V. (40 page)

"Do you ever dig what I'm trying to say," he wondered.

"On the horn I don't," she answered, honest enough, "a girl doesn't understand. All she does is feel. I feel what you play, like I feel what you need when you're inside me. Maybe they're the same thing. McClintic, I don't know. You're kind to me, what is it you want?"

"Sorry," he said. After a while, "This is a good way to relax."

"Stay tonight?"

"Sure."

Slab and Esther, uncomfortable with each other, stood in front of an easel in his place, looking at Cheese Danish # 35. The cheese Danish was a recent obsession of Slab's. He had taken, some time ago, to painting in a frenzy these morning-pastries in every conceivable style, light and setting. The room was already littered with Cubist Fauve and Surrealist cheese Danishes. "Monet spent his declining years at his home in Giverny, painting the water lilies in the garden pool," reasoned Slab. "He painted all kinds of water lilies. He liked water lilies. These are my declining years. I like cheese banishes, they have kept me alive now for longer than I can remember. Why Dot."

The subject of Cheese Danish # 35 occupied only a small area to the lower left of center, where it was pictured impaled on one of the metal steps of a telephone pole. The landscape was an empty street, drastically foreshortened, the only living things in it a tree in the middle distance, on which perched an ornate bird, busily textured with a great many swirls, flourishes and bright-colored patches.

"This," explained Slab in answer to her question, "is my revolt against Catatonic Expressionism: the universal symbol I have decided will replace the Cross in western civilization. It is the Partridge in the Pear Tree. You remember the old Christmas song, which is a linguistic joke. Perdrix, pear tree. The beauty is that it works like a machine yet is animate. The partridge eats pears off the tree and his droppings in turn nourish the tree which groves higher and higher, every day lifting the partridge up and at the same time assuring him of a continuous supply of good. It is perpetual motion, except for one thing." He pointed out a gargoyle with sharp fangs near the top of the picture. The point of the largest fang lay on an imaginary line projected parallel to the axis of the tree and drawn through the head of the bird. "It could as well have been a low-flying airplane or high-tension wire," Slab said. "But someday that bird will be impaled on the gargoyle's teeth, just like the poor cheese Danish is already on the phone pole."

"Why can't he fly away?" Esther said.

"He is too stupid. He used to know how to fly once, but he's forgotten."

"I detect allegory in all this," she said.

"No," said Slab. "That is on the same intellectual level as doing the Times crossword puzzle on Sunday. Phony. Unworthy of you."

She'd wandered to the bed. "No," he almost yelled.

"Slab, it's so bad. It's a physical pain, here." She drew her fingers across her abdomen.

"I'm not getting any either," said Slab. "I can't help it that Schoenmaker cut you off."

"Aren't I your friend?"

"No," said Slab.

"What can I do to show you -"

"Go," said Slab, "is what you can do. And let me sleep. In my chaste army cot. Alone." He crawled to the bed and lay face down. Soon Esther left, forgetting to close the door. Not being the type to slam doors on being rejected.

Roony and Rachel sat at the bar of a neighborhood tavern on Second Avenue. Over in the corner an Irishman and a Hungarian were yelling at each other over the bowling game.

"Where does she go at night," Roony wondered.

"Paola is a strange girl," said Rachel. "You learn after a while not to ask her questions she doesn't want to answer."

"Maybe seeing Pig."

"No. Pig Bodine lives at the V-Note and the Rusty Spoon. He has a letch for Paola a mile long but he reminds her too much, I think, of Pappy Hod. The Navy has a certain way of endearing itself. She stays away from him and it's killing him and I for one am glad to see it."

It's killing me, Winsome wanted to say. He didn't. Lately he'd been running for comfort to Rachel. He'd come in a way to depend on it. Her sanity and aloofness from the Crew, her own self-sufficiency drew him. But he was no nearer to arranging any assignation with Paola. Perhaps he was afraid of Rachel's reaction. He was beginning to suspect she was not the sort who approved of pimping for one's roommate. He ordered another boilermaker.

"Roony, you drink too much," she said. "I worry about you."

"Nag, nag, nag." He smiled.

Next evening, Profane was sitting in the guardroom at Anthroresearch Associates, feet propped on a gas stove, reading an avant-garde western called Existentialist Sheriff, which Pig Bodine had recommended. Across one of the laboratory spaces, features lit Frankenstein's-monsterlike by a night light, facing Profane, sat SHROUD: synthetic human, radiation output determined.

Its skin was cellulose acetate butyrate, a plastic transparent not only to light but also to X-rays, gamma rays and neutrons. Its skeleton had once been that of a living human; now the bones were decontaminated and the long ones and spinal column hollowed inside to receive radiation dosimeters. SHROUD was five feet nine inches tall - the fiftieth percentile of Air Force standards. The lungs, sex organs, kidneys, thyroid, liver, spleen and other internal organs were hollow and made of the same clear plastic as the body shell. These could be filled with aqueous solutions which absorbed the same amount of radiation as the tissue they represented.

Anthroresearch Associates was a subsidiary of Yoyodyne. It did research for the government on the effects of high-altitude and space flight; for the National Safety Council on automobile accidents; and for Civil Defense on radiation absorption, which was where SHROUD came in. In the eighteenth century it was often convenient to regard man as a clockwork automaton. In the nineteenth century, with Newtonian physics pretty well assimilated and a lot of work in thermodynamics going on, man was looked on more as a heat-engine, about 40 per cent efficient. Now in the twentieth century, with nuclear and subatomic physics a going thing, man had become something which absorbs X-rays, gamma rays and neutrons. Such at least was Oley Bergomask's notion of progress. It was the subject of his welcome-aboard lecture on Profane's first day of employment, at five in the afternoon as Profane was going on and Bergomask off. There were two eight-hour night shifts, early and late (though Profane, whose time scale was skewed toward the past, preferred to call them late and early) and Profane to date had worked them both.

Three times a night he had to make the rounds of the lab areas, windows and heavy equipment. If an all-night routine experiment was in progress he'd have to take readings and if they were out of tolerance wake up the technician on duty, who'd usually be sleeping on a cot in one of the offices. At first there'd been a certain interest in visiting the accident research area, which was jokingly referred to as the chamber of horrors. Here weights were dropped on aged automobiles, inside which would be sitting a manikin. The study now under way had to do with first-aid training, and various versions of SHOCK - synthetic human object, casualty kinematics - got to sit in the driver's, death, or back seat of the test cars. Profane still felt a certain kinship with SHOCK, which was the first inanimate schlemihl he'd ever encountered. But in there too was a certain wariness because the manikin was still only a "human object"; plus a feeling of disdain as if SHOCK had decided to sell out to humans; so that now what had been its inanimate own were taking revenge.

SHOCK was a marvelous manikin. It had the same build as SHROUD but its flesh was molded of foam vinyl, its skin vinyl plastisol, its hair a wig, its eyes cosmetic-plastic, its teeth (for which, in fact, Eigenvalue had acted as subcontractor) the same kind of dentures worn today by 19 per cent of the American population, most of them respectable. Inside were a blood reservoir in the thorax, a blood pump in the midsection and a nickel-cadmium battery power supply in the abdomen. The control panel, at the side of the chest, had toggles and rheostat controls for venous and arterial bleeding, pulse rate, and even respiration rate, when a sucking chest wound was involved. In the latter case plastic lungs provided the necessary suction and bubbling. They were controlled by an air pump in the abdomen, with the motor's cooling vent located in the crotch. An injury of the sexual organs could still be simulated by an attachable moulage, but then this blocked the cooling vent. SHOCK could not therefore have a sucking chest wound and mutilated sexual organs simultaneously. A new retrofit, however, eliminated this difficulty, which was felt to be a basic design deficiency.

SHOCK was thus entirely lifelike in every way. It scared the hell out of Profane the first time he saw it, lying half out the smashed windshield of an old Plymouth, fitted with moulages for depressed-skull and jaw injuries and compound arm and leg fractures. But now he'd got used to it. The only thing at Anthroresearch that still fazed him a little was SHROUD, whose face was a human skull that looked at you through a more-or-less abstracted butyrate head.

It was time to make another round. The building was empty except for Profane. No experiments tonight. On the way back to the guardroom he stopped in front of SHROUD.

"What's it like," he said.

Better than you have it.

"Wha."

Wha yourself. Me and SHOCK are what you and everybody will be someday. (The skull seemed to be grinning at Profane.)

"There are other ways besides fallout and road accidents."

But those are most likely. If somebody else doesn't do it to you, you'll do it to yourselves.

"You don't even have a soul. How can you talk."

Since when did you ever have one? What are you doing, getting religion? All I am is a dry run. They take readings off my dosimeters. Who is to say whether I'm here so the people can read the meters or whether the radiation in me is because they have to measure. Which way does it go?

"it's one way," said Profane. "All one way."

Mazel tov. (Maybe the hint of a smile?)

Somehow Profane had difficulty getting back in the plot of Existentialist Sheriff. After a while he got up and went over to SHROUD. "What do you mean, we'll be like you and SHOCK someday? You mean dead?"

Am I dead? If I am then that's what I mean.

"If you aren't then what are you?"

Nearly what you are. None of you have very far to go.

"I don't understand."

So I see. But you're not alone. That's a comfort, isn't it? To hell with it. Profane went back to the guardroom and busied himself making coffee.

III

The next weekend there was a party at Raoul, Slab and Melvin's. The Whole Sick Crew was there.

At one in the morning Roony and Pig started a fight.

"Son of a bitch," Roony yelled. "You keep your hands off her."

"His wife," Esther informed Slab. The Crew had withdrawn to the walls, leaving Pig and Roony most of the floor space. Both were drunk and sweating. They wrestled around, stumbling and inexpert, trying to fight like a western movie. It is incredible how many amateur brawlers believe the movie saloon fight is the only acceptable model to follow. At last Pig dropped Roony with a fist to the abdomen. Roony just lay there, eyes closed, trying to hold down his breathing because it hurt. Pig wandered out to the kitchen. The fight had been over a girl but both of them knew her name was Paola, not Mafia.

"I don't hate the Jewish people," Mafia was explaining, "only the things they do." She and Profane were alone in her apartment. Roony was out drinking. Perhaps seeing Eigenvalue. It was the day after the fight. She didn't seem to care where her husband was.

All at once Profane got a marvelous idea. She wanted to keep Jews out? Maybe half a Jew could get in.

She beat him to it: her hand reached for his belt buckle and started to unfasten it.

"No," he said, having changed his mind. Needing a zipper to undo, her hands slid away, around her hips to the back of her skirt. "Now look."

"I need a man," already half out of the skirt, "fashioned for Heroic Love. I've wanted you ever since we met."

"Heroic Love's ass," said Profane. "You're married."

Charisma was having nightmares in the next room. He started thumping around under the green blanket, flailing out at the elusive shadow of his own Persecutor.

"Here," she said, lower half denuded, "here on the rug."

Profane got up and rooted around in the icebox for beer. Mafia lay on the floor, screaming at him.

"Here yourself." He set a can of beer on her soft abdomen. She yelped, knocking it over. The beer made a soggy spot on the rug between them, like a bundling board or Tristan's blade. "Drink your beer and tell me about Heroic Love." She was making no move to get dressed.

"A woman wants to feel like a woman," breathing hard, "is all. She wants to be taken, penetrated, ravished. But more than that she wants to enclose the man."

With spiderwebs woven of yo-yo string: a net or trap. Profane could think of nothing but Rachel.

"Nothing heroic about a schlemihl," Profane told her. What was a hero? Randolph Scott, who could handle a six-gun, horse's reins, lariat. Master of the inanimate. But a schlemihl, that was hardly a man: somebody who lies back and takes it from objects, like any passive woman.

"Why," he wondered, "does something like sex have to be so confused. Mafia, why do you have to have names for it." Here he was arguing again. Like with Fina in the bathtub.

"What are you," she snarled, "a latent homosexual? You afraid of women?"

"No, I'm not queer." How could you say: sometimes women remind me of inanimate objects. Young Rachel, even: half an MG.

Charisma came in, two beady eyes peering through burnholes in the blanket. He spotted Mafia, moved toward her. The green wool mound began to sing:

It is something less than heaven

To be quoted Thesis 1.7

Every time I make an advance;