Los Angeles

by Philip Wylie

  By and by he walked into the building. She’d told him to look around and made it clear her difficulty would require some interval for management.

  The school building was made of concrete, prestressed. No sign of metal reinforcement appeared at the far end, where a wall had been breached and an addition was rapidly—and very silently—rising. No building or apartment had windows, at least as far as he’d seen: nothing to look at but another “interior,” mean streets with rather dim lighting.

  He went along a first floor corridor, noting the distance between classroom doors and estimating the size of the rooms from that. He came to a flight of stairs and went up. A second flight led him to the top floor—three stories seemed the standard for everything, nearly. On the first floor, the subject of the classes had been spelled on doors and those courses had sounded familiar: history, math, advanced math, special science, geography, advanced English.

  But the third floor studies were different as he immediately saw. They were devoted to what he would have called “sex education” though the lettered doors were shockingly explicit. He walked along on a soundless, rubberlike tile and saw the toilet entry from which Donna would emerge. He strolled on past, looking for a place to wait and soon reached a door marked “Senior Sexual Training” which seemed the most far-out of a half dozen such listings. Also, he could now hear what was going on in that room, as its rear door fit poorly. He had seen other examples of haphazard construction. There were spaces above and under this door and the door itself hung on a slight angle making a crack from its middle to the top. Young male and female voices came quite clearly from these several crevices.

  Glenn stopped there because of the title of the class and the guilty chance to eavesdrop. There was nobody else in the long corridor and he rationalized: his own lack of privacy meant that privacy wasn’t important in the new LA, and he had a “quid-pro-quo” right to get back his own.

  What he first heard was a teacher’s voice:

  “Very well, class!” Lights went up in the room as the cracks showed Glenn.

  “Now. A five minute rest period while I outline the day’s next exercise. The girls will, of course, shift up a number. Odds will advance with evens. Sevens move to tens. Nines to twelves and so on.”

  Glenn listened in a daze.

  The calm, slightly flat voice of the teacher went on. “Before we engage again there will be a demonstration. The class is to watch closely …”

  He stood there, fixed, till a hand touched his shoulder. He jumped and eased the door to, as he turned to face Donna with vast embarrassment. She beckoned him from the entry. She was amused—and more so, when she read his expression, saw his shocked condition.

  They started down the hall. “Well!” she said. “You sure pooped up the program!”

  He didn’t reply.

  “We planned to start you in kindergarten. Where the children are allowed erotic play of any sort but the painful. Then we would have moved to the child-adult games—”

  They had reached the stairs and as they went down he said, “I see. It just doesn’t quite fit into my—well—moral background.”

  “No. But you never faced the need of genetic management.”

  “No.” Glenn stopped on the second staircase. “This—this instruction—partner-shifting—has that aim?”

  “Of course! If you are going to have your children by assigned males, or one at a time of the right class—or if you also want to marry, and then have somebody’s two kids to rear part of the time, as your own—you obviously must be nonspecific, nonmonogamous, and promiscuous.”

  “And that is the way we really are?”

  She didn’t answer but led him to the car and then, when its door slammed, sat without starting the motor. “That is the way we somewhat are, at least. Psychologists and physiologists and other scientists still aren’t certain. What they are sure of is that the earlier one’s erotic realizations start, and the more frequent the encounters, the more potent both sexes will be and the longer throughout life.”

  “Kinsey said that.”

  “Kinsey?” The name wasn’t known to her. “Back then?”

  “Before—‘back then.’ Decades. But nobody paid any attention, or almost nobody. Sex acts of any sort with children led to years in prison. Also, normal acts with an underage girl.”

  “Underage? Which was—?”

  “Different in different states. Fourteen or fifteen, the lowest for girls, I think. Twenty-one, in some states.”

  “My God in the NonBlueSky! Twenty-one—and not even—!”

  “The law said so. Young people broke it more and more—”

  “Fantastic! And you never realized that your antisexual ways were a major cause of your”—she spread her hands—“of all this? That a person needs sex and must have it as often as he-she wants, with whoever is wanted and wants you? Don’t you realize any restraint there was unnatural? Perverse? The most horrible sin to the body and nervous system? Such a frustration that most people, trying to follow the prohibitions, were quite literally—insane?”

  He looked at her closely, admiring the blonde shine of the woman, her lovely calm that hid her lovelier noncalm, her pure white skin—the raspberry tip of her nipples.

  “We evidently were insane,” he finally agreed. “As you say: witness all this.”

  “Which is getting saner every day!”

  “Is it?”

  “You can question that?”

  “I can question it, yes. But not answer myself, yet.”

  “You’d better realize how much knowledge and experience has gone into our culture, our sexual customs, everything, before you decide wrongly. The Board will expect a new member to be in tune—”

  It sounded threatening. “I daresay.” He passed it off without the indignant comment he’d formed in his mind. “But it’s difficult to see how human beings can become choiceless”

  “Choiceless? Oh. People have choices. It’s all right as long as it doesn’t interfere with the overall condition. Everybody has fantasies, for instance, and acts them out. Marriages sometimes, in fact often, end in separation and marriages to new spouses. Some things are very exciting to some people. Not others.”

  He shrugged and she stared at him with a misty-eyed wonder. “You, for instance, from my viewpoint. You’re twice my age, not counting forty-six added years. Almost a grandfather appeal; and I never got over making love—at eight and nine—with my girl-friend’s grandfather! It slanted me to older men. Even old ones. I never had a chance at either of my own two grandfathers—and never stopped regretting that! They’d died. So that’s why I feel an added heat for you. I would pretend you were mother’s or dad’s father. See?”

  “In a way.”

  “I have that fantasy about you, of course! To make love to your great grandfather—in his prime! What a dreamy thing! And then I began to churn till I had those cramps! No man ever got me that upset Aroused.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Why? At what’s the outmost, for me? I’m fun, too—as you must be able to realize.”

  “I’m sure—” It was lame.

  “Miss Edmunds, the teacher—you saw her? With Jim Sether? Well, she’s substituting for me …”

  “What!”

  “Of course. Why not? I have an M.A. and am getting a Ph.D. in Sexual Ed. Demonstration. My next thesis is on orgasm capacity for females. Is that so—dreadful?”

  He found it difficult to respond. “A shock, say,” he finally muttered.

  She sagged. “I guess I’ve really blotted my book! Put you off!”

  “It’s all so new to me—” He tried to sound apologetic. Actually, he was beginning to feel slightly afraid. These people were not human beings, in his sense.

  “I think,” she said tightly, “I will take you to your apartment—and go home. The strain’s too much—the failure—!”

  Her eyes showed him what she meant. He had left that slightly open door in a state of violent and visible arousal
. He was no longer in that state.

  She dropped him after a relatively fast trip to his place. But as he said good-bye and thanked her, she had recovered enough to laugh, her way: “I may still get you on a fertile vacation!”

  There were workmen in his apartment. Three men in plain and suddenly familiar garb: denim overalls with many pockets, blue, with blue shirts. The head man spoke after Glenn used his key and swung the door open, “Be through in five minutes, Mr. Howard. I’m the foreman, here. Jim Peters.”

  They shook hands. Glenn’s enquiring eye brought immediate explanation: “Just making some electrical-electronic shifts. The … the people upstairs thought you’d appreciate it.” He beckoned Glenn into the bedroom and indicated a newly installed switch beside the big, luxurious bed. “They want to observe you as much as you’ll allow. But if you flip this switch, every observational device will cut out and you’ll have privacy.” He stared at Glenn with interest and, perhaps, veiled amusement. “They hope you won’t. But you can. And it’s straight.”

  Glenn felt embarrassed—because of his embarrassment at being watched. Evidently nobody else shared that sensation.

  The other man shrugged. “Miss Smith, Mayor’s Secretary, just phoned. You’re to call back.”

  He got Leandra, voice and picture in natural color, on the visaphone. “Hi?” she was smiling. But not quite the radiant way she usually had smiled at him.

  “Hi!” he answered.

  Her next words depressed him. “You like red-headed damsels?”

  “I like girls. A girl, here, especially.”

  That somehow brought her to an unexpected halt. He watched her recover her self-control and when she spoke, she was very businesslike. “Have your lunch—the panel shows you what to push for your order. At two, a Miss El-ma Bareen is calling. The hospital, since you gave up the school.”

  Miss Bareen was all any redhead could be: green eyes, the same creamy skin that Donna possessed, a witchy way and a restlessness he noticed at once. A trained nurse.

  The hospital was interesting. So was the lady.

  He saw part of a transplant operation—eyes. He watched an injured man receiving a new left leg and a new kidney. He understood these things—the rejection factor had been resolved. All sorts of elaborate nerve-connections could be made—even for eyes! Colds were halted by a single shot in the arm. Disease, however, was rare in L.A. But his final view was of a “Still” Room and that altered his rising marvel at medical advances.

  An elderly man, accompanied by a weeping wife, kissed her at the glass door of the Still Room and entered. He lay down. A white-clad nurse entered and gave him an injection. He looked toward his sobbing wife, a grey-haired woman, toil-worn, nervous, kindly, and somehow lost. He waved and blew a kiss but his effort at repeating that failed. His arm dropped. His eyes closed. Glenn and his redheaded guide watched silently, Glenn not yet aware of what they watched: not aware that the elderly woman, the man’s wife, was quietly given a small glass of medicine which she drank after a wordless protest. His guide took him away but the woman remained and, Glenn thought, began to recover from her grief.

  “What was that therapy?”

  “Therapy?” Miss Bareen was astonished. “He was erased.”

  “Killed?”

  “Of course! He had one of the relatively few cancers we cannot cure. It had reached the painful stage. He no longer could work—he was some sort of a checker. So—”

  “Jesus!” Glenn was stricken. “And his wife—a nice, sweet, kindly, hard-working woman—!”

  “They gave her Monemnmon.”

  “What?”

  “A drug. She won’t remember the misery you saw her feeling. Only that her husband didn’t have to suffer for ages. She won’t—with repeated doses, if needed—ever recall her grief. Just the happy times they had. And her present will be largely what she will be aware of, anyhow.”

  Glenn said to himself, “Monstrous!”

  “What?” It was quick, fiery and hostile.

  “I said, ‘marvellous.’ Euthanasia—and no mourning afterward! Just a rub-out!”

  “I thought you said something else?”

  “You’re wrong.” By then Glenn had begun to know that any sign of outrage at the current system was not acceptable.

  Miss Elma Bareen let it go, changed the subject to the usual one. They’d have dinner—there was a special restaurant for Class A’s. She was B, but had an exception permit. Then some movies—at her place.

  He gathered, on the way to the restaurant, that the ‘movies’ would be designed to make him so ardent—together, doubtless, with Aphron in the roast beef, or what not—that Miss Bareen would get herself loved.

  She nearly was, without erotic movies. But not quite. Through an interesting meal, a meal with several dishes he couldn’t identify but found delicious, with an invisible source of music that seemed not recorded, but was, and that seemed to arouse the rather shinily clad ‘beautiful people types’—his description of the diners—to an elated and also amorous mass-condition. It did not affect Glenn, however. His mind was wrestling with the memory of that “Still Room.” For such chambers were not devoted wholly to ending lives that couldn’t be saved and would be agonizing.

  Criminals were “erased” there. Miss Bareen had filled him in, since he feigned a positive interest, and he had hidden his sense of horror. Crimes were rare, but they occurred. Thieving, a few sexual attacks of a sadistic sort, or, at least, of unwanted kinds. And people who’d been injured in ways that could not be well enough healed to permit them to return to their special job or profession, these, too, were erased. Flawed infants, also rare owing to medical advance and genetic screening, didn’t get to the Still Rooms; they were simply erased in the crib wards. All anticorporate attitudes brought erasure. Some fumbling at work, if repeated often enough and if the fumbler wasn’t useful in some lower job, meant death. It seemed to Glenn that they could hardly count on the very small population growth their city extension and production increased allowed. But he knew these things would be computerized and if there happened to be a period of excess “youth-to-middle age erasures,” there would be a matching increment of breeding on those “fertility vacations.”

  It made Glenn a less than attentive dinner companion.

  And when he told Miss Bareen that, thank you very truly, he was too tired for her apartment and the movies, she tried to force him, it seemed, to go with her, anyhow.

  He would get some drugs, she said, to cut out his weariness. She would bet anything that he wouldn’t be able to look at her private show of motion tapes for half an hour and not demand sex with her. Or with somebody.

  “They are of me, making love. With some very lovely men. And some girls.”

  “Girls?”

  “Dorothea and Frances and Delma and I do it all the time. You’ll be literally wild when you see me with one of them.”

  Afterward, Glenn realized why that offer was made. Stag films in his time were usually or at least often of female lesbian acts; not of male homosexuals, but female. And stag shows included men and women, groups, the odd animal film, which he detested. But lesbian relations were favorites of stag audiences. This, then, was an effort to try to reach him that way.

  At the time, he hadn’t understood.

  When she stopped her car to let him out, she was, for a moment, somewhat grim. When he finished his “thankyou’s” and “nice evenings” she said:

  “Look. I know something got you off me. But not what. Just bear this in mind, Glenn Howard! You are going to have to live our way, and soon! And ‘our way’ doesn’t mean freezing up every time a desirable woman practically begs you to bed her!”

  “Sorry,” Glenn had answered.

  And he had nearly said more. For he had at least realized that the four-letter Anglo-Saxon terms were now universally used and with no sense of indecency. “Shit,” he mused, walking into his apartment, had been in the standard version of the Holy Bible, the version once most used, as
had “piss”—till a bunch of inconceivably filthy-minded people, thinking themselves pure, had edited their very Bible to suit their state of mind, their abomination-in-excelsis.

  To be what the self-styled called “clean-minded,” Glenn had often reflected, one had to have the dirtiest mind possible. For most of what the “clean-minded,” the “pure,” the “decent” thought of as obscene was as pure and as normal, as natural, as necessary as sunlight; but it had to be utterly defiled so people could manage, or pretend to manage, a life of the so-called clean sort! Still, though the beautiful lasses of this new era could say “screw,” (of its more literal synonym) exactly as a flower-lover might say “roses,” Glenn found that the dirty-minded strictures of his day made it hard for him to be honest and so, to say what were the only right words for those right acts and their rightful variations.

  He threw himself on the bed, exhausted, and switched his lights low, letting the damned bugs run, if they were on. In time, a key turned in the other room and the unmistakable voice of Lysette called, “Night maid?”

  “Skip it!”

  She came right in. “I could take off your clothes, bathe your back. I promise that is all!”

  “Scram!”

  She tried it: “‘Scram’!” she giggled. “Does that mean something nice that I—we started—?”

  “It means get the hell out, darling! I’m bushed.”

  “Oh-ho! Goodie!” She got out. Maybe she had misinterpreted the sense of “bushed.” After half an hour he rose, showered and undressed so he could lie down, nude, as was his habit. But sleep wasn’t capturable. The enormous stresses of the last days and hours were so short a time. Such hard things to accept, let alone, digest, pitched him into a waking nightmare of memories. He tried to understand what was current and real while he also mourned his vanished life, dead loves and friends, old ways—everything he had lost.