The Complete Roderick (50 page)

Noon. The apostle clock chimed, and out of its innards came a parade of tiny wooden figures. Their faces and clothes had long since dissolved in wormholes; they now looked less like apostles than bowling pins.

Automatically, Mr Kratt lifted his snout to listen. His little black eyes lost their hard focus for a moment, and his powerful hands stopped throttling the pages of a company report.

‘You know, bub, my old man left me that clock when he died. I ever tell you about my old man?’

Ben Franklin, checking his own watch, shrugged. ‘I don’t think so. Er, what was he like?’

The hard focus returned to Mr Kratt’s little black eyes. ‘He was a bum. A professional failure. A dummy. If I had my way, people like him would be turned into fishfood. At birth.’ He gripped the company report again in a stranglehold. ‘At birth. Damn it, I never could stand cripples …’

He cleared his throat and looked at Franklin. ‘Anyway, where were we?’

‘The patent leaseback deal with –?’

‘No never mind that now, I want to go into this goddamned learning robot gimmick. You and Hare promised to deliver this thing six months ago, how long are we supposed to carry you? So far I don’t see anything on paper even.’

Ben Franklin fingered his upper lip as though stroking the moustache he had not worn for years. ‘I can explain.’

‘Let’s hear it.’

‘Well I’ve been having trouble assembling the right research team. Hare’s a good enough research director for ordinary stuff, but this is special. I wanted to bring in this colleague of mine from the University, Dan Sonnenschein. He –’

‘I know, I know, he’s the guy who really invented this gimmick.’

‘Well we all worked on Roderick, I don’t think it’s fair to say any one of us really invented – but Dan yes Dan was certainly more, more familiar with some of the programming problems. So I wanted –’

‘Sure, sure, but we settled all this last year, didn’t we? I gave you the go-ahead, hell, you’re the vice-president in charge of product development, get this Sunshine guy, get Frankenstein, get anybody, only get moving, we need that gimmick.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t keep calling it a gimmick, Mr Kratt.’

‘Call it a fucking pipe dream I wouldn’t be too far off, would I? Damn it you and Sunshine aren’t at the University now, this is real life. I know you say you built a prototype and it got lost or something, but all I get are explanations, excuses, you haven’t even got your research team together, damn it, bub …’

‘Yes sir, but you know I did mention that Dan was in the hospital, his nerves –’

‘You said he was in the looney ward over at the U Hospital but so what? All these research geniuses are nuts, look at Dr Hare now. Trying to make pancakes with phonograph records on them, no idea what he’s doing or why, we just wind him up and point him at a problem. So why don’t you just spring this pal of yours outa the looney ward, stick him on the payroll and –’

‘Frankly I don’t think he’s well enough to work for us, not yet.’

‘Great, so we sit around waiting, do we? While the competition cuts our nuts off, that’s not my idea of running a company, bub. KUR Industries is a growth company, damnit, and growth needs ideas. See
that?’
He suddenly thrust out a thick hand. Ben Franklin flinched, but Mr Kratt was only showing him a ring: a heavy gold claw mounting a steel ball.

‘That’s a pinball from my first machine, bub. One stinking
machine in a dark corner of a greasy little diner in a neighbourhood so crummy the winos wouldn’t puke on it. And I built up from there – more machines, an arcade, a chain of arcades, a carnival, saunas, leisure centres, bowling alleys, business machines, pleasure machines, fun foods – and all the time I had to feed the company with ideas. Ideas. Hell, I even hired you as an ideas man, and then suddenly all the ideas stopped.’

‘Mr Kratt, I’m sorry if –’

‘Because you drag your feet, bub, you keep on dragging your feet. Look at our funfood venture, Jinjur Boy, you dragged your feet over that. Best damned idea in the whole industry, a gingerbread boy with built-in microcircuitry, a talking toy and one hundred percent edible, how could it lose? Only you had to drag your –’

‘But Mr Kratt, you can’t always hurry research like that, we did have problems with those mercury batteries –’

‘Problems? Only problem we had was a bad press, a handful of kids get a bellyache and right away everybody wants to blame us.’

‘But some of those kids ate Jinjur Boys and died, others still have brain damage from mercur –’

‘Nobody ever proved a thing. Damn it, bub, when you run a growth company, you gotta take chances, okay maybe we made one mistake but that’s all in the past. Forget the damn past, forget it.’

‘Yes sir.’

‘We belong to the future.’ Mr Kratt’s cigar had gone out. He threw it away, got up from his desk and walked to the window.

‘The future, yes sir.’ Frankliln watched Kratt standing there in silence, heavy hands clenched behind him, heavy shoulders hunched against the sky.

‘Look, we need this robot gimmick now. Get Sunshine or get somebody.’

Ben Franklin looked down on the city, etched in grey stone and black glass, a gleaming future to which he wanted to belong.

‘Sonnenschein, initial D?’ asked the hospital receptionist.

‘Yes. I’m his son, Roderick.’

‘I’m sorry, our records show he has no immediate family.’

*

‘That waiter looks just like Lyle, you remember Lyle? Only he hasn’t got Lyle’s birthmark …’

‘Oh, speaking of plastic surgery, guess what Barb paid for her new chest? You’d think it was gold instead of whatsit, silicon …’

‘Darling, it’s not silicon, it’s sili
cone.’

‘Yeah but what do you think she paid for her silly cones?’

The voices from the alcoves rose and fell, striving to be heard above the drone of taped music, the noises of feeding animals, other voices from other alcoves.

‘Basically I’m a Manichean myself …’

‘Manic? I wouldn’t call you manic, you’re more …’

‘… Libran basically, I took her to see …’

‘… a puppet government, okay, but
whose
puppet, that’s what I want to know. Take …’

‘… The Reagan Expressway through Hilldale only there was this accident at the Dalecrest exit, we hadda go all the way down to …’

‘Prague? Terrible, just terrible, my phlebitis acted up all week, maybe I should get me some dacron veins or …’

‘Spaghetti, didn’t the Chinese invent that?’

‘… a sage pillow for spirit dreams – but hey, isn’t that Sandy? Over there with the Labrador.’

‘I thought Sandy
was
a Labrador – oh you mean Sandy Mann, no they’re on vacation in Prague or someplace …’

‘… Ruritania, I can’t even find it on a map

‘… basically Libran until we went and had her spayed …’

‘Now everybody thinks the Japanese invented transistors just like everybody used to think the Chinese invented the abacus, and even if spaghetti isn’t Western …’

‘That looks just like Sandy …’

‘That sure looks like Lyle …’

The waiter who looked like Lyle moved smoothly through the dining room, serving dog and master with the same polite, mindless devotion. Roderick seemed a perfect minion. He was able to balance a heavy tray while a Sealyham urinated on his foot; to smile at the owner of a pit-bull that was trying to shred his hand; to take down details of a large, complicated order while a toy poodle tried to mount his ankle.

Beneath the smooth surface Roderick dreamt of violence.
There would be like this big gangster with all these bodyguards, and Roderick would have to kill each of them in a different way like maybe an exploding rice-flail or a duel on skates with chain-saws and like maybe strangle all their guard dogs and like maybe … hundreds of corpses, oceans of blood, until he would shoot it out with Mr Big, put a blue hole in his forehead and watch him crumple slowly, a look of surprise on his face as he becomes dead, very dead … until Roderick was victorious and alone.

Roderick was not victorious, just alone. He watched the dogs and their owners moving with assurance in their own world, where a Chihuahua and a St Bernard would recognize each other as dogs, a Republican optometrist and a Trotskyist dope dealer speak the same language. No one recognized Roderick or spoke to him as anything but ‘waiter’.

There were conversations of which he understood hardly a word:

‘Well I’m doing Rolfing now, but I was heavy into oneness training.’

‘Connections, I know. I had this gestalt thing to work through with my family, you know? And –’

‘Yeah how is Jaynice, anyway?’

‘She’s more in touch with herself now only – I don’t know, maybe familying just isn’t her mind-set.’

‘Too many tight synapses, I felt just like that after Transactioning, I kept noticing my own tight synapses. I’m gonna try Science of Mind training next, or haptics maybe, you gotta try something …’

‘Nodally it’s probably all oned together anyway.’

‘… yeah …’

‘… yeah, synergy is. Isn’t it?’

‘Yeah. Oh waiter? We’re ready to order here.’

He would take this order and move on to an alcove where two women, having spread paper napkins on the table between them, opened their jewelled pillboxes and set out arrays of coloured pills as though arranging beads for a barter, which, in a sense they were.

‘Oh is that pink one Thanidorm or Toxidol?’

‘That’s Yegrin. Oh you mean this bitty pink one, that’s Zombutal, beautiful, you want one?’

‘Thanks, kid, now let’s see what I got here to trade, these green ones are Valsed, the light green are Quasipoise, and the green two-tone are I forget, either Jitavert or Robutyl. The red must be Normadorms.’

‘Is that like Penserons?’

‘Only stronger, you want a couple? Or hey I got these terrific mood flatteners called what is it? Parasol? Here this yellow one. Or is that Invidon? Sometimes I get so mixed up …’

‘… me too … I need something …’ Well-manicured nails the colour of Bing cherries selected a capsule of the same colour and carried it to lips of the same colour. ‘A Eulepton.’

‘Was that a Eulepton? I thought it was a Barbidol … I get so mixed up …’

‘Me too …’

Then to the kitchen where Mr Danton would twist his arm and threaten him, then back with a heavy tray to meet another territorial Sealyham, another angry pit-bull.

‘Is it Sue Jane that’s married to Ronnie now? I get so mixed up talking about Sue and her pals, all those divorces and all …’

‘Well, it really boils down to three men and three women, and they been married in every possible legal way to each other, eight weddings in all. And none of them married anybody else …’

‘You take Clarence now, he was his first wife’s first husband, his second wife’s second, and his third wife’s third!’

‘That’s nothing. Vern’s third wife’s third husband’s third wife is the same person as his second wife’s second husband’s second wife, how do you like that?’

‘… divorced the sister of … and right away married Mary Sue, who was single. But his ex bounced back just as fast, she married the guy who’d just split up with …’

‘Sure sure but what I want to know is, who was Sue Ellen’s third husband?’

Roderick, leaning over to polish the table, murmured what he thought was the answer.
^*

The people at the table looked at him. ‘You know them or something?’

‘No, I just wanted to help. I –’

‘Nobody invited you to butt in, asshole,’ said the owner of a Yorkie now devouring a bowl of goose liver.

‘But I just thought – if everything you all said was true –’

‘You calling us liars?’

‘No I – sorry, I’m sorry.’ He backed away, stepping on a coil of dogshit, tripping over a leash as he fled the dining room. He wished everyone sliced thin and fed to to their own pets who would in turn crumple slowly with looks of surprise as he shot them dead, very dead … no one would miss the human species or the canine either, least of all Roderick the victorious.

An hour later, a woman smiled at him and told him he was a sweet boy. That changed everything: he cancelled the extermination of two species and decided to go dancing instead. But first another try at University Hospital.

‘Daniel Sonnenschein,’ he said to the receptionist. ‘I’m his stepson, and I
demand
to see him.’

‘Certainly, sir. Just take a seat.’

Two hours later, Roderick was told that visiting hours were over for the day. A pair of security cops did the telling, and showed him how to get out of the building.

The figure performed its purpose admirably. Keeping perfect time and step, and holding its little partner tight clasped in an unyielding embrace, it revolved steadily, pouring forth at the same time a constant flow of squeaky conversation, broken by brief intervals of grinding silence.

Jerome K. Jerome,
The Dancing Partner

The Escorial Ballroom was a large gloomy place where a few tired-looking couples leaned together, shuffling slowly around the floor to
The Tennessee Waltz.
The three white-haired musicians chatted and drank as they played, and the drummer was eating his lunch with one hand. The dancers seemed not much younger or more interested in anything: the men wore old suits and sideburns, the women wore flared dresses, heavy makeup and large earrings.

While Roderick was standing at the edge of the dark dance floor trying to figure out what to do next, he felt a little bump at the rear of his crotch. He turned to see a plump woman with heavy makeup and large earrings. She was examining her thumbnail and frowning.

‘Jesus, try to give somebody a friendly goose and you run into – what you got there, iron underpants?’

‘I’m sorry, are you hurt?’

‘Busted nail. Oh well, I could’ve done it opening a can of sardines, and I don’t even like sardines. You dancing?’

‘Well I, I’m not sure, I –’

She seized him. ‘You’re dancing.’

She had a deep, pleasant laugh, blonde hair going dark at the roots, and her name was Ida. She didn’t seem to mind that Roderick couldn’t dance at all.