Summer of Love, a Time Travel by Lisa Mason Page B

raised with a bowling ball became imprinted on
it and followed it everywhere as if it were a mother goose. Stan is her sexual
bowling ball.
    Now
she swallows hot tears. Her throat is killing her. Her nipples tingle, she can
barely keep food down, and she’s got to pee every half hour. The Transparent
Woman, a.k.a. Stella, dances on the coffee table.
    Her
period is three days late.
    *  
*   *
    Fawn
leaps up on the coffee table and dances with Stella. They proceed to kick
everything off, the grease-lipped beer mugs, rotten apple cores, the can of
half-eaten SpaghettiOs, their clothes. People drift in and out of the living
room, sit on the floor in circles, pass joints around, dance by themselves, roam
off to raid the kitchen, or wander away through the halls.
    Stan
the Man has disappeared.
    Susan
is feverish, burning up. She’s so exhausted, her bones feel like a Gumby Doll’s.
She just wants to sleep despite the fact it’s only late afternoon. Peace and
quiet, that’s what she desperately needs. She climbs up the three stairways to
her room.
    Only
it’s not her room. It’s Stan’s room.
    The
door is closed. Susan hears voices, not just his. Laughter, the chuckle of
seduction. She pushes the door, and it swings open. He’s too wasted to have locked
it.
    She
gets an eyeful of Marilyn’s Mill Valley thighs and, between them, Stan the Man.
    As
she flees down the stairs, Susan wonders if she can stop the trembling in her
heart.

5
    White Rabbit
    Chi
perches in the catbird seat for his noon-to-four-thirty shift, daydreaming of
imploders, calcite crystals, the awesome dish of the chronometer. Has he really
been gone only ten days? It seems like forever since he’s left his future in
the past. The catbird seat, which Ruby rigged up, is a chair cushion tied on an
amputated chair seat. The seat, in turn, is nailed to the top of a rickety
stepladder set in the back of the Mystic Eye. Ruby is boundlessly resourceful,
but the tachyonic shuttle it’s not.
    Chi
folds his arms in the djellaba she gave him, a scarlet-striped robe he pulls
over his clothes that covers him, head to toe. He pulls the hood over his head
and around his face, allowing a lock of his long red hair to fall across his
brow and sunglasses. Ruby gave him the sunglasses, too. Ray-Bans, she calls
them, the color candy-apple red.
    Thus
anonymous, swathed in red, hunching over gargoyle-style, he watches people mill
around the shop. Down below, beneath his gaze, shoppers hesitate. Some touch
the merchandise reverentially, glance up at him, and replace a mojo bag or a
conjuring wand just so. Others can’t conceal the larcenous intent crossing
their faces. A boy no more than twelve, in dirty denim and floppy hair like ten
thousand other boys passing through the Haight-Ashbury, fingers a brass
butterfly strung on a leather thong.
    Chi
lets loose a booming, “The Mystic Eye Sees All!”
    The
would-be knickknacker jumps, so badly startled he drops the butterfly and
dashes out the door.
    Two
women smile up at him and whisper to each other, giggling. College students,
maybe twenty, in the uniform of Beat intellectuals—black turtlenecks, jeans,
and sandals, canvas shoulder bags filled with books by Alan Watts or Marshall
McLuhan. The tall slim one is so prime she could compete with Bella Venus,
except for her gooey black hair. He pictures her nude. Without her clothes, of
course, but even more, without the wild extrusions from her scalp, her furry
eyebrows, the fuzz on her forearms where she’s pushed back her sleeves. And
without the trauma to her skin: her suntan. He still can’t get over how people
so young look as weather-damaged as day-laborers without domes or proper Block.
The sight is as disturbing to him as a peg-legged beggar would be to this
vivacious girl.
    Chi
longs to tell her: Stay out of the sun. Even your gentle sun. Would his
warning violate Tenet Three of the Grandmother Principle? He sighs. He cannot
affect any person in the past, except as