Hyperreality Books

“She kissed him quick but deep with her tongue; bubbling over, she pulled away from his mouth, still in an arm-on-shoulders mutual embrace, said: 'Jack, Jack I watched you on television, I mean really watched you, really saw for the very first time what you were doing. You were magnificent, you were everything I always knew you would be the first day I met you in Berkeley, but better — better than anything I could've imagined—because then I was a girl, and you were a boy, and today you were a man, and I ... Well, maybe at the advanced age of thirty-five I'm leaving adolescence and I'm ready to try loving you the way a woman should love a man.'
'That's ... uh ... groovy,' he said, and now she thrilled even at the way he was preoccupied, the old Berkeley distant-focus preoccupation, thinking through her, above her, warm exciting man-thoughts enveloping her in him were the moments she had always loved him most.
'Groovy, and I dig what you're saying — I mean about us. But the show . . . look, Sara, there are things I've got to tell you. I mean, don't think I'm back in the silly old Baby Bolshevik bag. I suppose it looked that way to a lot of people, and there were moments when I ... but I don't do things without a reason, and there are things going on that—'
'I know, Jack,' she said. 'You don't even have to tell me. It stands out all over you. You're involved in something big, something important, the kind of thing you were always meant to do. Something real like you used to — '
'It's not what you think, not what anyone thinks,' he muttered, brows furrowed at some hidden contrapuntal train of thought. 'I don't even know the whole story myself. But I feel something, can smell it ... something so big, so ... I'm afraid to even think about it until I —”
― Norman Spinrad, Bug Jack Barron