Summer of Love, a Time Travel

by Lisa Mason

“I said stop it, Penny Lane.”

  “That’s what I said, too!” Nance mimes surprise. “When Handy Andy came to my bedroom? I said, Don’t. Stop. Don’t. Stop. Don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop.” She rocks with that awful laughter.

  “I’ve got to go.” Susan stands, ready to bolt this time.

  “Hey, I’m shucking you. Don’t you know when you’re being shucked? Wait, wait. Please?”

  “No.” Her voice clogs in her throat. “I’ve got to be somewhere.”

  “Hey, what a reunion.” Tearful eyes, a trembling lip. “Don’t you love me anymore, Starbright?” Dramatic Nance.

  Susan has no answer.

  “Look, I’ve got a joint,” Nance says brightly. She opens her ratty handbag and shows Susan the fat, hand-rolled cigarette tucked inside. She switches instantly to a flirty look. “Come smoke a joint with me, sweetheart? For old times’ sake?”

  *

  No pot-smoking is allowed in the Blue Unicorn Café, so Susan and Nance take the joint to the ladies’ room. They crowd into a narrow stall.

  Susan stares down at the toilet bowl. The place is clean, but the porcelain is ancient, stained tobacco brown. Someone has tossed in several cigarette butts. Hot pink lipstick stains the filters. The side of the stall is covered with graffiti.

  Nance tucks the joint in her mouth, pulls it over her tongue and through her lips, dampening the paper. She lights it, drags deep, and hands it to Susan.

  Susan takes the joint. She’s never liked grass. She tokes, but exhales the smoke right away. As usual, the grass stings her eyes and her throat.

  She hands the joint back, but Nance holds up her hand and commands, “Take another hit. Hold it in your lungs, for Pete’s sake.”

  “That’s okay.” She presses the joint into Nance’s fingers. “I’m, like, allergic or something.”

  Just that hit instantly slides through her consciousness, rearranging things. Righteous shit, as Professor Zoom would say. Suddenly she feels claustrophobic and paranoid in the stall. She doesn’t want to be here. The graffiti swirls. She doesn’t want to look at Nance, this bristling gaunt stranger who, with her white crew cut and lined forehead, looks much older than her fourteen years.

  Nance shrugs and finishes the joint herself. With a sly smile, she blows smoke in Susan’s face. “You’re mad at me, huh.”

  The words resonate and tangle, spinning off implications. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Well, don’t be.”

  “I’m not mad at you, Penny Lane.”

  “You’re the only person in the whole world I don’t want mad at me, Starbright.”

  Susan wants to weep at the sorrow in her voice. Nance Payne, the pretty little dark-haired girl from Euclid Heights. The edge of mockery in her voice suggests that Susan has betrayed her, too, along with the rest of the world.

  Nance unzips her jeans. “Gotta pee. All that coffee.”

  Susan reaches for the bolt on the stall door, but Nance says, “It’s okay. You can stay.”

  She pulls down her jeans. She wears no panties. Her thighs look like those pictures you see of starving people in Asia. She sits on the seat, tinkles, and stands. She turns around deliberately, pulling up her jeans, and Susan flinches at the dark scarlet rash starting at the middle of her thighs, dappling her pelvis to her waist.

  For a moment, still reeling from that awful hit, Susan doubts her eyes. A hallucination? A trick of the light?

  Nance grins at her astonishment. “Gross, huh? Don’t worry. It’s just a dose of the clap.”

  “You’ve got to go to the Free Clinic! Get some medicine!”

  “Oh, it looks worse than it is. Anyway, they’re too wasted to notice. They usually want to do it in the dark.”

  “They? Who’s they?”

  “The tricks, sweetheart, the tricks. The guys who want to do it for money.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about survival. Don’t give me that look. I never had a gig at Mr. G’s art supply store. I had no bread when I split. I just had to get away from Handy Andy, okay? How did you get to San Francisco? Did you fly? Pan Am or United? Not me. I hitchhiked, baby, inch by inch, mile by mile.” She smiles her heartbreaking smile. “It was an experience. Are you experienced?” She hums the riff from the Jimi Hendrix tune.

  Susan knocks the bolt back, stumbles out of the stall. She runs to the sink, turns the knob for hot water, and watches rivulets swirling in the basin. The faucet is smudged with greasy fingerprints. Same for the plunger on the soap dispenser.

  A sudden recollection of the smeary bus window assaults her the way recollections do when she’s stoned. How well she recalls peering through Chi’s scope. How Chi scolded her. Oh, Chi!

  She pulls down a paper towel, wraps the towel over the plunger, and squirts a ton of soap into her palm. She scrubs her hands, turning soap and hot water around and around the way Chi uses his freaky wipes. She goes to turn off the water and stares again at the greasy knob. The smudges remind her of the rash on Nance’s thighs. She can practically see bacteria swarming all over the chrome.

  And it strikes her—in one of those Summer of Love lightning flashes—that’s what Chi has been carping about. About doorknobs and bongs passed around. His clean thing. His prophylaks and wipes. He’s talking about disease.

  And survival? Oh, yeah.

  Suddenly she gets it. She pulls down another paper towel, uses that to turn the water knob off, and takes another towel to dry her hands. The thought of touching anything in the ladies’ room with her bare hands nearly makes her ill.

  Nance bangs out of the stall. “You ever want to party with me, sweetheart, you let me know. There’s plenty of bread to be scored during the Summer of Love. I’d love to turn you on.”

  “That’s not my scene,” Susan says bluntly. Who in the Haight-Ashbury can argue with that?

  “Sure,” Nance says, splashing water on her hands. “I understand. I mean, why should you party with a no-good so-and-so? You don’t need to turn tricks, right? You’ve got plenty of money.”

  “Penny Lane, I’m down to my last dollar. Stan the Man owes me the hundred bucks he stole from me for the dragon’s blood deal.”

  “That’s really true?”

  “Yes, it’s true.”

  They stare at each other in the mirror over the sink.

  “Tell you what.” Nance bends and pulls something out of her boot. A twenty-dollar bill. “I was saving this for a bag of doo, but I’m giving it to you.”

  “No, that’s okay,” Susan says. “It’s not your responsibility.”

  “My postcard brought you here. It is my responsibility.” Nance savors the word. She cocks her head at Susan as if she’s just discovered a new way to mock her.

  “Penny Lane, no. Keep your money. Forget it.”

  Nance’s eyes darken. She juts out her chin. “Don’t tell me to forget it. Don’t tell me I’m not responsible.”

  Everything has twisted around again. Does Nance need to feel that Susan is in her debt? This strikes Susan as absolutely fair. She is in Nance’s debt. “You’re right. If it weren’t for you, Penny Lane, I wouldn’t be here at all.”

  “Plus, I named you, sweetheart.”

  “You did, you really did! You named me as surely as my parents once named me.”

  Nance is triumphant. “I’ll get that hundred bucks for you, Starbright. I’ll get it somehow, I swear.”

  Susan’s hands are reasonably clean, but now she’s got to touch the smeary door handle to get out of here. She wraps another paper towel around her hand the way Chi would wrap a prophylak.

  Nance dogs her heels. “If Ruby Maverick ever kicks you out, and you need a place to stay, you come to me.” Nance seizes her shoulders and kisses her on the mouth. “You were the one thing I could care about all those years. I love you, Starbright. I’ve always loved you.”

  “I love you, too.” And it’s true. Susan has always loved Nance like a sister. A weird feeling ris
es in her throat. As she plunges through the door, she turns back for a moment.

  Hollow cheeks, hollow eyes, spare white hair, and the skinny body of a waif. Nance is a puzzle. An optical illusion of the heart. Is she a pretty young girl gazing in a mirror or a monstrous crone with death on her face?

  Which are you, Nance? Which are you?

  14

  Piece of My Heart

  Chi stalks down Haight Street, searching for her. People are buzzing about the news of the hippie murders, but that’s nothing compared to the darkness in his heart.

  Some smart strategy, Chi. He thought he could play with a young girl’s heart. Starbright. So easy to win. So easy to lose.

  He doesn’t give a damn about the arrest of Shank, who is a loudmouthed freak, always wasted and on the make. As for the Syndicate moving in, what do these people expect? Peace and love? Anytime there’s illegal bread to be scored—lots of it—mobsters will make the scene, sooner or later.

  That’s why President Alexander decriminalized illegal drugs in 2093 and instituted the registration system, regulating the ingestion of everything from nicotine to heroin. The system took decades to become fully operational and was legally challenged during the brown ages more than once. But tax revenues in the first year financed the start-up of education and detox programs that went hand-in-hand with registration. Plenty of anti-big-government protesters objected but the good news was an effective lockdown of the borders and an end to the drug cartels freed up lots of funding to benefit American citizens and private enterprise.

  Reallocation of resources from an inefficient and often corrupt criminal justice sector to the private civil sector, from black market economies to legitimate capitalist business accountable to reasonable regulation proved so successful, Chi finds it hard to believe American policy was so shortsighted for so long. In the centuries following, comicists always supported President Alexander’s vision.

  He jogs all the way to Stanyan where a dozen people sprawled on the grass pass around a gallon jug of Papa Cribari, joints, and paper plates of greasy fried fish and chips. He turns right and jogs to Oak Street, starts a sweep down the Panhandle.

  Of course Chi has always supported President Alexander’s vision. He’s a survivor of the world’s tragedies of the past half-millennium. A student of history with twenty-twenty hindsight. One of the superior few who finally understands how to live lightly on the Earth. If humanity cocreates reality with the Cosmic Mind, then humanity must live responsibly or die.

  Yet two women of this ancient day who know nothing of these things have managed to undermine the Grandmother Principle and then—as if that isn’t enough—the theory of probability physics that’s the very foundation of t-porting. The very reason t-porting works, even if no one completely understands why. No one completely understands gravity or electromagnetism, either. But they work.

  The Grandmother Principle and Schrodinger’s Cat. Are these ugly symptoms of a moral disease corrupting the very root of t-porting?

  At first, Chi was furious with Ruby. She deliberately set out to sway him from the path he was required to follow. The policy under which he was expected to live for a mere seventy-six days. She laughed at his nutribeads, then tempted him with her food and wine. With the scent of frying onions and garlic toast, she broke his will. And then—when he was prime, heavy with food and slow with contentment—she broke his belief. The way you think about things shapes the way your reality is.

  What does that make the Archivists, the Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications, his skipparents, him? Virtual murderers of grandmothers? Theoretical Nazis conducting some terrible experiment with a gas chamber?

  But it’s absurd, emotional, irrational. Scientists down the ages have toasted these chestnuts. Whoever questioned their form, their expression? Murder your own grandmother; it’s just a thought experiment. Is the cat alive or dead; it’s just a metaphor.

  Chi is a shattered man. Starbright’s tears and Ruby’s anger make sense to him, however badly he wants to rationalize their reactions away.

  He feels dizzy, disoriented. Another bout of tachyonic lag? He feels like that song about warm San Francisco nights—which are actually quite chilly—about how walls move and minds do, too. On the night of the riot that never happened, he saw shadows ripple across the rooftop. He saw a skull bulge out of the solid wall of a house. A wall moved.

  His questions of only a week ago now take on a deeply ominous tone. Starbright has a demon double from the Other Now. Ruby does, too. And someone else in the Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love has a demon double. Someone else has the power to collapse the timeline. But who?

  Suddenly Chi feels confused about the object of the SOL Project. He stops at the corner of Cole and cups his hand around the knuckletop. “K-T,” he whispers, hungry for probabilities. The knucketop spews out alphanumerics that make no sense. Be ready, always. Watch for Prime Probabilities. Watch for demons. Of course, of course.

  Why does K-T’s readout leave him so uneasy?

  As the days have drifted into August, the Summer of Love parties on. Young runaways arrive every day. The Doors, the Young Rascals, Buffalo Springfield play the Fillmore. The Diggers have started handing out free food in the Panhandle again after a hiatus of six months. Leo Gorgon is so busy with the effort, he doesn’t come around the Mystic Eye anymore. Or maybe his confrontation with Ruby on the rooftop broke apart whatever fragile relationship they had. Chi isn’t sure, but he’s very glad Gorgon is gone.

  The hysterical gaiety of the Scene fails to enchant him. The costumes and dazed smiles are a gaudy mask concealing a sick face. The mouse magician is insane.

  Yet he witnesses the core community fighting back. Since Shob’s murder, five hundred people gather at sunset every night in front of the Psychedelic Shop. They march from Haight Street to Hippie Hill, chanting, ringing bells, clanging cymbals, tooting flutes, strumming guitars. They carry a silk-screened banner of a scarlet phoenix rising from a bonfire. They call themselves The Flame, dedicated to preserving the spirit of the Haight-Ashbury.

  Chi followed The Flame into Golden Gate Park and strode down John F. Kennedy Drive to the Portals of the Past. In the twilight, he examined the marble pillar with despair and disbelief. The glyph—that tenuous piece of evidence that’s supposed to prove he was here. There’s no glyph. No glyph, at all.

  And there’s no peace at 555 Clayton. Starbright avoids him. She goes out to the Scene on her own. And Ruby? Ruby has turned cold since the night of the riot that never happened and his revelation about Schrodinger’s Cat. Chi was always the aloof one. Now she withholds herself from him. She shoos her precious cats upstairs to sleep with her instead of allowing them to drape themselves all over him on the couch. He wakes shivering in the night without those furry, purry heating pads. He’s started feeding them, refilling their water bowls, changing their litter box, even combing them for fleas in a silent apology.

  Ruby doesn’t notice, or if she does, she doesn’t let on. He never realized how much strength he took from her smile. How much he took her ready generosity for granted. She doesn’t evict him from 555 Clayton but, in a thousand small ways, she’s evicted him from her heart. One night, very late, after viewing Discs 2 and 3 again, he found himself near tears. And all his anger at how Ruby tempted him, all his outrage at how she shattered his belief, dissolve into a desire to appease her.

  And win Starbright back. He can’t go on if he can’t win Starbright’s heart again. He misses her trusting eyes, her wise innocence, her teasing, her hair. Yes, her beautiful long hair.

  How can he prove he’s not some monster from the future with a jack in his neck? How can he prove his sincerity? Prove all of cosmicism’s sincerity? His violation of the Tenets pale next to this moral imperative: Starbright and Ruby have to believe in the future he’s transmitted across five centuries to conserve. They have to.

  How can he make things right?

  Chi jogs east down Oak Street along the south sid
e of the Panhandle. Across from the corner of Clayton, little Cyn sits on the grass under the eucalyptus trees with yet another young black dude. Chi’s never seen him before, handsome in his beret and leather jacket. To Chi’s relief, he tenderly holds Cyn’s hand and gazes, rapt, at her angelic face.

  “We saw her crossin’ the Panhandle an hour ago,” Cyn tells Chi.

  Damn! She’s making him crazy. He can’t go on like this, searching for her through the throng just when he’s finally found her. He slows his pace as he approaches the corner of Ashbury.

  And there! Crossing the block from the Panhandle, a flash of golden-brown hair in the wind. Her bobbing head, the way she’s started striding down the street with such confidence. He would know her walk anywhere.

  He sprints after her. She spots him and takes off, heading south on Ashbury, flying down the block, her boot soles flipping up behind her knees. The speed of her flight shocks him. She sprints across Page Street without looking.

  He chases after her, his breath tearing in his chest. He dodges oncoming traffic, nearly colliding with a flower-spattered van. The driver leans on his horn, flips him the bird.

  He catches up with her at the corner of Haight and Ashbury where the Tuesday afternoon crowd slows them both down. He seizes her wrist.

  “Damn it, Starbright,” he says, panting. “This isn’t a game!”

  “Yes, it is,” she says. “You’re nothing but games, Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco. I don’t know what the demons want. I don’t know what you want. Except that you’re all using me for some game.”

  “No! I don’t believe in using anyone, least of all you. Cosmicists don’t believe—”

  “Oh, you and your cosmicists! You and your awful thought experiments! You’re using me. You’re using Ruby. You tell me I’m important and everything depends on me. And then you treat me like I’m… .just some girl.”

  He takes her shoulders, she tries to twist away, but he won’t let her go. “I’m the one who’s being used in a game, Starbright. You and Ruby, you’ve taught me things I didn’t want to know. But… .” He searches for the right words. The right words are so important to her. “I’m glad I know what I’ve learned from you and Ruby. It does make a difference. We do make a difference. In your Now. And in mine.”