Fun House

by Appel, Benjamin

  “You’re talking like a Reservationist!” I exclaimed.

  She laughed sadly. “It’s that Bee-Ambo, darling, but don’t call me a Reservationist. Automatons wound up for work — that’s what you are. But at least you’re still human. We’re becoming antihuman.”

  She was so serious I had to tease her. “Paris in June, have you forgotten?”

  “We’ve made a little progress since then,” she smiled sadly.

  “So very little.”

  “Russoplayo and the professor with his little plaything. The nice professor of the cauterized conscience!” I shuddered and dug into my pocket for my pills. “Have a U-Latu, Gladys?”

  “I’ve sworn off,” she said.

  “My God, the revolution has come!”

  “I’ve sworn off all false hopes, darling.”

  Her eyes were shining and her plump pretty face with its full lips that once I had thought abandoned, was — to use a phrase of Her Excellency, the Minister of Police Affairs — almost spiritual. “I see it all so clearly,” she said. “This chase after the A-I-D has opened my eyes. Have you thought that, despite all our differences, we’ve always wanted the same thing? You on the Reservation. We, here. Happiness! There are no real differences between poeple — ”

  I held up my box of U-Latus. “No real differences?”

  “Only in their institutions, their habits, their politics, and with the A-I-D, these differences mean less than over. Today, the way I see it, there are only two parties in the world. A Death Party and a Life Party.”

  I didn’t say a word. I felt she had said them all.

  “And now to work, darling. Did the Commissioner explain that we belong to the R.T.R.?”

  “He never explains,” I said, but this time I wasn’t bitter.

  “Everybody at Russoplayo belongs to some faction or other. The R.T.R. are the Revolutionary True Revolutionaries …”

  I listened for five or ten minutes. I took her hands in mine. “Gladys,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m an old-time member of that Life Party of yours, and one of the big planks on the program is you know what.”

  “What?” she smiled, and patted my cheek.

  “Love, the game of love.”

  “The blame of love,” She laughed. “Do you love me more than I love you? I suggest we go back to our cabin. It’s rather cramped here in the linen room, my little sparrow, or perhaps since we’re bound for Russoplayo I ought to call you my little red cardinal.”

  I laughed, too. It was good to know that the new Gladys still included the old one.

  When we landed, L. and O. guards searched every passenger for weapons as had been done before leaving Washington. This time they confiscated all possessions considered bourgeois. My U-Latu cigars and U-Latu pills, my pocket dictionary of humor etc. Then we were marched from Customs Inspection to a fleet of Russoplayo cars.

  There were hundreds of players. With our approved passports, we piled into the cars and were driven to Union Square in New York City where we descended to the playland which was a quarter of a mile below the surface of the city. Quite literally, we had gone underground. We were now conducted to a gloomy reception chamber where under a huge portrait of Ivan Radizl1 there sat Ivan Radizl in person. He was a man of medium height, wearing an astrakhan hat, a white blouse, high Cossack boots. “Comrades,” he said. “Welcome to Russia, and a word of comradely warning. We will accept no deviation whatsoever on our Space Ship Programs. As you know, the first space ship was perfected in 1992 by the American, Maxwell Roy Rodger, and destroyed on its first flight at an altitude of 43,281 miles. This was considered an accident until the next space ship met disaster at exactly the same altitude. During the next two years, no space ship of any country succeeded in escaping the 43,281 D.P. or Disaster Point. It was evident Comrades, that Superior Beings2 of some planet or stellar system unknown had decided on a fixed off-limits for men of the Earth. Simultaneously, comrades, flying saucers were no longer to be seen, proving that the period of surveillance was at an end. Every country abandoned space ship construction with the exception of our country. Comrades, this Socialist program of ours has its enemies who exist not only outside but inside our borders — ”

  One of the newcomers shouted. “Down with the imperialists!”

  Another released a balloon, which as it floated up towards the ceiling, expanded. It was painted with an atomic mushroom and carried the slogan:

  WE WILL PLANT FORESTS OF MUSHROOMS ON THE SOIL OF OUR ENEMIES.

  When order was restored, Ivan Radizl continued. “Our Space Ship Program is the only correct program, comrades. I warn you not to associate with the counter-revolutionary elements who argue that our Space Ship Program is worthless because it has been rejected by the Superior Beings. It is true, comrades, that they have consistently destroyed all space ships of all national origins. But nevertheless we will succeed for we have a new five-year plan. This plan advocates not only a communication of transportation but a communication of minds. We will perfect our sound-wave and light-wave telegraphs and with true Socialist zeal, we will create a monolithic improved radar that will reach to the furthest ends of the universe and thus achieve peaceful communication with the Superior Beings of outer space. Are there any questions, Comrades?”

  Gladys-Ekaterina arose from her seat and said. “Long live the Space Ship Program! Long live the Five-Year Plan! Comrade Ivan Radizl, the bourgeois scientists as well as our own scientists are in agreement that all life will ultimately vanish from the Earth because the Earth itself is not eternal. The stockpiles of A and H bombs, the invention of the terrible A-I-D — all demonstrate the complete correctness of the Space Ship Program. Mankind’s only hope is the solution of the problem of how to leave the Earth when the Earth, either through natural causes or man-made causes becomes uninhabitable. Comrade Ivan Radizl, I would like to propose a slogan. Workers of the world you have nothing to lose but your lives if you remain on Earth.’ ”

  She was greeted with cheers. Comrade Radizl himself congratulated her and then the meeting ended. As I escorted the comrade from the meeting, I said. “Ekaterina, you constantly amaze me.”

  We newcomers were brought to the Hotel Five-Year-Plan. We had dinner served by automatons dressed simply in red blouses. After dinner Gladys-Ekaterina and I left the hotel. We walked down the street — more accurately a tunnel chipped out of stone. It was some eight feet high and four feet wide. Its walls covered with murals of outdoor scenes. There were yellow wheat fields with sunburned happy toilers waving at the famous sputnik1 that had carried the historic dog Laika. There were murals of advanced sputniks successfully flying past the Disaster Point. I began to feel depressed and unhappy. These murals of earth and sky in this man-made hole made me feel as if Gladys-Ekaterina and I were the last two survivors of some terrible catastrophe.

  “I’d rather die than live like this,” I muttered. “Never knowing if there’ll be a tomorrow. God, we’ve simply got to get hold of that damned A-I-D.”

  Suddenly from an alcove, stepped a comrade carrying a black brief case. “You would rather die than live like this?” he asked in an accusing voice.

  “The American comrade is joking,” Gladys-Ekaterina said hurriedly. “Americans have been weakened by the Capitalist virus which among them is known as humor. Believe me, comrade, the American comrade regrets his foolish remark criticizing the glorious achievement, this supreme example of revolutionary architecture, the Underground of the Comrades.” She raised a clenched fist over her head and shouted. “Long live Comrade Ivan Radizl!”

  “Long live Comrade Ivan Radizl!” I echoed her as the man with the brief case studied my face for a long minute. Then he opened his brief case and gave me a pamphlet.

  “You will find this instructive, comrade,” he said. “It is an account of humor as a leftist deviation of the rights of the people.”

  Was he joking? His play on the words leftist and right seemed as if he might be. But his manner was
serious, and I remembered that I had no rights in Russoplayo. He could kill me or I could kill him. These stupid games, I thought bitterly. Games, when the professor and that infernal A-I-D was menacing all of us.

  I accepted the pamphlet, and without a word he walked with us down the tunnel.

  “The comic strip was not his sole reading, comrade,” Gladys-Ekaterina said to the man with the brief case. “With the pennies saved from his bitter and debased existence as a shoeshine boy, for he steadfastly refused to toil as a newsboy, the other calling open to the declassed sons of the American Proletariat — ’No!’ he said to his degraded father who wished him to sell the yellow journals of the capitalistic press. ‘No, father!’ he said, ‘I will not further the enslavement of the American mind by selling even one copy of ‘The Racing Form’1 or “The New Yorker’1. And thus with the pennies saved from shining the shoes of the capitalists he contributed to the one American paper dedicated to a proletarian America.”

  She broke off her eloquent description of my formative years because the comrade had stopped and was opening his brief case again. He took out a Searchorod2 and we watched the yellow bubble inside the spectrometric dial fluctuate before steadying. The comrade then examined the stone wall before him and touched what seemed to be a rough edge. A section of the wall opened, showing a secret elevator. We stepped into it and the wall closed behind us. In the bright reddish light of the elevator, Gladys-Ekaterina looked at me as if to say: Whatever you do, keep your mouth shut.

  As the elevator began to move, I realized it wasn’t an elevator so much as a subway3 for it was moving horizontally. And inside our little compartment, a deep voice began to speak in Russian. “The Secretary of the Party, Comrade,” Gladys-Ekaterina explained to me. “He doesn’t understand Russian,” she said to the comrade with the brief case.

  Again, the comrade opened his brief case and took out what seemed to be an ear plug4. “Insert this in your ear, comrade.”

  I did so and the Russian of the unseen orator immediately changed into English. “… the dialectical necessity of the superstructure involved with the Space Ship Program is historically based on the Socialist principle of the class struggle as it has undeviatingly struggled with the backward forces led by jackals and hooligans masked as leaders …”

  I still didn’t understand, but I left the gadget in my ear anyway. The three of us traveled in silence. The subway became an elevator, ascending up, up, up, and suddenly we were in the open air. High above was the night sky, the stars and moon with its domed gleaming cities. There in lunar America, the Rulers were sitting, the Great Inflexibles. I thought of the old pure untouched virgin moon of the past when the solid earth had seemed so everlasting, when all wars were of no more consequence than the sorties of armies of ants. I thought of how easily we could now be turned into radioactive dust under the iron heel of science, and wished that iron heel had still been made of old-fashioned, honest iron and not of atoms.

  We had come to that part of Russoplayo that was above ground. Roving shafts of red light played over the empty streets and spotlighted the Kremlin.1 I thought that I had to succeed. For my own people, for these people, for all people, no matter what games they played.

  “Where is everybody?” I asked the comrade with the brief case.

  “At home studying for the examinations.”

  “What examinations, comrade?”

  “You know so little of our way of life, comrade from America. You must read, you must study, comrade. I must leave now. The Committee has given you two hours at which time I will meet you here.”

  When he left I whispered to Gladys. “Is he one of us?”

  “Sh! You’ll be overheard2.”

  I stared at the empty streets, a city without moving shadows. Only the fixed shadows of the buildings. It was like a vision of the St. Ewagiow, a city of the dead where only we two were alive.

  It was a relief when we entered a workers’ apartment house. Even in the lobby we could hear the sound of voices, the voices of Moscow’s busy students. I glanced at the statue in the middle of the lobby, a marble fisherman hauling in a book made of red stone with the author’s name in gilt letters: KARL MARX. We climbed a flight of stairs and with the Universal Translator in my ear, I had no trouble understanding the students behind the closed doors.

  “The bourgeois conception of the underprivileged beast of burden known as the camel leaping through the eye of a needle manufactured under non-union conditions …”

  It was so good to hear voices, any voices, to know that the A-I-D had not yet destroyed the world. On the second flight, Gladys-Ekaterina led me to a door at the very end of the corridor. She kicked the door four times. Two hard ones and two taps. “It is the kick that is important,” she said excitedly. “Don’t worry, we can talk here.”

  “The kick?” I said, puzzled.

  “When sound waves travel from a position close to the ground they are so registered on the electric griddle inside,” she explained. “Usually secret knocks are delivered with the knuckles. The kick is pure genius. Only Comrade Atanos could have thought of it.”

  “Atanos?”

  “The greatest man in the R.T.R. Darling, don’t look so worried. Nobody can hear us. They have neutralized every listening device in this Building. Comrade Atanos — Commissioner Sonata to you — is a genius.”

  I began to see daylight as we say on the Reservation. The R.T.R., as I had suspected, was an L. and O. front.

  The door remained shut. Gladys-Ekaterina smiled and kicked it four times again. We heard footsteps. The door opened and we went into a living room, or so I guessed, for never had I seen so much tobacco smoke1. I blinked at what was probably people, grayish blurs without faces. Several of the blurs approached us and before I knew what was happening, they seized us. “Spies!” one of them shouted.

  I was so stunned I didn’t resist, and then it was too late — they had tied me up with what must have been All-Emergency Thread.

  “We’re not spies!” Gladys-Ekaterina cried.

  “Only spies would know the secret knock of the R.T.R.!” one of the gray blurs answered her. “Unsmoke the room!” he ordered.

  In a few minutes they were all completely visible. I stared hopelessly at a dozen teen-agers2 who were armed to the teeth. Literally so, for several of them carried the outlawed daggers3 of the St. Ewagiow between their molars. The St. Ewagiow, I thought with numb horror.

  “Death to the spies!” they shouted and now the St. Ewagiow daggers were in their hands as they rushed us. I stood stiffly, trying to face the onslaught as a brave man should. “Death the Victorious!” they chanted. “Death — ”

  “Stop!” their leader ordered, a pale boy of nineteen or twenty with a waxy white face. “We will give these spies a trial before execution.” He turned sternly to Gladys-Ekaterina. “How did you know the secret kick of the R.T.R.?”

  “We overheard an R.T.R. agent at the hotel,” she lied with the professional coolness of an experienced police agent.

  The pale boy grunted. “Guilty. You are both guilty.”

  “Hallelujah!” they approved the verdict.

  “Man is born of dust and to dust he shall return,” shrieked a red haired girl in a St. Ewagiow black dress.

  “Hallelujah Dust!” the fanatics echoed her.

  “Dust the Glorious! Dust the Victorious!” they chanted.

  The pale boy said, “Brother Fecalle, recite the prayer for the dead.”

  It was all over, I thought numbly. Death had won.

  A boy of seventeen in a torn black coat who looked like some kind of preacher stepped into the middle of the room. I choked with fear, for this was indeed the end of the rope, a rope made of neutrons, not only around my own neck but that of all mankind. For who now would have the patience to negotiate with the professor? There was so little time left to find the A-I-D! Then suddenly, inspired, I shouted. “Execute me? Execute a member of the St. Ewagiow?”

  They surrounded me, cursing me for a
liar, but steadily I said in the deepest and most death-like voice I could manage. “I swear on my honor as a man who holds the skeleton within him in sacred trust that I will do all to hasten its revelation.”

  This password that I had learned at Bangani Castle caused them to stare at me and to whisper among themselves.

  “Let us end the world!” I shouted like a true fanatic. “Let us end the world and the universe! Smash, burn up the planets! Down with Mars, Venus! Down with the moon! Down with the Milky Way! Death, Universal death for every form of life! Our life and life wherever it is among the stars! Death, universal death for the universe.”

  My inspired speech impressed them. And when they put me to the test, I demonstrated all the secrets I had learned at Bangani Castle from the St. Ewagiow who had been Barnum Fly’s double.

  I showed them the St. Ewagiow kiss, kissing each of their leader’s closed eyelids. The mystical kiss of death, for under his eyelids were the sockets of his skull. “Long live the sacred skull!” I shouted. “The final custodian of mortal flesh!”

  It was a narrow escape. We couldn’t believe it when they freed us. Outside in the corridor, Gladys-Ekaterina wiped her tears of joy and whispered. “It was the wrong apartment. This is the door I wanted.” I waited fearfully as she kicked it four times, but when we entered there was no cloud of smoke and the five men present looked what they were, L. and O. operatives. Gladys-Ekaterina introduced me to their leader, a sharpfaced policeman who you could see with one eye had come up from the ranks by fair means or foul. In short, a man I could trust. “Meet Captain Weir,” she said. “Or Comrade Nyet as he is known here.”

  “I’m glad to meet you, Crockett,” he said. “Everything I’ve heard from the Commissioner has been good.”

  “You’ve got some interesting neighbors,” I said. “St. Ewagiows down the hall.”

  He shrugged. “What can you do, Crockett? They’re everywhere. And I’ll tell you something. They know the A-I-D is here in Russoplayo.”