Summer of Love, a Time Travel

by Lisa Mason

  Ruby is tossing out clothes from her closet in her bedroom. A silky shirt with a high collar, a cotton sarong in purple and red, a long blue velvet dress. “Don’t wear these much anymore, either,” she says to Starbright. “Take your pick.” Two cats bat at the fringe of an embroidered shawl. Three other cats lounge on Ruby’s bed, gold and blue eyes blinking lazily.

  “Where did you go?” Chi demands.

  “Out. This was always too short on me.” Ruby holds up a violet suede skirt. “Should fit you just fine.”

  “You shouldn’t go out without telling me, Starbright,” he says.

  “Get a load of him,” Ruby says.

  Half-buttoned into a paisley dress, Starbright turns and glares. “I can go anywhere I want to without telling you, Chi.”

  He stares.

  No white lipstick. No white stuff around her eyes. No blue eyeliner. Instead, her cheeks are flushed, her lips stained plum. Her eyes are two dark ovals smudged with kohl. Her hair is brushed out in long, tawny curls. The dress nips her waist, the long skirt sweeps over her hips. She looks as if she’s shed a layer of flesh.

  “What have you done to yourself?” he says, turning the probabilities around in his head.

  She shrugs and finishes buttoning the dress.

  “What do you think, Chi?” Ruby says.

  He hesitates. At school, he’d come back with a quip. The narcissim of these wasteful people. Obsessed with the latest fashion while their world goes down a toxic sewer. White lips, plum lips, straight hair, curly hair—who gives a damn? But his retort is stifled by a sudden image of Bella Venus, her dazzling body paint.

  “Starbright has become beautiful,” Ruby laughs. “Right, am I right?”

  There is a new camaraderie between these females that makes his uneasy. Not because women are close, which is common among Bella Venus and her friends. No, because they’re excluding him from something, and he cannot begin to guess what.

  “Do you have a new name, too?” he asks.

  “I’m Starbright,” she says with a toss of her head.

  “You want to go out with us, man from Mars?” Ruby says. “We’re going to go have some fun.”

  Chi starts to smile. Is it just his hope or has Starbright—in a morning—become a closer match to the girl in the CBS News holoid? Is it possible? After all, he’s in a Hot Dim Spot.

  “What’s the occasion?” he asks.

  Ruby says,”Today is Goddess Day. Celebrate!”

  *

  There is no dissuading Ruby, so they all step out. At least Ruby invited him. Otherwise, he’d have to figure out how to follow them. Ruby makes him wear a wide–brimmed gaucho hat. An irony, that, since mass-produced beef has been illegal for over a century.

  They catch the 24 Divisadero bus northbound to Geary Boulevard and stroll four blocks to a handsome old auditorium called the Fillmore. A bluesman, Bo Diddley, whom Ruby wants to see, and a psychedelic band, Quicksilver Messenger Service, whom Starbright wants to see, are playing a double bill. Chi has never heard of either of them. Two obscure notes lost to the Archives.

  They take a place at the back of a colorful queue.

  A swarthy little short-haired man bangs out of a side door. In a white button-down shirt, he looks like someone’s square uncle. He carries a broom and begins sweeping the sidewalk. He sweeps from the start of the queue to the end, sending litter and dust flying into the gutter. He glances up from time to time, forming silent words. If Chi had to guess, the square uncle is counting how many people there are. No one pays him any attention. He’s just the janitor.

  “That’s Bill Graham,” Ruby whispers to Starbright.

  “Grass, hash, acid, speed?” a guy in a yellow poncho murmurs.

  Suddenly two men push past Chi, shove Ruby out of the way, and seize Starbright’s elbows. A squat man in a stovepipe hat and a tough, skinny guy in purple tie-dye, his eyes darting like a reptile watching for insects.

  “This is the chick,” the Lizard says.

  “Hey!” Starbright cries.

  Chi tries to elbow around them, but Stovepipe’s got shoulders like a football player.

  “You owe us big-time, you stupid chick,” Stovepipe says.

  “Buzz off, scuzz,” Ruby says, but her eyes are wide, her lips pale.

  “You shut up,” the Lizard says.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Starbright cries.

  “Dealin’ rat poison as dragon’s blood,” Stovepipe says. “Seven grand for rat poison. That’s what I’m talkin’ about.”

  “You’re making a mistake,” Chi says, his hand on his maser. “This girl isn’t a dealer.”

  “It’s the Man!” Ruby cries.

  A black-and-white police car, top light spinning, speeds up to the curb.

  Stovepipe and the Lizard vanish in the crowd.

  A rusty van with a burned-out tail light slows in front of the police car, pulls over to the curb. The cop climbs wearily out of his car. The van’s driver hops out, too, a stringbean in a fringed jacket and feathered hat who jogs over to meet the cop, dropping baggies in the gutter. “Afternoon, officer,” he says with a dazzling smile. “What’s the hassle?”

  “Could we come back another time?” Starbright says. Her face is drained of color. Her teeth are chattering.

  “You bet,” Ruby says. “Another time.”

  Chi takes Starbright’s hand. Her fingers are freezing. He closes his hand around hers. He doesn’t even use a prophylak.

  *

  The Haight is packed when they disembark from the Divisadero bus. Chi has never seen the street this crazy. Tourists gawk, point cameras, lean on their car horns. Crew-cut military guys catcall “I love you” and leer at Hell’s Angels, who show them what a leer really looks like. Black-leather hoodies lounge on their choppers. Teenyboppers sit in lotus positions three deep on the sidewalk. The mouse magician promenades, clanging his bell.

  Locals run up to the cars with bits of broken mirror and turn the mirrors toward the tourists so they’re looking at their own reflections. Other locals stroll in front of cars with Brownie cameras, snapping photos of the occupants. Still others leap on car bumpers, rocking the cars from side to side, or jump onto car hoods and sprint across them.

  Chi walks between Ruby and Starbright, his arms around them. He doesn’t like this. The mood borders on hysteria. “We should get out of here.”

  But the two of them are enjoying the show.

  Ruby leans across him and says to the girl, “Well, you did it, kid, but I’m sorry you had to go through all that.”

  “What do you mean, Ruby?” Chi says, alarmed. “What did Starbright go through?”

  Starbright only nods and glances around. “Hey, maybe I’ll see Penny Lane.”

  Half a block up, a pail is thrust from a second-story window. Red paint splatters down. The crowd roars. People start to push and shove.

  Chi stands with Starbright and Ruby on the curb in front of the Psychedelic Shop, waiting for the light to change. A Day-Glo van and two battered junkers stop dead in the middle of the intersection. Westbound, eastbound, north and south, traffic is gridlocked. Car horns blare. People cheer and boo.

  A police car pulls onto the sidewalk, scattering people.

  “The cops is comin’!” someone yells.

  “Get off the street,” a police officer says through his loudspeaker. “Get off the street. Now. Move onto the sidewalk. Now.”

  Suddenly sirens drown out every sound. Twenty black-and-white patrol cars materialize from every direction, skidding up onto the sidewalks, going the wrong way down alleys and lanes, jostling around the gridlock. Four paddy wagons follow. Police in full riot gear leap out. There must be fifty of them, swinging billy clubs.

  A dog is barking.

  Someone throws a bottle. The glass smashes on the concrete, spraying shards on a woman in a fringed dress. She screams.

  “Get off the street. Now.”

  Chi drags Ruby and Starbright back from the cu
rb. They wrestle against the crowd, until their backs press against the Psychedelic Shop.

  A girl in a long, black cape steps out of the crowd. She nudges next to Ruby, her face and her hair hidden by a peaked hood.

  Whistles shriek. People scream. A cop smashes a man on the side of his head. The man falls to his knees, blood staining his yellow hair.

  “Police brutality!” someone yells. “Get the cops! Get the cops!”

  The dog barks frantically.

  A woman screams, “Revolution! Revolution!”

  Three policemen charge through the wall of people toward Chi, Ruby, and Starbright, swinging their clubs.

  A young man flees before the police, cringing and stumbling. The barking dog leaps beside him. The young man’s got a leash wrapped around his hand. He stumbles again, and the leash tangles around his ankles. The dog, a black-and-white-sheepdog, snarls as a policeman batters the young man’s head and shoulders with his club.

  Now a tall woman in rags steps out of the crowd. A ‘fro of writhing gray curls crowns her head. A gray veil hangs over her face. The gray beggar presses herself against the shopfront next to Starbright.

  Chi watches, eyes wide. What the hell is happening?

  A cop seizes the young man’s head in an armlock, while another smashes his billy club across his kidneys. The young man drops the leash, and his dog leaps at the second cop, protecting his master. A third cop raises his arms straight up and slams his billy club on the dog’s head.

  Chi hears a crack.

  The dog shrieks.

  Starbright screams.

  The policeman slams the club again. The dog drops to the sidewalk. The policeman bashes the club across the dog’s face again and again, smashing the animal’s eyes and skull. Blood pours through the dog’s fur.

  A woman screams, “Revolution! Revolution! Kill the cops! Kill the cops!”

  The dog-killer turns. He sprints after the screaming woman, swinging his club. She runs, but the crowd blocks her. He aims for her face. “Kill the cops!” she screams. Crack. The club connects with her jaw and teeth. The dog-killer swings again. Crack. Blood streams from her mouth. She sobs. The dog-killer jerks her arms behind her back and hustles her into a paddy wagon.

  The gray beggar turns toward Starbright. All Chi can see through the veil is two burning eyes. But no, not burning. How can darkness burn? A darkness like the light is being sucked into a vacuum. Darkness throbbing with a terrible force.

  Starbright clutches his arm, tears streaming. Suddenly she sees the girl in the black cape standing next to Ruby.

  “It’s the girl with my face!” she screams.

  The black hood parts for an instant, and Chi glimpses her. Starbright? The same girl—but not the same girl. Fragments of the girl’s face shift in dizzying grimaces. The eyes burn like lit coals.

  The gray beggar groans, a sound like a rusty door hinge. With great effort, she extends her swaddled arm before Chi and freezing cold bludgeons his chest. The girl in the black cape brandishes a staff that writhes like a living thing. The girl lifts the staff as if it weighs a thousand tons and struggles to swing it toward Starbright.

  For a moment, Chi can’t move. The sheer force of the demons’ antimatter feels as if he’s falling from a great height.

  Ah, but the antimatter is struggling, too!

  The three cops feverishly push the crowd back against the Psychedelic Shop. The dog-killer is flushed and glittery-eyed. He charges toward the three of them.

  Chi yanks out his maser. He flicks to blue, runs the beam in front of the gray beggar. A faint blue line like a crack in glass glows for an instant. The beggar falls back. Chi flicks to green, bears the beam down. The tip of the girl’s staff bows to the ground.

  He shouldn’t, but he flicks to yellow and aims at the dog-killer’s chest. The dog-killer staggers back, as through tackled by an invisible halfback. The chest of his uniform bursts into shreds. He roars with pain and rage.

  The crowd screams, “Revolution! Revolution! Kill the cops!”

  The dog-killer lurches to his feet. Two police charge at everyone in front of the Psychedelic Shop.

  “Go, go, go!” Chi lunges, pulling Starbright and Ruby with him. He punches people out of their way, loses his gaucho hat. They shove through the crowd, heading to Clayton Street.

  Suddenly, in front of them, the girl in the black cape steps out of a telephone pole. Fingers trailing, she extracts herself from the dark wood. Black sparks crackle all around her.

  The gray beggar kneels beside a fire hydrant. She tugs at her rags, pulling them from the hydrant’s metal rim. She turns her veiled face to and fro like a radar dish seeking out a target. Seeking out them.

  “Come on, come on, come on!” Chi shouts.

  They run.

  Blood stains Chi’s boot.

  9

  Strawberry Fields Forever

  Ruby stops dead in her tracks, seizing Chi by the elbow. He whirls back, dragging Starbright with him.

  “What are you doing?” she shouts. “Where are you going?”

  “Back to the house,” he says, panting. He struggles with her, pulling her down the sidewalk. “We’ve got to get inside!”

  She brakes her heels. “And let those women, those… .ghouls, see us? Find out where we live?”

  “They won’t see us. They don’t need to see us.”

  “You’re crazy!”

  “It doesn’t matter, Ruby!”

  “You bet your ass it matters! We’ve got to scatter, throw them off our tracks!”

  “Listen to me!” The young dude is full of fire, flushed scarlet. She’s never seen him so wound up, but somehow he isn’t panicked like she is. “The Prime Probability has collapsed.” He glances all around him, at her, then long and hard at the kid. “The timeline is preserved. Spacetime, conserved. But we need to get off the street. If we’re not in any more danger, reality will remain stable. The demons can’t come through from the Other Now until there’s a hole.”

  This makes no sense whatsoever. Still, she sees a demented logic to his words. “Are you sure?”

  Then he does something so bizarre, he freaks her out almost as much as the ghouls. What did he call them? The demons. He untangles his hand from Starbright’s, raises his right fist to his lips, and whispers, “Katie.” For a horrifying moment, she thinks he’s speaking into a microphone in his ring, contacting some confederate hidden nearby. Like he’s a spy, a spy from the Man, come to infiltrate the hip community just like she feared.

  Then he raises his left hand, cupping his palm behind the ring. A little field of lavender light winks on. It isn’t a surface, like looking at a television screen, but an object the size and shape of a pulp magazine made entirely of light. The little field floats in midair!

  He whispers, “Katie, calc oh seven, oh nine, sixty-seven,” and tiny red numbers and letters dance in the light. He catches her astonished look and pivots a quarter-turn. Though the field of light seemed bigger than his hand, now she can’t see it at all.

  A beat, and he says, “I’m sure.”

  Ruby hadn’t believed Chi’s street-corner lunacy about being from the future, but she forgave him his wild imagination. She believes in imagination, the wilder, the better. And now? Now she believes he’s from somewhere, and it isn’t a hop and a skip down the road from Marin City.

  “The demons are gone,” he says. “Look around for yourself.”

  She looks around, and he’s right. Or at least they no longer crouch at the corner of Clayton and Haight, those weird sisters, those hags of doom, spewing mortal terror in their path. For that’s what she felt, standing next to the girl in the black cape: arctic air and an intimation she was about to die. They’ve vanished, sure as a C-note on a bad bet.

  “You in one piece, kid?’ she asks.

  Starbright nods. Her face is streaked with tears, but she’s no longer weeping. She is taut with anger and urgency. Any trace of the darling daughter from the burbs is gone for good. “They att
acked us,” she says in a strangled voice. “They killed an innocent living being.”

  They. She doesn’t mean the demons.

  “We’ve got to get inside,” Chi insists. “Out of danger.”

  Ruby is shaking. She never shook before, not one time. Not when the fuzz stuck a flashlight in her face in the doorway of her North Beach pad. Not when Roi went on the yen. Not even when she witnessed Doc Clyde and his rose gardening fourteen years ago.

  Blood on Haight Street, right in front of her eyes. How can anyone hold onto a New Explanation when the street is choked with hate and garbage and blood? A dog beaten to death while he’s out for a walk with his master in his own neighborhood. It’s too much.

  Before she can figure out what to do, Leo Gorgon darts out of the alley beside 555 Clayton. He takes her by her shoulders. Dark circles shadow his eyes. “Ruby. You were seen in front of the Psych Shop, man. The pigs.” He catches his breath, exchanging a poisonous look with Chi. “The pigs are lookin’ for you.”

  “We didn’t do anything!” Starbright says.

  “They’re lookin’ for witnesses,” Gorgon says. “They’ll take you downtown, detain you all night. Try to get a statement on record that’ll disqualify you later in court. A cover-their-ass gig. You want to go to the cop shop, Starbright? How about you, Beelzebub?”

  “She can’t go,” Chi says. “I would if I could, but I can’t, either.”

  “Got somethin’ to hide?” Gorgon says.

  “Don’t we all,” Chi spits back.

  “I’ll go,” Ruby says, though dread clenches her chest, making it hard to breathe. She’s no hero. She’s done everything in her power to avoid run-ins with the police, steered clear of politics and radical entanglements, not to mention illegal substances. But she won’t stand for an atrocity like this, coming down at her own doorstep. “I’ll call my lawyer at HALO, and I’ll go.”

  “Don’t do it, Ruby,” Gorgon says. “The cops don’t want a brutality rap. It’s bad press. They mean business.” He hustles all three of them to the stoop of the Mystic Eye. “Anyway, why should you? We’ve had enough of this harassment. The Chief of Police has been on the people’s ass for goin’ on two years. Right?”