The stereo blasts, and people mill around. So many!
One of the caterpillar-eyed girls who stood behind the stage approaches her. Sarah turns out to be a sweet, fine-boned blond with freckles and bloodshot blue eyes beneath her false eyelashes. Sarah leads Susan to the bedroom she shares with Mickey and shows Susan her swirling psychedelic drawings. It’s sad. Sarah is not a very good artist.
Susan can draw. She’s doodled hours away at Mr. G’s art supply store. She takes Sarah’s scarlet chalk and sketches a bold eye with a star for the pupil. Her mother always says her drawings are not proportional, but Susan has to wonder. Her mother is not a very good artist, either.
Sarah says, “That’s beautiful, Starbright. What do you think of this? I want to do my thing, too.” She shows Susan more crude drawings. “Mickey wants me to draw posters for the band, but Stan says no,” she complains. Susan can see why.
Looking at Sarah and her drawings, Susan is reminded of “The Menagerie” on Star Trek. The bleak landscape of Talos IV, and Vina, the human girl deformed and crippled in a starship crash. The Talosians make her whole and beautiful, but her beauty is an illusion. She falls in love with Captain Pike, who was deformed and crippled in a crash, too,
and now is strong and handsome—but only on Talos IV. Given a choice to leave or stay in an alien world, Vina prefers her illusion.
To Susan’s luminous, numinous mind, this is another revelation: the saving grace of illusion.
“That’s beautiful, Sarah,” Susan says of the drawings. She means it, too.
*
Stan the Man carries her purse and overnight bag in one hand, clasps her hand in the other, and leads her up three stories of stairs.
Paisley blankets and old smoke layer his dark little penthouse pad. Susan’s perceptions ripple and swell. She’s breathing hard from the long climb and aware of not having bathed since yesterday morning. Of a tart sweat gathering in her armpits and filming her skin.
He lights some candles, and they sit on a mattress on the floor. She’s never seen anyone sleeping on a mattress on the floor—especially a grown man—but it looks like fun. Like a pajama party. He eases off her jacket, slipping wool off her shoulders. He pulls her mod ankle boots off her feet and kicks off his own boots.
He pulls her sweater up over her head, the lavender mohair Granma gave her for her twelfth birthday, and tosses it on the floor. She follows the trajectory unhappily. He seizes her chin, ravages her mouth. His kiss, so exciting in the open meadow, is frightening in his lair.
He tears at her blouse, at the buttons she denied Bernie MacKenna and Allen Weisberg. She fights back, clawing at him, clutching herself.
No!
He backs off at once, turns away.
Now she’s worried. Is he angry with her? He props pillows against the wall, leans against them. No, not angry. He’s sad. Melancholy. “I’m not going to hurt you, Starbright,” he says. His face is extraordinary. He shrugs off his creamy suede shirt and beckons to her, kindly and inviting.
She gladly scoots across the mattress and snuggles against him, turning her back to him, though, her arms wrapped over her chest. She’s gravitating to his heat, that’s all. His bare skin is so hot, and she’s so cold, she’s shivering.
Shadows curl and pulse across the room.
Feelings shift. Thoughts drift.
Susan is suddenly aware of his living force beside her. He starts to speak, and she turns to watch him. His eyes are vibrantly alive as he murmurs strange things. “You’re with me, Starbright, but you’re not with me. You’re not with me.” He turns away. He won’t look at her. Still his voice rumbles, a thrilling sound she can almost touch.
She is part of a huge, complex pattern, a curtain woven of space and time. She’s with him, but not with him? How did he know she was thinking about separations and unities? About a new unity she craves?
There is something she must do. Get up and leave the mountain man’s bedroom? This occurs to her, but she dismisses the thought. Anyway, she’s not quite sure how to do it. She cannot get her legs to cooperate and stand. She feels paralyzed. Is paralysis another word for destiny? She almost laughs out loud. God, Susan, she tells herself. You are becoming wise.
Mostly it’s the cold that gets to her. Bone-chill, teeth chattering. Now he turns toward her, opens his arms, and cuddles her. Gently, they slide down onto the mattress. Gently, they lie together. He pulls a blanket over them. Dust tickles her nose.
He surrounds her, a cocoon of comfort. He strokes her hair, crooning softly. Her arms loosen and unwind. It’s unnatural to wrap your arms over your chest. It’s natural to unwrap them. Her shivering eases. It’s natural to hold someone holding you. She unfolds like a flower, be sure to wear some flowers. She drowses. He kisses her forehead lightly, lightly. He kisses her eyelids. His lips slide down the bridge of her nose.
His lips arrive at her mouth. Sleepy, her lips yield to his gentle kiss. She tastes his tongue, flesh and tobacco and white Lebanese pollen. Relaxing, her hand touches his waist. Somehow his jeans have vanished. She feels his flesh, his rigid cock.
Awake, awake, awake!
He’s got her blouse halfway to her elbows before she can fully rouse herself. He undresses her with ease, overcoming the logistics of buttons, zippers, hooks and eyes. Her clothes slide off before she can struggle. Red lights literally flash in her eyes. Every nasty conversation whispered in the girls’ lavatory jabbers in her ears. Her parents’ faces, stern and pasty, rise up like ruined moons.
He suckles her nipples, the left, the right, and she moans in spite of her alarm. But he’s not finished. Now he trails his tongue lower, between her ribs, to her navel, to her tummy, to the place where Mr. G pressed his hand.
She presses her thighs together. What is he doing?
He scoots lower and kisses her left knee, her right knee, planting kisses all over her clenched thighs. He wants to kiss her legs? How silly! She starts to giggle. His tongue feels so hot and wet on her skin, in a while her legs relax.
Suddenly he pushes forward, pushing her thighs apart with his shoulders, wide, wider. He circles her thighs and rests his hands on her hipbones, kissing her tummy again. Then he presses his fingers there, spreading her open. He dips his tongue there. She falls back, gasping at the exquisite sensation. He thrusts his tongue until she bursts with another kind of explosion so powerful her legs shake. She shivers with pleasure so intense, it’s almost painful.
He lunges up, pushing into her, but she’s tight and unyielding. That doesn’t stop him. He rams into her as she yelps in pain, rams again and again, thrusting inside her. He pounds against her until she can’t stand it. Is she screaming? He slaps her face, covers her mouth with his mouth.
Then he shudders, his sweat spattering her. His heat shocks her. Is she crying?
He rolls off her, rolls away. Then rolls back, tickling her ribs, biting her ear, kissing away her tears. “That was groovy, Starbright,” he says and slaps her butt.
She’s astonished. She’s aching deep inside. Blood stains the sheets between her legs. She stares at him as he hops to his feet and finds his clothes. He grins. He laughs. He doesn’t ache deep inside?
He zips up his jeans, pulls on his boots, grabs a fresh shirt, and stalks out. She hears his bootheels clattering downstairs to the party. People laugh and shout. A glass smashes. A woman shrieks. Motorcycles rumble outside on the street. Someone turns up the stereo.
Wild and free, oh take me.
Night shines through the rain-dappled window. Stars wheel in the heavens, forming mysterious patterns. She recognizes Orion the Hunter. She glimpses a bridge made of clouds, a spiral galaxy, a girl dancing in the night sky. And most of all, the first star of the evening, rising bright and high.
“Star light,” she sings softly, “star bright. First star I see tonight. Wish I may, wish I might. Have the wish I wish. Tonight.”
What does she wish for?
“I want to be happy,” Susan whispers. “Happy for the first time in my life.”
Then she dresses and goes downstairs to the party, where she boogies until four in the morning.
2
Do You Believe in Magic?
They never prepare you for the shock of the Event.
Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco steps through the Portals of the Past. After the subjective second it takes to cross over, he proceeds, as required by the Summer of Love Project, to check for his points of reference:
The dome;
the carving;
his time of arrival.
But wait, wait. He tries to stand very still as perceptions speed past him in a rush of images, scents, and sounds. Not dizzy like some, nor nauseated, nor faint. He just feels… .empty. They say you don’t feel the Event, but they’re wrong. He feels it. The pulse of his essence, the sensation of his physical body translating into pure energy and then transmitting across time faster than the speed of light. Ah!
Chi is shaken to his soul. In the flicker of translation-transmission, everything seems dead. A weight around his neck so vast, he quells the urge to weep.
They say reality is really only One Day. The same everywhere, everywhen.
Wrong, again. For a moment, he wonders if he really is dead.<
br />
But he’s not dead, he’s alive, and he’s got work to do. The Summer of Love Project, Chi. Get moving! He starts again slowly, breathing deeply and checking for his points of reference.
First, the dome. The cosmicist dome that’s enclosed New Golden Gate Preserve for nearly two centuries. Check. The dome is gone. Only the darkening twilight hovers above him. The sight of a night sky unshielded by PermaPlast sends a jolt of terror up his spine. Instinctively, he flings his hands over his face. Now he’s dizzy.
Damn it, Chi! This sky is thick and whole, damp with clouds, and untouched by radiation like the sky ought to be.
Like it used to be.
Like it is Now.
Calm down. Breathe slowly.
Next. The carving.
He touches the cool, smooth marble of the Portals of the Past. And with his touch on that ancient stone comes the second shock:
The carving near the bottom of Portal’s left pillar: It’s gone.
He reviews the drill one more time: the dome shouldn’t be there, but the carving should.
The carving, an indecipherable set of glyphs carved on the pillar centuries ago, was discovered only after a massive research effort by the Archivists under the leadership of Chi’s skipfather. The carving proved to be the final piece of the puzzle—or so the Archivists said.
When the evidence supported an Open Time Loop during the Summer of Love, the directors of the Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications threw billions of dollars at the project. Never mind that Chi’s skipfather was himself a LISA tech and a project director. Or that Chi’s skipmother owned seventy-one percent of the patent on transmission. If anything, their eminent positions made transmitting their own skipson to a Hot Dim Spot in the middle of the Crisis all the more compelling.
As Chi had stood in the Portals of the Past, waiting to translate-transmit, he’d stooped and pressed his fingers on that cool, smooth marble, learning the shape of the carving by touch, as well as by sight:
What did it mean? Who could say?
Chi knew the theories. The Eye of Horus was a prehistoric charm signifying wisdom, prescience. The heart symbol was even older, depicting not the organ of circulation but the buttocks of a beloved as a lover would see them. And the old-fashioned key? The key was an invention of the first millennium and a powerful symbol. A key unlocked secrets, secured ownership and possession. There were associations with music, translations, maps, codes, and ciphers.