Summer of Love, a Time Travel

by Lisa Mason

  “But,” he sputters, blushing, “Susan and me, we’re related.”

  “You said so yourself. So many generations. Five hundred years. I think you’ll be just fine. I think your skipmother would agree. Oh, hey.” Ruby’s face tightens with alarm. “Under the Generation-Skipping Law, are you allowed to father a child?”

  “Yeah, I’m a skipchild. I’ve got a deferment.”

  “A deferment, uh-huh.” Ruby darts into the kitchen and returns with Susan’s favorite sherry. She thrusts the bottle and two cordial glasses in his hands. “Then go defer your fine ass up those stairs.”

  “But this is impossible!”

  “I know your Tenets say you can’t kill your grandmother. But do any of your damn Tenets say you can’t make love to your great-great-great-great-grandmother? Huh, do they? Think about it.”

  Chi thinks about it. The more he thinks about it, the more Ruby smiles. As he thinks some more about it, Ruby starts to laugh. Soon he’s smiling, too, and laughing and shaking his head.

  “Dig it, you love each other,” Ruby says. “I call that the Grandmother Principle, 1967-style. Now get upstairs ‘cause she’s waiting for you.”

  Gossip, Innuendo & All The News That Fits

  At midnight September 4, tourist season officially ended and, for most of the people concerned, so did the Summer of Love.

  It all goes to prove what every veteran Haightian knew all along. Most of the summer lovers were out for their vacation thrill. They were tourists, plastic hippies, middle-and upper-middle class straighties who came down to play the game.

  Now the game is over and most of the kiddies will return to school.

  But one thing happened that no one can dispute. In one way or another, all these people were turned on. And while they may never see San Francisco again, it’s a sure bet that somewhere in the world they’ll someday be wearing flowers in their hair.

  “Haightians Thrill to Spacious Streets”

  Berkeley Barb, Vol. 5. Issue 109 (Sept. 15-21, 1967)

  Her hair is everywhere.

  Spilling from her scalp. On her eyebrows and eyelashes. In her armpits, a sprinkling on her forearms and calves. The down between her thighs.

  Chi hasn’t seen a nude female in months. He’s never seen a nude female other than girls who took the radiation vaccine and became nuder than nude.

  That hair. All that hair.

  If she notices his distress, she’s not dismayed. She giggles, hiding her face beneath the sheet, regaining her composure, then peeking out at him again, bursting into another peal of laughter.

  “What?” he demands.

  “Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear. Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair.”

  He follows her gaze. He’s never felt ashamed of his perfect nude body before. He turns beet-red all over.

  “They didn’t give you any hair.” She points, just in case he doesn’t get it. “Down there.”

  He can feel the blood pounding in his face and neck, staining his chest. “Well, they could have. It would just have been implants, like my scalp and brows and eyelashes.”

  “Then why didn’t they? Why didn’t they give you hair there?”

  He waves his hands in exasperation. “I don’t know! I wasn’t supposed to get naked in front of anyone. Not like this.”

  “You mean the LISA techs transmitted you five hundred years to the Summer of Love and you weren’t supposed to ball anyone?”

  “Well of course not! That would’ve been a violation of Tenet… . Oh, never mind.”

  “Well, now’s your big, big chance,” she teases. “Only you can’t use a prophylak, right?”

  He peers at her. She lies with a shoulder, a breast, a thigh beneath the sheets. The rest of her, golden in the candlelight.

  Despite the urgency of his duty that seems inescapable, he wonders if he can do it. He sits on the edge of the mattress, turning away from her.

  She’s giggling again, her big brown eyes glancing up at him beneath the fringes of her lashes. “You mean you haven’t gotten laid in over two months?” she says in mock horror.

  He feels her fingers tracing up his spine. “I haven’t exactly seen you getting it on.”

  “Not lately, but I got more than you-ooh,” she says in a singsong.

  She kneels behind him, pressing her breasts against his shoulderblades. The fur between her legs tickles his spine. She threads her arms around his neck, leans her cheek against his ear, and swings her long, tawny hair across his chest.

  “Oh, come on. I’m not a virgin, you know,” she whispers. “I love you, Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco.”

  Now he turns to her at once. At once. “And I love you. I will love you forever, my Starbright.”

  she is a delicious odor unfouled by smoke

  she is a shell in clear water

  she is a turtle with omens on her back

  she is the twin-tailed siren singing to the sailor

  she is joy, a mouth and a tongue

  she is sweet and salty

  she is a cat prowling free in the twilight

  she is the peach of a thousand years unspoiled by poison

  she is the pearl in the oyster’s cleft

  she is as bright as the first star of the evening

  THEY TOUCH!

  she closes a loop across space and time

  that night. . sometimes. . he sees their bodies glow

  21

  If You’re Going to San Francisco

  Ruby checks the time. Sweet Isis, it’s after ten-thirty. If she recalls Chi’s wild story correctly, he’s got to get to the tachyonic shuttle in Golden Gate Park before midnight. She clatters up the stairs to the third floor. Everything is sweetly silent inside the sitting room. She hesitates, then knocks on the door.

  “Come in,” they call in unison.

  They’ve folded up the blankets and sheets and leaned the mattress against the wall. They’ve rearranged the coffee table and chairs and rolled back the rug. Susan zips up her overnight bag. Chi zips up his jeans. They’re just two kids from the burbs, getting ready to go back to school. Right. Susan is decked out in gypsy finery that will be envy of her high school pals in Shaker Heights.

  “Well?” Ruby stands, tapping her toe like a babysitter asking if her charges have brushed their teeth.

  Chi whips out the oblong stone and presses it against Susan’s chest.

  “The double blip!” he says triumphantly. “The scanner shows the double blip!”

  “Uh-huh, the double blip,” Ruby says.

  “I’m pregnant,” Susan says. And she glows.

  “Congratulations,” Ruby says. “We better get going.”

  “No, I’m not stepping back through the shuttle, Ruby,” Chi says, his face set with determination. He takes Susan in his arms. “I’m staying in this Now. I’m staying with you, my love. I can’t leave you and our child.”

  “Oh, Chi, you can’t,” Susan says. “You’d be trapped in a CTL. I can’t let you do that.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “You have to care. You told us CTLs pollute the timeline.”

  “She’s right, Chi,” Ruby says. “You could cause another Hot Dim Spot. Maybe another Crisis.”

  He sighs raggedly. “But what about you, my love?”

  “I’ll survive. You showed me. And you know what? Every year for the rest of my life, when this day comes around again, I’ll think of you.”

  “You will?” he says, wistful.

  “Yes,” she says. “I’ll think—that bastard.”

  She peals with laughter. Ruby starts to cackle. Chi is stony-faced, then he grins and chuckles, too.

  And Ruby knows it’s going to be all right. It’s got to be.

  *

  The Portals of the Past look ghostly at this hour. Antebellum pillars set in a classic portico, the marble is luminous beneath the streetlights. Not a framework for some stupendous contraption from the distant future. More like a doorway into antiquity. Or into other worlds?

  Ruby isn�
�t sure. The Portals are hauntingly beautiful.

  They all climb out of the Mercedes. Chi strides around Lloyd Lake to the Portals. Susan hurries after him.

  Ruby glances at her wristwatch, lagging behind. A quarter to midnight. Something inside her is unwilling to witness Chi’s unmasking before Susan’s trusting eyes. For, of course, there is nothing inside the Portals of the Past. They look exactly as they always do. An artifact from the past.

  Chi stands, gazing at the Portals. Susan runs to him and hugs him, clinging to him.

  “And I said I’d never lose you again,” he says.

  “We’ll always have the Summer of Love.”

  Then she cries in triumph, holds up his maser, and dashes off with it. The kid’s knickknacked the maser from his pocket!

  “Susan!” Chi shouts. “Damn it, Susan.”

  She runs to the Portals, drops to a crouch on the steps. The kid flicks the maser on orange and, with swift sure movements, she aims the beam at the base of the left pillar.

  Alarmed, Ruby hurries after Chi. She sees the shaft of orange light twirling in the darkness. She and Chi stumble up at the same time. He’s breathing heavily, as if someone has punched him in the gut.

  “Chi?” Ruby says.

  He waves her away.

  Susan jumps up and shows them the graffiti she’s carved on the pillar:

  “What does it mean?” Ruby says.

  “It means I,” Susan traces the eye, “love,” she traces the heart, “Chiron,” she traces the key. “I love Chi.” She tucks the maser in his jacket pocket. “You like it?”

  Chi kisses her, his face wet with tears.

  Then he dashes up the stairs and steps through the Portals of the Past. For a second—a split second—Ruby glimpses glowing people, and blinking blue and green lights, and a tall, slim woman stretching out her arms to embrace him. Her bald head is as shiny as an ivory billiard ball.

  Chi disappears. It all disappears.

  Susan whispers, “Oh, wow.”

  Ruby whispers, “You little shit.”

  Dig it: the Haight-Ashbury was mobbed with Navajo chiefs, Merlin’s magicians, Egyptian pharaohs, guys with four eyes, men from Mars. And time travelers. These were strange and wondrous days, with plenty of time travelers. The Summer of Love was psychedelicized and science-fictionalized, but I did not believe you, Ruby thinks. Not in my heart of hearts, not in the back of my mind, not even after all your gadgets and light shows and the most frightful hallucinations I ever saw in my life. I did not totally believe you, Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco.

  Do now.

  Grandmother Says: T’ai (Peace)

  The Image: Heaven and Earth unite. Small things fade, and great things develop. Peace and blessings upon all living things.

  The Oracle: To unite in deep harmony brings a time of universal flowering and prosperity.

  When the strong lift up the weak, and the powerful smile upon the meek, the universe rejoices in peace. The infinite is revealed in the points of the compass, eternity in the cycle of the seasons.

  Hexagram 11, The I Ching or Book of Changes

  What I missed in your account was input from the parents who lived through that time, barely able to comprehend the social changes that were disrupting their safe middle-class lives, trying to stay in control and let go at the same time, fighting the terror of not knowing what was going on.

  Some of us made it. We remained friends with our kids and adopted some of the better changes for our own. Some of us didn’t. We lost our kids to beads, drugs, and squalor. Some of them left and never came back. Some left and came back burned out and weird. Some parents lost each other as well as their kids. Whom do you blame for failures and disappointments too painful to bear?

  When the Summer of Love was over, we had new ways of feeling, dressing, speaking, eating, praying, dancing, marrying (or not), childbearing, child raising, growing old, even dying. All the old rules were irrelevant, the new ones uncertain.

  It was the Summer of Love for some, the Summer of Discontent for others.

  “Letters,” Image Magazine

  San Francisco Examiner (Aug. 23, 1987)

  Ruby drives Susan to San Francisco Airport. They drive in silence as thick and heavy as the incoming fog. The kid cries a little. Ruby tunes the radio to KMPX-FM. “If You’re Going to San Francisco” warbles on. She slaps the radio off.

  They park, unload Susan’s overnight bag from the back seat, and drift into the airport. Oh, man. Bright fluorescent lights, garish carpets, ugly plastic stuff. A pair of Krishna devotees with shaved-bald heads and orange robes are panhandling the tourists.

  The squares are staring at Ruby and Susan with cold, uncomprehending eyes. Ruby knows how to handle this scene, but the kid is cringing, losing her nerve. She hasn’t been in society this polite in quite a while. And now she’s going to see her parents for the first time in months? This will not do.

  “Stop,” Ruby commands.

  They duck out of the stream of pedestrian traffic. Ruby takes out the vial of East Indian musk she always carries, dabs two drops under each of Susan’s ears, two drops under her own. The kid starts to giggle. That’s better. In the bottom of her purse, Ruby finds the beaded suede headband Luther gave her. Very pretty. She ties it around Susan’s forehead, threads it through her golden-brown curls.

  “You’re beautiful, Starbright.”

  And it’s true.

  “I love you, Ruby.”

  “Then you be strong for me.”

  They stroll through the airport, two wild-haired, perfumed women. Their exotic skirts rustle. Their bracelets clink. Their beads sway over lacy blouses of silk and cotton.

  They arrive at the gate. The plane her parents took is already there.

  He’s a handsome man, the kid’s father, tall with a bit of a belly that goes with his prosperity. The hair and eyes and nose he gave to his daughter. His mouth trembles despite his effort to quell it, and that instantly wins Ruby over.

  He strides to the kid and seizes her in a great big hug. “Sweetie pie! Oh, sweetie pie!” And he bursts into tears, right there in the middle of the airport.

  “Hi, Daddy,” Susan says.

  The mother hovers beside her husband and her daughter. A plucked and dyed dame with deep frown lines, she’s got the flabby, stooped shoulders of an old woman, though she can’t be more than forty. She joins their reunion, pecks the cheek of her daughter, but she can’t restrain her cold disapproval even now—look at her clothes, look at her hair.

  This mother, Ruby thinks, will have to learn a thing or two from her daughter.

  “I want to be a doctor, Daddy,” Susan says.

  “Well! That’s fine,” he says, nonplussed.

  “I don’t want to be a nurse. I don’t want to be a dental assistant. I want to study bacteria and be a doctor.”

  The parents exchange an uncertain look, and Ruby sees that the daughter as the troublesome child was the glue keeping their fractured marriage intact. And her defection has revealed deep rifts between them. Will the daughter’s return restore the reality they knew before? Not likely.

  “Also, I’m pregnant,” Susan says. “I want to have the baby. I want to keep her and raise her myself. You can’t change my mind, so don’t try, okay?”

  “Who?” her father says.

  “The father is gone. We love each other, but I’ll never see him again. So I don’t want to talk about that, either.”

  They are speechless, these square parents from Shaker Heights. This is not what they expected of their runaway to the Haight-Ashbury. And everything they expected, and then some.

  The father checks out his daughter’s costume, then checks out Ruby. His eyes flick up and down. The corner of his mouth twitches. Yeah, his daughter is beautiful. And yeah, Ruby is beautiful.

  Catching his glance, Ruby raises her hand, extends two fingers in a peace sign, and says, “The Summer of Love did not compel America’s children. America’s children compelled the Summer of Love.”r />
  Ruby kisses Susan’s forehead, then turns and walks away. In her heart she knows she will never see the kid again.

  She will close the Mystic Eye and leave the Haight-Ashbury behind. Get out of town, somewhere like Santa Cruz or Bodega Bay where the air is fresher. Where it’s easier to believe in a New Explanation. She’s started over before. She can damn well start over again.

  And she has business to attend to besides her own. The future survives because she, and the women of the world, take care of themselves. Take control of their own destinies. Take responsibility for their children.

  Dawn glows in the east. The future is hard for the world. But we have a future. We survive.

  She feels it as she pulls onto 101 northbound, the forward-moving future plunging beside her like a trusted companion. Yet the arrow of time is an illusion, Ruby knows that now. Day and night do not move forward, they spin, like the Earth. The hours meted out by the clock are tools for human survival, boundaries and categories, not reality. Dates and years measure the pace of a person’s life, mark initiations and graduations, but they are not the woman or the man. In truth, there is but One Day, always new, always coming forth into Being.

  About Lisa Mason

  A graduate of the University of Michigan School of Literature, the Sciences, and the Arts, and the University of Michigan Law School, Lisa Mason is the author of eight novels, including SUMMER OF LOVE (Bantam), a San Francisco Chronicle Recommended Book and Philip K. Dick Award finalist, and THE GOLDEN NINETIES (Bantam), a New York Times Notable Book and New York Public Library Recommended Book.

  Mason published her first story, “ARACHNE,” in Omni and has since published short fiction in magazines and anthologies worldwide, including Omni, Full Spectrum, Universe, Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Unique, Transcendental Tales, Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Immortal Unicorn, Tales of the Impossible, Desire Burn, Fantastic Alice, The Shimmering Door, Hayakawa Science Fiction Magazine, Unter Die Haut, and others. Her stories have been translated into Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish.