The Complete Roderick (55 page)

‘I think I see what you mean.’

Luke laughed. ‘They see it, too. They see everything I ever did mean and ever will mean! Well, you get back and they have to debrief you, that means a lot more talk about how well they’ve been watching you. Then come the awards and shaking hands with the President and banquets and more awards and parades and crowds, crowds everywhere, even if you get a minute alone in your hotel room if you turn on TV there you are, eating that ham sandwich again, the world is not a fine and private place at all.’

Roderick studied the oddly familiar stranger again. He had a long jaw, and the skin of his face seemed dull in the glaring lights of the Tik Tok Club – powdered? The only really familiar feature of that long, empty face was the pair of tinted glasses. Who did they remind him of? No one.

‘That’s not the worst, the publicity’s not the worst. The worst is when it’s over,’ said Luke. ‘Because then you go home and it seems good to be home, the wife and kids seem terrific after the others. So you relax, have a few beers, watch an old movie on TV with the wife, go to bed. You find yourself getting a hard-on, and just as you’re about to nudge the wife, a little voice in your ear says, “Nice going, Luke. Good idea to have sex with your missus, only watch the old pulse rate. You’re lookin’ good.” It’s old Mission Control, still with me! Still there! Still watching! The hard-on naturally vanishes.

‘And Christ, they been with me ever since, watching every move and passing little palsy-walsy remarks on everything I do. I went to a Corps doctor and asked him, was it possible they’d planted some kind of device on me? Some video-radio device on me or even in me? He sent me to a psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist had me thrown out of the Corps.’

Felix of the tinted glasses told the woman in black fur one last joke as they left. Tired of slumming. Tinted glass, tinted glass.

‘I thought when I left the Corps it would all stop. But no, not a chance: once they get you, they get you for life. Every time I so much as farted, Mission Control would tell me what a great idea it was to vent that gas buildup.

‘Well naturally that wrecked my happy marriage. What kind of wife can put up with that, her husband gets ready to make love and then suddenly says “Affirmative, Mission Control” and gets a tired cock? And the kids, too, I’d be reading them a bedtime story when Mission Control would come on the line, asking was I sure I read that last paragraph right, and would I say again?’

Again Roderick said to himself, tinted glass, through a glass darkly but then face to long empty face – of course, it was the gold-haired stranger! Of course with the hair dyed, a different pair of tinted glasses
–
but no disguising the empty grin, the long empty face that, once the pocks were puttied up, had nothing in it.

‘Excuse me,’ said Roderick to the bartender. ‘That couple who just left, woman in fur, man in tinted glasses? Do you know them? Know where they went?’

‘Nope. Why.’

Roderick ran to the door and out on the corner. There were empty streets stretching away in four directions, no human to be seen, nothing but a wind-blown page of newspaper.

Roderick went back to the bar. ‘Thought I saw someone I knew … probably wrong. Go on. About your voices.’

‘Go on?
They
go on, pal.
They
go on.’

‘And they’re still with you, right now?’

‘Affirmative. Saying it’s a good story but nobody’d believe it and that I’ve had enough ethanol. Time to leave.’

‘A little voice in your ear,’ Roderick said. ‘Sounds kind of like a conscience.’

‘It is a conscience. Correct and confirmed, it is a damned conscience. That’s why I keep messing around with religion and politics. I need to find some way to get rid of this conscience. To exorcize it. I mean hell, millions of people get along without consciences, why should I get stuck? I mean Nixon did what he wanted to, right? So why me? Why me?’

Roderick knew no answer. Which was unfortunate, because Luke was getting loud and defiant.

‘I won’t put up with it!’ he yelled. ‘You hear that, Mission Control? I won’t put up with it! I’ll find some kind of religion that will shut your still small trap for good! Or politics – I’ll start a goddamned revolution that will burn Houston to the ground!’

The bartender approached. ‘Get your friend outa here. Maybe we ain’t a high-class joint, but we got our limit. He controls himself now, or out.’

‘Over and out,’ murmured Luke, as Roderick helped him from the bar. ‘Your friend doesn’t control himself, Rickwood, because they control him. He’s not even human, just a radio-controlled model astronaut. Mission Control says I’m not walking too straight. Am I?’

‘That depends on where you want to go.’

‘Gert’s Café, where else? The address is on this.’ Luke fumbled in all his pockets and came up with a handbill printed in red:

WE SAY NO

NO to Fascist prison atrocities, extermination of dissidents and tortured confessions!

NO to Marxist-Leninist mindless bureaucracies grinding down the disaffected in slave labour camps!

NO to Capitalist corporate corruption, conglomerate exploitation of the workers and rape of the Third World!

NO to Maoist robotocracy, smashing individualism under mind-bending, brain-washing statism!

NO to the so-called New Left and other effete dilettante so-called movements drowning in their own so-called rhetoric!

NO to Anarchism, Trotskyism, Democracy and all other useless isms and ocracies!

Left Right and Centre, it’s all

A GREAT BIG NOTHING!!!

Find out the truth tonight: Mammoth meeting of the

FRACTIOUS DISENGAGEMENTISTS

(Gert’s Café Branch)

Gert’s Café

1141 Richelieu Ave. So.

Well and why shouldn’t 1141 Richelieu Ave. So. turn out to be an ordinary frame house in a slightly rundown neighbourhood? Why shouldn’t it be allowed to have a small sign on the front lawn:
GERTS CAFE. KEEP OUT. THIS MEANS YOU,
and why shouldn’t this make Roderick hesitate?

‘Maybe we shouldn’t go in,’ he said, at which Luke laughed.

‘You don’t know much about politics, Rickwood.’ The question which cries out for an answer now is, who does know anything about politics? Isn’t it just a dirty game for cynical manipulators of mass ignorance?

They walked in, by direct action demanding to be let in and given the same rights as anyone else – as those who could not read, for example.

Gert’s Café provided only four tables, but then there were only three Fractious Disengagementists in the Gert’s Café Branch, which was also so far the only branch of this new regrouping of committed elements of radical consciousness in anticipation of a totally new unfettered mass spiritual/ political movement unifying to force a final showdown with the present-day corrupt and powerful system. Anyway Bill was playing the video game machine in the corner all evening, so didn’t need a chair.

So far Gert’s Café had a menu but no manifesto, but tonight’s meeting would hopefully fix that. The menu had taken careful planning and much meaningful discussion, working through all objections to California grapes and Brazilian coffee and any other foodstuff outputted by any other oppressive regime. It was finally agreed to limit the menu to bread and water – homebaked stoneground wholemeal bread and pure bottled mineral spring water – the fare of all political prisoners everywhere.

These prisoners of conscience became acquainted: there was Rickwood, a taciturn guy whose symmetrical, bland face probably concealed a real thinker; Luke, a drunken loudmouth but probably revolutionary at heart; Bill, the big guy with the beard who played video games and said little, in fact nothing; Wes, the small intense guy with rimless glasses who talked a blue streak and wanted action! action! and ‘Gert’ who was really Joanne and married to Wes but who preferred not to be known as Mrs or even Ms but adopted the totally unbiased and sex-free title Msr, applicable to men persons and to women persons, in any order.

What was to be done? The entire world was now in the grip of authoritarian zombarchical police states, maintaining power through multinational conglomerates at the top and the jack-booted forces of oppression at the bottom. The world was beginning to resemble something in a satirical science-fiction novel of no great quality. It was time to do something, all right. Time for some all-out, ultimate, definitizing gesture that would make it clear for all time where everybody stood.

Wes wanted to go out right away and collect money to save up for a cobalt bomb that would wipe out all life on this planet for millions or maybe billions of years: that was action. Gert and Luke preferred to argue about the placement of punctuation in a draft manifesto condemning ‘world interdependences/coercive structures/Houston Mission Control/militarist juntas/pigshit bureaucracies’.

Roderick, having gone into the kitchen to find an outlet and recharge his batteries, came back at dawn to find the arguments still raging on, and Bill still playing a video game. Since it was breakfast time, they all sat down and (all but Roderick) had a bread and water breakfast. Bill spoke for the first time:

‘A lot of people talk a lot about blowing up the world, tearing it all down and starting over,’ he said ‘But I’m really doing something. I got me a job with the Hackme Demolition Company, and we’re really tearing stuff down.’

‘You blow stuff up for some capitalist,’ said Wes. ‘That’s no good. A rich guy in silk hat and striped pants holds out this bag with a dollar sign on it, and you say “Yes sir, yes sir. You want me to lose that building? Yes sir.”’

‘But I still blow it up,’ said Bill. ‘It’s still one building less.’ He thought for a moment, chewing his bread. ‘And they’re still hiring, if anybody here wants a job, a honest job.’

Wes already had a job, as clerk to a tax lawyer for a leading investment firm. Joanne had the cafe to run, Wes added.

Roderick and Luke agreed to help dismantle the world.

The apostle clock chimed. Mr Kratt lifted his snout automatically and listened. For a second the heavy black V of his brow-line softened.

‘Okay Smith, where were we?’

‘O’Smith, sir. The name is O’Smith. And the game today is I do believe industrill espionedge. Ain’t it?’ The insolent tone was unexpected. Nice change of pace, Kratt thought, from all the panting yes-men around here. Of course it was the desperate insolence of a loser, just look at the man. Kratt looked, and found himself trying to stare O’Smith down.

In essence, this ‘Mister’ O’Smith (who seemed to have no first name) was a fat cowboy with a deep tan. He wore the modified Western clothes favoured by bogus oilmen and revivalists on the make, but even his hand-tooled boots failed to give him a prosperous look. His fat would be the fat of poverty, of hash-house burgers dripping with mayonnaise, pancakes or powdered-sugar doughnuts in the morning and greasy pizza at night, watery tap beer and syrupy wine, and cokes glugged down too fast in desert gas stations. Kratt had seen thousands of O’Smiths passing through his amusement arcades and his carnival, hurrying on their way from trailer-camp childhoods to flophouse deaths, losers all the way.

Mr Kratt’s gaze faltered. ‘Okay, let me give you a general rundown on this operation and then turn you over to my product-development boy, Ben Franklin.’

‘Yes sir. Now do I liasonize with you or this Frankelin?’

‘Him, this is all his show. See, Franklin worked on a research project at the University, a few years ago. Building a robot.’

‘Yep.’ O’Smith was staring hard again.

‘When the project broke up, the robot disappeared. Naturally

Franklin was disappointed. After putting in all that work on the thing, to have somebody come along and steal it …’

‘So you want me to steal it back?’

That’s about it. It’s worth ten grand in cash, plus all reasonable expenses. Agreed?’ Mr Kratt stood up and was about to offer his hand when O’Smith turned aside and walked to the window.

‘By God you got a view here, sir. A view! From up here it looks like you could just reach down and pick up any old piece of that city down there, pick it up in your hand. Like it’s all yours. Guess lots of it is yours, right? KUR is such a big old conglomerate, like I guess you manufacture that there Brazos Billy gadget, right?’

‘Brazos Billy? What – oh, you mean the fast-draw amusement machine, yes one of our subsidiaries handles that one, why?’

‘Nothin’, I just always kind of liked old Brazos, boy I must of drawed against him a thousand times – at bus stations, airports, arcades.’

Kratt looked at his watch. ‘There a point to all this?’

‘I like the way when you hit old Brazos he flops down on the floor and bleeds like a stuck pig. Plastic blood I know but boy it surely looks real. I always wanted one of them machines for myself so I could practise at home.’

‘You want me to throw in a toy, is that it?’

O’Smith grinned. ‘’Predate that, Mr Kratt sir. But I was only calling attention to the difference between you and me. I wanted a robot for years and never got it. You want one for five minutes, you just call me in, say “Ten grand in cash” and you got it.’ The grin broadened. ‘You got it, Mr Kratt. Sir.’

O’Smith offered his left hand, a final insult.

Mister O’Smith still had his smile when he had finished talking to Ben Franklin, who could only give him two minutes. He kept the smile on until he was safely out of the building and into a bar, where he ordered a tap beer. Then he let it go.

‘What’s the matter, cowboy? Somebody shoot your horse?’

He looked at the woman in purple with her purple lipstick, and he continued to scowl. She raised her shotglass and nodded to him as though he’d bought her a drink. ‘You wouldn’t think it to look at me now,’ she said, ‘but I was once a Paris model.’

Model what? he wondered.

‘I was. A
mannequin.’

‘Lena!’ The bartender shouted at her as at a dog. ‘Quit bothering the customers, I told you before.’