She was right. Selection B4. His most recent hit, "Nowhere Nuthin" f.u.c.k-up," a sentimental number. And already the mechanism of the jukebox had begun to process the disc.
A moment later his voice, mellowed by quad sound points and echo chambers, filled the coffee shop.
Dazed, he returned to the booth.
"You sound superwonderful," Mary Anne said, politely, perhaps, given her taste, when the disc had ended.
"Thanks." It had been him, all right. The grooves on that record hadn"t been blank.
"You"re really far out," Mary Anne said enthusiastically, all smiles and twinkly gla.s.ses.
Jason said simply, "I"ve been at it a long time." She had sounded as if she meant it.
"Do you feel bad that I hadn"t heard of you?"
"No." He shook his head, still dazed. Certainly she was not alone in that, as the events of the past two days--two days? had it only been that?--had shown.
"Can--I order something more?" Mary Anne asked. She hesitated. "I spent all my money on stamps; I--"
"I"m picking up the tab," Jason said.
"How do you think the strawberry cheesecake would be?"
"Outstanding," he said, momentarily amused by her. The woman"s earnestness, her anxieties . . . does she have any boy friends of any kind? he wondered. Probably not . . . she lived in a world of pots, clay, brown wrapping paper, troubles with her little old Ford Greyhound, and, in the background, the stereo-only voices of the old-time greats: Judy Collins and Joan Baez.
"Ever listened to Heather Hart?" he asked. Gently.
Her forehead wrinkled. "I--don"t recall for sure. Is she a folk singer or--" Her voice trailed off; she looked sad. As if she sensed that she was failing to be what she ought to be, failing to know what every reasonable person knew. He felt sympathy for her.
"Ballads," Jason said. "Like what I do."
"Could we hear your record again?"
He obligingly returned to the jukebox, scheduled it for replay.
This time Mary Anne did not seem to enjoy it.
"What"s the matter?" he asked.
"Oh," she said, "I always tell myself I"m creative; I make pots and like that. But I don"t know if they"re actually any good. I don"t know how to tell. People say to me--"
"People tell you everything. From that you"re worthless to priceless. The worst and the best. You"re always reaching somebody here"--he tapped the salt shaker--"and not reaching somebody there." He tapped her fruit-salad bowl.
"But there has to be some way--"
"There are experts. You can listen to them, to their theories. They always have theories. They write long articles and discuss your stuff back to the first record you cut nineteen years ago. They compare recordings you don"t even remember having cut. And the TV critics--"
"But to be noticed." Again, briefly, her eyes shone.
"I"m sorry," he said, rising to his feet once more. He could wait no longer. "I have to make a phone call. Hopefully I"ll be right back. If I"m not"--he put his hand on her shoulder, on her knitted white sweater, which she had probably made herself--"it"s been nice meeting you."
Puzzled, she watched him in her wan, obedient way as he elbowed a path to the back of the crowded coffee shop, to the phone booth.
Shut up inside the phone booth, he read off the number of the Los Angeles Police Academy from the emergency listings and, after dropping in his coin, dialed.
"I"d like to speak to Police General Felix Buckman," he said, and, without surprise, heard his voice shake. Psychologically I"ve had it, he realized. Everything that"s happened . . . up to the record on the jukebox--it"s too G.o.dd.a.m.n much for me. I am just plain scared. And disoriented. So maybe, he thought, the mescaline has not worn completely off after all. But I did drive the little flipflap okay; that indicates something. f.u.c.king dope, he thought. You can always tell when it hits you but never when it unhits, if it ever does. It impairs you forever or you think so; you can"t be sure. Maybe it never leaves. And they say, Hey, man, your brain"s burned out, and you say, Maybe so. You can"t be sure and you can"t not be sure. And all because you dropped a cap or one cap too many that somebody said, Hey this"ll get you off.
"This is Miss Beason," a female voice sounded in his ear. "Mr. Buckman"s a.s.sistant. May I help you?"
"Peggy Beason," he said. He took a deep, unsteady breath and said, "This is Jason Taverner."
"Oh yes, Mr. Taverner. What did you want? Did you leave anything behind?"
Jason said, "I want to talk to General Buckman."
"I"m afraid Mr. Buckman--"
"It has to do with Alys," Jason said.
Silence. And then: "Just a moment please, Mr. Taverner," Peggy Beason said. "I"ll ring Mr. Buckman and see if he can free himself a moment."
Clicks. Pause. More silence. Then a line opened.
"Mr. Taverner?" It was not General Buckman. "This is Herbert Maime, Mr. Buckman"s chief of staff. I understand you told Miss Beason that it has to do with Mr. Buckman"s sister, Miss Alys Buckman. Frankly I"d like to ask just what are the circ.u.mstances under which you happen to know Miss--"
Jason hung up the phone. And walked sightlessly back to the booth, where Mary Anne Dominic sat eating her strawberry cheesecake.
"You did come back after all," she said cheerfully.
"How," he said, "is the cheesecake?"
"A little too rich." She added, "But good."
He grimly reseated himself. Well, he had done his best to get through to Felix Buckman. To tell him about Alys. But--what would he have been able to say, after all? The futility of everything, the perpetual impotence of his efforts and intentions . . . weakened even more, he thought, by what she gave me, that cap of mescaline.
_If it had been mescaline_.
That presented a new possibility. He had no proof, no evidence, that Alys had actually given him mescaline. It could have been anything. What, for example, was mescaline doing coming from Switzerland? That made no sense; that sounded synthetic, not organic: a product of a lab. Maybe a new multiingredient cultish drug. Or something stolen from police labs.
The record of "Nowhere Nuthin" f.u.c.k-up." Suppose the drug had made him hear it. And see the listing on the jukebox. But Mary Anne Dominic had heard it, too; in fact she had discovered it.
But the two blank records. What about them?
As he sat pondering, an adolescent boy in a T-shirt and jeans bent over him and mumbled, "Hey, you"re Jason Taverner, aren"t you?" He extended a ballpoint pen and piece of paper. "Could I have your autograph, sir?"
Behind him a pretty little red-haired teenybopper, bra-less, in white shorts, smiled excitedly and said, "We always catch you on Tuesday night. You"re fantastic. And you look in real life, you look just like on the screen, except that in real life you"re more, you know, tanned." Her friendly nipples jiggled.
Numbly, by habit, he signed his name. "Thanks, guys," he said to them; there were four of them in all now.
Chattering to themselves, the four kids departed. Now people in nearby booths were watching Jason and muttering interestedly to one another. As always, he said to himself. This is how it"s been up to the other day. _My reality is leaking back_. He felt uncontrollably, wildly elated. This was what he knew; this was his life-style. He had lost it for a short time but now--finally, he thought, I"m starting to get it back!
Heather Hart. He thought, I can call her now. And get through to her. She won"t think I"m a twerp fan.
Maybe I only exist so long as I take the drug. That drug, whatever it is, that Alys gave me.
Then my career, he thought, the whole twenty years, is nothing but a retroactive hallucination created by the drug.
What happened, Jason Taverner thought, _is that the drug wore off_. She--somebody--stopped giving it to me and I woke up to reality, there in that shabby, broken-down hotel room with the cracked mirror and the bug-infested mattress. And I stayed that way until now, until Alys gave me another dose.
He thought, No wonder she knew about me, about my Tuesday-night TV show. Through her drug she created it. And those two record alb.u.ms--props which she kept to reinforce the hallucination.
Jesus Christ, he thought, is that it?
But, he thought, the money I woke up with in the hotel room, this whole wad of it. Reflexively he tapped his chest, felt its thick existence, still there. If in real life I doled out my days in fleabag hotels in the Watts area, where did I get that money?
And I would have been listed in the police files, and in all the other data banks throughout the world. I wouldn"t be listed as a famous entertainer, but I"d be there as a shabby b.u.m who never amounted to anything, whose only highs came from a pill bottle. For G.o.d knows how long. I may have been taking the drug for years.
Alys, he remembered, said I had been to the house before. And apparently, he decided, it"s true. I had. To get my doses of the drug.
Maybe I am only one of a great number of people leading synthetic lives of popularity, money, power, by means of a capsule. While living actually, meanwhile, in bug-infested, ratty old hotel rooms. On skid row. Derelicts, n.o.bodies. Amounting to zero. But, meanwhile, dreaming.
"You certainly are deep in a brown study," Mary Anne said. She had finished her cheesecake; she looked satiated, now. And happy.
"Listen," he said hoa.r.s.ely. "Is my record really in that jukebox?"
Her eyes widened as she tried to understand. "How do you mean? We listened to it. And the little thingy, where it tells the selections, that"s there. Jukeboxes never made mistakes."
He fished out a coin. "Go play it again. Set it up for three plays."
Obediently, she surged from her seat, into the aisle, and bustled over to the jukebox, her lovely long hair bouncing against her ample shoulders. Presently he heard it, heard his big hit song. And the people in the booths and at the counter were nodding and smiling at him in recognition; they knew it was he who was singing. His audience.
When the song ended there was a smattering of applause from the patrons of the coffee shop. Grinning reflexively, professionally in return he acknowledged their recognition and approval.
"It"s there," he said, as the song replayed. Savagely, he clenched his fist, struck the plastic table separating him from Mary Anne Dominic. "G.o.d d.a.m.n it, it"s there."
With some odd twist of deep, intuitive, female desire to help him Mary Anne said, "And I"m here, too."
"I"m not in a run-down hotel room, lying on a cot dreaming," he said huskily.
"No, you"re not." Her tone was tender, anxious. She clearly felt concern for him. For his alarm.
"Again I"m real," he said. "But if it could happen once, for two days--" To come and go like this, to fade in and out-- "Maybe we should leave," Mary Anne said apprehensively. That cleared his mind. "Sorry," he said, wanting to rea.s.sure her.
"I just mean that people are listening."
"It won"t hurt them," he said. "Let them listen; let them see how you carry your worries and troubles with you even when you"re a world-famous star." He rose to his feet, however. "Where do you want to go?" he asked her. "To your apartment?" It meant doubling back, but he felt optimistic enough to take the risk.
"My apartment?" she faltered.
"Do you think I"d hurt you?" he said.
Fof an interval she sat nervously pondering. "N-no," she said at last.
"Do you have a phonograph?" he asked. "At your apartment?"
"Yes, but not a very good one; it"s just stereo. But it works."
"Okay," he said, herding her up the aisle toward the cash register. "Let"s go."
23
Mary Anne Dominic had decorated the walls and ceiling of her apartment herself. Beautiful, strong, rich colors; he gazed about, impressed. And the few art objects in the living room had a powerful beauty about them. Ceramic pieces. He picked up one lovely blue-glaze vase, studied it.
"I made that," Mary Anne said.
"This vase," he said, "will be featured on my show."
Mary Anne gazed at him in wonder.
"I"m going to have this vase with me very soon. In fact"-- he could visualize it--"a big production number in which I emerge from the vase singing, like the magic spirit of the vase." He held the blue vase up high, in one hand, revolving it." "Nowhere Nuthin" f.u.c.k-up," "he said. "And your career is launched."
"Maybe you should hold it with both hands," Mary Anne said uneasily.
""Nowhere Nuthin" f.u.c.k-up," the song that brought us more recognition--" The vase slid from between his fingers and dropped to the floor. Mary Anne leaped forward, but too late. The vase broke into three pieces and lay there beside Jason"s shoe, rough unglazed edges pale and irregular and without artistic merit.
A long silence pa.s.sed.
"I think I can fix it," Mary Anne said.
He could think of nothing to say.