Bodies Electric

by Colin Harrison

  The Chairman’s eyes crinkled. “God, the pornographers will go wild.”

  “Yes, actually, that’s right,” I said. “You’ll be able to slip a disk in and watch life-size people fuck from any angle, you’ll be able to control what they do. In fact you’ll be able to decide how big the woman’s breasts will be, make the man’s dick fifteen inches long, whatever turns you on. But what’s important is this kind of technology is incredibly exciting. People are now accustomed to computers in the home. Watching television passively is boring—”

  “But the American public is a stupid, nonthinking mass that gets stupider every year,” the Chairman said. “We are getting stupider as a nation, as a culture. I honestly believe that.” He sounded genuinely distressed. “We don’t vote, we don’t read books.”

  “Some of that is true. But these new technologies will create a kind of electronic reality that will be irresistible.”

  He pressed his spoon down on the wet tea bag. Ten seconds went by.

  “It sounds evil.”

  “It’s not. It’s the same old appetites given new forms of satisfaction. It’s an inevitable product of man’s ingenuity. The pictures on the wall of the cave become inscribed on a laserdisc. But in order for the Corporation to compete, we need a global system. With V-S’s Japanese microchip connections, we should be able to get integration with basic computer design and have six-month lead times over the competition. We can get on top of the market with new products. The products will follow a certain technological sequence, and each new interactive product will be downwardly compatible. Sooner or later, for example, all CDs and videodiscs will be about the size of a dime and they’ll hold a thousand times the information they do now. People will be able to buy entire libraries of information or catch it out of the air. We’ll have a satellite doing nothing but pulsing the five thousand most popular movies in America downward on a regular basis. The home receiver will capture and record the movies, even though different companies hold the different rights. With a few massive corporate players, the other companies will have to buckle in order to achieve access to the consumer. All the technology will be cross-indexed and cross-compatible. Let’s say I want to see Casablanca. I call it up, I get it, the original black-and-white version. You with me so far?”

  The Chairman nodded noncommittally.

  “All right, now for a gag, I want to splice in one of the soliloquies from Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet, where I please, and make Bogart speak the words perfectly—make his lips actually move and speak Shakespeare’s words in Olivier’s voice. And then I can colorize the lips if I want to, or I can freeze the frame and blow it up and put tiny pictures of the president of the United States into the pupils of Bogart’s eyes and then I can shrink the frame back to normal and then start the movie again, and I’m doing all of these things either by voice command or by moving a mouse attached to the computer against a menu at the margins of the screen, and then I can make, say, Daffy Duck, appear in a little floating box over Ingrid Bergman’s head, and I can do all of this fluidly with no forethought or special training or superexpensive equipment, just improvising for the hell of it, and then I can make the Terminator appear, a tiny one, the size of a fly and make him shoot Daffy Duck and then the both of them disappear on screen. So Bogart and Bergman continue, except for the colorized lips, say. Then I can get the computer to scan its ROM memory for a couple of pages from the Bible, say, or the front page of that day’s newspaper, and then make Ingrid Bergman speak that material in any written language, mind you, any, the idiom and inflection perfect to the ear of a native speaker—and of course I could patch in Vivaldi as a background music and then I can save the whole thing, the exercise, and then zap it to my friend in Hong Kong via fiber optic so he can play around with it and change it and then he can zap it back to me and I can watch it, and no one else, and this is what the future looks like. Can you get that?”

  The Chairman looked at me a long time. He’d forgotten to tight his cigarette.

  “Now,” I continued, “what you got off that is the basic on-line monthly fee paid to the local franchise, sort of like cable TV now, plus the rental fee for the original movie, the royalties for the use of Daffy Duck and the Terminator, calculated on the digital equivalent of a frame-by-frame usage, the fee for the software used to manipulate all these images, software which is leased to the local on-line franchises but developed centrally, the fee for first sale or on-line retrieval of the Vivaldi music, and the tine fee for the transmission of the thing to the guy in Hong Kong, and a satellite user’s fee on the turnaround. A fraction of money to be made at every step.”

  “There are political implications of this type of—”

  “Yes. They’re huge,” I agreed. “Let’s pretend you’re the president of the United States and I’m one of your speech-writers. You tell me to write you a speech on, say, the economic turmoil in the U.S. You want me to do a good job, I want to do a good job. I go to my White House press office, sit at my computer. Punch up a file. There, on the screen is you, the president. Your face, in color, frozen. You’re seated at the Oval Office desk, as if before the television cameras. I talk into a little microphone. ‘My fellow Americans—’ And just after I say it, you, the president’s image, say it, in your voice, with perfect inflection, with your lips moving in perfect articulation. I work on the talk, first saying this, then deciding on some other phrase, and sooner or later I get it right. I show it to my bosses. You, the president, may or may not see it. On the tape you speak for twenty minutes. We broadcast it to the networks, what’s left of them, and that’s it.”

  “I see.” The Chairman still had not lit his cigarette. His eyes were far away now. He’s got it, I thought, he’s finally got it. I went on, pressing whatever advantage I might have gained.

  “And along the same lines, in time, when the technology is far enough along, you will be able to scan in photos of someone who doesn’t live and interact with them. Scan in ten or twenty pictures of your late mother, say, maybe also a tape of her talking . . .” I froze—I would be able to do this with Liz. “That would be enough information. You could just see her again. Or anyone who was dead and who had pictures taken of them when they were alive. Imagine having a conversation with Marilyn Monroe. How great that would be, her eyes sultry and half-opened, her lips saying your name, that soft voice responding to your questions.”

  “They commodified her corpse, if you ask me.” The Chairman shook his head. “I was there when she sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to President Kennedy at Madison Square Garden,” he mused. “I was in the audience.” His old blue eyes became unfocused. “I realized, on that very night . . . I realized that we five in a pagan society. The men around me were seeing a goddess sing to a god. The power of her image was actually dangerous, I think. Pagan idols. We worship them. And this, incidentally, is the secret of the entertainment business, Jack. Monotheism is a learned habit. Paganism is the baser instinct.”

  “Then you see how the technology plays into the human psyche.”

  “You know,” the Chairman said, changing topics, “you cough a hell of a lot. But you don’t seem to have a cold and you don’t smoke. I noticed it when we were in Washington.”

  “It’s my stomach,” I told him. “I’ve got this acid problem. It’s bad today, actually.”

  “Taking stuff? Pills?”

  I nodded.

  “Ulcers or reflux disease?”

  He had an old man’s knowledge of illness. “Reflux disease,” I answered.

  “Jesus,” he noted to himself. “They do Nissen’s plication for that.”

  “How do you know that?” I was astounded.

  “Because they did it to me, thirty years ago.”

  “Is it bad?” I asked fearfully.

  The Chairman didn’t answer. Some other thought had come into his head and I felt a sudden odd fear. “It’s a hell of a thing for a young man with a bad stomach to mock an old man’s ever-nearing death.” He drank off his tea. “
It’s—”

  “It’s my only advantage,” I interrupted nervously, trying for a joke.

  “Get out.” He meant it this time, waved his hand brusquely. “Get out.”

  I did get out, with hateful quickness. It now was of no concern to me if the Chairman lost control of the Corporation in a bloody internal fight. He was a rich old bastard who probably had a maid put on his socks every morning. When he was dead shoe leather in a box, I’d still have another forty years. Let him be publicly humiliated, did I care? I was swimming in the strong current of change. Morrison had been right that the Chairman was just an old drunk in a new suit. He was too cautious for the game, slow in the head, and I decided to report to the others that they should just go ahead and run him over. Let the board buy itself off with huge stock plays. Let Morrison send in the marines with charts and reports and all the hyperrationalized argument. Get the PR windmills revved up. Fuck the Chairman.

  I returned to my office and stood at my window watching the odd antlike activity below and thinking of my father, what he would say to me if he knew how I’d just spent my last hour. “What you’re doing,” he would tell me, setting a tomato seedling into the earth, “is wasting your mind and your heart. Remember that, you’re wasting your heart, too.” It was after 6:00 P.M., late enough on a low, clouded day that the lines of the other office buildings were indistinct against the sky, a time when Manhattan has a brooding melancholy, when men such as I stand at their office windows and wonder how it was that the boy had become the man in a suit in a lighted box above the street. I floated over to my desk to gather up some papers. Helen, who had left at five-thirty, had put something on my chair so that I would see it—with a yellow note in her handwriting stuck on it saying that this had been delivered at the end of the day. It read:

  MR. WHITMAN,

  I STAYED HERE THE WHOLE DAY. YOU MUST TELL ME.

  THEY IS MY WIFE AND BABY-GIRL.

  —HECTOR SALCINES P.S.

  I’M SERIOUS.

  I placed this note in the same drawer with the first one, and just then the phone rang in Helen’s office. I picked it up.

  “Jack Whitman,” I said as usual.

  There was no answer, just the far buzz of a phone line, maybe traffic sounds. A pay phone.

  “Who is this?” I asked.

  “Where is she?”

  Disguise your voice, I thought. “Think you got the wrong number, guy.”

  “Look, Mr. Whitman, wait,” came Hector’s voice, a sad, beaten version of the personality I’d met at the used car lot. “You gotta understand. I don’t have nothin’. All I ever had was my family. Now, now I got nothin’. You can’t understand that . . .” He hadn’t recognized my voice. “Dolores and me’ll work things out. We always did before. Maria misses me, I know. And I miss her, miss my little girl. You can’t take that from a guy, you can’t take that away from me, it ain’t right. I want you to tell me how I can talk to my wife. Let me talk to my wife.”

  My meeting with the Chairman had left me in a brutal mood. Hector didn’t scare me. I said nothing.

  “You gotta let me see my wife!”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

  “Why? Why the fuck not?”

  I hung up—gently, as if this mattered.

  TEN

  I WANTED HER BODY TO FORGET HECTOR, TO MAKE ITS ACcommodations to me. Dolores came back to my bed that night and the next and all those that followed, and I was devotedly energetic in my attentions, not only because I enjoyed this newfound bounty of flesh and warmth after my long loneliness but because when you do it over and over again, a certain corporeal loyalty takes effect. An expectation of the other. The sounds and smell and weight. There were, now, the first shades of habit and familiarity in how we acted with one another. Each evening at nine o’clock Dolores would warm a bottle of milk for Maria, which comforted her, and after Maria had fallen asleep in the bed in the apartment, curled around her “Sesame Street” dolls, Dolores would climb the stairs to my bedroom.

  “Maria okay?” I’d ask.

  “She’s all right. I got to get her off the night bottle.”

  “She likes it, though.”

  “Maybe soon,” Dolores would say. “She’s almost four.” Then, as I watched from the bed, she would take off her clothes and stand in front of the mirror in her bra and panties to brush out her hair. Her body was firm, abundant in the breasts and hips. But most striking was the basic strength in her shoulders and back and thighs. It occurred to me that either her mother or father had been quite physically strong. Picking up a hairbrush, Dolores would bend her head down, exposing the soft nape of her neck, and brush the dark mass from the back of her head forward. I watched the muscles of her arm and shoulder flex and relax, flex and relax as she brushed, her eyes cast downward at the floor, thinking to herself, knowing she was being watched, enjoying the exhibition. Then she would flip her hair back and brush it the other way.

  Later, afterward, we would lie in bed. Eventually one of us would get up. I did not mind that Dolores saw me swigging the awful acid stuff, I did not mind that standing in my underwear I did not appear as young as I once did. You get past this as you get older. And, to my relief, Dolores seemed free of the need to appear as anything other than what she was; I knew this the moment that she padded barefoot into the bathroom one night and forgot to close the door. I heard that discreet and once-familiar feminine tinkle into the bowl, the sound muffled, then the flap of the toilet paper roll spinning, and I smiled—it set me right somehow, it was real. And we talked about birth control; she was on the pill and had refilled her prescription. Soon after that we abandoned any pretense that Dolores and Maria were living in the apartment downstairs and I moved Maria’s new bed, which I’d ordered from a children’s catalog, into the front bedroom.

  But still there was much that was unsaid. The question of who Dolores Salcines was, really, dangled before me like a fascinating fruit. Strange how it is that men and women may be naked together but keep great secrets within themselves. I realized that the fact that she had left her husband didn’t mean that she did not mourn the end of their marriage. And until now she had protected her history with Hector, dodging around it, telling me only a little of this, a little of that. He was a car salesman, he installed cable, he had cared very much about Maria, and so on.

  I did not press Dolores, however, for I felt redeemed that the house and my life were suddenly warmer, full of life. Maria seemed to accept the fact that her mother and I now slept together, and each morning she ran into my bedroom—our bedroom—throwing herself onto the sheets, wriggling and giggling and hugging me with abandon, as if she had once done this every morning in her home, as if all her child’s love and need for a father had found expression with me. My own daughter would have been born within a few months of Maria, and when Maria flung herself against me, I felt a certain bittersweet confusion. So this is what I would have had if Liz hadn’t been killed, I thought to myself, reaching past the veil of fate and time to see my own self in bed with Liz asleep on one side, with our baby girl between us. This is almost what it would have been like. A roof, the light of early morning, the smell of sleep, warm bodies in bed. I believe that we are more like each other than we realize, across place and time and other distinctions. And so now I could understand Hector’s torment; what I had here, this flesh gathered in both my arms, was once his. I felt a strange vicarious sadness for him. My pleasure came at his deprivation. My guilt, however, was not so great that I admitted to Dolores I had seen Hector at the car lot or that he had attempted to communicate with me in order to reach her. Would it have made any difference, later, if I’d told her? I don’t know.

  The night after my meeting with the Chairman, Dolores put Maria to bed while I prepared some notes for the next day. Then she knocked on the door of my office and came in, holding an empty bottle.

  “She wanted you to say good night to her. She wanted you to sing to her.”

  “I can sing ‘Take Me O
ut to the Ball Game,’ that’s about it.”

  “She doesn’t care what songs. Sing to her tomorrow night.”

  “How about ‘Silent Night’?”

  “Anything, Jack,” Dolores said. “She’s so crazy about you.”

  I turned toward her. There was something new in her voice. Dolores let her fingers trail over the papers on my desk. Tonight wasn’t going to be about sex, I saw. I suggested we go up to my roof. The air was cooler and it was a clear night. We climbed up with a bottle of wine and some bread and cheese and fruit. I poured out the glasses and we sat there in the dark.

  “Did you expect it?” Dolores asked me suddenly.

  “It?”

  “You and me,” she said.

  “No,” I answered. “It’s the craziest thing I heard of, you and me. I hoped it might happen but I didn’t assume it.”

  “I knew,” she laughed. “I kind of knew all along.”

  “You knew I wanted to?”

  “Well, of course, but I mean I knew we’d do it. You have to realize I was so sick and tired. I thought about it the first night, though. Something about a clean bed made me want to.” She rolled over. “And you had so much money.”