“Oh yeah?” said Elva when she heard about that, and instantly fulfilled a long-standing desire by calling Rough Traders Sex Service. She had been attracted by their ad in the Directory: ‘ Dig, you want it rough, raw, real, and sweaty, but you also want that it shouldn’t be a turnoff. Right? Right. Call our number, baby, ‘cause we got your number.’
They both got a little freaked out from it all, and cooled out with Dreamboat Launchers of Fire Island and their famous motto: ’Meditate the Easy Way, with Dope.’
The Elroys were really getting it all together now, hut things kept intruding. Elixir was freaking out again, and at the worst possible time, for Elroy was soon to be profiled by ‘New York Magazine’ and Elva was about to begin a two week prima ballerina course with a job already assured her at the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. They held a family conference and came across an ad in the Directory for Childmenders.
“What does it say?” Elva asked.
Elroy read: “ ‘Is your child losing out on the best of life by possessing an unruly personality? Do you feel frustrated by the problem of giving him/her love without getting swallowed up? Is it all getting a bit much? Then why not take advantage of Childmenders! We will cart away your child and return him/her loving, obedient, docile and easily satisfied—and we will do this without screwing up one bit of his/her individuality, initiative and aggressiveness, so help us God.’ ”
“They sound like they give a damn,” Elva said. “Funny you should say that,” Elroy said. “Right down here at the bottom of their ad it says, Believe us—we give a damn!’ ”
“That clinches it,” Elva said. “Call them up!”
Elixir was carted away, and the Elroys celebrated their new-found freedom by calling up Instant Real Friends and throwing a party with the help of Perry and Penny, the Party People.
Onward the Elroys plunged along the rocky trail of self-transcendence. Unfortunately, this involved a clash of interests. Mr. Elroy was pursuing High Matters through Mindpower. Elva still sought consummation in the veritable flesh. They fought about which item in the Directory they should opt for next. Since they had both taken the Supreme Communication Foundation’s Quickie Course in Inexorable Persuasiveness, they were both terrific arguers. But they got on each other’s nerves because they were both terrible listeners.
Their relationship fell apart. Stubbornly, neither of them would go to Relationship Repairers. In fact, Klva defiantly joined Negatherapeutics, with its intriguing slogan, ‘Hate your way to Happiness.’ Elroy pulled himself together and explored his feelings with the revolutionary new Cellular Self-Image Technique and understood at last where he was at: he detested his wife and wanted her dead. It was as simple as that!
Elroy swung into action. He pounced on the Directory and located the Spouse Alteration Service of Saugerties, New York. They came and took Elva away and Elroy finally had time to get into himself.
First he learned how to achieve instantaneous ecstacy at will. This had formerly been an exclusive possession of a few Eastern religious organizations, which until recently, had been the only ones with the telephone number of the service that provided i l. Bliss was a lot of fun, but Elroy had to come out of it when Childmenders called to say that his child was irreparable, what did he want them to do with her? Elroy told them to put her back together as well as they could and store her until further notice.
It was at this time, through the assistance of Psychoboosters, Inc., that he was able to raise his intelligence to two levels above genius, a fact that was duly noted in the updated edition of his autobiography that was being serialized in the New York Times.
The Spouse Alteration Service called and said that Elva was the old Unalterable model and could not be adjusted without grave danger to the mechanism. Elroy told them to store her with his irreparable kid.
At last, triumphantly alone, Elroy could return to the joyous work of saying good-bye forever to Mr. Pain. He had it all pretty much together by now, of course, and was experiencing many religious visions of great power and intensity. But something unsatisfactory still remained, though he couldn’t put his finger on what it was.
He looked through the Directory, but found no answer. It looked like he was going to have to tough this one through on his own. But then, providentially, the front door opened and in walked a small, dark, smiling man with a turban and all-knowing eyes and an aura of incredible power. This was the Mystery Guru, who seeks you out when the time is light and tells you what you need to know—if you are a subscriber to the Directory.
“It’s the ego,” the Mystery Guru said, and left.
Vast waves of comprehension flooded over Elroy, l he ego! Of course! Why hadn’t he though of that? Obviously, his ego was the final thing anchoring him to the gummy clay of everyday reality. His ego? His very own ego was holding him back, forever yammering its selfish demands at him, completely disregarding his welfare!
Elroy opened the Directory. There, all by itself on the last page he found the Lefkowitz Ego Removers of Flushing, New York.
Beneath their ad was this: “Warning. The Surgeon-General had Determined that Ego Removal may be Injurious to your Health.”
Joseph Elroy hesitated, considered, weighed factors. He was momentarily perplexed. But then the Mystery Guru popped into the room again and said, “It’s a seven to five shot at the Big Spiritual Money, and besides, what have you got to lose?” He exiled, a master of timing.
Elroy punched out the big combination on the console.
Not long after, there was a knock at the door. Elroy opened it to the Lefkowitz Ego Removal Squad.
They left. After that, there was nothing whatsoever in the room except a disembodied voice humming ‘Amapola.’
And then even that was gone and there was only l he console, winking and leering and glittering at itself, daring itself to flipflop out of existence.
1980
THE FUTURE LOST
A moment in time so fantastic it had to be real
Leonard Nisher was found in front of the Plaza Hotel in a state of erotic agitation so extreme that it took the efforts of three policemen and a passing tourist from Biloxi, Mississippi, to subdue him. Taken to St. Clare’s Hospital, he had to be put into a wet pack—a wet sheet wound around the patient’s arms and upper body. This immobilized him long enough for an intern to get a shot of Valium into him.
The injection had taken effect by the time Dr. Miles saw him. Miles told two husky aides, one of them a former guard for the Detroit Lions, and a psychiatric nurse named Norma to wait outside. The patient wasn’t going to assault anyone just now. He was throttled way back, riding the crest of a Valium wave where there’s nothing to hassle and where even a wet pack can have its friendly aspects.
“Well, Mr Nisher, how do you feel now?” Miles asked.
“I’m fine, Doc,” Nisher said. “Sorry I caused that trouble when I came out of the space-time anomaly and landed in front of the Plaza.”
“It could affect anyone that way,” Miles said reassuringly.
“I guess it sounds pretty crazy,” Nisher said. “There’s no way I can prove it, but I have just been into the future and back again.”
“Is the future nice?” Miles asked.
“The future,” Nisher said, “is a pussycat. And what happened to me there—well, you’re not going to believe it.”
The patient, a medium-sized white male of about thirty-five, wearing an off-white wet pack and a broad smile, proceeded to tell the following story.
Yesterday he had left his job at Hanratty & Smirch, Accountants, at the usual time and gone to his apartment on East Twenty-fifth Street. He was just putting the key in the lock when he heard something behind him. Nisher immediately thought, mugger, and whirled around in the cockroach posture that was the basic defense mode in the Taiwanese karate he was studying. There was no one there. Instead there was a sort of red, shimmering mist. It floated toward Nisher and surrounded him. Nisher heard weird noises and saw flashing lights before he bl
acked out.
When he regained consciousness, someone was saying to him, “Don’t worry it’s all right.” Nisher opened his eyes and saw that he was no longer on Twenty-fifth Street. He was sitting on a bench in a beautiful little park with trees and ponds and promenades and strangely shaped statues and tame deer, and there were people strolling around wearing what looked like Grecian tunics. Sitting beside him on the bench was a kindly white-haired old man dressed like Charlton Heston playing Moses.
“What is this?” Nisher asked. “What’s happened?”
“Tell me,” the old man said, “did you happen to run into a reddish cloud recently? Aha! I thought so! That was a local space-time anomaly, and it has carried you away-from your own time and into the future.”
“The future?” Nisher said. “The future what?”
“Just the future,” the old man said. “We’re about four hundred years ahead of you, give or take a few years.”
“You’re putting me on,” Nisher said. He asked the old man in various ways where he really was, and the old man replied that he really was in the future, and it was not only true, it wasn’t even unusual, though of course it wasn’t the sort of thing that happens every day. At last Nisher had to accept it.
“Well, okay,” he said. “What sort of future is this?”
“A very nice one,” the old man assured him.
“No alien creatures have taken us over?”
“Certainly not.”
“Has lack of fossil fuels reduced our standard of living to a bare subsistence level?”
“We solved the energy crisis a few hundred years ago when we discovered an inexpensive way of converting sand into shale.”
“What are your major problems?”
“We don’t seem to have any.”
“So this is Utopia?”
The old man smiled. “You must judge for yourself. Perhaps you would like to look around during your brief stay here.”
“Why brief?”
“These space-time anomalies are selfregulating,” the old man said. “The universe won’t tolerate for long your being here when you ought to be there. But it usually takes a little while for the universe to catch up. Shall we go for a stroll? My name is Ogun.”
They left the park and walked down a pleasant, tree-lined boulevard. The buildings were strange to Nisher’s eye and seemed to contain too many strange angles and discordant colors. They were set back from the street and bordered with well-kept green lawns. It looked to Nisher like a really nice future. Nothing exotic, but nice. And there were people walking around in their Grecian tunics, and they all looked happy and well fed. It was like a Sunday in Central Park.
Then Nisher noticed one couple who had gone beyond the talking stage. They had taken their clothes off. They were, to use a twentieth-century expression, making it.
No one seemed to think this was unusual. Ogun didn’t comment on it; so Nisher didn’t say anything, either. But he couldn’t help noticing, as they walked along, that other people were making it, too. Quite a few people. After passing the seventh couple so engaged, Nisher asked Ogun whether this was some sexual holiday or whether they had stumbled onto a fornicators’ convention.
“It’s nothing special,” Ogun said.
“But why don’t these people do it in their homes or in hotel rooms?”
“Probably.because most of them happened to meet here in the street.”
That shook Nisher. “Do you mean that these couples never knew each other before?”
“Apparently not,” Ogun said. “If they had, I suppose they would have arranged for a more comfortable place in which to make love.”
Nisher just stood there and stared. He knew it was rude, but he couldn’t help it. Nobody seemed to mind. He observed how people looked at each other as they walked along, and every once in a while somebody would smile at someone, and someone else would smile back, and they would sort of hesitate for a moment, and then . . .
Nisher tried to ask about twenty questions at the same time. Ogun interrupted. “Let me try to explain, since you have so little time among us. You come from an age of sexual repression and rebelliousness. To you this must appear a spectacle of unbridled license. For us it is no more than a normal expression of affection and solidarity.”
“So you’ve solved the problem of sex!” Nisher said.
“More or less by accident,” Ogun told him. “We were really trying to abolish war before it obliterated us. But to get rid of war, we had to change the psychological base upon which it rests. Repressed sexuality was found to be the greatest single factor. Once this was recognized and the information widely disseminated, a universal plebiscite was held. It was agreed that human sexual mores were to be modified and reprogrammed for the good of the entire human race. Biological engineering and special clinics—all on a voluntary basis, of course—took care of that. Divorced from aggression and possessiveness, sex today is a mixture of aesthetics and sociability.”
Nisher was about to ask Ogun how that affected marriage and the family when he noticed that Ogun was smiling at an attractive blonde and edging over in her direction. “Hey, Ogun!” Nisher said. “Don’t leave me now!”
The old man looked surprised. “My dear fellow, I wasn’t going to exclude you. Quite the contrary, I want to include you. We all do.”
Nisher saw that a lot of people had stopped. They were looking at him, smiling.
“Now wait just a minute,” he said, automatically taking up the cockroach posture.
But by then a woman had hold of his leg, and another was snuggling up under his armpit, and somebody else was pinching his fingers. Nisher got a little hysterical and shouted at Ogun, “Why are they doing this?”
“It is a spontaneous demonstration of our great pleasure at the novelty and poignancy of your presence. It happens whenever a man from the past appears among us. We feel so sorry for him and what he has to go back to, we want to share with him, share all the love we have. And so this happens.”
Nisher felt as though he were in the middle of a Cinemascope mob scene set in ancient Rome, or maybe Babylon. The street was crowded with people as far as the eye could see, and they were all making it with one another and on top of one another and around and under and over and in between. But what really got to Nisher was the feeling that the crowd gave off. It went completely beyond sex. It felt like a pure ocean of love, compassion, and understanding. He saw Ogun’s face receding in a wave of bodies and called out, “How far does this thing go?”
“Visitors from the past always send out big vibrations,” Ogun shouted back. “This will probably go all the way.”
All the way? Nisher couldn’t figure out what he was talking about. Then he got it and said, almost reverently, “Do you mean—planetwide?”
Ogun grinned, and then he was gone. Nisher saw the way it had to be—this group of people loving one another and pulling more and more people into it as the vibes got stronger and stronger until everybody in the world was in on it. To Nisher this was definitely Utopia. He knew he had to figure out some way of bringing this message back to his own time, some way to convince people. Then he looked up and saw that he was on Central Park South in front of the Plaza.
“I suppose the transition was just too much for you?” Miles asked.
Nisher smiled. His eyelids were drooping. The Valium rush was passing, and he was coming down fast.
“I guess I just freaked out,” Nisher said. “I thought I could explain it to everyone. I thought I could just grab people and make them give up their hang-ups, that I could show them how their bodies were shaped for love. But I went at it too hysterically, of course; I scared them. And then the cops grabbed me.”
“How do you feel now?” Miles asked.
“I’m tired and disappointed, and I’ve come back to my senses, if that’s what you want to call it Maybe it was all a hallucination. That doesn’t matter. What counts is that I’m back and in my own day and age when we still have wars and energy crises
and sexual hang-ups, and nothing I can do will change that.”
“You seem to have made a very rapid adjustment,” Miles said.
“Hell, yes. No one ever accused Leonard Nisher of being a slow adjuster.”
“You sound good to me,” Miles said. “But I would like you to stay here for a few days. This is not a punishment, you understand. It is genuinely meant as an assistance to you.”
“Okay, Doc,” Nisher said drowsily. “How long must I stay?”
“Perhaps no more than a day or two. I’ll release you as soon as I’m satisfied with your condition.”
“Fair enough,” Nisher mumbled. And then he fell asleep. Miles told the orderlies to stand by and alerted the psychiatric nurse. Then he went to his nearby apartment to get some rest.
Nisher’s story haunted Miles as he broiled a steak for his dinner. It couldn’t be true, of course. But suppose, just suppose, it had actually happened. What if the future had achieved a state of polymorphous perverse sexuality? There was, after all, a fair amount of evidence that space-time anomalies did exist.
Abruptly he decided to visit his patient again. He left his apartment and went back to the hospital, hurrying now, impelled by a strange sense of urgency.
There was no one at the reception desk on Wing 2. The policeman normally stationed in the corridor was missing. Miles ran down the hall. Leonard’s door was open, and Miles peered in.
Someone had folded Leonard’s cot and leaned it against the wall. That left just enough room on the floor for two aides (one a former guard for the Detroit Lions), a psychiatric nurse named Norma, two student nurses, a policeman, and a middle-aged woman from Denver who had been visiting a relative.
“Where is Leonard?” cried Miles.
“That guy musta hypnotized me,” the policeman said, struggling into his trousers.
“He preached a message of love,” said the woman from Denver, wrapping herself in Leonard’s wet pack.
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