The Star-Spangled Future Read online

  He walked slowly along, orienting himself by the supposition that the green-yellow brilliance was the breaking surf, that the areas of darkness outlined by the living lattice-work of colored wavefronts were solid objects to be avoided. It wasn’t easy, but it was somehow enchanting, picking his way through a familiar scene that had transformed itself into a universe of wonder.

  Then the world changed again. He could hear the crashing of the sea. On his left, he saw a thick blue-green spongy mass, huge and towering; on the ground, the path was a ribbon of blackness through a field of pinkish-gray; here and there fountains grew out of the pinkish-gray, with grayish stems and vivid maroon crests, tree-high. He smelled clear coldness. Krell was a doughy mass of colors, dominantly washed-out brown. Marvin guessed that he was seeing smell.

  It was easy enough to follow the path of dead earth through the fragrant grass. After a while there was another, subtler transformation. He could see that he and Krell were walking up the path toward his cabin, no more than twenty yards away in the silvery moonlight. But his mouth, was filled with a now-winey, now-nutty flavor that ebbed and flowed with an oceanic rhythm, here and there broken by quick wisps of spiciness as bird-shapes flapped from tree to darkened tree. The only sound was a soft, almost subliminal hiss.

  Dazed, transported, Marvin covered the last few yards to his cabin open-mouthed and wide-eyed. When they reached the door, the strange tastes in his mouth evaporated, and he could hear the muffled grumble of the pounding surf. He laughed, exhilarated, refreshed in every atom of his being, alive to every subtle sensory nuance of the night.

  “How do you like living where I live?” Krell said sourly.

  “It’s beautiful… it’s…”

  Krell scowled, snickered, smiled ruefully. “So the big wise-guy turns out to be a sucker just like everyone else,” he said, almost regretfully.

  Marvin laughed again. In fact, he realized, he had been laughing for the first time in over a week. “Who knows, Krell,” he said, “you might enjoy living in one of my pornographic movies.”

  He laughed one more time, then went into his cabin, leaving Krell standing there in the night with a dumb expression on his face.

  Later, when he got into bed, the cool sheets and the soft pillow were a clear night full of pinpoint-bright multicolored stars, and the darkness smelled like a woman’s perfume.

  The world went livid red, and the wooden slats beneath his naked body became a smoky tang in his mouth.. Marvin felt himself glowing in the center of his being like a roaring winter fireplace, heard Dave Andrews’ voice say, “Really sweats the tension out of you.”

  The flash passed, and he was lying on the wooden bench of the sauna shack, bathed in his own luxuriant sweat, baking in the heat given off by the hot stones on their cast-iron rack. The fat towel-wrapped man on the bench across from him stared sightlessly at the ceiling and sighed.

  “Phew!” Andrews said as his eyes came back into focus, “I could really hear my muscles uncoil. Twooong!”

  Marvin lay there just sucking up the heat, going with it, and entirely ignoring Andrews, who was some kind of land speculator and a crashing bore. He closed his eyes and concentrated on the waves of heat which he could all but feel breaking against his body, the relief of the grain of the wood against his skin; the subtle odor of hot stone. He had learned to bask in the world of his senses and let everything else drift by.

  “I tell you, old Krell may be charging a pretty penny, but it sure cleans out the old tubes and charges up the old batteries…” Andrews babbled on and on like a radio commercial, but Marvin found little trouble in pushing the idiot voice far into the sensory background; it was easy, when each sense could become a universe entire, when your sensorium was no longer conditioned to sight-sound dominance.

  Suddenly Andrews’ voice was gone, and Marvin heard a whistling hurricane wind. Opening his eyes, he saw wispy white billows of ethereal steam punctuated by the multicolored static of Andrews’ words. He tasted something like curry and smelled a piney, convoluted odor.

  When the flash passed, he got up, slipped on a bathing suit, dashed out of the sauna, ran across the rich green grass in the high blue sunlight, and dove straight into the swimming pool. The cool water hit his superheated body with an orgasmic shock. He floated to the surface and let the little wavelets cradle him on his back as he paddled over to the lip of the pool, where Karen sat dangling her feet in the water.

  “You’re sure a different man than when you came here,” she said.

  Looking up, Marvin saw her bikinied form as a fuzzy vagueness against a blinding blue sky. “Well, okay, so Krell’s got something going for him,” he said. “But at these prices, he’s still a crook, and, the funny thing is, he thinks he’s even a bigger crook than he really is…”

  She didn’t answer for a long moment, but stared into the depths of the pool to one side of him, lost in the universe of her own synesthetic flash.

  When she finally spoke, it came out as a gusher of glistening green-black oil emerging from soft lavender clouds, while Marvin tasted icy cotton-candy. Judging from the discord of her lace jarring the soothing melody of the sunlit sky, it was probably just as well.

  Marvin luxuriated in a shower of blood-warm rain, saw a sheen of light that pulsed from sunshine-yellow to sea-green; then the flash passed. He was sitting on his cushion on Harry Krell’s sunny porch, in a circle around Krell, along with Tish, Andrews… and Karen.

  Strange, he thought, I’ve been here nearly three weeks, and I haven’t had a booster group with Karen yet. Stranger still was the realization that this hadn’t seemed peculiar or even significant until this moment. Like the rest of the outside world, his former relationship with Karen seemed so long ago and far away. The woman to his right seemed no closer to him emotionally than any of the other residents of Golden Groves, who drifted through each other’s private universes like phantom ships passing in the night.

  Harry Krell took a deep breath, and the vault of the sky became a sheet of gleaming brass; below, the sea was a rolling cauldron of ebony. The porch itself was outlined in dull blue, and the people around him were throbbing shapes of yellowish pink. To his left, the odor of fading incense; across the way, rich Havana smoke, and the powerful tinge of ozone pervaded all. But the smell that riveted Marvin’s attention was the one on his right; an overwhelming feminine musk that seemed compounded of (or partially masked by) unsubtle perfume, drying nail polish, beauty cream, shampoo, deodorants—the full spectrum of chemical enhancers which he now realized had been the characteristic odors of living with Karen. Waves of nostalgia and disgust formed inside him, crested, broke, and merged in a single emotional tone for which there was no word. It simply was the space that Karen occupied in his mind, the total image through winch he experienced her.

  Another change, and he saw light pulsing from yellow to green once more, tasted a salty tang. From his left, he heard the ricky-tick of a funky old piano; across the way, a staccato metallic blatting; over it all, the brassy, hollow, melancholy wailing of Harry Krell. But once again, it was the theme on his right that vibrated a nerve dial went straight from his senses through his brain and into the pit of his gut. It was as if a gong were striking within an enclosure that rudely dampened its vibrations, slamming the echoing notes back on each other, abruptly amputating the long slow vibrations, creating a sound that was a hysterical hammering at invisible walls, the sound of an animal caught in some invisible trap. Ironically, the smell of a woodland field in high summer was heavy in Marvin’s nostrils.

  After a few more slow changes, Krell brought them flickering back through the sequences: blood-warm rain, a sheet of gleaming brass over an ebony sea, the smell of feminine musk and body chemicals, light pulsing from yellow to green, rich Havana smoke, peppermint and red wine, high summer in a woodland field, flat highballs, melancholy wailing, ricky-tick.

  Then Marvin was seated on his cushion next to Karen’s, while the sea grumbled to itself below, and Harry Krell breathed
heavily and wiped sweat out of his eyes.

  Marvin and Karen simultaneously turned to look at each other. Their eyes met, or at least their local plane intersected. For Marvin, it was like staring straight at two cold green marbles set in the alabaster face of a statue, for all the emotion that the eye-contact contained. Judging from the ghost of a grimace that quivered across her lips, she was seeing no less of a stranger. For an instant, he was blinded by yellow light, sickened by the odor of her chemical musk.

  When the flash passed, he saw that she was in the throes of one of her own; her eyes staring sightlessly out to sea, her lips twitching, her nostrils flaring. For a moment, he was overcome with curiosity as to how she was experiencing him; then, with a small effort, he put this distasteful thought from his mind, knowing that this was the moment of true divorce, that the alimony was now the only bond that remained between them.

  A moment later, without a word to each other, they both got up and went their separate ways. As Karen walked through the glass doors into the house, Marvin saw a billowing spongy green mass, and heard her hysterical trapped hammering beat time for her march out of his life forever.

  And time became the flickering procession of sheets of flashing images. The sun set over the cliffs into the Pacific, now a globe of orange fire dipping into the glassy waters and painting the sky with smears of purple and scarlet, now the smoky tang of autumn fading into the sharply crystal bite of winter night, now a slow-motion clap of enormous thunder dying slowly into the velvet stillness.’ The morning light on the porch of the beach house was a shower of blood-warm rain, a field of orange radiance shot with mists of cool blue, a humming symphony of vibrating energy.

  For Bill Marvin, these had become the natural poles of existence, the only time-referents in a world in which night might be the toasty woman-smell of his bedroom darkness, the brilliant starry night of cool sheets against his body, or the golden light of anonymous female flesh against his, in which day was the coruscating fireworks of food crunching between his teeth, the celestial chime of his hot body hitting the cool water of the pool after the curry flavor of the sauna, the billowing green clouds of the surf breaking against the foot of the cliffs.

  People floated through this quicksilver wonderland as shifting, illusive constellations of sensory images. Ricky-tick piano. Chemical female musk. Cloud of Havana smoke. The wail of an electric guitar. Peppermint and red wine. Hysterical, confined gonging. Smoked chili peppers. Garlic-and-peptic gall. The melancholy wail of a gypsy violinist playing hot jazz on a tuba. The sights and sounds and tastes and smells and feels that were the sensory images of the residents of Golden Groves interpenetrated the images of the inanimate world, blending and melding with them, until people and things became Indistinguishable aspects of the chaotic whole.

  Marvin’s mind, except in isolated moments, consisted entirely of the combination of sensory impulses getting through to his brain at any given time. He existed as the confluence of these sensory images; in a sense, he became his sensory experience, no longer time-bound to memory and expectation, no longer a detached point of view sardonically bouncing around inside his own skull. Only in isolated stretches when his synesthetic flashes were at momentary ebbs did he step outside his own immediate experience, wonder at the strangeness in his own mind, watch himself moving through the trees and cabins and people of Golden Groves like some kind of automaton. At these times, he felt a certain vague sense of loss. He could not tell whether it was sadness at his temporary fall from a more sublime mental state, or whether his ordinary everyday consciousness was mourning its own demise.

  One morning, when the granola in his mouth had scattered jeweled images of sparkling beads as he crunched it against a coffee backdrop of brown velvet, Harry Krell held him back as he started to walk out onto the porch for his morning booster session.

  “This is day thirty for you, Marvin,” Krell said.

  Marvin stared back at him dumbly, hearing a hollow, brassy wail, seeing a rectangle of blight orange outlined against deep blue.

  “I said this is the last day you’ve paid for. Either pony up another five hundred dollars, or send for someone to take you back to L.A. You won’t be in any shape to drive for about a week.”

  Marvin’s sensorium had changed again. He was standing in the cool living room near the open glass doors, through which sunlight seemed to extend in a solid chunk, “Thirty days?” he said dazedly. “Has it been thirty days? I’ve lost count.” Lord, he thought, I was only supposed to be here a week or two! I haven’t done any work in a month! I must be nearly broke, and the alimony payment is past due. My God, thirty days, and I can hardly remember them at all!

  “Well I’ve kept good count,” said Krell. “You’ve used up your five hundred dollars, and this is no charity operation…”

  Marvin found his mind racing madly like some runaway machine trying futilely to catch up with a world that had passed it by, desperately trying to sync itself back in gear with the real world of bank, statements, alimony courts, four-day shooting schedules, rubber checks, vice-squad hassles, recalcitrant actresses, greasy backers. If I can cast something in three or four days, maybe I can use the same cast to shoot three quickies back-to-back, but I’ll have to scout three different locations or it won’t work. That should give me enough money to cover the monthly nut and keep Karen’s lawyers off my back if I get all the money up front, pay them first and kite checks until—

  “Well, Marvin, you want to write out another five hundred dollar check or—”

  “What?” Marvin grunted. “Another five hundred dollars? No, no, hell, I’m broke, I’ve already been here too… I mean, I’ve got to get back to L.A. immediately.”

  “Well, maybe I’ll see you around again sometime,” said Harry Krell. He walked into the brilliant mass of sunlight, leaving Marvin standing alone in the shadowed living room, and, as he did, Marvin saw a brilliant pulse of sunshine yellow, heard an enormous chime, felt a terrible pang of paradise lost.

  But there was no time to sort his head out. He had to call Earl Day, his regular cameraman, and get him to come out and drive him back to Los Angeles in the Targa. They could put together three concepts on the way in, start casting tomorrow, and have some money in four or five days. Gotta make up for lost time fast, fast, fast!

  For the barest moment, Bill Marvin was enveloped in rainbow fire which sputtered and crackled like color-TV snow, and he heard the zipping, syncopated whooshing of metal birds soaring past his ears, igniting phantom traces of memories almost forgotten after the frantic madness of grinding out three pornies in less than a month, slowing his racing metabolism, catching for a fleeting instant his psychic breath.

  Then he was back stiff-spined in the driver’s seat of his Porsche, his hands gripping the wheel like spastic claws, the engine growling at his back, barreling down the left lane of the Ventura Freeway at seventy-five miles per hour in moderate traffic. The flash had come and gone so quickly that he hadn’t even had time to feel any sense of danger, unlike the first time he had tried to drive, only five days out of Golden Groves, when he nearly creamed out as the road became a sharp melody through rumbling drums up in the twisty Hollywood Hills. Now the synesthetic flashes were few—one or two a day—and so transient that they weren’t much more dangerous behind the wheel than a strong sneeze. Each one slipped through his mind like a ghost, leaving only a peculiar echo of vague sadness.

  The first couple of weeks of production on the other hand, had been a real nightmare. Up until maybe ten days ago, he had been flashing every half hour or so, and strongly enough so that he hadn’t been able to do his own driving, so that takes had been ruined when he tripped out in the middle of them, so that the actors and crew sometimes thought he was stoned or flipping out and tried to take advantage of it. Fortunately, he had made so many pornies by now that he could just about do it in his sleep. The worst of it had been that making the films was so boring that he found himself actually waiting for the synesthetic flashes, concent
rating on them when they came, even trying to anticipate them, and experiencing the actual work as something unreal, as marking time. He was never much interested in sex when he was shooting porn—after treating female bodies like meat all day it was pretty hard to get turned on by them at night—and the only time he had really felt alive was when he was flashing or involved in one of the hundreds of horrible hassles.

  He made an abrupt three-lane jump and pulled off the freeway at Laurel Canyon Boulevard, drove across the ticky-tacky of the San Fernando Valley, began climbing up into the Hollywood Hills. The Valley side of the Hills was just more flatland style suburban plastic, but once across Mulholland Drive, which ran along the major ridge line, Laurel Canyon Boulevard curved and wound down toward the Sunset Strip, following an old dry stream bed through a deep gorge that cut through overgrown and twisted hills festooned with weird and half-hidden houses, a scene from some Disney Black Forest elf cartoon.

  Usually, Marvin got a big lift out of leaving the dead plastic landscape of lowland Los Angeles for the shadowy, urbanized-yet-countrified world of the Canyon. Usually, he got a tremendous emotional surge out of having finished one film—let alone three—driving away from it all on the last day of cutting, with any one of a dozen readily available girls already waiting at the house for him to start a week-long lost weekend, his reward for a job well done.

  But this time, the drive home did nothing for him, the end of the final cutting only left him empty and stale, and he hadn’t even bothered to have a girl waiting for him at the house. He felt tapped out, bugged, emotionally flat, and the worst of it was that he didn’t know why.

  He pulled into his carport and walked around the side of his house into the seclusion of the unkempt, overgrown garden. Even the wild, lush vegetation of his private hillside seemed washed out, pallid, and somehow unreal. The bird sounds in the trees and underbrush seemed like so much Muzak.