The Star-Spangled Future Read online

  There’s no business like the guru business, Marvin thought as he followed Krell and three of his fellow residents out onto the porch above the rumbling sea.

  Four large, plush cushions had been, placed on the bare wood in a circle around an even larger zebra-striped pillow. Krell, in his white sarong, lowered himself to the central position in a semblance of the lotus position, looking like the Maharishi as played by a decaying Tab Hunter. Marvin and the other three residents dropped to their cushions in imitation of Krell. On Marvin’s left was Tish Connally, a well-preserved thirty-five-ish ex-Las Vegas “showgirl” who had managed to hold on to a decent portion of the drunk money that had swirled around her for ten years, and who had eyed him a couple of times over the granola. On his right, Mike Warren, the longhair he had seen the first day, who turned out to be an ex-speedfreak guitarist, and, on the far cushion, a balding TV producer named Marty Klein, whose last two series had been canceled after thirteen weeks each.

  “Okay,” said Krell, “you all know Bill Marvin, so I guess we’re ready to charge up for the morning. Bill, what this is all about is that I unfreeze everybody’s senses together for a bit, and then you’ll have synesthetic flashes on your own off it for a few hours. The more of these sessions you have, the longer your own free-flashing will last, and finally your senses will be reeducated enough so you won’t need me.”

  “How many people have… uh, graduated so far?” Marvin asked sweetly.

  To his credit, Krell managed not to crack a scowl. “No one’s felt they’ve gotten all I’ve got to give them yet,” he said, “But some are far along the way. Okay, are we ready now?”

  The morning sun had just about burned away most of the early coastal fog, but traces of mist still lingered around the porch, freshened by the spray churned up by the ocean as it broke against the rocks below. “Here we go,” said Harry Krell.

  There was light: a soft, all-enveloping radiance that pulsed from sunshine yellow to sea green with the tidal rhythm of breakers crashing against a rocky shore. Marvin tasted a salty tang, now minty-cool, now chowder-hot. To his right, he heard a thin, throbbing, blues-like chord, something like a keening amplified guitar stretching and clawing for some spiritual stratosphere, higher, higher, higher, but never quite getting there, never resolving the dynamic discord into a bearable harmony. To his left, a sound like the easy ricky-tick of a funky old piano that had been out of tune for ten years, and had mellowed into that strange old groove. Across from him, a frantic syncopated ticking, like a time-bomb running down as it was running out, a toss-up as to whether entropy would outrace the explosion.

  And dominating it all, the central theme: a surging, blaring, brassy wailing that seemed a shell of plastic around a central motif of sadness—a gypsy violinist playing hot jazz on a tuba—that Marvin knew was Harry Krell.

  Marvin was knocked back on his mental heels by the flood of transmogrified emotions pouring in on him from unexpected sensual directions. He sensed that in some way, Mike Warren was that screaming non-chord that was the aural transformation of his visual persona, that Tish Connally was the funky ricky-tick, and Klein’s running-down rhythm, a has-been wondering whether he would fall apart or freak out first. And Krell, phony brass within sad confusion within cheap pseudo-sincerity within mournful regret within inner emptiness like a Muzak version of himself—a man whose existence was in the unresolvable tension between his grubby phoniness and the overwhelming, rich strangeness of the unique consciousness a random hit on the head had given him, grandeur poured by fate into the tawdriest available vessel.

  Marvin had never felt pressed so close to human beings in his life. He was both fascinated and repelled by the intimacy. And wondered what they were experiencing as him.

  Then the universe of his senses went through another transformation. His mouth was filled with a spectrum of tastes that somehow spread themselves out along spatial dimensions; acrid spiciness like smoked chili peppers to the right, soft furriness of flat highballs to the left, off aways something like garlic and peptic gall, and everywhere the overwhelming taste of peppermint and melancholy red wine. He could hear the pounding of the surf now, but what he saw was a field of orange-red across which drifted occasional wisps of cool blue.

  “Now join hands in a circle and feel outsides with your insides,” said the plastic peppermint and musky red wine.

  Marvin reached out with both hands. The right half of his body immediately became knotted with severe muscular tension, every nerve twanging to the breaking point like snarled and taut wire. But the left half of his body went slack, soft, and quietly burned-out as four a.m. in bed beside someone you picked up a little after midnight at a heavy boozing and doping party.

  “Okay, now relax and drift on back through the changes,” said peppermint and red wine.

  Sight became a flickering sequence: blue mists drifting across a field of orange-red, sunshine yellow pulsing through sea green in a tidal rhythm, four people seated in a circle around Harry Krell on a sunlit porch. Back and forth, in and out, the visions chased each other through every possible variation of the sequence, while Marvin heard the pounding of the surf, the symphony for four souls; tasted minty-cool, chowder-hot, smoked chili peppers, flat highballs, peppermint, and red wine. The sensual images crossed and recrossed, blending, clashing, melding, bouncing off each other, until concepts like taste, sight, hearing, smell, feel, became totally meaningless.

  Finally (time had no referents in this state) Marvin’s sensorium stabilized. He saw Tish Connally, Mike Warren, Marty Klein, and himself seated on cushions in a circle around Harry Krell on a sunlit wooden porch. He heard the crashing of the surf on the rocks below, felt the softness of the cushion on which he sat, smelled a mixture of sea breeze and his own sweat.

  Krell was bathed in sweat, looked drained, but managed to smile smugly in his direction. The others appeared not quite as dazed as Marvin felt. His mind was completely empty in that moment, whited-out, overwhelmed, nothing more than the brain center where his sensory input merged to form his sensorium, that constellation of sight, smell, sound, taste, touch, and feel which is the essential and basic ground of human consciousness.

  “I hope you weren’t disappointed, Mr. Marvin,” Krell said, “Or would you like your money back?”

  Bill Marvin had nothing to say; he felt that he hardly had enough self-consciousness to perceive words as more than abstract sequences of sound.

  The bright afternoon sun turned the surface of the pool into a rippling sheet of glare which seemed to dissolve into glass chiming and smashing for a moment as Marvin stared at the incandescent waters. Even his normal senses seemed unusually acute—he could clearly smell the sea and the stables, even here at poolside, feel the grainy texture of the plastic cloth of the beach chair against his bare back—perhaps because he could no longer take any sensory dimension for granted, with the synesthetic flashes he was getting every’ few minutes. There was no getting around the fact that what he had experienced that morning had been a profound experience, and one that still sent echoes rippling through his brain.

  Karen pulled herself out of the pool with a shake and a shudder that flashed droplets in the sun, threw a towel around herself, and plopped down in the beach chair next to his. She was wearing a minimal blue bikini, but Marvin found himself noticing the full curves of her body only as an abstract design, glistening arcs of water-sheened skin.

  “I can see you’ve really had a moving session,” she said.

  “Huh?”

  He saw that her eyes were looking straight at him, but in a glazed, unfocused manner. “I’m flashing right now,” she said. “I hear you as a low hum, without the usual, grinding noises in the way you sit, and…”

  She ran her hand along his chest. “Cool green and blue, no hard silvers and grays…” She sighed, removed her hand, refocused her eyes. “It’s gone now,” she said. “All I get unless Harry is really projecting is little bits and pieces I can’t hold onto… But someday…”
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  “Someday you’ll be able to stay high all the time, or so Krell claims.”

  “You know Harry’s no fraud now,”

  Marvin winced inwardly at the word “fraud,” thinking what it could be like testifying against Krell. Lord, he might drop me into a synesthetic trance in the middle of the courtroom! But… but I could fake my way through if I was really ready for it, if I have enough experience functioning in that state. Krell seems to be able to function, and he’s like that all the time…

  “What’s the matter, Bill?”

  “Does my body sound funny or something?” he snapped.

  “No, you just had a plain, old-fashioned frightened look on your face for a minute there.”

  “I was just thinking what it would be like if Krell really could condition you to be like him all the time,” Marvin said. “Walking around in a fog like that, sure I can see how it might make things interesting, but how could you function, even keep from walking into trees?…”

  “Harry is like that all the time, and he’s functioning. You don’t exactly see him starving in the street.”

  “I’ll bet you don’t see him in the street, period,” Marvin said. “I’ll bet Krell never leaves this place. The way you see him walking around like a zombie, he probably goes on memory half the time, like a blind man in his house.” Yeah, he thought, people, food, money—he makes it all come to him. He probably couldn’t drive a mile on the freeway or even walk across a street without getting killed. Suddenly Marvin found himself considering Harry Krell’s inner reality, the strange parameters of his life, with a certain sympathy. What would it really be like to be Krell? To be wide, open to all that fantastic experience, but unable to function in the real world except by somehow making it come to you?

  Making it come to you through a greasy con game, he told himself angrily, annoyed at the softness toward Krell that had snuck into his consciousness, at the momentary blunting of the keen edge of his determination.

  Rising, he said, “I’m going to take a dip and wash some of these cobwebs out of my head.”

  He took four running steps and dove off the concrete lip of the pool.

  When he hit the water, the world exploded for a moment in a dazzling auroral rainbow of light.

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Six weeks,” said Tish Connally, lighting a cigarette with a match that momentarily split the darkness of her cabin with a ringing gong in Bill Marvin’s head. Another synesthetic flash! He had been at Golden Groves for only three days now, and the last session with Krell had been at least five hours ago, yet he was still getting two or three flashes an hour.

  He leaned back against the headboard of the bed, felt Tish’s body exhale against him, saw the glow of her cigarette flare brightly, then subside. “How long do you think you’ll stay?” he asked.

  “Till I have to go make some money somehow,” she said. “This isn’t the cheapest joint I’ve ever seen.”

  “Not until you graduate, become another Harry Krell?”

  She laughed; he could feel her loose flesh ripple, almost see pink gelatin shaking in the dark. A flash—or just overactive imagination?

  “That’s a con,” she said. “Take it from an expert. For one thing, there are people who have been in and out of here for months, and they still need their boosters from Harry to keep flashing. For another, Krell wouldn’t turn you on permanently if he could. We wouldn’t need him anymore then; where would his money come from?”

  “Knowing that, you still stick around?”

  “Billy-boy, I’ve kicked around for ten years, I’ve been taken every way there is to be taken, took men every way there was for me to take ’em. Before I came here, I’d felt everything there was to feel fifty thousand times, so no matter what I did to get off, I was just going through the motions. At least here I feel alive in bits and pieces. So I’m paying Krell a pretty penny for getting me off once in a while. I’ve made most of my money on the other end of the same game, so what the hell, it keeps the money in circulation, right?”

  “You’re a mean, old broad,” Marvin said, with a certain affection.

  She snubbed out her cigarette, kissed him lightly on the lips, rolled toward him.

  “One more for the road, Billy-boy?”

  Diffidently, he took her tired flesh in his arms. “Oh, you’re golden!” she sighed as she moved against him. And he realized that she had been hoping for a synesthetic flash to give her a bit of the sharp pleasure that he alone could not.

  But he could hardly feel anger or disgust, since he had been looking for something more spectacular than a soft human body in the darkness, too.

  Strolling toward his cabin near the sea cliffs in the full moonlight, Bill Marvin saw Harry Krell emerge from Lisa Scott’s cabin and walk down the path toward him, more rapidly and surely than he usually seemed to move in broad daylight. They met in a small grove of trees, where the moonlight filtered through the branches in tiger-stripes of silver and black that shattered visual images into jigsaw patterns.

  “Hello, Marvin,” Krell said. “Been doing some visiting?”

  “Just walking,” Marvin said neutrally, surprising himself with his own desire to have a civil conversation with Krell. But, after all, strictly as a curiosity, Krell had to be one of the most interesting men on earth.

  Krell must have sensed something of this, because he stopped, leaned up against a tree, and said, “You’ve been here a week now, Marvin. Tell me the truth, do you still hate my guts? Are you still out to get me?”

  Glad to have his reaction masked by the camouflage-pattern of moonlight and darkness, Marvin caught his breath and said, “What makes you think I’m out to get you?”

  Krell laughed, and for a moment Marvin saw a bright blue cataract smashing off a sheet of glass in brilliant sunlight, “I heard the look on your face,” Krell said, “Besides, what makes you think you’re the first person that’s come here trying to nail me?”

  “So why’d you let me come here?”

  “Because half the Golden Groves regulars come here the first time to get the goods on that phony Harry Krell. If I worried about that, I’d lose half my trade.”

  “I just can’t figure where your head’s at, Krell. What do you think you’re doing here?”

  “What am I doing?” Krell said, an edge of whining bitterness coming into his voice. “What do you think I’m doing? I’m surviving as best I can, same as you. You think I asked for this? Sure, a lot of nuts come through here and convince themselves they’re getting religious visions off of me, a big ecstasy trip. Great for them! But for Harry Krell, synesthesia’s no ecstasy trip, let me tell you! I can’t drive a car or walk across a street or go anywhere or do anything. All I can do is hear the pretty colors, smell the music, see the taste of whatever crap I’m eating. After three years, I got enough experience to guess pretty well what’s happening around me most of the time as long as I stay on familiar ground, but I’m just guessing, man! I’m trapped inside my own head. Like now, I see something blue-green off to the left—probably the sea I’m smelling—and pink-violet stuff around us—trees, probably eucalyptus. And I hear some kind of gong. There’s a moon out, right? If you’re saying something now, I can’t make it out until I start hearing sound again. Man, I’m so alone here inside this light-show!”

  Bill Marvin fought against his own feelings, and lost. He couldn’t stop himself from feeling sympathy for Harry Krell, locked inside his weird private reality, an ordinary slob cut off from any ordinary life. Yet Krell was entirely willing to put other people into the same place.

  “Feeling like that, you still don’t mind making your bread by sucking other people in with you…” he said.

  “Jesus, Marvin, you’re a pornographer! You give people a kick they want, and you make your living off of it. But does it turn you on? How’d you like your whole life to be a pornographic movie?”

  Bill Marvin choked on a wisecrack which never came out, because the deadening quality of
what his life had become slammed him in the gut. What is the difference between me and Krell? he thought. He gives the suckers synesthetic flashes and I give ’em porn. What he’s putting out doesn’t turn him on any more than what I put out turns me on. We’re both alone inside our heads and faking it. He got hit on the head by a surfboard and got stuck in the synesthesia trip, and I got hit on the head by Hollywood and got stuck in the porn trip.

  “Sorry to put you on such a bummer, Marvin,” Krell said. “I can smell it on you. Now I can hear your face. What…?”

  “We’re both alike, Krell,” Marvin said. “And we both stink.”

  “We’re just doing what we gotta do. You gotta play the cards you’ve been dealt, because you’re not going to get any others.”

  “Sometimes you deal yourself your own lousy hand,” Marvin said.

  “I’ll show you lousy!” said Krell. “I’ll show you how lousy it can be to walk just from here to your cabin—the way I have to do it. You got the guts?”

  “That’s what I’m paying my money for,” Marvin said quietly. He began walking back up the path. Krell turned and walked beside him.

  Abruptly, the darkness dissolved into a glowing gingerbread fairyland of light. To Marvin’s left, where he knew the sea was crashing against the base of the cliffs, he saw a bright green-yellow bank of brilliance that sent out pulses of radiance which struck invisible objects all around him, haloing them in all the subtle shades of the spectrum, forming an infinitely complex lattice-work of ever-changing, intersecting wavefronts that transformed itself with every pulse from the aural sun that was the sea. Beside him, Harry Krell was a shape of darkness outlined in a shimmering aurora. He heard a faraway gong chiming pleasantly in the velvet quiet. He tasted salt and smelled a rapidly changing sequence of floral odors that might have been Krell speaking. The beauty of it all drenched his soul through every pore.