Summer of Love, a Time Travel (53 page)

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.