by Carol
A small man of gray colors—hair, skin, eyes, T-shirt, beads—took hold of John's arm. (Another person handling John who wasn't really anyone John liked; it was becoming harder to bear each time.)
“That fellow—” The young man nodded in the direction of the doomed, departed editor. “All the influence in the world. But no confidence. But—who am I to tell you? You know there's no such thing as a mind.”
John counted to ten, to himself, because he found that if he did that sometimes the tears wouldn't start.
“By the way, I know who you are, but you don't know who I am. I'm Charlie Blei, I'm in plastics.”
“Plastics,” repeated John carefully.
“Plastics. Manufacturing end.”
“Is that what you do?”
“We make things out of plastic.”
John nodded; he had understood part of the conversation.
“That fellow, he thinks he's so great. I know all about him, my firm puts money into the conglomerate that owns the publishing house that subsidizes the paper he writes for. Last year my nephew was writing this column? You know? For a paper out here? So this fellow, he says, that’s too commercial, why don’t you be yourself? So next thing, this fellow that’s so smart, he’s superintending adviser on a soap opera, it’s on every day, he collects a mint. So anyway, it makes me so tired to—”
“When you’re tired why don’t you go to sleep,” asked John, hoping vaguely that the man would say okay and that somehow everybody in the room would go to sleep.
“Jesus, that’s it!” The gray man grinned and caressed John’s shoulder, reaching up. “Go to sleep if you’re tired. Eat if you’re hungry. I expect nothing from nobody. Why? I really like myself!”
“That’s what that other person said,” began John, but had to stop because he couldn’t remember what was in his mind when he’d started the sentence.
“You take anybody like me, in analysis for ten, maybe fifteen years,” said the gray man. “What the hell does money mean? Zilch. You like yourself, that’s money in the bank. I read books—that is to say, I buy books, I don’t read them because they don’t relate to me, but what gets to me is a machine that performs a function. You’re a machine, you know that? You got these stores, you know how to run them, you’re a machine.”
“I’m not a machine, I'm a boy,” said John very softly, so the gray man, who wasn’t listening anyway, didn’t hear.
“I never have to prove myself any more, that’s the thing. I go out and I do this or I do that and business I can handle with my left foot. Do you swim?”
“No,” said John.
“What’s swimming? What’s any of that Superman crap? Who swims? I’ll tell you who swims, a lot of fags trying to prove they’re not fags, that’s who swims. But I’ll tell you something else.” He paused, put down his drink and his cigar that he was smoking through a convoluted wire holder attached to the middle finger of his left hand, and jabbed John in the chest. “I’M A HAPPY MAN!”
John was so tired of being touched by strangers that he pushed the gray man. The gray man fell into a deep white velvet sofa and began to vomit a little, murmuring, “I don’t have to prove nothing, nothing, nothing.”
At dinner John was seated to the left of a man who was too drunk to talk, and two seats away from a lady who leaned across the drunk to shout things at John. She was wearing an ensemble that had nothing on top, showing bare, brown, wrinkled breasts unsuccessfully veiled under chains of beads. “Did you ever taste real vegetables before?” she yelled at John. “They grow their own. The Wangers grow their own vegetables. Nothing frozen! God, I hate frozen food, everything frozen ...”
The word “frozen” meant ice cream to John, so he smiled.
“S’why taste food at a restaurant, it’s not the same. AND THEY CALL IT PROGRESS.”
John cleared his throat and spoke in his natural voice, which was clear and resonant. “Then maybe it is better not to have progress if it is wrong,” he said.
There was silence at the table. Several people began making notes on their white pants, on the tablecloth and each other’s backs.
The woman opposite John leaned across the table. “I know you know me,” she said.
“No, I don’t,” said John.
There was another silence. Everybody knew this woman for her own activities, which were vague but famous. She made a point of maintaining extraordinary press coverage. Someone once asked her if it was true that she was having an affair with a certain art director. She replied, “I only sleep with celebrities.” When that had been quoted to John, he repeated, “I only sleep with celebrities” (evoking laughter from the three directors with him at the moment, who thought he was being funny). Then John smiled his sweet smile. “I only sleep with Teddy,” he added. They roared with laughter.
“. . . or in politics,” Mrs. Wanger, on John’s left, the head of the table. John hadn’t heard the first part of what she was saying, so he nodded. His chicken was good and he had finished it and was hoping for a nice dessert.
“... when they make those speeches,” Mrs. Wanger called, because as hostess it was her obligation to herd her hundred guests together in a listeners’-hedge-hog as she endeavored a pleasing general conversation.
“Speeches,” said John.
‘“Hie politicians. They all have the same damn writers, they don’t even know what they’re talking about and—”
The day before, somebody had told John about Abraham Lincoln writing his most important speech on the back of an envelope.
“Why doesn’t the President write his own speeches?” said John.
Mrs. Wanger broke into tears. “Did you hear that?” she yelled down the considerable length of her dining table. ‘Did you hear that? How about that? How about not letting anybody be a senator or a congressman or a anything unless he is fully capable of writing his own speeches?”
“It won’t play,” said the topless lady, fiddling with her chains. “What is she, some kind of agitator?”
The note-writing was taken up again, and somebody thirty or forty seats away from John called, “And a little child shall lead them!”
“I’m not a child,” said John, very low. He was so tired.
After dinner he took his nap. But people kept moving in and out of the room and he heard so many fragments of conversations ...
“... my nephew the congressman tells me there’s a surprisingly large bloc of blind people, there’s a vote you don’t hear much about, like your kikes, your niggers, your pot-heads, and excetra, excetra. He’s going to go after those blindies!”
"... they’re killing me.” A shrill, high, nasal voice. "These shoes. I wear them, everybody says clogs are in, but I keep turning my ankle. They cost fifty dollars. They’re ugly. They hurt. So I wear them.”
"... he just missed that plane crash, the one from St. Louis, and—”
"What was he doing in St. Louis on a Thursday?” "It’s the day he tells his wife he has the chiropractor appointment.”
"On a Thursday?”
"Well, anyway, there were all these people killed and he wasn’t on it.”
"On a Thursday?”
Once, when Dix had tried to prove to the Teacher that he was indeed paying attention to his project, he mentioned the use of computers. The Teacher had smiled wearily. "They are the toys of your toys; doing only what you have taught your dolls, who then care for their dolls. It would be a pity if your own mind were the lodestar of any actual life. It is your inadequacy that causes you to fashion your project people in your own image. Like you, they constantly feel an unappeasable hunger for an unattainable food. In your own case, it is simply your small attention-span making you restless; they think it is the center of their being. I've noticed that they cherish their tribal superstitions, as our youngest children do, but you have given them as well the almost criminal notion that here is a rational explanation for everything that occurs in the project. How can they know that their rational explanation is nothing bu
t you?’
Dix sulked. He did not like to be laughed at. He open wished the Teacher would notice the clever things he had done: from the start of the project, when the first three beings were evolved, he had caused them, to originate society, the basis of any combination of animals, insects, or programmed dolls. He muttered something about the structure of the beehive and the anthill. The Teacher smiled.
“By now you should have done much better with your ‘people.’ Your dim grasp of ends-andrmeans results in chaos for them. For example, they are incapable of accepting or even recognizing humor and perception . .. what is worse, they seem to punish the few who possess those faculties. Do you remember one of your few acceptables saying, “Only connect! Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.” Well... it seems to me there is a great deal of disconnection going on in little orb.”
Dix nodded, sneering to himself. He decided that when he got home he would beat up his little brother; that always made him feel better.
“. . . Thursday?” someone else was shouting. “Who was in Spain Thursday?”
". . . he said he was going to Spain, so naturally I told him I had this friend in Spain I can’t pronounce his name? he lives somewhere, I didn’t remember where? so I said look him up? He said he’d look him up.”
“. . . He was a great mystery story fan. Read everything.” John had wandered into another conversation, and listened again without hope. “So when he died, I couldn’t help thinking—now remember, you have to bear in mind he was a mystery fan, you see—well, when I heard he died and everyone knew he was such a police buff—a real mystery fan. Followed police calls. Had his own radio. Well, he died, you know, and I said to Dick—just as a whimsy, not anything serious, you understand—I said, “Undoubtedly he has been called by God to help him in his investigation. Get it?”
At this moment, the city of Paraguay was having a red rain. The streets were deserted as panic-stricken citizens, staring wildly at the crimson stains on their clothing, took to their houses. The Gulf of Paolo looked like a pool of watered blood in the morning. In Pasay, just south of Manila, the air was throbbing with small, sharp stones; Pasoeroean was visited with tiny green bats; Phoenix, Arizona, suffered a temperature change from 54 degrees Fahrenheit to 12 below zero; the ruined castle in Pontrefact, Leeds, collapsed. Little Brother had received his beating and was kicking at a large notebook. The notes were in doll-alpha-bet order, and the book was open at “P.”
The day after the party John felt tired. Lydia asked him if he’d had enough sleep; he said yes and that he’d liked the party a little but not much. “The cherries in the drinks were good, though,” he said.
“Oh, don’t be sarcastic, Mr. Sun,” said Lydia. “That doesn’t sound like you.”
John blinked at her and then dismissed it. “Shall we read the Gossip Gazette now?” he asked. He and Lydia shared a little secret. Every couple of days she would read to him from a syndicated column based on the doings of celebrities. She thought he had some special way of concentrating, that it helped him to think more clearly when he heard the items rather than reading them to himself.
“Okay,” said Lydia. She searched through some papers on his desk and found the sheets she wanted. She mumbled part of the time. None of what she read ever made sense to her but she imagined that all the people mentioned were personal friends of Mr. Sun.
“... let’s see ... Singer Blanca Marlow has used thirty-four names during her musical career ... Actor Robert Gray recalled filming seventy-eight takes for a commercial. When he was through somebody handed him an aspirin. "Thanks/ he said, "I needed that.’ . . .
Murray Hill, the actor, was visited by his broker after the show. 1 just broke eighty,’ said the broker. 1 know,’ said Murray, whose piece on Alexander Hamilton will appear in an upcoming issue of Flatulence. 1 am one, too.’ ... Oliver Wendell Holmes, former jurist and Washingtonian, watched a pretty girl go by and exclaimed, ‘I wish I were eighty!’ He didn’t know it, but he was one, tool ... Frank Sinatra and Clark Gable once used the same dressing room at different times ... Dan Dooley, the X-rated film producer, plans to make an animated cartoon of the Apocrypha ..
‘What does that mean?” asked John.
“What does what mean?” asked Lydia, who hadn’t understood any more than John what she’d read.
“What’s an X-rated film?”
“You know. The porno films. They’re X, and then some are marked Restricted, and some are PG for parental guidance ...”
“Parental Guidance?” John felt sad. The phrase meant something to him. “Can you tell me a film that is marked PG?”
“Sure, wait a minute,” said Lydia. She looked at the cinema listings and came up with a film that was playing not far from John’s apartment. He decided he would take the afternoon off and see it. Parental Guidance was one of the things he wanted to find out about.
The theater had red velvet seats that would move like a swing when you sat down. The picture began, and a funny-looking little man began talking to himself onscreen. People laughed at him, but he seemed so miserable and lost that John felt tears stinging his eyelids again. He held his breath and thought of something pleasant, which was not always effective in holding the tears back, but he had to be sure no one saw him cry.
Then a man and a woman began holding each other and moving around all over each other. They weren’t fighting, and the movie wasn’t at all like the Westerns John liked so much on TV. Now the man and the woman were lying in a bed, with no clothes on at all. John sighed and wondered why it took so long for the real picture to start ... this might be some kind of advertisement, a commercial for a mattress company? The Sun Company didn’t sell mattresses . . . what would the directors say if they knew their president was sneaking out to the movies? John smiled. He liked being naughty; he squirmed uncomfortably, waiting for the dull part to be over, but dozed off for at least half an hour.
When he woke up he felt stiff so he thought he’d better take a walk. The afternoon was fine and almost sunny through the gray, dust-dotted air. He walked several blocks and then he saw a lot of people gathered. Usually, he had learned, this meant only that a crowd was watching a man get robbed or an old lady being hurt, but he noticed a lot of policemen and firemen around. He began to run. He liked anything that attracted police and firemen; their uniforms were the nicest clothes he’d ever seen.
Everyone was looking to the sky. John looked up, too. Sometimes planes were going by (and sometimes he saw bright shimmers that reminded him of confused dreams). But there was nothing in the sky now.
“What happened?” he asked a woman standing near him.
“There’s a man going to jump.” John didn’t know what she meant, but he heard some of the people around him yelling, like the crowds at the stadium, “Go on, jump, go on, jump, jump, jump.”
A policeman who looked very young went by. John had learned that some really pretty people looked this way not-on-purpose, as though they had just been bom a few minutes ago into a big size. Then there were the opposites—all the people he met at parties or saw on TV, the ones who were supposed to be young, but looked, in spite of their colorful faces and bodies, a hundred years old, with makeup all over their eye-bags and mouth-lines and always held-in by elastic bands on their rigid figures. This policeman, although tall, looked about twelve years old. John liked him a lot.
“Sir, can you tell me what’s happened?”
The policeman mopped his forehead. “Some Spic ... he’s up there on a two-foot projection outside a fifteenth-story window. He don’t know whether he wants to jump or what. So we get called out, there’s a priest up there with him, there’s Channel Two and Four and Seven and Eleven—everybody—for one little Spic busboy. How do you like that?”
“I like that,” said John. “It’s very nice of the television people and the police and the firemen to come out because one person is worried. That’s really very n
ice.”
“Ah, come on,” said the policeman, “knock it off. I hear that enough from the bleeding-heart civilian police boards. Yeah, so one little guy is worried. Okay—so it makes a great human interest story. Do you realize that right here, right here in this city, at this moment, people are getting shot up and murdered and set fire to and raped and ripped off and nobody is there because everybody is here watching this big four-foot-eleven busboy make up his crummy mind whether he wants to live or not? And you know why? It’s like take your best sellers or your big shows ... Moses and the Ten Commandments, Star Trek—all that stuff. The people down here take some kind of private vow ... I don’t know what they do or how ... but any time there’s a guy on a ledge—Bingo! He’s in. You could go out tomorrow and knock off ten old men in the park and then maybe rob a bank for lunch and follow a girl home in this Greenwich Village, and what would happen? You’d get a nice notice in the paper if they had the room, if something wasn’t going on with the Washington crowd. Maybe. But you take anybody—and I mean anybody—he goes out on a ledge and he’s a four hour wonder. Okay, I grant you, tomorrow he’s no news, nobody remembers, but this is one of the big-time situations and don’t you forget it.”
“I won’t forget it. I promise,” said John. "But how are they trying to stop him from falling?”
"Oh my God, how are they trying ... how are they trying ... I’ll tell you how they’re trying ... there’s a priest up there, and a lawyer and his wife and his lads, and a doctor and a nurse and some newspaper people and TV people—they all promise him anything he wants if he don’t jump. But he won’t come in and see, he has these small feet so no one else feels very safe being out here, their feet wouldn’t fit. I’m telling you, you try to jump, big man like you, you’d fall right off. He’s lucky. He’s little.”